Unto the pure, all things are pure

Index of Posts

2011-12-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

My pictures: National Geographic prides itself in sending photographers armed with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment across vast distances to capture great pictures. Big deal! I think it's a bigger challenge to see what you can capture from one spot on planet Earth, with just one cheap lousy camera.
Click to see captions:

What you see here are pictures all taken from one place, my home. It used to be at any one time there is only one working camera (except phone cameras) in the house. Now there are more cameras around but all cost are below $300. And by the way, I live in a totally built-up area in one of the densest cities where I have yet to see a squirrel. Let me know if you can do better.

Contents of this blog (reverse chronological order):

dcpromo on two feet

2011-12-06T07:02:00.000-08:00

Today, I installed a Windows AD domain controller while waiting in the line for lunch in the cafeteria.

This was on a newly installed Windows Server 2008 R2. I started adding the DC role when I joined the lunch queue. The longest decision making required was perhaps on choosing which functional level to install. In the end I decided to go for Server 2008 R2. When it was my turn to order the food, the upgrading was already in progress.

I did all this using my mobile phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note and Jump Desktop's RDP client.

I disconnected when I got my food as I didn't want to mix my lunch with dcpromo. As I was busy after that, I found time to reconnect to the server almost half a day later. As it turned out, the upgrading process completed beautifully while I was away.

The wonders of technology!

All Men Are Created Equal Not

2011-11-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

My apologies, but Thomas Jefferson was wrong, perhaps just this once. Not [all men are created equal].

(I won't split hair over whether it should be all men are not created equal or all men are created not equal.)

You must have heard of this anecdote before: if every possession in the world today were confiscated and then divided out equally among every living person, after ten minutes, the whole world will be unequal again, assuming everyone acts rationally. There will be the Bill Gates'es who would successfully trade their bottle caps for medals. There will be others who would give away their farms for something trivial, trivial as in trivial to you and me.

The ugly and yet beautiful fact is that the world functions because of inequality. If all men are equal, the world grinds to a complete halt. Life freezes, and, if the equality is really maintained, everyone drops dead.

Society works because everyone places a different value on the same thing. It all started with the first kids. When Cain wanted a beef steak to break the monotony of his vegetarian menu, he exchanged some of his onions to Abel for a part of a cow. Cain must have reasoned that that part of a cow was worth his onions, and similarly Abel thought that the onions was worth that part of his cow. If Cain and Abel had come to the same evaluation of the onions and the same evaluation of that part of a cow, both would have died of some food poisoning and there won't be you and I to discuss this subject today.

If David and Goliath were equal, their fight would have ended in a stalemate. But as history has recorded, David slayed Goliath. That is a confirmed inequality.

... to be continued later ...

Related: My three heresies.

Heresies of Economics

2011-11-09T06:11:00.000-08:00

These are my private laws of economics:

Heresy #1: People respond to incentives
Heresy #2: People respond differently to (the same) incentives, and this creates a functioning society.
Heresy #3: Not [All men are created equal].

I have an advanced degree in Economics from the School of Hard Knocks. I missed many classes. But as there was no government in the School of Hard Knocks, I decided to award myself the degree anyway.

Respecting Intellectual Property

2011-11-07T19:09:00.000-08:00

If IP owners want everyone to treat their IP just like any other property, then perhaps they should start by treating their IP just like any other property.

First (not in any order of importance), the freedom to use IP should be similar to the freedom to use all other property. When you buy a chair from Ikea, you can do anything you like to it. Sit on it. Put things on it. Use it as fuel for a BBQ. Even if Ikea does not sell chairs but only rent chars, you are free to do whatever you want with a chair, as long as you are able to return it, less fair wear and tear, at the end of the rental period. But when you buy Mac OS, you are not permitted to install it on non-Apple hardware.

Then, we should also be free to transfer ownership of the IP with the same ease to transfer ownership of other property. If someone threw his old TV set out of his house to let the garbage collector pick it up, in most jurisdictions, people are free to pick it up and do whatever he likes with it, including using it to watch TV programs. If someone damages his music CD (physical property), hard luck and he must pay again to get another copy of the CD. But as a license to use the music cannot be damaged, an owner of the license must be free to transfer his license when he has no use for it.

Next, trading in parts and components should be similar to other property, that is, they are available because it is practical and cost effective to do so, not because only when the owner does not veto it. You can buy a steering wheel of a Toyota car without having to buy the whole car. You must be able to buy/sell a copy of Mac OS without having to buy/sell a Mac computer.

Lastly, notwithstanding that, in all non-communist countries, the selling price of anything is the highest price that the buyer can bear, the selling price of IP should bear some relationship to the cost of the IP.

If you exploit and drive people to the wall, expect people to think of creative ways to escape the bondage. Once IP owners treat their IP like other property, people all over will naturally respect (or not respect) IP like all other property.

Understanding Display "Resolution" (Retina display)

2011-10-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

When I first heard the "Retina display" of the iPhone explained, the perplexed reaction I had was "what for?" By the way, "Retina display" is just a marketing term for a density of greater than 300dpi.

Display area is probably the most expensive piece of real estate in the world after the Disney Store in New York city's Times Square. When you have a large spreadsheet to analyze, every pixel is priceless.

Why would you want to waste 960x640 of screen real estate at 326dpi? It's not about discernible (read snobby) people being able to tell the dots when the display density is below 200dpi.

For paper printouts, yes, you would want 300dpi or better. But for an electronic display which is refreshed at 30 times a second? For an electronic display showing moving images or video?

My main beef with high resolution displays on cell phones is that the density is too high. The density should be reduced to make the display more readable when each pixel is put to good use. Notice I said "put to good use". The iPhone's beautiful display is not put to good use with the applications we are seeing. See explanation.

The Samsung Galaxy Note has 1280x800 pixels and at a density of 285 dpi. This works out to a size of 5.3 inches diagonal. Now, 1280x800 is same or more abundant than the full-size displays of 85% of the laptop computers shipped in the world today! I could do some serious work on the phone with this amount of addressable and displayable pixels. The current Galaxy Note goes into all of my pockets comfortably. At 250dpi, this would give a screen size of 6". I think this would be better for an all-purpose computer that can be with you all the time. My eyes, which are more than half a century old each, are ok for such a display.

Smartphone Battery Life

2011-10-30T04:10:00.000-07:00

Why do the specifications of smartphones still give the maximum number of talk hours? And this is usually a huge fantastic number of half a month or more. And there is no other indicator of battery life.

As we all know, we use the smartphone more as a computer than as a (voice) phone. If I had wanted a very good voice phone, I would just get a $20 Nokia simple phone.

Smartphone battery life should be stated like laptops. And no laptop battery can last a day. Similarly, if you use a smartphone like a computer full time, don't expect it to last a day.

From experience, on the first day you bought your smartphone, your usage will be abnormally high. You discover that the battery life isn't that "good". As the days go by, your usage drops to a more realistic rate and you will find that the battery can last about a day.

The iPhone 5

2011-10-30T03:59:00.000-07:00

I predict that the iPhone 5 will have a much bigger screen, à la the Samsung Galaxy Note.

Understanding "Resolution" 101

2011-10-28T08:04:00.000-07:00

The word "resolution" has been so misused that the original definition, if I remember it correctly, actually bears little connection to how it is used nowadays.

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

The first step in the communication process (from the screen to the person) is "visual acquisition". Your eye must be able to acquire the image. The image must be big and bright enough to trigger photosensitive cells in your retina. Ignoring brightness, and just considering a single dot to represent the image, there is a minimum size for the dot below which the human eye cannot pick it out. But this depends on how far away you are from the dot, so a better parameter to quantify this is the angle subtended by the dot to your eye.

Figure 1 - Images of different sizes can subtend the same visual angle, depending on distance

Obviously the minimum subtended angle that can make a dot visible varies from person to person. And an eagle probably beats every human.

The second step is image recognition. To simplify, let's forget about pictures and just restrict the discussion to the letters of the English alphabet. About the minimum number of dots needed to represent each letter of the alphabet and still make every one distinguishable and recognizable (as letters of the English alphabet) is 5 dots horizontal by 7 dots vertical. If you have examined an old fashioned CRT terminal, an old fashioned moving stock display, or an old-fashioned matrix printer, you would know what I mean.

Figure 2 - Anything less than a matrix of 5x7 would make it difficult to recognize all the letters of the English alphabet as we know them.

The minimum is 5x7. But that doesn't mean you can't have more. Having more doesn't make each letter more distinguishable than the next. Technically, anything more than 5x7 is pure waste. But artistically, using a bigger matrix for each letter allows you to have nice smooth curves, with minute turns, and so on, to create a more visually appealing character. Now you know why a typeface like Times Roman looks coarse and ugly on "low resolution" displays. Serifs are just lots of curves and curves require lots of pixels to achieve a smooth graduating path.

Figure 3 - Letter A drawn in a 50x50 dot matrix and in shades of color (dithering).

The above letter A when seen from a distance where the subtended angle of each dot becomes barely discernible will look like this:

Now that you know the reason, you should not say "Times Roman looks ugly on low resolution displays". The right thing to say is probably: "Times Roman cannot be rendered adequately if each letter is represented by a small matrix of dots"!

"Resolution" is defined as the number of dots per unit distance. A typical laser printer output is 300 or 600 dots per inch. That is high resolution. The LCD screen that I am using now has about 120 dots per inch. Times Roman can still be rendered beautifully at a resolution of 10 dots per inch, provided you have a gigantic display.

Next, the displayable quantity (and size). The monitor I am using now has 1,680 horizontal dots and 1,080 vertical dots, and it is 23 inches diagonal. I can see so much of a spreadsheet if each character in the spreadsheet is represented in a matrix of 10x14 dots. Go ahead and do the simple division arithmetic to find out how many rows and columns that is exactly. A person with a display of 1,024 x 768 would be able to see less of the same spreadsheet than I. Even if the person has a 500-inch jumbo display with 1,024 x 768, he will still see less of the spreadsheet than my 23-inch display. For a display capable of showing 1,024x768, the person sees the same amount of information, whether the display is physically 14-inches or 500-inches. The only difference is that with a larger display, he can see the spreadsheet from further away. Remember the very first point above about the angle subtended by each dot? (Hint: if you fit the same number of dots onto a bigger screen, naturally each dot will be bigger.)

By quantity or the amount of information, I mean just that. To explain what I mean, ten letters on a line is twice the amount of information as five letters on a line. Ten letters on a line on a 14-inch screen is the same amount of information as ten letters filling up a line on a 500-inch screen. Hope you can grasp this in totality, otherwise please re-read.

I will digress a bit to talk about address-ability. All the previous discussion assume you have a computer capable of generating that 1024x768 or whatever "resolution" video signal. When you plug the cable to the display, the display input hardware must be able to synchronize with that signal. That is, it is able to pick out that you are streaming 1024x768 dots per frame. If a display cannot synchronize with the input signal, the picture (on an analog display) would be jumping or appear as some noise or the display can be damaged. On a digital displays, usually you will see a blank screen or an informational message telling you what's wrong. If the video signal is received properly, then the hardware will present that signal onto the display screen. It is entirely possible that the display can synchronize with a much higher frequency video signal, say to 1920x1280, even if the display can show only, say, 1024x768. The electronics in the display would "greek" the signal, averaging a few dots of the input signal into one dot for the screen. So a beautiful image would appear as a compressed smudgy image on this "low resolution" screen. Most projectors are like this. The actual projection optics is expensive and the most common one today is capable of only 1024x768 (up from 800x600 of a few years ago). However, most projectors today can accept input signals of any "resolution" so as not to inconvenience users. How the signal is then projected varies. Some projectors greek them. Others show a viewport of 1024x768 and allow you to pan to see the bigger picture.

Now we come to the true use of the word "resolution". Laser printers have very good resolution. It's 300dpi since 1990. The common standard now is either 600dpi or 1200dpi. Most people cannot tell the difference (subtended angle again) when the resolution is higher than 300dpi. Traditionally, displays have the lowest resolution, 100dpi is quite common. But even 100dpi does not affect reading efficiency if something like ClearType, using graduating brightness to substitute for graduating dots, is used.

Lately, with cell phones, the displays have been increasing in resolution without increasing in size. The iPhone 4 has 326dpi - 960 x 640 in 3.5" diagonal. This is wasteful. Lots of memory and electricity are used to render a lot of dots which cannot be consumed as they are not visible to most people.

In conclusion, for a given amount of displayable dots, if you want to transmit the maximum amount of information, you use the most simple typeface - a cell of 5x7 for each letter. If you have plenty of dots to spare, then you can have the luxury of showing each letter more artistically with hundreds of dots. Remember that the size of the display plays no part in the quantity of information you can show if the amount of dots are the same. A bigger size display simply means you can see it from farther away.

RDP Client for Mobiles

2011-10-16T18:49:00.000-07:00

I have been looking for a good (and cheap) RDP client for my Android phone. I was about to pay $25 for Xtralogic's software when I saw the one from Jump Desktop for only $0.99. Having tested both, I find the Jump Desktop one better than the much more expensive one.

Jump Desktop's price for Apple is $14.99. Better grab Jump Desktop for your Android before the price goes up.

Jump Desktop's RDP client has the following useful and better features:

It is both RDP and VNC. But I have not used VNC myself.
It is a standard RDP client, but at the same time, if your host is on an internal network and you don't know its external IP address, you can configure Jump Desktop to go via Google for connectivity instead. I haven't tried it myself, but I think the host contacts "Google's servers" (according to the FAQ), your client contacts Google, and Google makes the connection. Neat if it works.
It has two "cursors", making use on a small phone screen lots lots easier. There is a big circle which you can drag to move the host's Windows cursor. Touch anywhere else and you can drag to pan the viewport showing the host's desktop or dual touch to zoom. As it is likely that your phone's display is smaller than your host's desktop, without this feature a terminal session is not practical.
Popping up the Android's virtual keyboard does not cover the host's desktop. Hence, you can see what you are typing.

One thing I can't find on Jump Desktop is audio options. For one of my hosts, I need to let audio play on the host as it is doing a recording. [Oct 31 Update: the latest version allows you to configure audio options, just like the Windows version.]

Like Xtralogic's, Jump Desktop does not run in the background, and it exits without prompting if you hit the Android back button one too many times. [Oct 31 Update: the latest version has a confirmation dialog before quitting.]

After purchasing Jump Desktop, I discovered Wyse's PocketCloud Remote RDP, which is free. PocketCloud is almost the same as Jump Desktop except that it cannot zoom by touch. You have to touch +/- keys on the screen.

I have tested Yongtao Wang's RDP Lite some time ago and I found it too basic.What I am surprised is why Jump Desktop has only 1,000+ downloads when Xtralogic has 10,000+.

In conclusion, if you don't want to spend a single cent, go for Wyse's PocketCloud. If you can afford a dollar, try Jump Desktop.

--
After using RDP on a mobile for a few minutes, I came to realize that it's not like working on a PC. A PC is true multi-tasking and you can jump from any window to any window. Working on mobile is a bit restrictive. If I press the Home button, I don't know whether the current app will run in the background or the system will kill it after a while. Hence, if you are working on a remote session via RDP, and a call comes in, what should you do?

My Computer

2011-10-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to describe my computer until I read this: http://tratt.net/laurie/tech_articles/articles/good_programmers_are_good_sysadmins_are_good_programmers.

First, what I do. I write code, some of it, everyday. I administer networks and servers too.

I develop Windows apps, about a hundred thousand lines of C# code so far. I do ASP.NET apps, more than twenty operational but small web sites. I do Silverlight too, a LOB one used by two thousand users. I have an unmanageable number of Powershell scripts, doing all sorts of funny things which most people would have written a console or Windows app to do, and this is possible because Powershell has full access to the complete .NET Framework class library. I administer several PCs and about ten servers currently. I install OS'es with my own two hands from a floppy/CD/DVD/thumbdrive, ie SYSPREP images strictly prohibited, in well over 100 machine instances from DOS 1.1 to Windows Server 2008 R2. I install SQL Servers too, since version 2005. There is also the occasional Sharepoint Server which I dislike. Oh yes, I do Active Directory as well. I install and operate my own on premise Exchange Server 2010, with one email account, mine. I build networks. Right now I am running six in six different locations with five of them using HSDPA for WAN access. I have Virtual PC on my primary machine with five images, but I seldom switch them on because performance is disappointing. I monitor about 20 batch jobs daily.

The machine that is with me all the time (meaning at times it could be in the trunk of the car, but always reachable at short notice) is a 17-inch notebook with 1600x900 addressability and displayability. At three places I frequent, I have a positioned a 1680x1050 monitor. So for >90% of the time, my notebook is running with a desktop of about 3200x1000 pixels. I wish for more.

I disagree with Mr Tratt respectfully that a notebook is not powerful enough (instead see why it's an overkill). I also disagree that a notebook is not ergonomically sound. I have not used a mouse since November 1996. But I have not yet met another person who can operate a computer (ie access applications, work applications, enter data, manipulate windows, etc) as fast as I can. Not even anywhere close. Perhaps my circle of acquaintances is too small.

At any one time, I have 30+ application windows opened on my notebook, partially overlapping one another. I have three Powershell consoles and two cmd.exe consoles, only one in elevated mode and with a danger red background. On a busy day my RJ-45 is connected to one (restricted) network, my wi-fi is my route to the Internet, and I have two VPN tunnels to two distant networks. Typically I have six terminal service (TS) sessions connected to some of my remote computers. The good thing about TS is that I could be disconnected by a calamity such as an earthquake. The next time I reconnect I am exactly at the middle of the down motion of the mouse click when I was disrupted.

Another thing, I have not shut down my computer since November 1996, that's when I got my first notebook. I have upgraded eleven times since, but I have not shut any of the eleven notebooks down for the purpose of shutting it down. Sure, I have to power it off to do hardware repairs and all that. But I have not shut it down because I go to bed or drive somewhere or board a plane. My computer is always on Sleep mode (not Hibernate) when I am on the move.

So, whenever I put my computer out of Sleep, it is exactly where it was previously. I reboot my notebook once in two to three weeks at the point where it starts to behave weirdly. I couldn't go longer than that, even with Windows 7. I detest rebooting, because it would mean having to re-launch all my applications all over again and losing all the keyboard command buffers in my console sessions (I am that lazy).

Do you think I am insane?

Nov 2011 update: My mobile phone is the Samsung Galaxy Note. It has a 1280x800 display. This works nicely as all my remote desktops are at 1024x768. See here why the Note display is a bit small. See here why mobile computing is different from working on a notebook PC. With the Note, finally I have the ability to access everything I want to access, anytime, even while not sitting down. This is cloud computing in its purest form.

The case for an iPad

2011-10-12T07:11:00.000-07:00

Do you know of anyone who has an iPad but not another personal computer?

Do you know of anyone who has an iPad but not a mobile phone?

I think the answers are overwhelmingly no for both questions.

Managing three devices is crazy, cloud services notwithstanding. You spend more time managing the devices than using them. It's not about enthusiasm. It is just plain showing off.

A tablet computer is a great, probably the greatest, computing device for the situations when you can't be sitting down. When you are not sitting down, you cannot do serious work. Hence, an iPad is just that, for not serious work. It is an expensive toy, just like those expensive hand bags with names you can't pronounce.

But what the heck, we need spenders like that to keep any economy functioning.

Today's iOS or Android is essentially a single tasking system. If you are reading a document, you can't be looking at another document to compare the two. If you are in the middle of an RDP session and a phone call comes in, you are stuck, like a deer in the headlights. This is a massive retrogressive step since Lisa or Windows 1.1. Until this changes, the notebook PC will still be the main workhorse for everybody.

Like expensive handbags, there will be many who will die to get an iPad. Like expensive handbags, there will be many who would die than be seen holding an iPad.

138.26.72.17

2011-08-26T06:25:00.000-07:00

Military Technology 2011-07-16 The Network Storm is here

There you have it! This is a reproduction mock-up of the attack software from the Electrical Engineering University of the People's Liberation Army:

Select Attack Target

IP Address of Attack Target

FalungGong Network List:

Watch the original video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Wu1HlZbBk

An expert is...

2011-08-25T18:46:00.000-07:00

A good teacher or an expert is someone who, after listening to you for five seconds, knows :

what you know,
what you don't know,
what you want to know, and
what you need to know in order to achieve what you want to know.

Otherwise both of you will be spending unproductive hours going around each other repeatedly. I am sure you have see this only too often, where two parties confuse each other out on different frequencies.

Hence, if you are offering advice, do take a step back and spend five seconds to figure out what they other person knows, does not know, wants to know, and what he needs to know.

Today and yesteryear

2011-08-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

The gigantic difference between today and say, twenty, years ago, has got to be Google Search.

Before there was airplane travel, there were restrictions to what we can do to impact people far away. It was worse before there was long distance telephone. But with the near death of distance from cheap calls and fast jets, there was a boom in work that got done.

With computers came software. The difference in speeds between today's toy computer and the first super computer is often forgotten, but it is a mind boggling three orders of magnitude. Imagine your car doing 50,000mph instead of 50mph. Imagine every granny driving such a car.

Software on speedy computers is a super enabler. But the super enabler is idling in waste 99% of the time while we think of things to make it do. The limitations now, instead of being caused by vast distances, are caused by the smallness of the human brain. There's only so much knowledge we can hold. There's only so many tomes of encyclopedia we can look up in so many waking hours a day. That is, until Google Search came along.

Initially, Google Search was just a different Alta Vista. But soon it became one million professors standing by your side, 24x7. (I don't know whether this is not the case in the non-English speaking world. (Wow, triple negatives!))

So, the challenge now becomes who can make better use of the one million professors by your side. Every granny and Michael Schumacher has the exact same 50,000mph car.

I have to stop here. I need to go and consult my one million professors, lest your granny zooms past.

The decline of Microsoft

2011-08-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

I use the quality of Windows Messenger as a barometer of Microsoft.

In 2000, it was MSN Messenger. It came after Yahoo Messenger, but surpassed it immediately. The features were really convenient. Those pleasant audio notifications when your friends come online or send you a message became the standard noises in the office. Remote Assistance worked, and I used it to help troubleshoot the PCs of many friends located far away. There was even a real telco connection and you could dial to real phones. File transfer worked if the firewall wasn't too strict. PC to PC voice was excellent.

In 2003, MSN Messenger was the largest network, eclipsing AIM and Yahoo Messenger, with 30 million customers I think. The ability to make any animated GIF into an animated emoticon was priceless. Pressing F2 you could use it like a walkie-talkie. File transfer worked all the time. So did handwriting, which was absolutely critical when what you want to say could not be totally expressed in words.

Then Remote Assistance stopped working. Not even between two PCs next to each other connected on the same LAN. In 2007, Remote Assistance mysteriously worked again, but only for a few days.

Then they renamed it to Windows Live Messenger, and it was downhill all the way. Each newer version became bigger, but less and less things worked. And it crashed more often, on a pure Windows PC.

Then came Google Chat as part of Gmail. It was no fight as Chat was web based and was thus restricted in the number of things that can be done.

Then came Facebook, and Twitter. I thought Microsoft would just tweak Messenger by letting the user broadcast certain threads and kill Twitter right away. I waited and waited, but nothing happened.

Messenger was enhanced with its own integrated blogging feature, called Spaces or something. It was neat, but not promoted at all, and died. Considering the huge Messenger base, this is tragic.

In 2008 I had a Nokia E71. It came with a true Messenger client. It worked well, but back then I didn't have a data plan, so use was restricted to wifi opportunities only and usage didn't take off.

It's 2011. I have two PCs on the same LAN with the newest version of Live Messenger. On one PC I can send a file to the other. On the other PC, the file transfer function is disabled. On some days, it's the other way round. On other days, it will complain that I or the other party don't have the latest version of Messenger.

It's 2011. Google has a GTalk client on Android, which talks to all Google Chat users. Microsoft still refuses to produce an Android client for Messenger. The web version is unusable. And sorry, I don't approve giving my password to the likes of eBuddy. So now, at my desk I use Live Messenger. When away, I have to use GTalk on my Android phone.

[Sep 1, 2011 update] It's getting disastrous. Live Messenger now creates extraordinary barriers to add a new contact. It used to be: click Contacts, click Add. How do you do it now? I have someone sitting next to me, both online, both on the same LAN. He has added me. I don't see him. I don't get any notification that he has added me. He sees me as offline. He sends an offline message to me. I received nothing. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I think it's the result of having the wrong Program Manager on the job.

And the handwriting feature has disappeared! I need to sketch a quick drawing to my co-worker. I am stumped. I don't want to launch Word, save as a file, and transfer a file.

When do you think the once largest everyone must have Instant Messenger service will just die away?

Connecting HP Photosmart to the Time Capsule

2011-07-14T05:18:00.000-07:00

Today I helped a friend who had trouble connecting her HP Photosmart B210 to the Apple Time Capsule.

The error message on the HP printer was not useful, something about MAC filtering being turned on at the wireless router. This is patently not true as MAC filtering was not enabled and any other PC could just connect to the Time Capsule by entering the correct password.

After two wasted hours, it was down to the type of encryption used. The (old) Time Capsule was on WEP. By changing it to WPA, it worked.

What is gambling

2011-07-10T20:06:00.000-07:00

Everyone tells me gambling isn't directly defined in the bible. Here's my take.

Gambling is not playing a game of chance. If it is, children playing Snakes and Ladders would be engaging in an act of sin. (Perhaps it is and I am unaware of some Christian groups out there who prohibit Snakes and Ladders.)

Gambling is not placing a bet. If it is, a farmer who buy some seeds hoping to reap a harvest later in the year would be making a huge gamble that the weather would turn out favorable.

Gambling is not gaining something without honest labor. If it is, a Boeing 747 pilot lifting 400 tons across the ocean with the mere effort of his fingers would be doing something sinful. And a person inheriting a house from his parents would be a born gambler.

However, all the generally acknowledged forms of gambling are invariably games of chance and require placing bets. We will talk about honest labor later.What then is gambling?

From what I have read from different sources, I see gambling as something that complies to all three of the following conditions:

a. Gaining ownership mainly by chance.
b. Gaining ownership through the transfer of ownership from someone else (the loser) without an overall gain in productivity or value in a zero sum game.
c. A covetous act.

Based on the above, Snakes and Ladders would not be gambling as it does not have b (unless money is being wagered in which case it is like any other game in a casino) or c. A farmer planting crops would not be gambling as it does not have b too.

Based on the above, everything in the casinos is gambling. "Investing" in the stock market by studying the ups and downs and making money from this is gambling. It meets a, b and c.

About the honest labor part, notice that the lack of it is not in my three conditions. Playing blackjack is gambling despite the enormous application of intelligence and hard work by serious players. Most stock market gamblers do serious study and work, though whether that effort has a correlation to desired outcome is dubious.

Tougher to determine, or perhaps tougher to accept without being in denial, would be placing some money in in an interest bearing bank account. You would not be doing the gambling. Someone else is, in order that you may receive some of the interest. Is this where Islamic banking comes in?

Some people argue that gambling in casinos does not meet condition b, as gambling revenue provides a whole string of jobs in the long food chain from the tax collector to the cocktail waitress.

Now that I have defined gambling, I will leave you to learn from the theological experts the badness of gambling.

A Simple Solution to the LINQ to SQL Connection String Problem

2011-06-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

Sometimes geniuses do fumble.

Visual Studio is without question an engineering masterpiece. But the LINQ to SQL connection issue is really a silly mistake. Why would anyone want to compile a connection string, with password and all, into code?

Anyway, the geniuses did provide a good alternative. The problem can be solved easily without having to modify anything generated by Visual Studio.

The DBML Designer generates a few constructor overloads for the DataClasses1DataContext class (assuming default naming). One of them takes in a, what else, connection string! So, when you instantiate your data context, just use this constructor instead. This is what I do for my particular application:

DataClasses1DataContext db = new
DataClasses1DataContext(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["xxx"].ConnectionString);

Bluetooth - ideal and useless

2011-05-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

The hardware engineers did a fantastic job. The way the specifications of Bluetooth are developed, with all the different profiles to cater to every conceivable application, shows the professionalism and brilliance of the people behind Bluetooth.

The same cannot be said of the software people.Virtually every notebook PC comes with Bluetooth these days. But it is effectively useless. The dreams and aspirations of the Bluetooth creators are not, and cannot be, realized. It is a utter complete waste. The culprits are Microsoft and the driver developers of the device makers.

If some of the original goals of Bluetooh were realized, everyone would be able, among other things, :

To exchange files between notebooks instead of the hassle of a thumbdrive.
To connect to the Internet on the road through the mobile phone in the pocket, seamlessly.
To control a PowerPoint show, for example, with a pointer device using Bluetooth, instead of having to plug in another dongle.

I had gone through four different notebooks with Bluetooth. Every time it is always something like the following, which is the latest HP ProBook 4720s of mine:

Going to HP's driver support site merely wastes my time. Contacting HP support wastes more time without a resolution.

Desktops are worse. I bought a Bluetooth dongle from BlueSoleil some time ago and the driver BlueSoleil destroyed the PC.

I have yet to see a single person using Bluetooth on a PC.

Why is it so difficult to get this simple but very useful job done?

Your smartphone is very powerful!

2011-04-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

It seems that most people, especially present day young ones, have problems understanding my Apollo 11 illustration. I will try again with another example.

When the most well-known bank in my city had a million customers, it had 50+ branches. Almost every customer operated a savings account where each was given a savings book. Every deposit or withdrawal transaction was printed as a one-line entry in the book with the latest balance in the second last column. (The last column was a comments field.)

Every teller in the branch had an IBM terminal. Customers would fill up and sign a form to withdraw money, or just present cash to deposit. The teller would open the savings book to the page where the last entry was and insert the book into the printer next to the terminal. She would push the book all the way in. When she hit the key to print, the central mainframe computer would send out the exact number of line-feeds so that the latest transaction would be printed nicely just below the previous one.

Overall it was a pretty efficient system. It even took care of transactions not conducted at the branch, for example ATM withdrawals, by printing them in the savings book the next time you presented it at the branch.

The whole system was driven by two state-of-the-art IBM System 370 mainframes. Each had 8MB of core RAM. I can't remember the clock speed of the mainframe. Probably it was below 5MHz, given that most register based S/360 opcodes took one cycle each and I thought the system had a couple of MIPS. All the hardware in the branches were terminals, that is, every keystroke by each teller had to be sent to and processed by the IBM mainframe.

What the bank had is but a small fraction of what the phone in your hand has: 8MB vs 512MB, 5MHz vs 1,000MHz. To conclude, your stock iPhone alone is grossly over-powered to run the total operations of a bank with 50 branches and a million customers. Do you get it? It's not an analogy. It's not an extrapolation. It actually happened. Imagine a 10,000 sq-foot computer room totally empty except for an iPhone sitting in the middle and driving all functions of the bank.

What's the catch? There is none.

This illustration is not as beautiful as the Apollo 11 one as you can argue that now there're Internet banking requirements and banks now do more than just handle deposits and withdrawals. So please go and read the Apollo story. The distance to the moon has not increased, and astronauts are not asking for more comfortable seats.

What all this means is that we have tremendous power to do whatever we want. It's like the (impossible) luxury of having unlimited electricity or water. The availability of energy and water is worse now than at the beginning of the twentieth century, and is getting worse with each passing day. On the other hand, we have more and more computing power at our disposal. So, it's time to get off our butts and do something useful with all this power.

And the power goes to...

2011-04-25T16:30:00.000-07:00

Probably something like 80% to 90% of the new found computing power goes into the graphical user interface. This is on personal computers as well as mobile phones. The sleek graphics painted in a window that we take for granted require billions and billions of computing cycles, repeating and repeating every time something on screen changes.

The graphical UI is obviously a great enabler. It allows lay people to use the computer where previously only trained professionals could.

However, do not let this be a distraction. The fact that a small fraction of an iPhone powered the complete operations of a bank or sent men to the moon and back cannot be erased. And it is repeatable, with great ease.

Is it so difficult to appreciate that there are things we do not know that we do not know?

2011-04-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

(I will justify shortly that) to most people, the set of things in the world is divided as follows (not to scale):

Things I do not know

Things that I know

Figure 1

For the past thirty years or so, I have always assumed that the set of things is as follows (not to scale):

Things (I know that) I do not know

Things that I know

Things that I do not know that I do not know

Figure 2

I spend most of my waking hours tranfering things from the yellow zone to the pink zone. It is only too easy to lapse into Figure 1 thinking if I lower my guard.

Why do I think most people think like in Figure 1? I draw this conclusion from the ridicule poured on Donald Rumsfeld from almost 100% of the press. Some thought it was poetry! The BBC called it bizzare. I don't know whether to believe that the British Plain English Campaign doesn't understand what Mr Rumsfeld was saying. It appears that people do not realize there is a Figure 2.

To me what Mr Rumsfeld said couldn't be clearer. If only journalists didn't forget the sets and Venn diagrams they learned in grade 7 or 8.

Related: An expert is...

We can be right but wrong

2011-03-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

For almost five thousand years, we were certain that the sun rose in the east and set in the west. People went about planning a day's routine based on this knowledge that the sun moved in the sky around the earth. No one was hurt or killed even though our understanding was badly wrong.

Newton put forth many laws of physics that govern almost everything we do. We build bridges, skyscrapers and aeroplanes based on those laws. No one has been known to be injured or killed because any of Newton's laws were faulty. But 300 years after Newton, Einstein's theory on relativity showed that Newton's laws were wrong! Newton was right only if speeds were slow. Luckily the rocket scientists had time to make the adjustments before sending people to the moon.

So, we can be right but still be wrong, and be the none worse for it.

We can be wrong in totality, but if our application of knowledge is restricted to the scope of what we know, it is possible that we can still be successful in thinking that we are right, while actually we are wrong.

Back to the earth going round the sun. How certain are we now that the earth is indeed moving round the sun? It is possible that the earth could still be the center of the universe after all. If someone with a good understanding of this subject matter were to propose this today, he won't be persecuted like Copernicus or Galileo were, but he would be ridiculed. I would keep an open mind.

The Awesomeness of Power

2011-03-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

Finally, today I see someone with similar views. See Programming is a Super Power.

You might have discovered that I too started with assembler on 8-bits. Survivors from that bygone era respect power, or rather the lack thereof. Some of us are stupid enough to always optimize every line of code in the head, mentally mapping the compiler output to IL to Intel opcode, notwithstanding that the entry-level CPU is running at a billion instructions per second in each of its four cores. Most of the time we are proven right, as any application beyond the trivial will become sluggish when one relaxes and indulge in "easy" code, no matter how BIPS you may have.

With today's hardware and the enormously rich class libraries, I am continuously thrilled by the amount of heavy lifting that a single line of innocuously looking code can do. It must be like flying a jumbo plane - little movements on the stick maneuver 350 tons just like that!

After a while, it becomes addictive!

Why are people still comparing browser performance?

2011-03-17T01:53:00.000-07:00

IE9 is out today and web sites have sprung up benchmarking it against Chrome, Firefox, et cetera.

100 years ago, the lunch time conversation probably centered around who's got the fastest car, and if yours was 38mph and mine was 42mph I get the looks of envy and admiration.

About 50 years ago, people forgot that cars came with a maximum speed limit. Because whatever roads there were, and whatever you wanted to do, every car could go faster than what the other restrictions impose.

Here we are at IE9 on an entry level consumer PC with quad-cores and a billion instructions per second per core, who are these people talking about browser benchmarks, and what are their motives?

That confounded WCF configuration file

2010-12-15T17:04:00.000-08:00

The great thing about Visual Studio is that it pampers you, by doing a fantastic job on your behalf to hide all the nitty-gritties. The downside is that when you depart from the default values/names/settings, you may not know what manual changes are needed.

If you have read Keith Elder's article about WCF, you will understand what a Boeing 747 you have. And you need a lot of new skills to pilot such a plane. I would like to share some basics about web.config/app.config that I learned the hard way.

The new section of interest in the configuration file is: <system.serviceModel>. You can have nothing in this section, and everything will simply take on certain default values. The commonly used elements in this section are:

<services>
<bindings>
<behaviors>

<services>

The <services> section defines the web services you want to publish. (On the client's web.config, you would not have this but a <client> section instead.) The <services> element contains the <service> elements (that's how subtle and confusing the names can be if you read too fast).

For each web service you have in your project, though optional, you should have a corresponding <service> element defined. If your web service code is like:

namespace NNNN
{
[ServiceContract]
public interface CCCC
{ ...

and the implementation:

namespace NNNN
{
public class SSSS : CCCC
{ ...

then an example of your <service> element can be as follows:

BBBB points to a <behavior> element in your configuration file, while BCBC points to a binding element in the same file. In other words, BBBB, if it is specified in the service, must be in the name attribute of a <behavior> element in the <behaviors> section, and similarly BCBC must be in the name attribute of a binding element in the <bindings> section. Otherwise, you will get an error when you try to call anything on the host.

One thing I find odd is the need for the binding attribute in the <endpoint> element. It is not free text, but must be one of the valid binding types. But the binding type is already defined in the binding element (see below) referred to in the bindingConfiguration attribute of the endpoint.

A service can have zero or one or more endpoints explicitly defined.

<bindings>

The elements in the bindings are not named <binding> but must be one of the valid WCF binding types. So, they could be <basicHttpBinding>, <webHttpBinding>, and so on. (Use Intellisense in Visual Studio to see the full list.) For my above example, you can use something like the following to make use of integrated Windows authentication:

You may need to look up further documentation on what other values you can have in <security> or <transport>, and other elements you can add.

<behaviors>

I have not learned what behaviors web services can have other than the one use to publish meta data. Meta data is the information that your client can use to determine the web methods and data types that are available from the web service. If your clients are using .NET WCF, then a behavior such as below will expose the meta data:

Conclusion

I hope the above gives you an introduction to the intricacies of the WCF configuration file. With the basics out of the way, you will be able to explore the esoteric options and attributes.

Super OLED!

2010-11-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

After two years, the age of my Nokia E-71 showed. The main shortcoming has been the display size. The good and real keyboard has made it impossible to go higher than 320x240 without increasing the thickness of the phone.

So I got myself the Samsung Galaxy S recently. It is a very good copycat of the iPhone 3GS, down to the packing box. What did they say about imitation and flattery? I am speculating that the next version of the Galaxy would, like the iPhone 4, have rectangular instead of curvy edges on the sides.

I have not used the iPhone other than testing it. I find Android much more usable compared with my experience with the iPhone. The menu and back buttons on the Galaxy S are really handy. The Program Monitor gives me a very visible state of my phone. If control equals power, I am power-drunk. People like me would have difficultly living under the yoke of Mr Jobs.

The biggest jump in capability has to be Swype. I guess Samsung has to pay for it as one Motorola model I know does not have it. It is so powerful that it makes you become more verbose. Ever since my first SMS in 1996, I have always ensured that every word in every single SMS I send is spelled in full and every sentence is properly punctuated. Hence Swype is an excellent tool for me.

The Super OLED display is just super. It gives new meaning to the term "vibrant colors". If you have not seen it go to a phone shop and check out the weather forecast in Daily Briefing. The lightning or moon behind clouds will stun you.

One thing I will have to get used to is that I have to get some basic essential stuff from the Market. I am used to Nokia providing a basic set of software for the hardware they sold. In the Android world, you are expected to use those written by some kind souls out there. I still don't feel good that my location accurate to 5m can be reported to some unknown person every time I use some application.

One feature I wish for is an on/off switch for celluar data. Other than roaming protection, there are times when I need to control radiation. For example if I am still outside and my battery is low, I want to be able to conserve power until I get a chance to recharge.

Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S is an excellent phone.

I have not upgraded to 2.2 Froyo as I keep hearing all those negative reports.

Why it is Peking and not Beijing

2010-11-15T07:05:00.000-08:00

[As at January 2011, this web site cannot be viewed from within China.]

Lord Carrington explained it most clearly when he said that English speakers do not call Moscow Mockba.

I see two fundamental misunderstandings on names and languages.

First, English speakers do not need the permission of the CCP to decide how to name the capital of China in English. English speakers do not seek Italy's permission when they call Roma Rome. The list goes on. Similarly, Britain does not, and cannot, insist that the Chinese do not call London 伦敦 but London. Britain cannot object the French from calling that same place Londres.

Second, the capital of China in Chinese is 北京, not Beijing. This second point is a bit subtle so not everyone may get it immediately. "Beijing" is 100% not a Chinese word. Chinese is not written using the letters of the English or Latin alphabet. Chinese is written using pictographs, eg 北京. The word "Beijing" is as Chinese as "Лондон" is English.

There is nothing offensive or ominous about calling the capital of China Peking in English. There are no western hegemonic overtones or Chinese humiliation implied when we use the word Peking. [Jan 2, 2011 update: mind you I just returned from an absorbing visit to Yuan Ming Yuan] Just like when the Chinese call London 伦敦 in their language, there is no connotation China might have overrun England. On the other hand, using Beijing instead of Peking in English unequivocally acknowledges a total capitulation to the CCP! I guess big cash can do wonderful things. If this goes on, soon we will have to use Zhong-guo instead of China.

Coming back to the word "Beijing", it is merely the Hanyu Pinyin phonetic spelling of 北京, when pronounced in Chinese, just like "lʌndən" is the IPA phonetic spelling of London, when pronounced in English. We should leave these as they are.

Long live Peking! 北京万岁!

Auto Cars

2010-10-11T08:06:00.000-07:00

I had this idea for twenty years but Google beats me to testing it.

The car carrying capacity of any road is simple: unlimited.

To take more cars, just increase the speed of cars. The real limit is parking. Sooner or later cars have to stop. So the trick is to find a way for cars to slow down gradually to a a parking spot.

Hence, we should just increase the speed limit to give everyone a smooth ride. Every car will know where every other car is and is going. All cars can zoom past each other at traffic junctions with no need for traffic lights. The faster you zoom past each other, the more people can have cars and use them. Of course all cars will be driverless, like what Google is trying to do.

In my vision of things, nobody owns cars anymore. To go anywhere, just punch a button on your mobile phone. In a minute or so, a driverless car will come to your exact spot. Hop on, and the car will pick up speed and join the main traffic. If your destination is 10 miles away , you should reach there in much lesser than 10 minutes, irrespective of the traffic volume!

After you alight, your car will stop where it is and wait for the next request. In version 2, the car will move to the next best spot based on predictive demand forecasting.

The amount of fuel consumed per passenger for such a journey will be a small fraction of what you can get today on a mass transport system like the bus. Remember Newton's first law, and second law? Fuel is needed only on the initial pick up and, after that, only for overcoming traction and air resistance.

Getting Web Images Right

2010-02-18T00:24:00.000-08:00

I appreciate all the programming and troubleshooting tips posted by the many enthusiastic contributors from all over the world. Many of them include lots (and lots) of screenshots to illustrate what they are trying so hard to help us. One problem, however, is the clarity (and size) of those screenshot images.

I always love screenshot images that are in native resolution: one pixel in the bitmap corresponding to one pixel on the original screen and corresponding to one pixel on my screen.

No one should have any problems capturing the screenshot - the [Alt]-[prt sc] key does it all to the active window. I think the problem is in saving it. The original MS Paint was a disaster. You have to manually set the size your image. And it can't save to the png format.

I find that Paint Dot NET is the most convenient tool. Pasting from the clipboard automatically creates a new image of the dimensions of the image in the clipboard. So it's the perfect size, no chances of error. And saving to png gives the best, in terms of color and file size, for most dialog box type of screenshots.

One mistake most people make is to resize (I don't mean crop) the screenshot images. Never never do that. The moment the image is resized, even by one pixel smaller, a million floating point calculations are done to divide out the original number of pixels over the new number of pixels. Unless it happens to be nice round integers, there will be lots of fractions and arbitrary decisions have to be made whether to round up or truncate. Thus the image gets distorted and the colors get distorted. Textual characters that use the minimum number of pixels in the original image become illegible.

There are two places where images can be resized. First is in the image editing software as mentioned in the preceding paragraph. The second place is at the web page. Many people still add a WIDTH or HEIGHT attribute to their IMG tag. NEVER DO THIS! But then there are culprits, such as Blogger.com, who refuse to allow me to put up my original image. Look at the sample below:

My picture was 406x471 pixels, a crisp looking snapshot of Task Manager with one pixel in my file for every one pixel in the original image, and a file size of only 7.63kB. The picture fits more than nicely on the page, but Google insists on greeking it into an ugly illegible smudge with a file size of 79kb!!!!. Grrrr! Why why why?

Are you current?

2010-02-05T22:50:00.000-08:00

[It is not fiction that a fully-laden airliner can complete its whole trip from take-off to landing, at most modern airports, with the pilot's hands totally off the controls throughout the journey. Nevertheless,]

An airline captain, say of a Boeing 777, must land a Boeing 777 manually at least once every 35 days to maintain his currency as a captain. If he does not achieve that, then he must land the same aircraft in a simulator. If he has extended his currency through the simulator, then within the next 35 days he must land the real plane from the right hand seat, that is, with another captain in command and supervising.

In contrast, anyone can claim to be a qualified and experienced software architect or developer! Is it because no one gets killed when software is poorly written? I am convinced that this is the real answer.

An airline pilot is certified not only on his flying skills but by aircraft type. A Boeing 777-200 pilot is not permitted to fly a Boeing 777-300ER without undergoing a conversion course. Imagine a company not permitting a Java programmer to write in C# until he is re-trained. That company will go out of business because other companies will not impose this restriction upon themselves. And the reason can only be: no one gets killed when the software crashes.

My favorite question during hiring interviews has been: "Have you written 500 lines of xx code in the last 30 days?"

The Mother of All Trojans

2010-01-14T22:29:00.000-08:00

Well, now we know that the Communists do not understand that entering someone's computer is the same as entering someone's house. Or maybe I am giving them too much credit. Do they also enter people's homes if no one is watching?

Using zero-day attacks or upatched vulnerabilities is a contorted process that requires lots of hardwork trying to predict and then handle all possible outcomes. Such attacks are not always successful even if the target computer is vulnerable.

If they could spent their talent and energies on such hacks, just imagine what they could have put into all those Huawei routers!

According to Wikipedia, Huawei is founded and still led by an ex-PLA man, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of China and a congressman!

Could they be that far-sighted? The router is the mother of all Trojans. It's the interface point between your internal network and the Internet. All other network equipment are similarly vulnerable as they just have to communicate. Just imagine all the sleeping robots out there waiting to be awaken and report back to Commie HQ. The possibilities for total destruction are mind-boggling. All that is needed is a little backdoor code to boot-strap the software of the day!

All you corporations and government departments out there in America, Europe, and even China: if you had purchased Huawei because the quotation was 50% cheaper than the Cisco one, you had better quickly unplug them.

My thinking is not original. See the following too:

UK Sunday Times Huawei's Dubios Reputation Is Huawei behind Ghostnet?

Welcome to the new Cold War - added May 10, 2011Perhaps the hacker community can do some community service and study the Huawei firmware for Trojans.

Download Fails for Windows Update

2010-01-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

I don't know how well-known it is that the Windows Update client, even when run from IE, does not run using your logged-in credentials. This is according to KB 900935.

So, if your computer requires a proxy server to connect to the Internet and you have configured the proxy server through your IE settings, the Windows Update client will still try to connect directly. This is because the IE settings are specific for each user.

I have a newly installed Windows Server 2003 that is on a LAN that requires a proxy. The first update went through ok. But subsequent updates keep failing to download. By running proxycfg -u to copy my IE proxy settings for everyone, Windows Update breezed through.

The puzzling thing is that I have two other Windows Server 2003 sitting next to this one on the same network. They were installed 1.5 years ago, with the proxy server configured in IE. I checked and proxycfg on these two says "Direct access". But Windows Updates for those two servers work fine!!

Enabling ASP.NET on a Windows Server 2003 64-bit

2009-12-18T23:41:00.000-08:00

I installed 64-bit Windows Server 2003 (R2 with SP2) for the first time this week. Surprisingly, there is no option to enable ASP.NET on IIS even though I have all the .NET frameworks installed and updated.

The Add/Remove Windows Component Wizard does not have ASP.NET as an option under Application Server. Neither does the Managing Your Server application. In 32-bit Windows Server, it says Application Server (IIS, ASP.Net) but in 64-bit it is as follows:

As it cannot be done through the GUI, I checked up the Help documentation. The documentation says my next task is to enable ASP.NET but I couldn't find any clues on how to do that.

Finally I found the instructions hidden in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894435, an article which really does not apply to my situation as I want a pure 64-bit server.

The steps are:

a. Install and enable IIS first. Do this through Manage Your Server or Add/Remove Windows Components.
b. Run: cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 0
c. Run %SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i
d. Enable ASPX (and ASP if you need it) via the Internet Information Services Manager, as follows:

Hope the above works for you as well.

Where to buy notebook batteries at ZhongGuanCun (中关村)

2009-12-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

I guess you already know that ZhongGuanCun (中关村) in Peking (北京) is the largest collection of shoppping centers selling computers and electronics stuff.

If you need something for your computer, I think you will find at least 1,000 shops/counters selling what you want. The hard part is getting what you want at the price you don't regret later.

The trick is to buy only things you have researched thoroughly. Use a place like eBay to find out the lowest market price.

Buying something on impulse will always end up with regrets, unless you are a trained negotiator.

ZhongGuanCun is not one mall. It is a whole city of malls. I don't know how many there are. I went to only a couple of buildings. Basically they are all the same. I guess in lieu of marketing to differentiate, each just bank on fleecing one unsuspecting customer a day.

I went to look for a notebook battery. Surprisingly this was one item that was not really that popular. If you need a battery and want to save time, follow these steps:

a. Go to HaiLong building (海龙大厦). This is the mall directly outside the west exit of the ZhongGuanCun subway station. This is on line 4, a brand new line. Click the following air photo to see details. Go to Google Earth/Maps to see readers' pictures of the building. Just note that most of the positions of this building on Google Earth are wrong. The location on Google maps is here but unfortunately the map and photos don't quite match.

b. Go to the fourth floor and look for the HoneStar Technologies counter at #4075. The numbers are on a license plate hanging off the ceiling. #4075 is furthest way from the escalators. It is manned by two young ladies. If you have limited time in Peking or you think your battery is a rare one, contact them before hand.

Email: liangxianfen@sogou.com, QQ instant messaging: 437105767, mobile: +86-13552906007.
Website: http://store.taobao.com/shop/view_shop.htm?asker=wangwang&shop_nick=liangxianfen

English is barely spoken. The best way to contact is to use QQ if you know how to install and use the software. Otherwise email and then follow up a day later by phone to ask Miss Liang to check her mail.

The building opposite Hai Long to the east is KeMao (科贸中心). There is a pedestrian bridge from the second floor of HaiLong going across to KeMao. KeMao is another mall of the same, hundreds of counters selling computers and electronics. But there is also a large supermarket (Wu Mart) and a KFC.

Hope you get what you want!

Open source, free software, the confusion

2009-11-29T07:39:00.000-08:00

There is some confusion and muddle over open source software and free software.

Many equate open source with free software, and vice versa. Nothing is further from the truth.

Open source means the source code is available. Having possession of the source code doesn't mean you have the rights to use the software. Just like legal ownership of a CD does not necessary mean you can use the software contained in that CD. Whether you can or cannot use a piece of software is governed by the terms and conditions set by the software owner.

In almost all countries, the software owner can determine the exact rights to use the software according to his own will and good pleasure. He can say that for a fee of $x you can use a piece of software for one year (for example Microsoft Action Pack). When the one year is up, you cannot use the software even though you may continue to hold the shiny CD with the hologram in your hands.

Similarly, and easier to understand, is that free software doesn't always mean you can see the source code.

So, software can have source code available, openly and freely or subject to terms, but it does not mean usage need be free.

I see peddlers and users of open source/free software divided into three general categories.

A. Big enterprises who cannot face the risk of support disrupted or terminated.

For such companies, they must have access to the source code, not to be able to resell the software, but so that, just in case the software owner cannot correct a problem, they can continue to keep the software running. There are some reasons when this can happen:

a. The software owner thinks a particular bug is not important enough and refuses to fix it.
b. The software owner retires the software but the business user cannot or does not want to upgrade to a supportable version.
c. The software owner goes out of business.

Although the last two situations can be protected by escrow, from my experience, escrow is 100% cow stools. A real-life experience: Oracle buys PeopleSoft, and retires Vantive (a PeopleSoft CRM system). A Vantive customer decides to continue to use the software and refuses to buy Siebel which Oracle pushes as the Vantive replacement. Customer activates access to source code. Oracle drags its feet for many months. Then they say they "couldn't find the tape". Customer threatens to sue. After a few more months, Oracle says "tape found" but "data could not be read".

There is no practical way to verify that when a software owner moves the source code to escrow, that source code is the right code and will generate the software the customer is using. In fact, there is no incentive at all for the software owner to ensure that the intent or integrity of this process is upheld. For most people, this un-policed task would be the lowest of priorities, and I wouldn't be surprised if people simply check in garbage files. The escrow is usually a bank or lawyer and would be none the wiser. After all, when the company goes out of business, no one would be around to be responsible for what's in the escrow's vaults.

Hence, the CIO who knows his business will insist on having access to the source code at all times. This in no way means that the customer is asking for free software. In all likelihood, such customers would have to pay extra for this service.

There is an alternative to achieving software support security without source code. And that is safety in numbers. Use software that is used by millions or hundreds of millions. First there would be revenue for the software owner to continue to maintain the software. Second, hopefully millions of users banded together can have some clout to insist that the software remain supportable for a long time. Windows XP is one good example.

B. The communists and Stallmanites.

There are still some people who believe that software should be free. They don't think that computers need be free. They don't think that Big Macs should be given out for no charge. They don't think that houses should be free. But for some unexplained reason, they think that software must be free.

And we know that the only communists left are in Cuba and North Korea.

C. The software losers.

Everyone is entitled to try all legal means to make a living. Hence, if you can't make money in one area, you think of another way. If you can't beat Microsoft at writing (and marketing) software, you try something else.

There's a category of people whose proud mantra is "we will give the software for free, and we will charge for support". It's like saying we will give you a car for free but you must come to us for maintenance. It's perfectly legal, but it's perfectly obvious that there are no incentives to deliver a software that is trouble-free.

It's good to know that there are customers of such software/services. We need them to help keep in check the other software providers.

Great Wall of China - DIY

2009-11-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

It's very easy to plan a do-it-yourself tour of the Great Wall of China at BaDaLing (八达岭). And it costs only RMB12x2 (total USD4) for the journey there and back.

The Internet is full of postings on how people signed up to tours only to be held at ransom to cough up more money after the bus has moved off. Do not be another victim.

By the way, most of the victims are Chinese nationals from out of town or people who speak some Chinese. The swindlers, or enterprising businessmen depending on how you view them, tend to leave the non-Chinese speakers alone as sign language is harder, I guess.

Follow these steps carefully for a low-cost and enjoyable tour. We just did it last week.

1. Make your way to DeShengMen (德胜门). This is once a city gate of which only the archer's tower is now left standing. The archer's tower is a huge structure that cannot be missed once you are in the vicinity. There are a few bus terminals there. The one you must go to is north of the tower. From the air photo below you can see the buses lined up for the journey to the Great Wall.

2. The nearest subway station is JiShuiTan (积水潭), 500m to the west of the tower. You can also go to http://www.bjbus.com/ to find the buses to DeShengMen from where you are. Each city bus trip costs RMB1, or RMB0.20 if you have a multi-trip card. Taxis can be a cheap option especially if you have three or four persons in your party. Taxis start at RMB10 and covers some good distance before the fare increments.

Be careful about taxis. A seasoned taxi driver seeing an obvious foreigner wanting to go to DeShengMen in the morning would know that you are going to the Great Wall and would try to take you there himself. The driver of the first taxi we flagged pretended that he didn't know where DeShengMen was but asked where we wanted to go from there. We waved him off. The driver of the second taxi we flagged was a brand new driver who really didn't know where DeShengMen was and I had to guide him with the GPS in my Nokia phone.

3. The bus you need to take is number 919, a green and white bus. And that is where the problem is. Every bus going out of this DeShengMen terminal is 919 but they go to different places! The signage is havoc. There are touts aplenty. They do not look like touts. They speak to you nicely and appear to be offering friendly advice. Ignore them totally and speak to only people in the bus company's uniforms.

On my trip, they put in extra buses to the Great Wall. The bus had a sign as in the picture below, which actually means "extra direct bus".

When the staff saw me taking a picture, she helpfully flipped it over to the more meaningful one which says "Direct to BaDaLing" (八达岭).

Anyway, the bus-stop should have this sign. But the crowds there could have moved it from its proper position.

The bus moves off only when filled. The whole journey is on the BaDaLing Expressway, which starts right at DeShengMen. The trip will take about 1.5 hours with the traffic jams on the expressway.

For the return trip, board the same 919 from where you alight at BaDaLing. I guess it is prudent to double check it's the express to DeShengMen.

Have a nice trip!

The entrance fee at the Great Wall in November is RMB40. Credit cards can be used.

The futility of expanding wi-fi

2009-11-25T00:24:00.000-08:00

Remember CT2 or the initial incarnation of PCN? They have gone the way of the dodo. The technology is now used in DECT phones.

Efforts to expand wifi to provide wide area coverage will meet the same fate.

CT2 was marketed as a poor man's alternative to cell phones. It is a neat engineering idea. You get to use a wireless phone when you are in range of a base station. But it is just that, a neat engineering idea.

Using wi-fi as a poor man's wide area data network is in a similar situation. The reason is not un-obvious.

If only, say, 20% of the time that you need to use the Internet you find yourself outside wi-fi coverage, you would need to pay for a data subscription from your cell-phone company. And, if you already have paid for wide-area data why would you still pay or need wi-fi?

Wi-fi has its uses, just like DECT phones. You use it at home or in the office, when you are pretty stationary and there is no point expending power sending data a few miles away when you can send it down the hall.

Good communications equal a bad plan?

2009-11-25T00:15:00.000-08:00

One of the fundamental principles of communications is that the amount of planning is inversely proportional to the efficiency of communications available. The better communications you have the less planning you have to do. The more planning you do, you are less dependent on the need to communicate.

To illustrate: a family hits the shopping mall. In the old days, a detailed plan would have to be worked out, something like: "Everybody, it's free and easy for the next 30 minutes. Then we meet at this water fountain. If by 35 minutes, Johnny doesn't show up, this is what we will do,......" Lots and lots of if's then else's to cover all conceivable contingencies. Today, when a family reaches the mall, everyone takes out his or her cell phone, does a battery check, and everyone do whatever he or she likes. When someone feels it's time to go, the phones start ringing.

This similar scenario occurs everywhere. When an army wants to conduct an attack, a detailed plan with all sorts of contingencies covered means there is less need to rely on battlefield communications, which can be very poor. A haphazard plan means everyone will be screaming into their radios when something unexpected happens.

A corollary from the above means that it is idiotic or sheer arrogance not to switch on your cell phone when you have one. For if you know when you need to use the phone (ie you have a good plan), you wouldn't need a phone.

There are opposing arguments on whether having efficient communications is good or bad overall. There are some who say that relying too much on good communications means there is no plan or no good plan. But there are others who say detailed planning to avoid communications is impractical and would only lead to rigid and uncreative plans.

Extending the paradigm further, remember the times when an author writing a novel means inserting a piece of paper into a typewriter. The writer has to compose mentally to some great detail before he commits onto paper. With word processing software, it's type, delete, cut and paste at no extra cost or effort.

The same goes into finance budgeting. If you work in a company where everything you want to purchase must be in the annual budget, you would be forced into detailed planning and forecasting the year before. But if there is no such need, you would be making purchases every now and then and may over spend.

Demystifying data and GPS on Nokia phones

2009-11-14T01:09:00.000-08:00

Introduction

The modern cellular phone is very powerful computer with fantastic capabilities. The technology, from the user point of view, is not that complex. However, the lack of information on implementation specifics prevents lots of wonderful things from being done. For example, Nokia documentation such as (on page 57 of my E-71 manual) "To use a specific positioning method, select Positioning methods" is not helpful. The bewildering number of terms used for the same thing, and the same term to mean totally different things add to the confusion.

The Nokia phone has lots of powerful features for data. For example, your laptop computer can have full Internet access by "dialing" out through the phone in your pocket. This is something I have been doing for the past ten years, since CSD days, and that iPhone users still cannot enjoy.

Data on the move

There are two distinctively different types of data networks the modern Nokia phone such as the E-71 supports (I will not talk about Bluetooth and infrared here). Even if you are a network expert, please read on to see the different nomenclature used by Nokia:

Wifi - on the Nokia phone this is called Wireless LAN . Wifi is a very local area wireless network with a coverage of a few tens of meters. Most likely you already have one at home as part of your Internet connection. The little box with one or two short antennas sticking out to provide Wirless LAN is called by everybody as an "access point". Whether this service is free depends on whose access point you are using. When you move too far away from the access point, your Wireless LAN connection is broken.

Cellular data - on the Nokia phone this is called Packet data . This uses the same radio and spectrum that you use to make voice calls. Depending on what your telco has deployed, Packet data can be alphabet soup: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, 3.5G (HSDPA) or LTE. Packet data thus goes through your telco's towers and you need a subscription, and probably have to pay extra, to use this. Where you can make voice calls you should also be able to access Packet data. Thus Packet data has more universal coverage than Wireless LAN. Every operator gives a different name to this service, and some hide it so well that you will have to do some research before you realize which product they offer is Packet data.

Access Points, again

In the Nokia phone, to connect to a network you first have to define an Access Point. This is not to be confused with a wifi access point! This Nokia Access Point is nothing physical but a configuration that you set up in the phone, so that other applications can refer to it to connect to the Internet. Example applications that let you choose one of these Access Points are: web browser, Windows Live Messenger, email and so on. To see your Access Points, go to Tools, Settings, Connection:

Figure 1

As part of defining an Access Point one of the properties you have to specify is Data bearer. The Data bearer is where you state whether it is using Wireless LAN or Packet Data.

If your Data bearer is Wireless LAN, you have to provide the WLAN netw. name which everybody else in the world calls the SSID. Connection name is just a description string for your own reference. Depending on the wifi (not Nokia) access point settings, you may need a password.

Figure 2

If the Data bearer is Packet data, you will have to specify the Access point name. (See, this is the third re-use of the phrase "access point" to mean a different thing!) More commonly abbreviated as the APN, this is a value that you must obtain from your telco. Telcos can have different APNs for Internet access, walled-garden applications, MMS, et cetera. In all likelihood some default ones are already created in your SIM. There is usually no need to enter the User name or password as most telcos authenticate you by the SIM you are using.

Figure 3

In Figure 1 above you will notice there is another item called Packet data! I salute the extraordinary effort the documentation experts at Nokia have put in to confuse the whole world. If you press that item, you get:

Figure 4

What can this "Packet data" thing be? I could not find any meaningful documentation for this. You enter a telco APN in the "Access point" field. From my experimentation, this configuration is just a special (Nokia) Access point configuration that is used when I use my laptop to dial out through the phone. That means, if I set my laptop to dial out via Bluetooth to my Nokia, the configuration that is used will be this "Packet data" thing.

GPS

It is surprising many people are still confused over what GPS is. If you are not sure, it is important you first Google and understand it clearly. Try here, or here.

In short, GPS has nothing whatsoever to do with the mobile cellular network. GPS takes readings from a constellation of 24 low-flying US satellites, and from the different times it takes to receive a coded message from each satellite, it is a straightfoward triangluation calculation to determine where you are on planet earth. GPS requires a clear view of the open sky to work. You cannot be in a building, in a tunnel, or under a thick forest canopy.

GPS simply gives you four items: x, y, altitude and a very very accurate time. There are no maps, no compass, no speed, no driving instructions, no when the fish will bite, no et cetera. All the other navigation goodies are applications built on top of those four pieces of data you get from GPS. For example, speed is the displacement from the last two position readings divided by the time between the two readings!

The problem with GPS is that it takes a long time to synchronize with the satellites. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the low power used and to make GPS robust and reliable, the data rate of the messages from the satellites is very low - 50bps. Secondly the earth is very big and the integer arithmetic rolls over about every 300km. So without some hints, it can take a cold GPS receiver ten minutes to lock in to the satellites.

On the Nokia mobile phone, you see the following confusing GPS options and I will describe from the least relevant first:

Figure 5

Integrated GPS This means use the GPS receiver in the phone. I don't understand why this is necessary. If you have purchased a GPS receiver, why would you be switching if off to find your position?

Bluetooth GPS means to use an external GPS receiver connected via Bluetooth. This may be applicable if your phone does not have a GPS receiver. If your phone (eg E-65, E-51, E-71) already has a built-in GPS receiver, I don't see any reason to use this. I know some weirdos complain that the built-in receiver is not accurate enough!

Assisted GPS As explained earlier, it takes a long time to lock onto the satellites. Assisted GPS allows you to specify an external source which can provide some quick estimate of your current position so that the satellite fix can be achieved almost immediately. This feature requires a Packet data connection (see previous section) to a server somewhere on the Internet. The set-up is under Tools, Settings, General, Positioning, Positioning server:

Figure 6

As you can see, my phone has supl.nokia.com as the provider of the Assisted GPS service. Only Packet data access points can be selected, as I think it is assumed that you won't have wifi coverage when on the road. Once you have Assisted GPS enabled, the data connection will be made without asking you whenever GPS positioning is switched on in your phone. So, if you are not a data user, don't be surprised with data charges in your bill when you use GPS. GPS positioning can be switched on directly under menu GPS, GPS data, or it can be switched on by an application, example Nokia or Ovi or Google Maps. I don't know what data or protocol is used for this service. If someone knows please do share.

Note that Assisted GPS by itself does not give you your location. Assisted GPS is just to speed up satellite synchronization. I am speculating that the server uses the IP address of the mobile unit to tell the GPS receiver the rough 300km zone it is in.

Network based Cell phone towers (BTS'es) are usually fixed. If you can record the time taken for a signal to travel from two or more towers to a mobile phone, it is, theoretically, a simple task, just like GPS, to plot out your own position. In practice it is tough to measure accurately a signal traveling at the speed of light and also it is tough to identify reflections from buildings and so on. Hence, position location by cell phone towers at best is an estimate. But the estimate would be more than sufficient to allow the GPS receiver to lock in to the satellites in a jiffy.

However, Network based option can be used for positioning if you are ok with the rough accuracy. Nowadays cells can be very small, eg a pico cell, that the position of the BTS can be taken as the position of the mobile phone. The Network based option comes in handy during those periods when the satellites are not visible, example when you are in a building.

The Network based option requires that your telco deploy the locating services feature on the network. The triangulation is not done at the phone. It is done in the network, and the result transmitted to the phone via the signaling channel.

If you have Network based GPS turned on when you launch Nokia Maps, you will notice that the red dot indicating your position would first be some distance from where you really are. Then after a few seconds it will jump to the spot where you really are.

Important: from my experiments, Network based GPS requires a data connection. So if you are roaming, be aware of the possible high data charges. Without Network based or Assisted GPS, my Nokia E-71 will take about 20 minutes to lock in on the satellites. With Network based GPS, it is consistently under eight seconds.

Conclusion

I hope you find the above information useful. Parts of the above are from pure speculation and some are from non-exhaustive reverse engineering. If you have more accurate information do let me know.

Where Nokia menu commands are referred to, it is assumed to be the menu sequence from an unadulterated Nokia E-71.

Nokia E-71 - Still the best

2009-10-29T20:28:00.000-07:00

[Superceded by Super OLED.]

Bought my second Nokia E-71 today, for US$140 on a US$30 plan contracted for two years. I could have traded-in my one-year old one for US$140 but I didn't as the new phone is for my daughter.

This phone is still the best considering all factors. The GPS receiver alone is worth the price.

What I like about the phone (all equally important to me except infrared):
a. Tethering without issues
b. Slimmer than an iPhone
c. Exchange client
d. Full QWERTY keypad, albeit a bit small
e. Reasonably good camera for all the emergency situations
f. Two cameras
g. Video recording
h. HSDPA, Wifi, Bluetooth with A2DP
i. Expandable storage through MicroSD
j. GPS
k. VOIP according to standards
l. FM radio
m. Browser that can see most web sites
n. Plays MP3 and WMA
o. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF viewers
p. Live Messenger client
q. It's hardy. Have dropped it from height quite a few times and none the worse.
r. It can stand upright on its bottom
s. Infrared - though I can't find a notebook that has one these days

I can find only one serious shortcoming: screen size of 320x240. I would like to see that increased without increasing the current thickness or losing the keyboard.

Irritation? Still a 2.5mm headphone jack. It has to wait for a technology breakthrough in the E-72 to have that increased by 1mm!

So, Apple has a new mouse

2009-10-21T17:55:00.000-07:00

I am wondering why people still need a mouse, especially on a notebook. A quite common scenario I see is someone brings a laptop into the meeting, and then spends the next five minutes plugging in the charger and the mouse and then booting up. With all those cables, the laptop is no more a mobile computer!!

I have not used a mouse for the last thirteen years, that is, since I got my first notebook, a Compaq Armada 4100. It has a touch-pad. Between 2000 and 2004 I was using the Compaq M700 and that has the stick. The stick was tough on the finger due to the force required.

Even the stick is better than the mouse. For the very simple reason that it takes less than one-tenth the time for your hand to leave the keyboard to reach for it. So I can do things ten times faster than a mouse user.

The touch-pad is still the best pointing device as it requires the least effort for a lazy person like me. A well-tuned touch-pad would allow me to move the cursor across a 1600-pixel wide screen by moving across just half the pad.

I compare myself to colleagues sitting around me who still insist on using the mouse. I get screen work done at least ten times faster than all of them on average. It is frustrating every time I go to their PC to see something they are showing me. It's a snail's pace compared to what I normally experience on my PC. And when they come and see something demoed on my PC, it's a smooth flow of activities, so fast that they sometimes get lost.

Another reason for my speed is that I use the pointing device for only a small fraction of the time. I have no hard data, but it's something like for 80% of the occasions other people are using their mouse I am simply using the keyboard. Basically I don't use the touch-pad if some key will do. Hence the speed difference is easily a few hundred times, two to three orders of magnitude apart. For example, I take five centi-seconds to hit a key, you take half a second to move your hand from keyboard to the mouse, two seconds to move it to a menu item, and another second to come back to the keyboard.

All you need is to spend a diligent five minutes learning to use the touch-pad after tweaking the drivers. And you will never touch a mouse again.

What I am looking forward to is a touch-pad that is located between the H and J keys on the keyboard. This will reduce the travel time even further whenever I have to use the touch-pad.

The disadvantage of the touch-pad? Every time I have to use someone else's PC, I suffer from a major handicap as performance is down-shifted by a few notches.

Microsoft Security Essentials - Network and Connectivity Issues

2009-10-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

The only time I have used an anti-virus software for myself was in 1987 (yes, more than 20 years ago) when I checked out a version from an Israeli company. I disassembled it, examined the machine instructions, and promptly uninstalled it as I could not relish the idea that every int 21 call must go through a third party. Since then I have not installed AV software on any of my computers.

If you have problems updating the MSE anti-virus files due to a proxy server, you may want to skip the long story and jump to the last paragraph below.

My daughter started using Windows 95 at age 5 and went through the peak of virus mania circa post-2000. My wife uses the computer daily to check mail and browse the Internet but she belongs to the group of the most elementary and novice type of user you can find. So within my family you can find the full range of computer users. All our computers are running Microsoft Windows and none of them has AV software installed.

It's 10 years later and none of our computers have been infected, not even once. All our computers are connected to the Internet all the time, and web browsing and emails are the major activities.

In the last few years of my working life I struggled with evading corporate requirements to have anti-virus software. Now that I have my own small business I finally have the satisfaction of banning AV software within my company.

Lately I had to work with a customer who "needs" AV software. Not wanting the bloated stuff, I dragged my feet until MSE was released. I immediately installed it for the customer on Sep 30. But updates couldn't work. The error dialog box says:

---------------------------
Microsoft Security Essentials
---------------------------
Virus & spyware definitions update failed

Microsoft Security Essentials wasn't able to check for virus & spyware definition updates.

Make sure your computer is connected to the Internet and try again.

Click 'Help' for more information about this problem.

Error code: 0x8024402c

Error description: Microsoft Security Essentials couldn't install the definition updates because the proxy server or target server names can't be resolved.
---------------------------
OK Help 
---------------------------

This customer's security people have an easy time. Management forgets to include in the KPIs of the security people the amount of business done or the level of business efficiency. So everything is prohibited. And the security people are never wrong. If something gets infected, it's because someone has asked for a waiver and indemnified and released the security people from being responsible.

So this PC is in a maximum security area, where even access to a DNS server is denied. All it can connect to is a HTTP proxy server. And names are resolved by the proxy server. So if you want to go to http://ibm.com, you tell the proxy server that and it will resolve ibm.com for you.

So why doesn't MSE updates work? Internet browsing and Windows Updates work fine on this computer. After lots of spent hours, the problem came down to one of Windows Updates not using the same credentials as the logged-in user.

January 2010 update:

To cut a long story short, MSE is using different proxy settings from IE.This is according to How the Windows Update client determines which proxy server to use. So, even if the logged in user is using a certain manually configured proxy, Windows Update is not and is trying to connect directly. So the trick is to use proxycfg.exe. I simply typed the following on the command line:

proxycfg -u

and, presto, all udpates went through! The -u option copies the proxy settings from the currently logged in user.

proxcfg has gone missing in Windows Vista and Windows 7. You should use netsh then. The equivalent for the above is:

netsh winhttp import proxy ie

Hope it works for you too.

Assembly version, File version, Product version

2009-09-17T08:38:00.000-07:00

If you are a .NET developer, Assembly and File version would be familiar to you. They can be set in the Designer UI (project Properties page, Application tab, Assembly Information button...) which basically updates appropriate attributes in AssemblyInfo.cs.

Now, there is a less well known number - the Product version. It is not well documented and most developers ignore it altogether with no side-effects most of the time. However, it is an important number and it seems that, of the three, Product version is the most widely used.

The three version numbers simply take the values you give them or:

a. If Assembly version is not explictly specified, it takes the value of 0.0.0.0.
b. If File version is not explictly specified, it takes the value of Assembly version.
c. If Product version is not explictly specified, it takes the value of File version.

In Windows Explorer of Windows XP and Server 2003, you can see from the properties of a file all three version numbers. In Windows Vista and later, you can't see Assembly version anymore.

To see the assembly version of a file in Vista or later without writing a program, simply type the following in Windows PowerShell:

[Reflection.AssemblyName]::GetAssemblyName('xxxx.dll').Version.

Where xxxx.dll is the full path of your assembly

There are two special folders that developers should use for storing application level data and user level data respectively. They are:

a. Application.CommonAppDataPath
b. Application.LocalUserAppDataPath

To prevent applications from breaking and to keep good security hygiene, developers should always reference these two Application properties instead of hard-coding. Where the physical locations of these two folders are depend on whether you are using Server 2003 and earlier or Vista and later.

In Windows Server 2003 and earlier, Application.CommonAppDataPath is, in an unadulterated system, "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\CCCC\PPPP\vvvv" and Application.LocalUserAppDataPath is "C:\Documents and Settings\UUUU\Local Settings\Application Data\CCCC\PPPP\vvvv" for a non-roaming profile, where

a. UUUU is the "user id", loosely speaking.
b. CCCC is the Company name specified in the assembly.
c. PPPP is the Product name specified in the assembly.
d. vvvv is the four part Product version number. vvvv is not the File version number. Because Product version number has largely been ignored and adopts the File version number automatically, many may be led to think that vvvv is the File version number.

In Vista and later, CommonAppDataPath is by default "C:\ProgramData\CCCC\PPPP\vvvv" and LocalUserAppDataPath is "C:\Users\UUUU\AppData\Local\CCCC\PPPP\vvvv".

Why I came about to writing this article is because one day I decided to follow the good reasons given in KB 556041 to freeze the Assembly version temporarily and auto-increment the File version instead.

However, specifying something like "1.1.*" for File version in Visual Studio 2008 simply does not work. Somewhere in the assembly the File version is kept as "1.1.*" literally!

FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location).FileVersion will return "1.1.*". That is alright in itself. But, if you don't explicitly specify the Product version, Product version will be equal to the File version and the asterisk character will cause your program to crash and burn when you try to access any of those two special folders mentioned above. The Windows file system does not accept "*" anywhere in a path name. The error is System.ArgumentException - "Illegal characters in path."

How do you specify the Product version? Simply put the following attribute in AssemblyInfo.cs:

[assembly: AssemblyInformationalVersion("v.R.b.r")]

To retrieve the various version numbers, use these:

string assemblyVersion = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().Version.ToString();
string assemblyVersion = Assembly.LoadFile('your assembly file').GetName().Version.ToString();
string fileVersion = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location).FileVersion;
string productVersion = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location).ProductVersion;

Hope the above information is useful to you.

Hyper-V Server on a Presario Notebook

2009-08-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be neat to have Hyper-V Server on a notebook, with Windows 2008 SBS as a guest OS, and then load some more legacy OS'es to test a piece of software I was developing. I have a 1.5-year old Compaq Presario (Core 2 Duo) lying around and I used it.

I chose to install the Hyper-V Server clean before installing any guest OS'es. That went fine and trouble free. Not a squeak that the CPU was or was not suitable.
T
Then searched around and found that Hyper-V Manager was needed. I downloaded the version for Vista 32-bit. It installed fine. But it won't connect. Complained with the famous error:

You do not have the required permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer XXX

Did some tedious preparatory steps as indicated in John Howard's blog. But I just did: 1) create the common user, 2) netsh advfirewall ... 3) DCOMCNFG on the client.

Hyper-V Manager now connects fine and I can install new virtual machines. But when I tried to Start one, I get another famous error:

'vm name' failed to initialize. (VMID 'vmid')

The virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running. The following actions may help you resolve the problem:

1) Verify that the processor of the physical computer has a supported version of the hardware-assisted virtualization.

2) Verify that hardware-assisted virtualization and hardware-assisted data execution protection are enabled in the BIOS of the physical computer. (If you edit the BIOS to enable either setting, you must turn off power to the physical computer and then turn it back in. Resetting the physical computer is not sufficient.)

3) If you have made changes to the Boot Configuration Data store, review these changes to ensure that the hypervisor is configured to launch automatically.

I went into my BIOS but could not find anything to turn on DXP or virtualization. Then Intel confirmed that my Intel® Core™ 2 Dual T5250 was not suitable for Hyper-V!!

What a waste of time

Well, I have an older Presario. It's a T5500 and according to Intel that has Virtualization Technology. It will take time to make that notebook available for Hyper-V.

Extended Desktop - 3 Big Screens?

2009-07-29T06:04:00.000-07:00

Now we all know that Bill Gates uses three screens.

I have been using Extended Desktop in Windows for coming up to ten years now. I think it's one of the great things that Microsoft has done by making it easy for display adapter drivers to be developed to work in such a manner.

My current set up is the 17" 1440x900 built-in of my notebook and a 1680x1050 standalone running off my notebook VGA port, with the external display positioned directly on top of the built-in display. I populate all the places I frequent with the second monitor (same specs), so that I can just plug in when I reach there, just like the power charger.

I am not using three displays because:

b. I tried using three monitors but find that I spend much time moving my mouse to where I want to go (even though my touch pad is set to maximum sensitivity), or looking for the cursor.

Q: Why is Linux not everywhere? A: Because it is free

2009-07-29T02:04:00.000-07:00

There are many discussions on why Linux isn't as successful as it is supposed to be, whatever those expectations may be. Reasons given describe the features, the user-friendliness, the lack of drivers, et cetra. Well, in my opinion, Linux fails and will continue to fail because of one reason: it is free.

Surprisingly as it may seem, the very reason why Linux is not widely adopted is because users are not paying for it. The loud-mouthed Stallmanites stop in their altruistic tracks when it comes to dishing out money to pay for TV spots and newspaper advertisements to market Linux.

Guess where Microsoft get all their big budgets to market their products? Customers, of course! Customers (of any product) pay their suppliers to market products to them. This is how the system works. Period.

Free software is a passing flavor of the day, just like Marxism was.

Have a good day.

PS: See my other blog on the three categories of open source software.

Email Forwarding in Microsoft Exchange

2009-01-29T16:33:00.000-08:00

There are times when a user does not have a mailbox in the Exchange server itself.

The place to configure forwarding is in ADUC and not System Server.

First, in the External Contacts folder in your domain tree, create the destination forwarding address.

Then, in the user's Properties, go to the Exchange General tab and select Delivery Options. Check the Forward to option and select the destination address from the list of External Contacts.

Creating SSL Certificates for IIS

2009-01-29T16:23:00.000-08:00

Here are the steps:

Create a certificate request (CSR). There're lots of documentation for this, mail me if you need help. Basically you do it from the IIS management console. (IIS 7 is different from previous versions by trying to make it "easier" but it assumes the user is illiterate - has lots of pictorial icons.) This will generate a Base64 encoded file, and it will also remember that there is a pending request.

If you use a commercial provider, then just copy and paste the contents of the file in your application.

If you want to use Windows Server 2003's certificate services, go to the server's website: /certsrv.

Either of the above will give you a .cer or .crt file. Go back to the IIS management console server certificate option and use the "Process pending request" option.

Das ist alles.

Hard Facts about Photography

2009-01-05T20:34:00.000-08:00

1. A SLR construction does not make a camera better

Digital camera marketing has been very successful. Lots of buyers are "monkey see monkey do" paying lots of money without knowing how their cameras work. I can bet that majority of SLR owners do not know what SLR means.

Today's SLR digital cameras can produce better pictures because most of them have a larger sensor compared to point-and-shoot cameras. Camera manufacturers would like to keep things this way to avoid fighting on price alone.

The ability to change lens does not require an SLR. Thankfully Panasonic has broken this mental block with their latest model.

A digital SLR is worse than a point-and-shoot when it comes to having a video viewfinder. Yes, some of us prefer to use the optical viewfinder up close with the camera touching our face. But there are situations where an indirect display is necessary, eg when holding the camera high to shoot over people blocking your view. The SLR was invented to achieve WYSIWYG, but when you need an external display the SLR prevents WYSIWYG. Inventions like Live View makes you lose some light.

The mechanical mirror in an SLR must be the most serious disabling handicap. I can't imagine flipping a mirror up and down to take a picture in this day and age.

So, all in all, a digital camera of SLR construction has nothing but disadvantages over cameras of other design.

2. The best and most expensive camera in the world is totally useless

when it is not with you when you want to shoot the picture you want to shoot.

Most people do not understand this basic fact. They spend $1,000 on an SLR, go for a special-purpose photography mission. Then for 99.999% of the time, they come across great picture opportunites but the camera is locked up in a climate-controled bank vault somewhere.

3. Megapixels

It's amazing that many people do not want to take the time to understand simple geometry. What's the point of having many mega pixels when no display is big enough, no paper is large enough, and worse the lens cannot resolve that many pixels. People are going for 5Mpixels on a phone camera with a lens of 2mm diameter?

Talk is cheap. Talk is free. I welcome you to the challenge here, single camera single lens, from 1cm to 240,000 miles.

Making HP Compaq Recovery CDs DVDs

2008-12-10T22:58:00.000-08:00

I have often clean install HP/Compaq notebooks from scratch, using my own Windows CDs/DVDs, and downloading each driver from HP one by one. This is because when I go for the recovery CDs, they are not useable for whatever reasons: lousy media, scratches, mould, et cetera.

Lately, some HP/Compaq notebooks provide the option to create ISO images instead of writing directly to CDs/DVDs. With abundant cheap storage nowadays, you should always use this option. Make sure you back up the images on more than one disks. Burn them onto DVDs only when you need to recover a system.

I have just bought a refurbished Compaq 8710p with the original HP 3-year warranty from a HP reseller. When I tried to make a set of recovery DVDs, unfortunately it tells me a set has already created from the system. According to the Help info, this obstruction is because of the Windows Vista license and not the HP drivers.

What I actually need is the HP drivers and not the Vista DVD. Notwithstanding that the notebook comes with a Vista Business license, I am a Microsoft Empower subscriber and have my own legitimate Vista DVDs and licenses.

While I can understand that the protection intentions are noble, I find it odd that I am allowed to use the current version of Vista until my disk breaks down. After that, I am not allowed to use the Vista from the same license.

Searching around, I found a simple hack that allows me to make another set. Just look for the file HPCD.sys in the Recovery partition and/or %windir%\SMINST. Rename or delete it. That is all.

Motorola Motorokr S9-HD - After one week

2008-12-06T06:39:00.001-08:00

As I have said earlier, the sealing capability to block out external sounds is zero. In a quiet place, I can hear the different parts of the orchestra clearly. Unless I compare it with a reference source, I cannot say for certain that I can hear all parts of the orchestra that were recorded. But in a quiet place it sounds really good.

In a noisy place, nothing is heard. Turning up the volume is suicidal of course and hence is something I do not try.

Listening while jogging is out as the ear pieces do not stay in place. If I hold with both hands, I hear the whole orchestra. When I let go, I just hear a weak melody, losing the identity of the instruments.

Also, it seems to forget the pairing with my Nokia E-71. I think the problem is in the Motorola as my phone works fine with another Nokia mono headset in the past. So, everytime I power on the Motorola, it connects automatically. After about three seconds, it disconnects. I have to manually pair it from the phone and enter the PIN again.

Honoring the System/360

2008-11-30T20:10:00.000-08:00

I just found this celebration of the 40th anniversary of the System/360 at the Computer History Museum.

Another presentation at the museum said that the S/360 project is like Google today pouring $32 billion into a new product which might or might not work to replace search. I found a video of the presentation here.

For the few who have the opportunity to write their programs on punched cards, paper tape, teletypes, CRTs, and now Visual Studio 2008, perhaps we should be more prepared to celebrate the 50th anniversary in 2014.

Deism, predestination, omniscience, infralapsarianism ...

2008-11-30T00:44:00.000-08:00

(This post is meant for trained computer scientists.)

I write a program, say, a game with different role playing characters. Let's call this program The World. There are good guys and bad guys in The World. There are space invaders, and spaceships too.

I am the creator of this program.
[Aug 2010 update: by sheer coincidence I came across this 1976 article: http://www.sacbusiness.org/cs/hesterj/HACKER.htm ]

Unless I have lots of time, I have to write the program running on an existing operating system. Hence, I would be making operating system calls. In addition, I may make use of third-party libraries. But nothing prevents me from also writing the operating system from scratch, starting with the first IPL instruction. It would take a long time, but is something a mere mortal can definitely accomplish.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding that my program with the OS is now more than 800MB of machine code, my program is pretty simplistic and deterministic. The outcome of every single player action is known when I wrote, or even at the time I designed, the program. Which spaceship is going to crash and burn, which corner of which space invader is going to be blown off, are all known by me, the creator, long before anyone inserts the first coin and a new player life is created. I have to write every single line of code that shows the bits of space invader falling off, pixel by pixel.

After many days (definitely far greater than six) of designing, coding and debugging, I could have a nice running game. With all the effort put in, The World is complex, in fact very complex (and very buggy). And it would probably be beautiful too, with lots of graphics, animation, and audio effects.

Now, I have complete knowledge of The World. Because I code every line, I know everything there is to it about this game. Over time, I may forget things here and there, but all I have to do is to refer to the source code, and if it is amply commented, I would be able to understand every bit again.

The World may be an enjoyable game offering countless hours of excitement and challenges, lots of explosions, and births of new lives and deaths of many others. But in the eyes of us human beings, that is, the class of living things who are capable of creating The World, it is a simple program, albeit with many lines of code.

Despite all the colorful graphics, sound and fury, my program is by all definitions still very dumb. Every single action is hard-coded in The World at the time of creation. Every possible outcome is predictable, and has to be decided and coded by me the creator. What happens when a player moves the joystick one degree to the right, I have to code the response, depending on the state of all the other parameters at that moment in the game. Nothing can be unexpected. If there is, it usually ends up as a bug and has to be corrected.

Which game character survives to eternity, which goes up in a ball of pixelated flame, it's all in my hands. I make the decision, at my own will and good pleasure.

Each player life has a certain amount of free choice. The outcome of every choice still has to abide strictly by my algorithms. When a new player life is created, I throw a die, a pseudo-random number that is still pre-determined on which algorithm I use, to set it on its initial path of action.

...to be completed

Motorola Motorokr S9-HD - After two days

2008-11-28T23:53:00.000-08:00

I am very pleased with the audio performance of this mobile concert hall. Anywhere (almost) or anytime, this headset turns my Nokia E-71 into a very nice piano concerto machine.

At Nokia volume level 1 (one notch above mute) and Motorola minimum volume level (double beeps), I can hear the klavier keys crisp and sharp, almost like sitting next to it. The cellos and double basses stun as they reverberate through my nervous system. ppp passages drown me in a stupor, and as the orchestra crescendos in the final bars, I have to hold back from clapping and making a fool of myself.

I said almost anywhere as the sealing capability of the "ear buds" is zero. Other than in a quiet environment, I have to push the "ear buds" with both hands into my ears and hold them there. So while it's cord-free, it's definitely not hands-free. The "ear buds" are no ear buds. They are gigantic speakers that perhaps only Shrek can call them ear buds.

Motorola Motorokr S9-HD Bluetooth Stereo Headset

2008-11-27T01:49:00.000-08:00

Motorola Universal Bluetooth Stereo Headset.

Just bought this today (Nov 27, 2008) for my Nokia E-71. I was, and am still, amazed that the functions worked beyond basic audio!!

Have been looking for a Bluetooth cordless stereo headset for a long time for my jogging. Anything with wires create too much noise when the wires brush against anything, including themselves. The Nokia one (BH-503) is too huge and are not ear buds. The Samsung store refuses to let me try and see whether theirs works with the E-71.

I feel that the sound quality of this Motorola device is good, but without an A-B blind test I cannot be totally sure.

At the store, the demo unit had a lot of noise. But back home, mine is just fine.

What work in addition to basic sound:

b. Microphone for voice calls - have to speak up though.

c. Remote control: skip track forward and backward, pause. All actions come with tone feedback.

d. Last number redial (press Call button and hold).

e. Voice activated dialing (press Call button once)

f. Volume control.

g. Incoming alerts for SMS and email - music playback pause momentarily.

The downside? The diameter of the ear pieces is huge, bigger than my ear opening. I think this is deliberate for safety reasons, to prevent the user from plugging in nicely and blocking out external sound totally.

It seems that the "universal" claim is true. I think this one will sell millions.

IIS ASP.Net - What identity is your page running in?

2008-11-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

There are at least three identities that I know of when you run an ASP.Net page on an IIS server. They are:

At the page level: Page.User.Identity

At the thread level: System.Threading.Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity

At the process level: System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent()

Then there are authentication and impersonation modes to set. In Vista, the Computer Management configuration is not as neat as XP or Server 2003, as follows:

The different identities have values as follows (the IIS server is mozart and the web browser user is UserA):

Authentication Mode	ASP.Net Impersonation	Process	Thread	Page
Anonymous	False	NT AUTHORITY\ NETWORK SERVICE	-	-
Anonymous	True	NT AUTHORITY\IUSR	-	-
Windows	False	NT AUTHORITY\ NETWORK SERVICE	mozart\UserA	mozart\UserA
Windows	True	mozart\UserA	mozart\UserA	mozart\UserA

References:

Process and Thread Identity in ASP.Net - A Practical Approach

Windows Vista!

2008-05-01T05:37:00.001-07:00

... WORK IN PROGRESS ...

This is a long blog entry, as the matter is serious and it cannot be trivialized by a few sound bites.

I started using Windows Vista only in January 2008. I didn't believe all the negative reviews out there. After jumping into it, I still do not accept all the comments that I have read previously. But Windows Vista is more than a disaster, it is alarming. It looks like the first step of a Microsoft decline, unless Microsoft takes drastic steps to get out of this complacency.

Speedwise, Vista is not slow, it is just fatally flawed. Features-wise, Vista is a retrograde, a big step backward. Things which we could previously do in Windows XP and Windows 2000 are now missing.

Microsoft does not give information on how Windows Vista is done. So I can only try and reconstruct by deducing from what I can see.

First, it is a very different team that worked on Vista. This is a team of Generation Xers, iPod-totting, and who use Windows XP without venturing beyond the default configuration settings that came out of the box. I will substantiate these hypotheses.

Lack of Common Sense

And this team or the program manager probably had never attended a class on operating systems. If they did, they did not understand what was taught. I have 2GB of RAM. All my loaded programs add up to less than 1GB. Tell me, why is my computer paging like no tomorrow? Why does Windows Messenger generate 13 million page faults after running for a week when at no time in the week did my programs ever go beyond 1GB? Why why why? Why should the disk even be touched at all (except when allocating paging space, space that will never be accessed again in my computer)?

I have Windows Explorer showing about 100 files in a folder. I press Ctrl-A. The hard disk goes into over-drive , the new fanciful hourglass comes on, and I cannot do anything to the folder for the next 6 seconds. Why? I have more than 1GB of RAM free, doing nothing but draining electricity. If I press Ctrl-A repeatedly, the same hold-up occurs each time. Doesn't the iPod-totting Vista team know anything about caching or not doing work that is already done? This is basic. This is an F. Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 do not have this problem. I have just installed Vista SP1, and this major flaw is not fixed.

All the reviews that describe Vista as slow are technically incorrect. When we say a software is slow, we mean that there isn't sufficient hardware power to do what the software wants to do. In Vista's case, there is gross overkill of CPU power and RAM to do the task at hand, eg select all files, but Vista is not using them.

There is a long list of things that I could previously do in Server 2003, XP and 2000. Possibly Windows 95 too but that was too long ago for me to remember to make accurate comparisons.

The Vista team probably did not know of these features, because they do not go beyond out-of-the-box XP. They are people who leave the default settings where they are.

They use the XP interface which consumes the extra pixels on the window borders for no beneficial returns. They use Windows Explorer in the default showing files as pictorial icons, just like the early man with his pictures of the day's hunt on the cave walls. Mind you, the icons of two different Word files are exactly the same but they prefer it this way. The icons don't even tell you that the files are of different sizes, but they like the blue W graphic. The screen real estate for four Word document icons would allow a listing of 20 files with details, but they prefer the pictures.

Missing Feature #1

The sad consequence is that they crippled the Windows Explorer Details view without even realizing it. Wake up! Previously, I could resize the width of a column in the detailed view to just a couple of pixels, for example the file Type column, which I don't need to see (because the file name extension already provides the same information) but I want to leave it there to be able to do a quick sort by file type by just clicking the column header. Vista does not permit a column width to go less than 70 pixels! Why why why? I want my file Type column to be only 3 pixels wide. Why must I waste another 67 pixels that can more than accomodate the file Size column? Why must the file Size column be at least 70 pixels wide when the string "144KB" takes up only 31 pixels?

(How do I make Blogspot not resize my images?)

Missing Feature #2

One limitation of a GUI as compared to command line mode is that repeating the last action is difficult to implement. Hence, it was ingenious of XP to have the recently launched programs stuck onto the Start menu. In XP it works reliably. In Vista, it's random. Sometimes a recently used program is there (Notepad), sometimes it is not (MSDN Library), and sometimes it stays there for a short while and then disappears (SQL Server Management Studio Express). Another feature loss compared to XP.

About the only innovative feature I can find in Vista is the ability to just type in a command or program name after hitting the Start button. Unfortunately, this feature is disabled by the Vista team whose members probably are not CS educated. If I type a command, I expect to see what I type immediately. However, Vista starts churning the disk, and it is less slow to click menu items instead. I have a 100 million times more RAM than what is required to contain my whole Program menu listing, but alas the Vista team insist on reading the disk.

I find it puzzling. I type some search words into Google, they are looked up against the whole world's billions of web pages, and the results come back from Google's servers 5,000 miles away on a narrow 128kbps pipe faster than the Start button giving me the right link after I type in "MSDN" on my computer with megabits of bandwidth among all the different components. This incompetence and complaceny will kill Microsoft.

Why iPod-totting? These people are a marketeer's fantasy. They fall for hype and have difficulty understanding the bare facts. The Aero interface is a joke. If I am so lame as to need swooshing windows I get a Mac. The Aero is a half-hearted effort that results in a half-baked Mac. I have no need for swooshing. All I need is a visual indication that a window is closing or opening so that I know that my system is still responding. The classic Windows interface, which I use even on XP, meets this UI requirement just fine. Swooshing the way the Mac does does not give me a single benefit in my use of the computer. Whoever thought of the Aero interface must have thought Windows users are equally gullible for a gimmick.

Missing Feature #3

Windows Extended Desktop must be just a mere curiosity to the Vista team. I have been totally reliantly on it for the past seven years, with different monitors in the office and home. My latest is a 1280x1024 display in one location and a 1680x1050 one in the other. My physical organization is the second monitor sitting above the LCD at both places. With XP, I have no problem plugging in at the two locations when I get my notebook PC out of Sleep or Suspend. (By the way, I do not Shut Down my notebook, not since Nov 1997.) It is a disaster with Vista. Each time I get the PC out of Sleep, the configuration is random! I make it a point to plug in the monitor and power it on before the PC. Sometimes, the second monitor would be on the right, sometimes it would not be detected, sometimes it would be on top, sometimes it would be on the left. At other times, Presentation Settings would automatically turn on.

Now, Presentation Settings with the New Display Detected dialog is one stupid gimmick that makes me deride the Vista team as incompetents. They allow the the second monitor to be on the exact left or exact right only. They think the whole world is a bunch of simpletons? It seems that the group that designed New Display Detected is totally unaware that Extended Desktop is a Vista feature.

work in progress ...

Your old notebook alone is an overkill to send man to the moon

2008-04-26T19:18:00.000-07:00

Remember Apollo 11? Apollo 11 took men to the moon and back safely.

There were some computers on the rocket, the command module and the lunar module, vintage perhaps, but still capable computing power to take men to the moon and back no less.

Working on the Apollo program were about 10,000 or more people: NASA employees and contractors. There were also a number of mainframe computers supporting the program, and to let all those 10,000 interact. In those days, there were no personal computers. Maybe a few leading edge engineers had electronic calculators. Nevertheless, they still sent men to the moon and back with all the stuff they had.

Freely call any electronics that is capable of holding some charge RAM. Call anything that is capable of doing some work on a clock cycle computing power. Now, if you add up all the computing power in all the electronics, all the mainframes and whatever computers that were used, in mission control, launch control, the command module, the lunar module, all the calculators, et cetera, the total amount of computing power, RAM and disk storage respectively would add up to less than what your grandmother has in her Celeron PC that she uses to browse the Internet.

What does it all mean? Detractors would say, "Oh, that was 1969." Wrong, very wrong! The crux is that your grandmother's Celeron PC can single-handedly control all the processes to send men to the moon and back. This is not a hypothesis. This is not a theory. It has happened.

Extrapolating from this experience, it would mean that with today's computing facilities, the accumulated knowledge and lessons learned, it would be possible to make another lunar mission using a fraction of the original workforce in a fraction of six years at a fraction of the original cost. The distance to the moon has not grown any longer nor the environment harsher.

What went wrong?

Next time you feel your PC is a bit sluggish, remember this story.

And if a CIO or computer salesman says that you need a more powerful server, either he is ignorant or has some ulterior motive.

S/360 NG

2008-01-01T05:24:00.000-08:00

Passing on the baton ...

@1995

@ 2008