Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Southern California is having yet another grey day as the clouds linger overhead.
Last night’s adventure in spyware removal was successful. I ran AdAware several times to purge the computers of the problem. What a pain in the ass.
Yesterday on my way back from the library I stopped by a new video store in town. Videotheque in South Pasadena is a DVD rental place specializing in “Foreign – Classic – Independent – Alternative – Rare Cinema“. I was pretty impressed. The first thing you notice is that most of the store has the films organized by Director. How f*iing cool is that. The rest of the DVDs are organized by very specific genres. There was a British Crime area and a War area. I highly recommend checking it out.
Work today should be a little busy. We’ve got the Apple WWDC keynote this morning coming down via satellite and plenty of more work to do on the budgets. I hope Michele wins the lotto soon.

I’m at my mother’s house doing maintenance on the computers here.
I look into the Program Files and see GAIN. GAIN is Gator Advertising Information Network. Spyware.
Now I need to run the anti-spyware stuff to clean out the computers.
Spyware delenda est.

It’s Saturday morning and there is a light drizzle outside. In a few hours I’m heading off to Dodgers Stadium to watch the boys in blue beat the world champion Angels. It should be a good game and I get a chance to eat Dodger Dogs and drink big plastic cups of beer.
I finished up two books recently that I hadn’t got around to reviewing yet.
In the Hall of the Martian King – John Barnes
The third book in the Jak Jinnaka series, this novel started off similar to the previous novels with Jak almost stumbling through the advenutre with little initiative and many pushes from outside. In the middle of the book, this changes where Jak actually takes charge and starts making things happen of his own accord. The first real tragedy of series occurs and the tone of the book changes dramatically. In the second half, the novel becomes a bit more philisophical and touches on the issue of the effect on society when long held truths are found to be false.
A good fast read, worth the paperback price. It will be interesting to see where the next novel takes us.
Promised Land – Cynthia Felice & Connie Willis
I’ve enjoyed Connie Willis’s books in the past and found this book in a used book store for cheap. The story is really a romance in a sci-fi wrapper. Not that I dislike romances, but I’m used to sci-fi stories with different kinds of issues the characters are trying to resolve.
You’ll find yourself at first angry with the protaganist, Delanna, and then excited as she changes her ways. The world they live in doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it’s believeable enough for the stories purposes.
The book is out of print, but if you see it at the library or a used book store it’s worth putting on the shelf as an ’emergency reserve’.
Gaming
I’ve been playing Planetside a bit and am really enjoying it. There is a new feature that allows for autogeneration of a stat picture of your character. Check it out.

The Planetside site generates the image nightly and once you put in the link, the image remains constant. They even have an XML feed of your stats so you can create whatever you want from the data. Looks like I’m gunna have to learn XML feeds one of these days.

I’m sitting in Lucky Baldwin’s waiting for anyone from the Weblog Meetup to show up.
Martin has been delayed by the people buying the house and is still trying to get here. I’m sitting here drinking by myself, waiting.
Why can’t it be a little easier to do this kinda thing…

Yes, I know I haven’t posted recently. I’ve been busy.

Till I get my groove on, check out the following:
Gizmodo
American public is very confused
Star Wars Kid Collection

Here’s the best present I was given today:

Many loyal Cruft readers had questions about the size of Tivo “hours” storage in relation to hard drive size. I have stolen this paragraph directly from the Weaknees site, a place you can buy upgrades to your Tivo.

How are the number of hours calculated on a TiVo?
TiVo standalone units (i.e., TiVos without a built-in DirecTV receiver) have four levels of recording quality. At the best recording quality, the rule of thumb is that the number of hours is equal to 0.35 times the number of gigabytes. At the lowest recording quality (basic), the number of TiVo recording hours is 1.2 times the number of gigabytes. Because drive sizes vary slightly (an 80 gigabyte drive may be 81.9 gigabytes or 80.0 gigabytes, for example), the exact number of hours in any given TiVo cannot be calculated precisely in advance. DirecTiVo units generally get about 0.875 hours per gigabyte of storage space. The hours reported on a DirecTiVo is a maximum amount; the actual number of hours yielded will vary based on the type of shows you record (eg. sports take up more space on a hard drive than do, say, soap operas, due to the amount of motion).

So, let’s do the math here. We’ll do the simple case first.
If Martin has a DirecTivo with a 40 GB drive, he should expect 35 hours (40 GB * 0.875 hr/GB = 35 hours). If Martin was to upgrade to a 120 GB drive, he should expect 105 hours (120 GB * 0.875 hr/GB = 105 hours)
If I have a standalone Tivo with a 30 GB drive that I use in High Quality mode, with a 30 GB hard drive there should be about 18 hours (30 GB * 0.6 hr/GB = 18 hr). If I upgraded to a 120 GB drive I roughly have 72 hours (120 GB * 0.6 hr/GB = 72 hr).
So the rough effect of my upgrade was to take me from 18 hours to 72 hours of recording time. The actual amount of storage will vary depending on the quality I choose to use for each show. Most of the kids shows record at Medium quality and most of our favorite shows record at Best Quality.
Make sense?

Not me mind you, but many people are having them recently.
Several of our family friends are having trouble with computers (1 Mac and 1 PC) and people like Ernie and Dave are having them too.
Almost inevitably the question of switching operating systems raises it’s head in these times. PC people consider Macs and Mac people consider PCs.
The truth is that all computers have trouble. I’m a trained engineer and run a damn IT department and I still have trouble with things. How non-techical people manage is beyond me.
I get calls all the time to help with friend and family computers when problems pop up. Usually the problem is PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair), but I can’t really blame people for problems.
Computers are confusing. Someone is always trying to see you something or take over your computer. It’s difficult for people to know what’s safe and what’s not. Whay software will solve my problem? What to believe?
When ever I look at someone else’s computer, they almost always have stuff installed that cripples their computer. Spyware, unnecessary apps, inappropriate settings, no anti-virus, no firewall, etc.
The truth is to run a computer that has good performance, reliablity and security, it takes a bit of knowledge and work. It’s a constant struggle for me to maintain good working condition on the computers in the house. Updates, patches, scans, they all need to be done.
Most people simply don’t want to do this. Mac, linux, or Windows, you need to be vigilant to maintain the computer. Most people don’t want to be vigilant and with good reason. It’s a pain in the ass.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The truth is that every lawn has problems. Switching operating systems isn’t going to solve the fundemental issue that computers are still not household appliances.
The fault lies in two places. The people that make invasive web pages that hijack your computer, and the operating system makers. Switching brand of computers won’t solve the issues about computer reliability. Linux, Mac, and Windows users all encounter problems regularly and I hear about it. They all get the job done, but there is no ‘best’ solution.
Switch computers if you want to try something new or like the hardware, but don’t expect the world of computing to get easier just because you buy a different brand.

Too many people are lazy when it comes to sharing links on places like Metafilter and Slashdot. They post links to places like the New York Times that require registration to view the article. People seem to accept this, but it’s fargin’ wrong.

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