cellio | Entries tagged with computers

A friend is having some vision problems that currently impede her computer use. She knows that I have vision problems and use computers heavily, so she asked me for advice. So I don't lose track of it, and for the possible benefit of others, I'm going to mostly cut and paste the email I sent.

My normal focal distance for reading is about 8-10 inches using bifocals, which makes laptops pretty unworkable and even regular monitors awkward if they're larger (because not everything can be in range at the same time at that distance). I solved this part of the problem by getting a pair of computer glasses, which are focused at a reasonable monitor distance instead of infinity. That is, the part that would normally be distance vision is instead monitor-distance vision, and I also still have the bifocal (my ophthalmologist's suggestion -- "do you ever have to read notes or something too?"). Once you know that your prescription isn't going to be changing a lot, that's something to consider -- but it does mean paying for another pair of glasses. (If you do get computer glasses, get the anti-glare treatment on them even if you're using monitors that are nominally glare-resistant.) Ask your ophthalmologist if this makes sense for you. I did find that I had to bump up font sizes across the board, because monitor-tuned distance vision is different from reading-tuned bifocal. I don't understand all the optics; apparently I can't get a pair of glasses that's just like reading through my bifocal but at twice the distance.

On the software side, here are several things I did. My vision problems are different from yours so I don't know which of these will help.

If you're using Windows, you can set text magnification system-wide to 100, 125, or 150%. I use 125%. This is in the control panel under either "display" or "personalization".

For Outlook, consider forcing all your email to plain text by default. You can then set the font size for that text. [My friend had complained that zoom levels didn't stick; she has to zoom each message. This works around that.] If you need to see formatting or embedded images, you can, for an individual message, choose "show as HTML" from a control just above the message text. Plain-text email is sometimes ugly because of the formatting you're not seeing, but I find it better than letting the sender choose fonts, font sizes, color, and, heaven help us, stationery. The "show as plain text" option is hidden in a very counter-intuitive place (thanks Microsoft!), at least in Outlook 2013 -- go to "trust center" and it's in there somewhere. Yes plain text is a way to avoid malicious Javascript, but I think of it more as an accessibility setting or something that should at least be mentioned under "email settings". We got new domain accounts recently and it took forever for me to find that again.

I have found no way to adjust the size of the header fields (including subject line) on individual messages -- very frustrating. You can change the size of the text shown in a folder (like the inbox) under "view settings". You have to do it for every folder you care about (like you do to dismiss the reading pane) because Microsoft hates us.

I don't know if this will help you, but consider switching your color theme. Black text on a white, backlit background is actually pretty hard on the eyes. You can try one of the reverse-video themes but (a) they can be hard to get used to and (b) most of your web browsing won't use dark/reverse themes and will seem even harsher by comparison (more about browsing in a bit). What I did instead was to personalize the desktop theme to make the default white background a gentler light tan instead. This is all under display -> personalization in the control panel. That's for Windows; on a Mac you're SOL, unfortunately, because Apple knows what's right for everybody.

If that makes a difference for you, then take a look at your monitor's color settings. (I don't know if laptops have this, but external monitors will.) A different color temperature might help you. Also, look at your contrast and brightness settings; I personally find high contrast and lower brightness to be most comfortable, though I've heard others say the opposite works better for them. Leave one of them alone while you experiment with the other. If the lighting near you is under your control, that's another knob you can turn. (I can say about lighting upon request.)

About browsing... lots of sites out there are designed by people with perfect vision who never thought about the rest of us, and some of the results are horrid. (What is with this trendy "light gray text on white background" meme?) Very frustrating. You can set a minimum font size in your browser and you can zoom individual sites with ctrl+/ctrl- (ctrl0 to reset to 100%). Firefox and Chrome remember these settings for a site; I don't know offhand if IE and Edge do. Some sites don't play as well with zoom as others -- maybe it makes the page too wide for your browser window and you now have horizontal scrolling, or maybe it uses a "responsive" design and moves things around on you. There are addons that let you force your own CSS on a site (Stylus) or apply your own Javascript to a site (Tampermonkey), but be warned that you will find yourself tinkering with settings often to respond to that shiny new thing your favorite site's designer came up with. I can pontificate at more length about browsers if you want.

Because of corporate changes (spun off from one company and merged with another), we have to remove our last dependencies on the old company's IT infrastructure. In this last round, they move our email and our (Windows) login accounts to a new domain. My migration was today.

They've sent lots of email about this over the last few months, but they left out some important details. A coworker who's been through it alerted us that they would be uninstalling and reinstalling Office, for no particularly good reason that I can see. (I mean, there's a good reason if you were on the wrong version or something, but I moved from 2013 to 2013.) The only hint they gave was telling us that we'd need to update our email signatures. Yeah, a bit more than that... maybe most people don't customize Outlook much, but I have to for accessibility. So a couple weeks ago, after finding no way to export all my client settings, I walked through all the configuration panels taking screenshots. Today I reapplied them all -- and there's a critical thing that's still broken and I haven't found a solution. I started customizing the web interface instead to see if that can meet my needs, but am feeling the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Maybe that's userscriptable. Dammit, Outlook is a PITA sometimes but it was working and now it's not.

They also created new user profiles for us. They said they would move "your files" over, but coworkers warned that this was incomplete. My browsers are very important to me, so I did my best to save bookmarks (easy), tabs (reduces to bookmarks), and session state. Chrome came through just fine. I was quite surprised, when launching Firefox post-migration, to be staring at the default configuration -- it didn't occur to me that I might lose about:config settings, add-ons, and other UI customizations. Frantic, I dug around in Users/me/AppData, found a Mozilla directory under Local, and copied the profiles therein. No effect. Eventually I went to Google to find out how to put things back the way they were (and sighing deeply about the customizations that don't sync, which I'd have to reconstruct), when I found something that pointed out how to ask Firefox where it's reading profile data from. Aha! Under AppData there is also a directory named "Roaming" (WTF is that?), and it was under there. Once I copied that directory I had my old browser state back. Whew! (Also backed that up for safekeeping.)

The actual migration process (not counting email, which they moved overnight) took about six hours. A chunk of that time was spent blocked and waiting on hold with IT. (An hour on hold the first time, 1:15 the second. Sheesh.) Because I knew the hold times would be long, as soon as I smelled a potential problem the first time I placed the call while I continued to work on it. Alas, the second blockage was a surprise error from their tool. By the way, they helpfully offered links to the FAQ and "contact support", both dead. At least they also displayed a phone number (which I'd secured in advance so I didn't need, but some would).

They moved most Windows settings over; for example, my large fonts, desktop icons, custom colors, and classic taskbar styling were intact. But, I discovered, they didn't move environment variables -- and I have no idea how to get those, since I can no longer log in with the old profile. I discovered this when Emacs didn't read my configuration -- it depends on HOME. So I reset that one, but I wonder what else I've lost.

Tomorrow I get to find out what else broke. I know the main doc tool will need intervention; the domain change confuses the license. I haven't tried git yet.

My laptop is getting on in years. On the one hand, this would have been a good time to replace it, given that there's going to be a lot of disruption anyway. On the other hand, it would come with Windows 10, which hasn't been making friends on my team. Also, I brought in a Windows 10 tablet to use during the migration, and yesterday when I was testing some stuff it announced that it couldn't start and I would have to reinstall the OS (!). I hadn't done much on it so I didn't lose a lot (had to reinstall the VPN and the browsers), but...really? In all my years of computer use, I've never once gone from "works fine" to "start over" in a span of hours. I wonder if I accidentally picked up that ~~virus~~ latest OS update, the one that was damaging data because it didn't check to see if there's enough disk space before starting. Every time that tablet asks me if I want to install updates I say no, but maybe something slipped through?

My (old) UPS has not been doing so well on the "U" part lately; a power flicker a few days ago rebooted my computer, and I attribute the loss of my browser tabs in a recent power outage to it. The replacement I ordered (on Thursday night! with the slower free shipping!) came today.

I took the opportunity to reorganize because, demonstrably, I don't otherwise. I kept my older Mac Mini for its CD drive (I should get an external CD drive, I guess), but removed the flatbed scanner that my newer Mac Mini can't talk to. (I've gotten used to just using the camera on my phone, at least for now; if I need a better scanner at some point in the future, I'll deal with it then.) I also don't need to keep a monitor plugged into the older machine, which I access via virtual desktop when I need to.

I can see more of my desk now. Wow, there were a lot of dust bunnies around the base of the scanner!

(I would have had to move things around, and move this desk, had an interesting recent opportunity worked out, but it didn't so I didn't. But now I've cleaned up anyway, heh.)

Maybe the old UPS just needs a new battery, but that wasn't enough less money and hassle for me to explore. I don't remember how old it is. If you're local and you want it, let me know.

This morning while I was having an uncomfortable annual preventative exam, the technician apologized for something taking so long and said the computer was slow today. I asked "you got the patch for the Intel thing?" and she gave me a blank look; she hadn't heard of the Meltdown/Spectre problem. I gave her a super-high-level summary and suggested what she could Google for later.

She asked me how much things would slow down and I said it's hard to tell -- could be 5%, could be 30%, could be worse -- depends on lots of things. She got a look of horror on her face and said "if it's that bad, we're going to have to change how we schedule appointments!".

Wow. That kind of effect had not occurred to me. I mean, there are computers with affected chips in everything these days -- medical equipment, air-traffic-control systems, sensor networks, self-driving cars... I presume that many of those systems will have to get patched, and that hardware replacements are big productions that won't happen until current systems reach the end-of-life mark, and that the consequences of slower execution could matter in some of those use cases. (Car: "stop at that red light... oh, that was back there".) Even if it's "just" diagnostic scans taking longer, what happens, logically and financially, when providers can see fewer patients per day?

I asked if the machine she was currently using was networked. It's on the facility's network only, as I expected. I said that perhaps their IT people will opt for securing the network and not applying the patch, but to myself I wondered if that opens them to liability claims or regulatory problems. It's also possible that some of these machines are specialized enough that they don't have the affected chips. I know next to nothing about embedded systems, specialized equipment like mammogram scanners, and so on.

I assume that in time this problem will be dealt with or worked around. I've already seen recommendations suggesting which patches to take and which to disable to walk that balance between reduced effects and security. I'm not trying to paint a picture of doom and gloom here. I just wonder how some of the bumps along the way will manifest.

Some stuff has been accumulating in browser tabs. Some of it lost relevance because I waited too long (oops). Here's the rest.

This article explains the Intel problem that's going to slow your computer down soon. I don't know much about how kernels work and I understood it. I do have some computer-science background, though, so if somebody who doesn't wants to let me know if this is accessible or incoherent, please do. In terms of effects of the bug, you're going to get an OS update soon and then things will be slower because the real fix is to replace hardware, but you probably want to take the update anyway.

This infographic gives some current advice to avoid being spear-phished. It has one tip that was new to me but makes a lot of sense: if you have any doubt about an attachment but are going to open it anyway, drop it into Google Drive and open it in your browser. If it's malicious it'll attack Google's servers instead of your computer, and they have better defenses.

Sandra and Woo: what the public hears vs. what a software developer hears.

This account of one hospital's triage process for major incidents blew me away. I shared the link with someone I know in the medical profession and he said "oh, Sunrise -- they have their (stuff) together" -- they have a reputation, it appears. Link courtesy of metahacker and hakamadare.

I was one of the subject-matter experts interviewed for this study on Stack Overflow's documentation project. Horyun was an intern and was great to work with.

From siderea, the two worlds, or rubber-duck programming and modes of thinking.

The phatic and the anti-inductive doesn't summarize well, but I found it interesting. Also, I learned some new words. "Phatic" means talking for the sake of talking -- so small-talk, but not just that. Social lubricant fits in here too.

Rands on listening for managers.

From the same source as the "phatic" post, a story about zombies made me laugh a lot.

From Twitter:
Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender says "Do you all want something to drink?"
The first logician says "I don't know."
The second logician says "I don't know."
The third logician says "Yes."

Somebody asked me this morning for help finding reliable advice about anti-virus software for his PC. He's currently using Norton (I don't know details, including what updates he's getting). I think he's going to need to find something simple -- fire-and-forget would be best (so automatic updates, at least). Who out there is currently doing reasonable neutral product comparisons in this area (Windows, not Mac)? If I could point him to one site where he could learn enough to make a decision, what would that site be?

I did talk with him about hygiene, it being far better to *avoid getting* viruses than to clean them up after. He says he's not opening unknown attachments or browsing in bad neighborhoods (though we didn't talk about how he would know, so I don't know if that's correct), but he's getting a lot of viruses and trojans. Or warnings about them, anyway; I haven't dismissed the possibility that he's picked up some malware that's doing that.

When I started using computers, keyboards were practically immortal. I stopped using my first keyboard when a couple keys physically broke such that I couldn't get the caps to stay on. My last couple keyboards have not fared so well.

I have an inxpensive Logitech keyboard. "Inexpensive" wasn't actually one of the governing criteria when shopping; I'm willing to pay for a keyboard that delivers higher quality. But what's locally available in stores tends to not be high-end, and I'm not going to spend real money on a keyboard I can't touch first.

The failure mode is irritating, though. My keyboard works fine in most respects, but... well, let me show you a picture:

I can actually live with the worn-off letters because I mostly touch-type. (I'm mystified by what's special about 'L' and 'O'. No, not gaming hotkeys.) But, as a touch-typist, I rely on those little ridges on the 'F' and 'J' keys to tell me that I'm oriented correctly. In the days of typewriters that didn't matter much as you almost never took your hands off the keys, but with a mouse on one side and sometimes a drink on the other, plus things like arrow keys and paging keys, it's pretty essential to the way I use a computer.

My 'J' ridge is gone. And 'F' isn't doing so well either. WTF? That's supposed to be molded plastic!

(I'm open to suggestions, though keyboards are a matter of personal taste so I don't expect them. I require keys that actually have some depth to them; I hate the Mac flat keyboards, which is why I'm using a generic keyboard with my Mac. I also require "not clicky"; typing on anything makes some noise, but I want a quiet one as much as is feasible and definitely not one of the old-style extra-loud ones. I don't care about special keys or even, most of the time, function keys; you'll notice the pristine state of those keys in the photo, cat hair aside. I would prefer that Escape be full-sized. I need the little legs that raise the back of the keyboard.)

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1069367.html

Today I got the following notification on my Android phone, allegedly from Google:

I haven't typed my Google password on my phone recently, nor has my account changed. Hmm. I saw a few possibilities:

1. Google legitimately wants me to re-enter my password, but their notice is wrong.

2. Phishing, though there's no obvious vector (no recent apps or suspicious web sites).

3. Compromised account, though that seemed very unlikely. (I use a very strong password for Google.)

When I got home (and thus to another computer) I verified that #3 was not the case. I then began searching for explanations for this notice. I had a wisdom of the ancients moment -- people have been having this problem since at least 2014, but no solutions were extant. I saw enough to decide that the notice really was from Google (so, #1) and re-entered my password, and lo, email returned to my phone.

So what was that? It's ok with me if Google wants to require re-authentication periodically on small, stealable devices with access to significant personal information, but if that's what happened, couldn't they tell us?

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1067814.html

At my new job I was given a pair of 22" monitors. As at the prior job, I set one up in portrait mode to make it easier to view documents, code, web pages, etc -- you know, the things that have a taller narrower orientation naturally, compared to things like spreadsheets, Outlook, and assorted other things that really want to be wider (landscape). But there's some difference between the old and new setups, because even though I think the monitors were the same size, at the new job the portrait monitor is not quite wide enough. (Maybe I'm using slightly larger fonts. Maybe that's because of lighting, or something in Windows 7 vs XP, or who knows what?) So that was no good.

The "miss" is just small enough that if I could get a monitor with 16:10 aspect ratio instead of 16:9, that would be good enough. We identified a 24" 16:10 monitor (so also slightly bigger, which would help), but it's no longer available. So, my manager asked, would I accept this 30" 16:10 monitor instead? Um, sure. :-) (It's not actually a no-brainer; a coworker is experimenting with a 40" monitor and that's too big for me to see everywhere on it without moving around a lot. He said he has a little trouble with that too, but not as much and he's motivated because look at all the code you can fit on that!)

It arrived today. It turns out that, between the larger size and the 16:10-ness, I can use it in landscape orientation and still see enough code/documentation/web page/etc for that not to be an impediment. (We made sure the one we got could be rotated, just in case.) It's nice to be able to make a browser window wide enough for today's obnoxiously-wide site designs, and while there's a little adjustment (I sometimes have to move a bit for stuff near the edges), I'm really liking this "single larger screen" approach compared to "two smaller ones that individually don't work as well and together are kind of eh".

I've kept one of the others, set up in portrait mode. It sits off to the side to hold random stuff like IM windows, console logs that need to be available but not necessarily read closely, and stuff like that. Yes, I've just relegated a 22" monitor to "random detritus". :-)

Dear Brain Trust,

Some years ago, manufacturers of computer monitors (and TVs, which have a lot in common with monitors) decided that the most-critical use case now is watching widescreen movies. The result is that a monitor in landscape orientation is too short, and (for me, with larger fonts) one in portrait orientation is too narrow. At home I've still got a monitor with the classic aspect ratio, but it's only 20" (would like a little bigger, but the same aspect ratio). At work I have two of the other kind (22"? 24"? haven't measured, but something like that).

Arguably I have enough screen real-estate, but it's the wrong shape. Before I just give up and order a mucking huge single monitor (a coworker has one that's about three feet wide, so I guess nominally a 42" monitor or so), does anybody know whether it's still possible to get the classic aspect ratio? I want to look at code, documentation, web pages, and stuff like that, not movies. I watch movies on my actual TV, thankyouverymuch.

Dear LJ brain trust,

Can anybody suggest an email client that runs on Windows 7 that satisfies all of the following requirements?

Can talk to an Exchange server. (I don't know what version; let me know if that matters.)
Is not Outlook 2003 (no longer supported by the IT department), nor Outlook 2007 (supported but unworkable).¹
Allows the setting of font size for all views (headers, reading messages, composing messages, folder names...).
Can be set to render all email in plain text, but allows some escape hatch for when you really do need the HTML/rich-text formatting to make sense of something (like when somebody formats a message with tables or different font colors or something).
Either uses system colors (text, background) or supports this configuration directly.
Supports saving to folders.
Has some migration path for my ~5GB of email in Outlook PST files. (Since this is a one-time operation it can be a separate tool; there just has to be a way to get there.)
Isn't from a known-suspicious source (it has to get past corporate IT).

I'll also need something in the way of a calendar (send/receive meeting invitations and that sort of stuff), which is probably part of the email client but I'm ok with a separate solution there if one exists.

¹ One big problem with Outlook 2007 is that it puts this huge bright-light-blue border around everything, which for someone in a reverse-video scheme is sort of like being out for a late-night walk far from city lights when somebody comes along and shines a full-power Coleman lantern in your eyes. Outlook 2010 does improve on this: you can make it a huge-bright-light-gray border instead. Near as I can tell, everything rooted in the Windows "Aero" theme is pure evil, and this is.

Thanks!

I'm typing this from my new Android tablet -- an ASUS Transformer with keyboard dock. It's quite spiffy! (And a well-timed gift, as I was still cogitating over my dead iBook.)

It works well as a tablet -- nice display, the apps work the way I expect, and it didn't take too long to figure out some of the interface quirks (which may be real or may be signs that I've used an iPad). The on-screen keyboard is "fat"; I don't know how else to describe it, but it works (and, not surprisingly, with better accuracy than my phone). The hardware keyboard is of course smaller than a conventional one, so currently I'm making lots of typos but I'm touch-typing. The keys are closer together than I'm used to and it feels like I'm hitting them harder than I'm used to, particularly the keys toward the edges (that are less likely to be struck "straight on"). I'm still faster with the hardware keyboard than the on-screen one, though, and it doesn't take up half the screen. So, bottom line, when I want to do extensive typing I can slip it into the dock, and otherwise its a nice 10" tablet.

Please feel free to tell me about all your favorite Android apps. I have an Android phone so I know a few, but tablets and phones are different.

Good news: somebody has ported emacs to Android and it's in the store (free). Bad news: it seg-faults for me on start. It's a known problem but the suggested work-around didn't for me. I've contacted the author.

The dock provides a USB port and there's a file-browser app. This is very promising.

How in the world do I get the Google+ web site to let me use the regular, not mobile, site? I know there's an app but I don't like it; the web site is just fine with the real-estate available on a tablet. But when I try to use it it forces me into the mobile version, which isn't as good. (Not as bad as the app, but not as good as it could be.)

The previous paragraph might describe a specific symptom of a more-general problem. General solutions also welcome. :-) (Stack Exchange, by way of contrast, uses the mobile site on my phone but the regular one on the tablet, so it's not as simple as checking for mobile devices.)

There are two browsers pre-installed, "browser" and Chrome. I wonder why. I wonder what "browser" is.

LJ oddity: I'm typing this using the (regular) web site, not an app, and when typing this text is a smaller variable-width font. When focus is elsewhere (like when I typed the tags), it changes to a larger fixed-width font (Courier, I assume). I want that all the time! (This is the HTML editor, not the rich-text one.)

I'm not very good at finger-based cursor placement yet. I wonder what typos Ive introduced while editing. :-)

More to come as I use it more, I'm sure.

Going to the eye-doctor and having my pupils dilated seems to cause the day to become bright and sunny. But this is Pittsburgh, where sunny days are relatively uncommon. Does this mean that most people in Pittsburgh never have their eyes checked this way, or are we all mysteriously choosing the same few days for this?

I posted the preceding on the "great unanswered questions" page on our wiki at work. In keeping with the name, I've received no answers.

Why does Windows 8 hide the control to shut down the computer? The discussion in the (currently-)top-voted answer makes a good deal of sense. And I actually didn't know that it's now considered safe to just turn a running computer off; decades of "don't do that" have trained me not to.

Back in July 530nm330hz posted a review of a new book of lessons from the talmud, specifically tractrate B'rachot (blessings). Based on that review I recently bought the book and I'm quite enjoying it so far. It's organized by talmudic page, so I first jumped to the entries on particular pages that I know and love -- how does God pray, different themes of concluding blessings, the tussle over leadership where they deposed Rabban Gamliel (I previously wrote about that one), and one or two others. Now I'll go back and read the rest. I hope this book is the first in a series.

I forget where I came across this special "de-motivator" image, but why should I keep all the fun to myself? (Image behind cut.) ( Read more... )

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

( Read more... )

I was surprised and a little weirded out, the other night, when I typed "parme" into Google and it offered to auto-complete to "parmesan crusted tilapia recipe". That was in fact what I was searching for, though I was going to just say "fish", but I hadn't realized Google's mind-reading was that good. :-) I didn't remember to follow up at first opportunity from a different IP address, though, so I don't know if profiling was involved.

(My question, still not satisfyingly answered as this recipe didn't do it so well, was: how do you get the cheese to stay on the fish? I was speculating about egg, as you often do for breading, but this recipe called for olive oil. I ended up with fish and cheese in proximity to each other, which was tasty but not what I was going for.)

Larry Osterman passed along this video showing upgrades from Windows 1.0 through to Windows 7 with all intermediate steps (except Windows ME, which doesn't play the upgrade game well, it appears). It was amusing to see what did and didn't survive upgrade (Doom almost hit 100%!), and amazing that it actually worked.

Bohemian Rhapsody on ukelele (video), from siderea. I didn't think I could imagine it, and I was right. Nifty!

Cool bedroom, and not just for kids! Link from talvinamarich.

The internet is for cats. Cats in sinks. Be careful; this is like TV Tropes on four legs. Don't say I didn't warn you.

And finishing up with another one from siderea: this funny ad for milk (involves cats).

This is (basically) a rant I posted on the work wiki, with serial numbers filed off of course.

I have (customer-supplied server) running on a (corporate) laptop with a scrawny little hard drive. The C partition is only 83GB, and while there's another 40GB languishing on D, IT can't repartition without risking data loss and it took too long to get this set up in the first place. So there's a "why can't I just use Partition Magic to fix it?" rant wanting to get out here, but that is not this rant.

This week I ran out of space on C. Usually this means the server has written a bunch of logs that I need to delete, but that wasn't it this time -- I reclaimed maybe 2GB that way. Defrag wouldn't even run well because it didn't have 15% free and couldn't buffer on D -- but that is not this rant.

No, the rant is that when I went looking for the culprit (it's a pretty lean machine as these things go), I found that Proventia Desktop (firewall -- it ought to be called Prevent-ya, as in "prevent ya from getting any work done"!) had written 70GB of logs -- and tampering in any way with firewalls can be a firing offense, not that I have privileges anyway. 70GB -- really? On an 83GB partition? Haven't the guys who make that ever heard of rolling logs? Or archiving? They zipped down to a hundredth their original size. Sheesh!

(Fortunately we have a very helpful on-site support person who was able to fix this for me.)

When I came home from work on erev Sukkot I was greeted by the plaintive wail of a UPS that had lost its will to live (thank you thank you thank you for not doing that 12 hours later!). There was nothing to be done then but unplug things. After Shabbat I replaced it; while I briefly considered just ordering a new battery, I noted that I was using all outlets on the UPS and all the wall outlets and was still resorting to a power squid, and on a recent power outage the UPS hadn't really held up very long. I was asking it to do too much; time for a bigger one. (And anyway, I didn't want my equipment to be unprotected for the several more days it would take for a new battery to arrive.)

This is as orderly as these things get: ( photo )

It should not be this hard for me to break into my own wireless network. Hrmpf.

Once upon a time we decided to go the "authorized MAC addresses" route instead of the "shared password" route or the "leaking open wireless all over the street" route. I no longer remember what I had to do to add the Roku last winter, but it was pretty straightforward. I strongly suspect that it involved a link like "add MAC address" on the router's wireless-settings page. Now I have a new wireless device and want to add it.

Problem the first: the new device doesn't have an obvious way to cough up a MAC address. Problem the second (and this makes the first irrelevant, at least temporarily): the router interface for managing MAC addresses seems to be hosed. I can't even find a way to just turn the MAC filtering off (which would allow the new device to join the network, at which point the router would tell me its MAC address and I could theoretically add it and turn the security back on). The router reports that this filtering is enabled but on the configuration page the check-box is unchecked; checking it does not then give me access to the list to manage. So I guess I've reached the wrong part of the configuration, despite this being the only plausible part I've found so far.

Google was no help, at least in a first round. Verizon's tech support (they supplied the router) claims that my only option is to reset to factory defaults and start over. Since I don't now remember everything we changed from factory defaults, I don't know how big a task this is. There is an interface to save and restore a configuration file, which I thought might give me something to poke around in, but "save" does not mean "save somewhere where a mere administrator can actually see its contents".

Leaking open wireless all over the street is looking better and better to me. If I can figure out how to turn the MAC filtering off I may well just leave it off. Meanwhile, I will take the Kindle I received as a birthday present to a coffee shop to register it.

This week we have customers in for a big development-and-integration event, with the result that I'm expected to basically spend the week in a lab doing development (configuration, not Java code, but pretty complex configuration). The lab, for sound security reasons, is not on the corporate network nor on the internet.

Monday morning was spent setting up customers' servers, providing an overview of changes since the last release, and stuff like that. So I really only spent about half a day working on that lab machine, but it was still exhausting. The default Windows configuration is not one that works well for me visually, and the tools available to edit XML (and read server logs) were Notepad and Wordpad, and, well, that sucked. Oh, and while I'd managed to get another monitor (the standard setup had them bolted to the back of the table; it's our deployment configuration but that's too far for me to see), I realized late in the day that it was at the wrong height and that was part of why my neck hurt.

Ok, then. Yesterday morning I appropriated a thumb drive (after confirming I was allowed to connect it to my corporate machine), went upstairs to my desk, and grabbed a few tools I'd need: Windows display theme, emacs (with my configuration file), and KeyTweak to remap caps-lock to control like Jim [1] intended. (The Cygwin installer relies on an internet connection so no joy there, but I was mostly just repeating the same command lines over and over in the DOS shell, so ok. And no IntelliJ for licensing reasons.) And a ream of paper, for the monitor.

Ah, much better. I can get through the rest of this week now. If we could do something about the fluorescent lights it'd be even better, but at least they aren't directly overhead or in my line of sight.

[1] Jim Gosling. I used his emacs for a few years before I encountered Stallman's, which morphed into Gnu, which is what everyone uses now. And back in those days, the control key was just to the left of home row (VT100 terminal), easily accessible -- important for a program where almost all commands involve that key. I have never, ever adjusted to the PC (and Mac) putting that key down on the bottom row where I can't easily reach it without actually moving my left hand out of typing position.

It's entertaining when malware distributors are both bold and stupid, like with this email I got today: "Dear customer, we have disabled your email account because we believe it has been compromised. To restore, run the attached executable and use the following password: 12345". (Yes, it was sent in the clear.) How many things are wrong with that ploy? Sheesh.

Serendipitiously, 15 minutes after seeing that scam I saw this excellent tutorial on password management by vonstrassburg. No, not the "how to choose a good password" hints you already know, but, rather, how to deal with the fact that that doesn't really work. I particularly like his suggestions for managing the database file.

From browngirl: Mordor or Iceland? Match the pictures to the source.

I have recently been participating in a small discussion of renaissance music notation... on a mailing list for Jewish worship. No, I didn't start it, but I could hardly let those comments just sit there... And now I have pointers to other editions of Salamone Rossi's music that seem worth investigating (Don Harran in particular). The edition I have is funky; the music is fine, but it's a transcription of a 19th-century French edition and Hebrew transliterated into French phonemes breaks my brain. I transcribe pieces from this book if our choir is going to do them. (What I really want to see is a facsimile edition...)

This tiny horse (link from anastasiav) gave me a serious case of the "aww, cute!"s.

Some iGoogle plug-in served me this cat picture, and all I could think was "yeah, I've had days like that". It's tempting to turn it into a userpic, but I don't know whose property it is.

Erik sometimes makes a squeaking sound now where I would have expected a meow to come out. He still has a full-voiced meow, so it's not like he's caught kitty laryngitis or something, but it's still odd. Embla's normal mode is a sort of chirp (I've only heard her actually meow two or three times), but this sort of thing is new for Erik. Weird.

The word came down from on high at work: Office 2007 is being pushed to our machines, no opt-out. (Yes, we're slow adopters. Big companies are often like that.) We've known this for months, so since I have to customize my environment for vision reasons, I asked a coworker who already had it to give my Windows theme a spin. The result was pretty terrible, so I sought help from the IT folks. Uncharacteristically for large-company IT departments, I got routed to someone who both cares and has a clue, so he's been experimenting for a while on my behalf. He had to consult Microsoft, but he finally sent me a screen shot asking if this was acceptable. It was, so I accepted the push at a time that he'd be available to talk me through the re-configuration.

( reality wasn't so straightforward )

I've had a lot of discussions with the IT guy about how to fix this. He agrees that this is unacceptable, but there seems to be no way to make Windows, Office 2007, and my accessibility settings play well together. So tomorrow morning we will restore Office 2003 (with luck the fact that I received 2007 once will keep the auto-push from coming around again), and he will begin the approval process to get me set up with a virtual machine. In which I will run Office 2007, because sometimes I'm going to need that. Using a different theme, probably, because I won't have to live in it, just visit it from time to time, so it's allowed to kind of suck. Eventually maybe we'll figure out the right juju to make things work for real, but meanwhile, I'll keep using Outlook 2003 (the Office application I use the most and really need to work) outside the VM and, as needed, Office 2007 inside it.

I don't understand the design intent of the various settings in Windows. If I had a model for what things are intended to do maybe I could find a path to a workable color theme, but I haven't been able to derive that model despite years of using Windows. This business with layered themes with the "superseded" one still having unpredictable results completely confuses me. I find myself wondering whether Microsoft employs anyone with my kind of vision problems and, if so, how I could arrange to have a conversation with that person to learn how he gets around.

It never occurred to me that after upgrading the Mac from Leopard to Snow Leopard, my printer (HP Laserjet 1020) might no longer work. I had to download a special driver to get it to work with Leopard, and I guess I assumed that driver would still work. Sigh. If I'd actually thought about it, I would have done some research before taking the OS upgrade.

My choices seem to be: (1) revert to Leopard (I don't even know if that's possible without doing damage), (2) wait for a fix (prognosis unclear), or (3) buy a new printer. I wasted a lot of time under Leopard trying (4), network the printer using my PC, so I probably won't try that again. (The Mac still needs a driver, whether the printer is local or remote, so that's not likely to help.) I'll continue with Google research tomorrow; so far the only solution I've found involves downloading a 750MB package, compiling code, and doing lots of fussing.

I realize that this is HP's fault, not Apple's. It's frustrating because I've been using HP printers for more than 15 years without issues and when I bought this one I never thought to check for Mac compatibility. (At the time I wasn't planning to buy a Mac.) It's a peripheral; at some level I expect it to just work.

On the other hand, it's worth noting how easy the OS upgrade was otherwise. Insert disc, confirm intent, leave for an hour, and there it was. I was never willing to attempt an OS change under Windows. This is the only major problem I've seen so far. (There's one minor one that I'll probably just have to get used to; they changed a color that I'd rather they not have, but there doesn't appear to be a user setting for it.)

Quote of the day #1: "My parents visited a planet without bilateral symmetry and all I got was this stupid F-Shirt" (from

bitsy_legend and Fred).

A few weeks ago BitDefender, my antivirus software, stopped working -- attempting to run a scan emitted a very unhelpful error message. Some time with Google showed me that lots of people were having that problem, and after some work I found and installed a patch. Today it shut down again, and after I tried all the new remedies suggested on a BD forum (lots more people are having this problem) I, in a moment of "it can't hurt" desperation, reinstalled the patch. (It should already be there, right?) And it started working again. I wonder what is going on. Customer support has been responsive but of mediocre quality so far. Ah well, one more reason to move to the new machine sooner rather than later. Once I have the Mac, I won't need the PC to be on the internet. And if I were staying with Windows, I'd surely replace BitDefender with something else when the annual subscription expires. (I have not, by the way, seen any evidence that the machine has actually been infected with anything.)

Signal boost: 530nm330hz has been developing his own siddur for personal use, and wants to know if enough people to justify a small production run are interested. The sample pages are quite lovely (a nice siddur can be more than just the words on the page); he's using color to effectively indicate variations for weekday, Shabbat, and festivals, and is laying it out in a way that sounds useful. Andrew's Orthodox, so it'll be a complete siddur.

This afternoon we saw a flurry of bicyclists cruising down our street. (There appears to have been some sort of organized activity, but I'm not sure what.) And, among them, I saw one guy on a huge unicycle. The wheeel was at least three feet across, possibly four. I wondered how one mounts a unicycle with a wheel diameter bigger than one's inseam. I don't yet have the internet in my pocket, so I had to wait until we got home to find out. Err, now that I know I'm even more impressed. I'm still not sure what you do about temporary stops, like red lights, though. It sounds like you need a hand-hold to get going; what do you do if none are available?

Quote of the day #2: "Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved", via kyleri.

Why aren't people commenting on my post? I've had this in a browser tab for a while waiting for a "misc" post to add it to, and I no longer remember where I got it.

A few months ago I was talking with my ophthamologist about the difficulties of sitting at a computer all day (eye-strain headaches, which I could mitigate somewhat by doing ergonomically-bad things and getting neck/shoulder/wrist aches instead). She said that's because I need computer glasses rather than trying to use one pair of glasses for everything. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my employer would even pay for this -- cool!

The nice thing about this is that the glasses can be focused at a more-normal distance, which means I was able to push my monitor back on my desk instead of keeping it at about 8-10". It's now at about 20", give or take. (I did have to change some font settings and some apps, like Outlook, don't respect all the settings, but that's managable. And I'm used to the software world not fully supporting the visually-impaired.) That, in turn, meant that I could finally support a second monitor -- commonly available in my company, but I could never get that much screen in visual range before. But now...

My second 22" monitor arrived yesterday. My plan had been to set it up in portrait mode (which would allow me to have more than 45 lines of text visible in an emacs buffer), but my graphics card's default driver doesn't support that. There is a newer driver, but it has other issues.

But, my computer is coming up on the end of its lease, which means I'm going to have to move off of it in a few months anyway. So, worst case I wait a few months to be able to rotate my monitor, or best case maybe I'll be allowed to switch early. Moving to a new computer is a pain in the butt, especially with all the security exemptions and stuff (to install non-standard software), so I never would have expected to find myself saying "I hope I can replace my computer soon". :-) (Holy cow, I just realized this will be computer #5 for me... maybe I can safely delete the archives from #2.)

I wonder if I can get a trackball or similar pointing device, too. Not to replace the mouse -- to augment it. This is a lot of screen to move across, and I'd like to spare my mouse hand the broad traversals. (I've never been any good at fine control with a trackball or touchpad, but if I could have both that and the mouse... I assume I can plug in two USB pointing devices and they'd both work, and that trackballs etc come USB these days. Something to check.)

As we go through the process of digitizing our non-digital music and ripping the CDs, both Dani and I have had multiple instances of iTunes crapping out on us in various ways. Usually the failure mode is that it takes over all the CPU, won't respond, and forces a reboot. Or it'll just decide to stop paying attention to the CD drive and not acknowledge the disc I just put in. Is this iTunes' doing, or Windows'?

Anyway, yesterday we ripped about 100 folk CDs. Progress. I've been going through tape-recorded Clam Chowder concerts. I hope to one day identify the source of the five stray tracks at the end of another concert tape -- a tape I had actually catalogued at the time, but I didn't record those additions. Hmm.

Links:

One Velociraptor Per Child, from

jducoeur. I hope they're offering a buy-one-get-one program; Dani really wants his own velociraptor.

From

shalmestere: dressage... with a camel (video). I didn't know they could do that.

From

siderea: feline cavalry (video).

kyleri passed on this twist on animal rescue.

From a locked post: curry can stave off Alzheimers?. If so, I'm even happier that Sree's is now selling Indian food across the street from my office.

Monica

vision problems and computers

bad IT day :-(

oh hey, I have a desk

computer slowdowns everywhere

link round-up

anti-virus for less-technical users?

keyboards: it's the little things

lies Google told me

ah, that's better

monitors with classic aspect ratio?

for the brain trust: email clients?

tablet

short takes

"7 things" #2

short takes

an IT rant

need...more...power

machines 1, Monica 0

some of the right tools

random bits

Office 2007: accessibility problems

argh!

random bits

cascading effects

short takes

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