Two Slashes

If you’re reading this, the topic of Windows 7 has probably already been worn so thin it’s liable to be used as the cling-wrap protecting your next party dish.  If it has, I apologize in advance.  If it hasn’t…well, I’ll put up money towards the first person who isn’t tired of a Microsoft-branded discussion by the end of this.  Oh, and the Geeky categorization?  It’s been earned at least three times over in this post, so avoid at all costs if you don’t want to be wearing a confused look for the next month.

The release candidate for the next version of the must-have-if-you-work-in-an-office-setting operating system has been put out and the critiques are already coming in.  (In short, they can be summed up as saying that Windows 7 is the better-looking younger brother to Windows Vista, though they’re both of about equal intelligence, but that’s beside the point.)

The group of people I’ve been most concerned with hearing from regarding the operating system upgrade is security researchers.  Given that this is a field I take  a reasonable amount of interest in, I’m actually rather alarmed that the only topic I seem to be watching pop up is the same “issue” that’s plagued Windows for over a decade.  And yes, those quotation marks are intentional and completely reasonable.

Once upon a time, there was DOS and Windows 3.1.  You were limited to 11-character filenames in the “8-dot-3″ format, where the first 8 characters were a user-specified name for the file and the last three were an extension denoting the type of file it was.  Then came Windows 95, and lo and behold the world was amazed that you could have these amazing 255-character filenames (which were really just an overlay to the old 8-dot-3 system) and give your files reasonably descriptive names!  And you could use punctuation (granted that the punctuation you wanted wasn’t a question mark, backslash, forward slash, pipe, or any of another two or three characters) too, which made things even better!  Sure, the file extensions were still there (and are to this day, as is the legacy 8-dot-3 filename), but nobody complained for they could name their files “My Letter To My Boss About Me Quitting Next Week.doc” and all was right with the world.

Of course, nobody complained until this file extension voodoo was abused.  You see, Windows defaults to a setting where you don’t have to see those ugly file extensions because they take up screen space and confuse newbies.  And, in my book, it’s a reasonable expectation that most people don’t want to see them.  (For the record, I turn this functionality off, but that’s a whole different topic.)

With the advent of the Internet, people (even the newbies) have been blindly trained to start recognizing certain file extensions for what they are anyway, even if they aren’t technically inclined to do so.  For example, even if you aren’t a geek, I’m sure you know what a .jpg, .gif, .doc, or .zip at the end of a filename denotes.  It’s useful knowledge, even for someone who prefers things that Just Work™.

Expanding this same notion to the contents of a user’s local files, that user is just as unafraid and accepting of seeing .jpg as they are online to the point where they don’t even think twice.  After all, what’s the worst thing that could come out of an image?  Porn?  An old photograph of Aunt Millie?

If you answered in the affirmative to either of those two suggestions, most people would urge you to jump off of the nearest highway overpass, though I’ll accept either of those as correct answers.  This giant group of security researchers, some of whom work for the same companies that ultimately provide the software your favorite pimply-faced Geek Squad employee will be installing on your next PC, have nothing better to do with their time than to complain about a well-intentioned feature.

I cannot count (on one hand, at least) the number of articles I have seen recently (like this one) that cry “Wolf!” over a trivial morsel like hiding file extensions only to have a piece of malware call itself “AuntMillie.jpg.exe.”  And here’s where my post title comes into play.  Is it Microsoft’s fault for adding what amounts to a (in my opinion) useful feature?  Is it the Symantec and McAfee developers (to name the recognizable duo, though just about any security suite provider should be included here) who kindly will alert you that you installed Cain (and then promptly remove it) but refuse to sound an alarm or do anything about legitimate malware (I’ve had this issue)?  Is it the end user for not disabling the feature and being vigilant and knowing what they’re doing?

I suppose we’ve become too dependent on file extensions for me to suggest that Microsoft ditch the idea, join the Unix crowd, and start using the contents of the file to figure out what it is rather than its name.  For example, web servers will use the file extension to determine what type of file you’re requesting and whether anything needs to be done (like executing it) before it gets passed along to the end user.  Granted, file extension hackery can be fun (who knew), but it would be a small price to pay (and the files would still be accessible by other applications, so it really doesn’t even ruin the fun).

However, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to demand why these same security gurus are not busy including a feature of their own to warn of questionably-named files.  I can think of few legitimate reasons for someone to have two or more extensions appended to their filename, so warning of files that end in “.txt.exe” on creation or execution probably isn’t a bad idea.

And to think that I've done more work in thirty seconds with the Visual Studio form designer than the security gurus have in over a decade. (For the technical: Yes, I realize that user conventions would switch the position of these buttons. However, you don't want anyone going to the "Yes" button out of habit, do you?)

If I wasn’t starting my final exams tomorrow, I’d probably write a proof-of-concept that accomplished this simply because I don’t know of anything similar that already exists.  (On the other hand, it is something for me to work on rather than study… )

For a group of security-focused people, their intentions are in approximately the right place.  However, they seem to be forgetting that there’s more to computing (and life) than three or four extra characters on a screen and the bright intentions of a few developers in Redmond.

(Cripes, and to think I would be writing over one thousand words in defense of Microsoft…  I really must be off my rocker.)

Since ancient times, seven has been the number of choice for everything.  After all, there are exactly seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  There are (obviously) seven days in the week.  James Bond’s agent number is 007.  (And what list of numbers would be complete without a blogger throwback to Brooke (more commonly known as Oh My Seven)?  Alright, that was corny…)

But while I’m either pleased with or indifferent to the aforementioned items, there’s one thing tarnishing the number for me.  And (to what I assume is Justin’s eternal glee), of all things, it’s a Microsoft product.

If you’re waiting on me to rant about Windows Mobile 6.5 and my Treo Pro, you would be half-right.  Literally.  Just one-half away from the appropriate version of Windows.  (Well, and a gigantic platform jump over, but who’s counting other than me?)  If you thought I willingly put myself into a position beta-testing the Next Big Thing™ to come out of Washington (other than the Mariners), you’d be right.  Seven points to you.

You might ask why I did it.  Back in October, I posted about how I have no problem whatsoever using in-development software.  (In fact, I’m writing this post using one of the latest nightly builds of Firefox, but I digress…)  Of course, that was before I willingly installed this pile of dung, and in the future I’m going to be putting more consideration into that policy.

Before you ask, it’s not the computer’s fault.  I’ve lived on Pentium 4s for the past several years, and finally decided in December to build a new Core 2 Quad desktop for school.  Of course, what would be better than loading up the test build of the operating system that it will most likely be seeing for most of its useful life, right?  That’s what I thought…

I’ve been using dealing with Windows 7 for about a month, and while I’ve taken to some of the “new” features, on the whole, I still feel like the experience is missing something.  A big something.

Performance-wise, everything seems to run at a very pleasing rate.  Even in beta, the operating system is quick to respond, and I’ve gotten used to some of the “enhancements” (read: mind-numbing changes for the worse) Microsoft made.  Things I’d also installed out of humor, like my old TV tuner, installed without any trouble.  Granted, the workflow in things like the Control Panel could be improved, but I’m going to let that one slide because it’s not the worst thing I’ve seen.

My biggest gripe is that Windows somehow seems to have lost control of user processes.  The same build of Thunderbird, for example, works fine on other operating systems (like my Windows XP-based laptop), but hangs in 7 to the point where it cannot be killed using the Windows Task Manager or even the appropriate command-line commands, and ultimately requires me to restart the machine from the front panel.  (As I write this, there is an unresponsive Thunderbird window where my desktop normally goes.)  This is on top of very annoying bugs I’ve already managed to encounter on more than one occasion.  I’ve also tried several applications that hang immediately, such as the NX remote desktop client, and plenty of applications you would expect to work (like Picasa) blow up without administrative permissions.

My next complaint is with data transfers.  For some reason, I have issues transferring files to and from removable media, though network transfers are fine, as is the removable media when used in conjunction with my laptop.  According to other people running the beta, they haven’t had any such problems, so this might be something I need to look into at a personal level, but it gets annoying that I need to transfer everything over in small chunks.

Win7’s inability to sync properly at all with my Treo is another showstopper, as far as I’m concerned.  And I would complain about power management, but I can’t say I’ve noticed any issues – my computer is kept on all the time, except when it’s being rebooted to ward off evil spirits and afflicted processes.

I’ll keep my hopes up (slightly – I wouldn’t want them dashed, as this is a Microsoft product we’re talking about) that the problems I’ve found get fixed before release.  I don’t know if I would be placing monetary bets on all of these issues being resolved before the final release, however.

What are your thoughts about the beta?

I remember a little more than a year ago; Digg, chatrooms, and the blogosphere in general were all abuzz with what sounded like one of the biggest undertakings ever, a cool achievement of the same caliber as Dana Hanna’s ‘An App A Day’.  The entries were in, the votes were counted, and development was starting out…

If you know what I’m talking about already (perhaps from my description, or obvious title), then kudos to you.  But for the uninitiated and clueless, I’m referring to My Dream App.  Essentially, the premise was that a group of well known (OS X) developers got together and took requests for applications common users had that they would like to see commercialized…with the expectation that the winning ideas would get a portion of the proceeds.  When everything was said and done, the apps to be developed included a cookbook/meal-planning application, a weather applet for the desktop, and (most useful) a simple way to synchronize files between multiple machines.

To go on a tangent for a moment, even though MDA was Mac-only, I still believe that the concept for MDA was excellent, and it really highlighted some of the community’s issues with Apple’s operating system (or the people using it…yeah, I’m evil).  Of course, there were the ideas that would have required a lot of development and research (research that I know for a fact is underway at several different unnamed universities simultaneously), but quite a few things that would have brought OS X more even with Windows came up just the same.

Now, fast-forward a little while to give the developers some time to get well into their projects, with the usual little bloggy updates to keep people interested in the applications informed of their progress.  The sad part is…it’ll be one year next month since the last update was posted.  And none of those apps have moved (at least, to public knowledge) from the position indicated by the latest posts for them on the development blog.  Add this to the fact that there were even brief hints at a second contest being run, and it seems as though what once was a thriving project is now collecting dust in the corner.

WWDC was earlier this week; and sure, there were a few announcements in the form of the iPhone 3G and confirmation of OS X 10.6 being named “Snow Leopard”, but it lacked any real innovation.  10.6 is a security release, the only real updates for the iPhone are upgraded connectivity and the iTunes App Store, and the quote I can’t get out of my head about how iTunes is the next ‘killer enterprise app.’  (Thanks, Justin, by the way, for making me sit through it. )  While I suppose it’s not always up to Apple to be the primary innovator, if the people commisioned to do the job can’t, it certainly seems like the entire gig has lost some of its luster.

Generally I’d let bygones be bygones and let the curtains close on something that so obviously won’t be collecting too much more attention.  But for some reason, I feel like the entire experience was just the result of me falling asleep in my swivel chair.  And now it’s time to wake up from My Dream Nap.

I came across a video purportedly demonstrating some of the new features of Windows 7 that Microsoft’s been working on.  While this early in the development cycle, such videos should be met with questions and belief in deceptive and mockups of what people would WANT, I figured it was worth a few moments of my time to discuss it.

For your convenience, the video is embedded below:

Now that you’ve seen what we’re expected to be using in just a while, perhaps it’s time to point out that absolutely none of this is revolutionary or breathtaking, or even a big step up from what’s available now.  If anything, all they’ve done is take the hard work and brilliant ideas of others, and besmeerch them with an Arial Black Microsoft logo.

Windows Explorer
Browsing for files in a paned/tabbed system navigator is not even remotely new.  Konqueror, Dolphin, and countless other utilities have been doing this for ages.  And there are add-ins available for Windows XP.  Nothing new to see here.

FTP Locations
How many times around the track does it take for you to realize that this is a feature of Windows already?

Now, Microsoft:  Where would you like to go today?  Because I’d like to go somewhere where the featureset of your operating system isn’t yesterday’s news to everyone else.

…Wait, you seriously thought I was kidding?

Keyboard Shortcuts
This may be new to Windows users who don’t want to use remapping utilities, but other platforms have had this for a while.  The one I can think of off the top of my head is the K Desktop Environment, which is extremely lenient and flexible when it comes to setting things like this.  On the other hand, this is also one of those features that permits standardization to fly right out the window.  Just wait until Great Aunt Cecil remaps all the keys to Shutdown and wonders why the manual telling her Ctrl-P to Print instead powers off her machine.  Perhaps this should come with a safety warning.

Screen Animation & Capture
The video portion of this, if true, is at least a long time in coming.  But they’re only integrating the tools many people use and reuse daily (Camtasia, FRAPS, etc.), and I highly doubt they’re even going to consider it for use in anything more than a basic desktop capture (i.e. no games or really-hardware-accelerated functions).

Disk Usage Analyzer
Pardon me while I clear my throat here; to have the nerve of pushing this as new is pushing it.  It’s been done…a lot better and with a more helpful visualization than a pie chart.  (Anyone notice that smell?  Smells like burning pie to me…and I think it’s coming from the Redmond campus.)

Task Manager
The only thing new I see here is that someone’s finally harnessed the power of Netstat in a convenient graphical interface.  Though, they’re definitely a bit late in this respect.

Virtual Drive
Need I say more than, “Daemon Tools and Alcohol, noobified?”

Website, Blog, and Portal Designer
Excuse me, but why is there a copy of Expressions in my operating system?  Shouldn’t that be something extra?

Seriously now, I can’t wait until people actually start using that…you can tell who the inexperienced are by their use of one of a few dozen stock header images and designs that probably say “Microsoft” in more ways than there are calendar days in a year.

Coming Soon…

• Image Conversion – Image conversion.  We’re spending all our time and money on image conversion.  Because Grandma can’t use the software that came with her digital camera to do it.  Or because it’s a part of several other operating systems and work environments.  Take your pick, because either way it’s still lame to me.
• Document Conversion – I love how ‘document’ can be so vague as to encompass anything and everything all at once.  Does this mean Windows might actually be able to open OpenOffice files?  Doubt it, unless you want to install the third-party filter.
• PDF Conversion – Wait, doesn’t this one smell like a royalty fee?  Has Adobe approved this?
• Password Manager – This one I can understand, but it’s also nothing new.  KDE has Wallet (which IE had something similar to), OS X and GNOME have keychains, and other password managers have their “acceptable alternative metaphor” to a Post-it note in a wallet.

I know I should be taking everything in that video with a grain of salt, but I can’t stand unoriginality in something like this.  Vista was just catchup for OS X (and a failed attempt at that, too…heh)…now it looks like Windows 7 is slated just to move Microsoft’s operating systems division into something resembling the early 2000s…most likely after 2011.  Oh well, at least it’ll give me more time to enjoy my eXPerience.

As most people probably know, I recently switched to a new dedicated server to host all of the projects I’m associated with, partially as the result of a group decision to ditch the ailing PhreakBox.  Things had been working great…until Friday, that is.

Of all the things that could happen in that particular week, and of any of the seven days in that week, it had to be Friday that the server’s hard drive decided it needed a permanent vacation, along with everything else going on in my life.  That’s right, all of the stored content for Two Slashes, LostCarrier.net, TechCentric, and any of my other projects ended up disappearing forever into the ether.

Being a responsible administrator, and knowing full-well that according to my provider’s AUP statement that they won’t recover data, I’ve got reasonably up-to-date backups (wait, that’s a first, isn’t it?) of everything, so it’s not like there’s more than a few hit statistics missing or anything, but there’s a lot of data to transfer and it’s very time-consuming.  Especially not great timing if you factor in my upcoming finals and all of the homework my professors have been assigning me.

But, like I said, it’s a long and strenuous process.  Most of Friday was spent in e-mail exchanges with the support people at my provider’s hosting facility, requesting an IPKVM and necessary configuration information and reloading the operating system and essential services, and having the techs look at a few issues as they came up.  I have to commend and offer thanks to them for their hard work and help in getting everything back online (and they didn’t pay me to write that), but there’s still the problem that recovery isn’t a drop-and-go ordeal; I’ve got to double-check that everything restored correctly (so far, so good) and rewrite configurations where necessary.  It’s not what I’d rather be spending my weekend doing.

On a different note, Digg managed to distract me for a few minutes with this morsel:  a gentle prod of current computer security techniques and why they are outdated and now qualify as “insecurity” techniques.  I think it has some merit to it and is at least worth looking over; even if you’ve barely got a shred of intelligent thought about you, a lot of what’s mentioned should be common sense but isn’t for some odd reason (i.e. precedent?).

And no matter what those “security experts” come up with, I don’t think they can hold anything to the owner of this fine automobile I saw parked on the street earlier today.  Sky blue with owner-added (and crappy – notice the mistakes between the top and bottom of the driver’s door) striping (which looks like some sort of black tape, I might add) just screams “I’m the brightest bulb!”, doesn’t it?  I would love to meet the person who parked that contraption there so that I can congratulate them on driving an oxygen-deprived zebra.

EDIT:  And for anyone who wants to complain about LostCarrier’s downtime, go right ahead.  I’m sure Last.fm is having a great time dealing with all of the downtime they’ve been experiencing this weekend as well.

If you don’t know what Linux, Ubuntu, or Gutsy mean, or you don’t feel like reading an incredibly painful and technical post, you probably want to read something else.  Might I recommend one of the links at the bottom of the page?

This week was supposed to be a big excitement for Ubuntu users, what with the release of Ubuntu/*ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10.  For many people, it’s been a fair experience.  Especially if these people are newbies, I’m talking of the perfect experience to get them into the Linux camp, and keep them for years to come.

However, Gutsy’s name has a double meaning that not many people are as willing to consider.   In a way, most people are correct in that the only real significance the name has is to differentiate versions and continue the trend of alliteration in the names set way back in the time of the “Hoary Hedgehog”.   However, I see a further significance to the name, as do many other people with (often unheard, or not-well-known) complaints about the new release.

Now, to be fair, I guess I owe a bit of back story before I launch into a ridiculous rant.  Since the time of Dapper Drake, I’ve kept an install of Kubuntu as my default operating system on my laptop (only using XP as a dual-boot option for times of necessity, like to use external video for reasons I won’t get into now).  This means that the majority of my work ends up being based in Linux.  With no problems, I’ve successfully used Dapper Drake and (with one small installation quirk) Feisty Fawn (6.06 and 7.04; I skipped 6.10 Edgy for reasons I don’t recall).  Anyway, since the release of Dapper, I’ve been pleased and more than happy to use Linux for the fact that everything worked, was recognized, and I really didn’t need to worry too much about what I was mucking around with because things usually ended up working (with only one or two notable exceptions).

Now, having had successful experiences with previous versions, one would assume that there would be nothing but good news surrounding updates.  Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for me, and several people just like me.   And I’m not inexperienced with Linux at all either, but the problems I’ve had are really turning me away from Gutsy and making me regret attempting to upgrade more and more as time progresses.

I’ll try to recap some of the more interesting of the problems I’ve had trying Kubuntu Gutsy here (while I reinstall and see if anything changes for the better), but there are so many it’s hard to even think to recount all of them.

• Shutdown no longer works.  At least, not without ugly hacks.  Yes, this is a very big, and seemingly very well-known issue.  Every version of Linux I’ve used on here in the past, be it Ubuntu or not, has worked perfectly in the power department, with no complaints whatsoever.  That is, until Gutsy.  Even the Live CD fails to power down the laptop when it should, instead giving me a black screen.  The hard drive is parked (as noted by the absense of being able to hear it and the distinct clicking sound it makes when you normally abruptly power off the machine) and nothing, including the keyboard, is responsive…but the only way the machine actually quits eating power is to physically hold the power button until it does so.

  Like I said, this appears to be a popular issue, with plenty of people suddenly in a similar situation.  But I find something as big and as common as this unsuitable for production-level software.  If you pride yourselves on having just released five alphas and some release candidates, one would expect the final product to uphold the standards set forth in them.  Feisty powered everything down fine; having to resort to holding down the power button not only is annoying, but it’s a great way to let your laptop overheat in your bag when you forget, and the thing sits there with the fan spinning full blast.

  Some people have reported being able to fix the issue by disabling ACPI support.  I tried it, and it worked for me.  However, this is unacceptable as ACPI is almost a necessity on a portable machine, which is why I’m not going to recommend it unless you’ve no need for what ACPI provides.

• Using a screensaver apparently causes the laptop to quit responding.  Yet again, this is another issue that I never had with Feisty.  Not that there’s much else to say than that.
• Suggesting that there’s a distro upgrade available when I’m running the latest build isn’t exactly helpful. Let me rephrase that:  Adept keeps suggesting that there’s an upgrade to Gutsy available.  Which would be helpful, say, if I was still on Feisty.  But seeing as I’m already on Gutsy, and the little tool it downloads to “continue the upgrade path” already sees I’m on Gutsy, it makes sense if everything else could seem to see that too.
• Where are the Kubuntu desktop effects? Exactly what it sounds like; I want to make my windows wobble on command.  Instead, Compiz seems to enjoy making sure I don’t have a window manager by the time it quits (Emerald starts with it, but doesn’t restart KWin at the end of the session).  Which is funny, because everything seems to be enabled by default on the Ubuntu Gutsy CD and working better than I would have expected.  Why can’t this methodology be easily applied to the KDE crowd?
• Hamachi refuses to start without beating around the bush.  Once again, there’s something changed between Feisty and Gutsy that plays with how well Hamachi functions.  While I don’t exactly blame either party for the break (it’s an OS upgrade of sorts, stuff happens), it shouldn’t take a ghetto hack involving decompressing Hamachi with UPX (which should be a non-issue at this point anyway) to get things working again.  Seriously, if people wanted that kind of thing, they’d probably be compiling their own kernel with Gentoo by now.
• I no longer seem to be able to add local printers via the Printer settings panel in the KDE Control Center.  Wait a second, it’s my machine.  Why am I no longer able to add printers to it unless those printers exist on a network connection (at least, using the GUI; there’s always the “edit-CUPS-configuration-files-and-pray-everything-works-when-you-restart-the-daemon” approach which still seems to be a viable option) is beyond me…what happens when I need to hook up to a printer directly?
• Strigi is annoying to no end when you trigger it accidentially.  Searching is a necessity, but I don’t call it efficient when I decide to reuse a tab Strigi is running in in Konqueror, only to find that every time I try to type a new URL, it overwrites it with one of its own.  It’s not exactly funny, now, is it?  Should I start taking things like the gas pedal off the developers’ cars?
• OpenOffice toolbar icons?  What icons?  Yup, there’s a bug in the included version of OpenOffice that for some reason makes all your toolbar buttons the text equivalents.  Yes, I’m aware it’s a configuration option to make them look like that anyway, and I know all about the different icon themes.  But flipping with the settings doesn’t work.  You’re stuck with the text.  (Hmm…for some reason setting the theme to Crystal suddenly allows about one of three different themes at the bottom of the list to work again…)

Given all the negatives, I must say that I have noticed that installing packages (once downloaded) appears to go a lot faster for me than it used to; even installing a big clump of packages doesn’t take more than a few seconds.  And I also enjoy the fact that the included version of KNetworkManager now seems to support VPNs through the aid of VPNC (or, I don’t remember having this capability before), which helps enormously considering my school requires one to connect to the campus wireless network.

However, also seeing how the *.04 releases seem to run better for me, I think I should stick with those for a while.  But if you’re one of the people who’s gutsy enough to put it all on the line for Gutsy…go ahead…be bold, be gutsy.

Tech support. Not one of the happier places for a geek of any kind to work, considering the fact that most people call up with a very poor attitude and about as much patience as a bull, and the dread of every consumer, knowledgeable or not, for fear of long hold times and the chance of getting someone who’s already irritated or has about a day and a half of total experience, mostly in topics unrelated to the product at hand.

When something happens, they’re your second stop, right after a more knowledgeable friend. We all know someone we can turn to for help with this or that (or perhaps you’re the person everyone turns to), and everything seems to work out in turn. But when they fail, the next stop is a bit of wasted time on the phone.

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this, but if you’re going to know what I’m ranting about, you need a little backstory. So here goes…

(continue reading…)

Just be glad this isn’t my pre-planned iPhone rant…that’s for another day.

As a geek of many interests, I find it useful to keep track of all matter of electronic devices, at least to some extent. Being a student, especially one inclined to seeing things for more than what they are, I take quite a bit of interest in TI’s graphing calculators. I’ve developed a little for them, and I’ve been using them for several years now.

For the most part, I’ve been happy, or at least satisfied with what TI’s put out. They get the job done, they’re expandable, I can develop for them (quickly, I might add), and they aren’t really much of a nuisance.

However, when I heard about TI’s new Nspire series of calculators recently, I had to question some of TI’s decisions about what went into the calculator.  I know the device isn’t new…but it’s new enough to me that it still warranted further investigation.  So here goes:

• First and foremost, why start with two models of the unit? I understand that you want to be accepted as a calculator of choice for tests like the ACT (actually, it’s not so much of a want as a requirement, because who’s going to purchase a banned calculator), but there’s nowhere near the need to confuse consumers…it’s like Microsoft and their fun with seven versions of Vista.  What’s next?  Nspire More?  Nspire Much More?
• Why would you allow one version the privilege of having a “replaceable” keypad (shown below), but not the other? If the one non-CAS model can instantly go into “84 mode”, I think it would be trivial to support this keypad on the CAS version…just disable the advanced features the CAS provides because they wouldn’t be accessible on the 84. With plenty of storage for an operating system, it seems obnoxious to me that this wouldn’t even be a consideration.
• While we’re on the subject of keypads, what idiot decided that rather than use TI’s norm of the Alpha-button, they should steer away from it and instead make minuscule keys for the alphabet, some logic operators, and some of the more important buttons…and make a weird almost-diamond-shaped key for all the other functions (again, shown here). Not only does that not make any usability sense, but it’s laid out in a really awkward configuration. I have small fingers, so I wouldn’t have much of a problem typing on that personally, if it made any form of sense. I can get a pretty decent WPM on an 83+…and that’s WITH having to press Alpha for every keypress (no Alpha-lock). And to put the icing on top, it looks like the whole thing was designed for Fisher-Price. Let’s not even get started about what’s supposedly the “84 Keypad”.
• The non-CAS version of the calculator also includes a “testing” light. What is a “testing” light, you ask? Simple…when certain parts of the calculator are disabled by an instructor for use during a test, there’s a little light that blinks to let the teacher know the functions still ARE disabled. Now, I get distracted easily, as do thousands of other students, so a little blinking light is the last thing I need drawing my focus away from my test and back onto my calculator. (Now, admittedly, I haven’t actually played with one of these things, and I can’t say for certain that it’s even that much of a bother…but just because the calculator you’re using isn’t blinking where you can see it doesn’t mean another student’s isn’t going to bother you.) And there’s another problem: who’s to say some knowledgeable student doesn’t just wire up a timer and switch to pulse an LED? After all, I’ve seen people add in backlights, 3.5mm headphone jacks (for game audio), fans, and all sorts of miscellany to a TI-83. If people are that willing to carve up a lesser calculator to “improve it”, imagine the possibilities for this thing.  Can I just ask whether teachers actually requested there be a blinking nuisance for tests?
• There’s no real application support. Wait a second, let me repeat that. THERE’S NO REAL APPLICATION SUPPORT. Now, I’m getting a little ahead of myself…but the only way either model supports applications or programs is through its emulated TI-84 mode, with the 84 keypad installed. Now, explain to me why TI would be so kind as to NOT include this? When I was in high school, my teachers didn’t really frown on the program support the 83’s and 84’s have. Some of them wouldn’t be too happy if you took advantage of them and typed up notes into the calculator, but others would actually embrace the idea to the point of ensuring the students had their (*poorly-written*) programs. In chemistry for example, one teacher was well-known for writing programs for the students to use in class, on homework, and on tests. Now tell me, if a forsaken teacher is embracing the functionality you add to a product, doesn’t it mean that means more than just games or cheating on a test?
• What’s with the design? I swear, one of the designers must have either come from GM, or been working on his car a lot in the time leading up to the implementation of this design, because the thing looks like a kiddie-ized version of the Tech 2.  Where do I connect to the OBD port in my car?
• Let alone design…let’s talk about specs. Talk about waste when you realize that there’s 32 MB of Flash ROM and 32 MB of RAM…explain to me what part of that is necessary when you can’t even develop apps to put on it? Oh…hold on just a second, I think I’m getting an idea…it’s called it’s necessary because the dingbats did away with the backup battery, instead prompting the device to reload its own OS every time you wear the suckers down.  And by the way…why are they wasting 16-shade grayscale LCDs on this?  Why not swap them into another offspring of the 83 that can actually make use of them?
• Finally, what’s with the name?  People know you as the company that labels their calculators with numbers in such a way that you can tell which ones are better just by if x is greater than y.  So why dump that in favor of something that attempts to sound cool and lame and makes me want to gouge my ears out every time I hear it?  Frankly, I’m surprised that for all TI’s attempts at not sounding clichéd, they didn’t just keep the ‘I’ and call it the ‘iNspired’.  At least then we’d have the confidence that the jolly folks developing calculators took English alongside math.

Alright, maybe I’m just nitpicking because I have nothing better to do.  But despite TI’s pushing this as the “revolutionary way for educators to teach their students”, perhaps the only thing it’s revolutionizing is how disappointed I am.

For every useful piece of technology, we’re left with some crock of crap that somehow manages to become a reigning champion and hang around for a while with no improvement. No, as much as I’d love to, I’m not actually talking about Microsoft Office today. This little blurb is about something much more common than that.

It’s on the very hard drive you’re probably using now, and chances are it’s probably alerted you to some problem at one point or another. Now, if that problem ever really existed, nobody knows, but you probably took the warning’s advice and replaced the drive pretty quick. Still not catching on? I’m talking about S.M.A.R.T. – the “drive health monitoring system” that’s been standard in every drive manufactured in the past several years.

Standardization is good. It’s why we can swap things around and still expect them to work without a lot of jerry-rigging or modification. It’s also the cause of plenty of things ranging from why Windows is the dominant operating system of this point in time to why the power connector on most internal devices is interchangable.

Still – why S.M.A.R.T.? Well, that’s a simple answer. The very “technology” designed to monitor the health of your hard drive and alert you when it might be dying has a very poor track record with me, and it’s about to get worse. Every S.M.A.R.T.-enabled drive I’ve used that has died has done so without so much as a single S.M.A.R.T. alert. That’s right, nothing but the dreaded “click of death” to tell you your data’s on its way to the curb with your useless hunk of metal. And in my case, that’s not exactly something to be celebrating or claiming that the drives in question failed suddenly or were abused – not at numbers like mine. These are drives that have essentially been babied from the get-go. And interestingly enough…the ones I get warnings on? False alarms. Yup, they keep churning away, while the drives that don’t give so much as a warning die off every once in a while.

Now, it’s been a while since I’ve had a drive fail…maybe a few months. (Though the fact that I’m now away from 90% of my equipment and unable to mess with it helps that longetivity score just a bit.) But I brought a desktop and my laptop with me to school.

My usage habits might raise some doubt in why I’m posting this, but it’s interesting all the same. My laptop, for instance, usually rides around with me in an unprotected backpack alongside my schoolbooks, sometimes being squeezed, pressed, crushed, dropped, smacked, banged, hit…in short, it takes quite a beating just being carried with me. I know I could protect it more, but it’s a cheap machine, it’s long outlived the lifespan I had expected for it, and in general it just goes to show that treatment isn’t always the primary reason for failure. Not to mention that I’ve pulled the thing apart several times, flung it around onto beds, tables, desks, chairs, and any other matter of instant-computing surface…and it works. For three years now it’s gone through treatment like that, and here it is, still churning away and letting me write up my post. In fact, the only new hardware the thing has seen is a stick of RAM. That’s it.

My “school” desktop, on the other hand, is a different story. For the most part, the machine’s been coddled like one would coddle a newborn. At least, since I got some of the parts. (I got them from a friend; long story, but they still work and they saved me a bit of cash.) The hard drive in there’s been mine since day one though. And even after suffering a nasty PSU incident about a year into its life (it’s now about 4-5 years old), it’s served me well. After that aforementioned incident, the drive developed a small clicking problem. And despite the clicking, I continued to use it. I mean, what’s the point of status monitoring if it tells you the drive is in better condition post-trauma than it is beforehand? Anyway, it managed to make it into my school machine (at which point the clicking had subsided). It’s been between a month and a month and a half since that…and the clicking’s back, but it’s no *click* this time. It’s almost more of a screech. In the signs of hard drive health, it’s not a good sign when the thing is screeching.

Anyway, even I can tell by now that the thing is about to kick the bucket…yet where’s the “monitoring” that was supposed to have alerted me to the problem even before it occured? I wouldn’t expect it to warn me about my PSU blowing up, but it certainly should be able to predict the drive’s death based on the fact that it spends more time attempting to perform disk activity than actually doing it.

Now, the concept of drives monitoring their health is novel, and bloody useful, especially in a corporate world, and if it weren’t for the problem of flash-based internal media coming to the consumer world in the next few years, I’d be wondering more why there haven’t been any recent announcements concerning a technology that may very well be on its way to redundancy. But based upon its standardization and wide acceptance, and (lack of) monitoring prowess, I’m left to wonder why nobody ever bothered to try and improve it considering it fails in every way, shape, and form imaginable.

So, this brings me back to my original point. Why include something that doesn’t work, and charge the consumer to implement it? Certainly there can be a middleground where the technology either is not implemented or actually functions well enough that the data on the drive can be backed up well before any audible clicking can be heard? It’s not smart, and it’s not fair to extort consumers for random “features” on that bulleted list that don’t work remotely near as advertised.  I realize that drive death prediction is really hard to do…but seriously…can it actually predict something?

Well, I’m both happy and displeased to announce that there is a small problem with the installation writeup I created to help install iLife ‘08 on OS X-based systems that didn’t meet the requirements. I’ve recieved several e-mails about the problem, but if you experience it yourself, let me know.

A user by the name of derbochennag has traced through some of his logs and discovered what may very well be the culprit: Quartz. From what I can tell based upon my discussions with him, and a bit of creative theorizing, the problem lies in the Quartz packages not being suitable for use with earlier versions of OS X. (Speculation: Perhaps this is the limiting factor in why Apple doesn’t officially support installations on prior versions of the operating system.)

The symptoms of the “Quartz bug” include some of your applications no longer working, and a Spotlight icon that flashes in the corner of the screen, but remains useless the entire time.

For now, I would like to perform some experimentation in attempting to avoid installation of those packages; perhaps the iLife suite will work fine.

I also realize that it’s been a very long time since I’ve posted content of any kind; school’s been getting into the way of me doing much of anything productive but unrelated to education lately. But we’ll see what I can do in the near future.

Update (9/18):  I have modified the posted shell script to SKIP the Quartz installation (it’s commented out in the script, so you can take a look at it if you want to experiment or try installing it against recommendations), until more testing can be done.  In the meantime, running a repair installation of OS X over your screwed up installation should fix everything up.