cellio | Entries tagged with computers

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 This business with layered themes with the "superseded" one still having unpredictable results completely confuses me.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.

Ok, sounds like we have the beginnings of a plan.

magid and I will be leaving FPU probably around 10:30-11AM; I don't remember what travel time is, but we can head to some place in Brookline. I think

goldsquare and Robin,

530nm330hz, and

mabfan (and

gnomi?) are available for lunch; anyone else? I have phone numbers for all of you, so how about if I call when we think we're an hour away? If you have food constraints other than kosher, please speak up -- otherwise

magid and I will pick something.

Edit Fri 9AM: It sounds like Ta'am China will best be able to accommodate a group of our size. I like TC so that's fine with me; please speak up if that won't work for you.

If anyone who will be at lunch can print a boarding pass for me on Sunday morning, could you let me know? (We're trying to arrange access to a printer here, as I'm certainly not the only one with this desire; this request is a backup.)

In other news,

mbarr has graciously provided a workaround for my ssh problem. Thanks! (Intermediary on a non-standard port.) Thanks to everyone who offered advice.

I have rather a lot that I want to write about from this week, but insufficient time so far. This will probably mean a burst of posts from me next week.

( religion, musical instruments, operating systems, misc )

A couple weeks ago at work we got our first look at the new version of Bugzilla, which we'll be forced to upgrade to soon. (Our current version is incompatable with the version of Perforce we're upgrading to.) Both Perforce and Bugzilla have web interfaces, and in the new versions, both assume a much wider browswer window than I am prepared to provide. That I have to jack up the font size doesn't help, but, fundamentally, people are, more and more, designing inaccessible web sites on the theory that of course you can spare 1000+ pixels in width. The web-design industry is mature enough (or at least old enough) that we should be past that... grumble. But I digress.

So, while talking with my manager about some of the things we were trying to do to address this (our build manager, in whose lap all this falls, has been wonderfully helpful), my manager said "I just ordered some new 22" monitors; I'll put you on the list". (I could, if I like, have a pair of 18?" monitors, but I can't actually place two monitors such that I can see everything.)

This morning the monitor fairy came. :-) 22" turns out to be widescreen (not the 4:3 or whatever of regular monitors); the new one might be half an inch shorter than my old one. But it's tall enough, and the extra real-estate is nice. The recommended resolution is only 1680x1050 (or something like that), which surprised me. (I expected to see a number over 2000 for the wide dimension.) That resolution actually works for me; yay! This was also the highest setting available on my computer; I assume that's a function of the graphics card and not the monitor. (I would not be able to put higher resolution to good use.)

One problem: I noticed some pretty significant color distortion in the top quarter of the screen. We actually thought it was defective, so we swapped it out for another one (slightly different model). The problem was less pronounced on the second one but still there. That's when I noticed that it changed with my height; if I raised my chair a couple inches the problem got much better. But I can't raise my chair a couple inches because then the keyboard will be in the wrong place. (Tried it for an hour. No.) If I could tip the monitor forward a little that would make a difference, but it's already at the max setting there. Perhaps I will channel my inner MacGyver and rig something to let it tip a bit without falling. (Ok, that's more like my inner MacGyver's four-year-old apprentice or something. MacGyver would rig it to track my eyes and auto-pivot in both dimensions, using nothing more than duct tape and pocket lint.)

Mind, I will find ways to live with the color distortion if necessary. The real estate is worth it. It's not a perfect solution; I have to roll my chair sideways a bit to fully utilize the screen. But it's pretty good, and if it just plain gives me the room to have some extra-wide windows that I can move around as needed, that'll do.

I failed to record my monitor customizations before removing the old one, so I was recreating color depth, brightness, etc by feel today, but I thought I'd written this down somewhere and, sure enough, I did. So I'll try those settings tomorrow (they're somewhat different from what I came up with today) and see how that affects my color distortion.

One other problem (handily solved): the first monitor did not have buttons but rather touch controls. With tiny little labels that are impossible to read in dim lighting. I had to borrow a flashlight and use my magnifying glass to configure the monitor. The second one (an older model) has buttons. Yeah, I'll keep that one. What was Samsung thinking? Touch controls?! (And finicky ones, too.)

Last week Dani got email from someone he knew in Toronto lo these many years ago. She and her family were driving to DC; did he want to visit with them on their way down? We said sure, and invited them for dinner Sunday. She and her husband are friendly people; their teenage sons were shy but pleasant, and they appreciated access to graphic novels and an internet connection while the rest of us were talking. :-) (One of them was excited to find Diablo installed on one of Dani's computers...)

The adults had obviously done some research. During dinner they said "please tell us about the SCA" and "so what about the house on the flatbed?". I googled both of us later and the page for the little house on the flatbed does not come up in the first half-dozen pages of results, so I'm not sure how they got there. (Of course, my home page does, from there you can get to my page of SCA links, and from there...) I, lacking information beyond her first name, had done no such research; I hope I was not socially deficient in these modern times.

Both Dani's and my desktop computers have been gradually getting sluggish over time. Dani went shopping and found that we could each triple our memory for $50. Ah, much better! Dani was kind enough to install mine for me. (We have a clean division of labor when it comes to household IT: he does hardware and I do system administration. Things go more smoothly when we do not try to switch.)

Dani did another hardware installation this weekend: late last week the water flow to the shower head was, suddenly, extremely diminished. Advice found on the internet suggested banging on the head and/or pipes to shake loose any gunk that might be in there; we decided not to do that without replacement hardware on hand, 'cause some water is better than none at all. (I should mention, in passing, that it took me a couple tries to find any useful information here. Who knew that some people try to deliberately reduce flow to their shower heads? Err, isn't that what the tub knobs are for? But I digress.) In the end, Dani bought a $5 head and simply replaced it; the new one is actually better than the old one. (Another in the "who knew?" department: you can spend $100 on a showerhead. It had better be gold-plated, water-softening, temperature-regulating, and massaging, for that price!)

A week ago Monday I took all the cats in for checkups, and two got blood drawn for tests. Tuesday night I got a message: um, err, we lost some of it. I had the last appointments of the night, and apparently one vial got left in the centrefuge... so I had to take Erik (I'm glad it was Erik! He's easy!) back to be stuck again on Wednesday. They were apologetic, but sigh. (Everyone's basically normal, locally scoped.)

Shabbat morning was a little more rabbi-heavy than usual. Both of our rabbis were there (until it was time to leave for the later service, anyway). We also had our incipient third rabbi (yes, now it can be told... we were looking for an educator and got one who's also a rabbi; mabfan, you know him). And our associate rabbi's aunt, who is also a rabbi, was visiting. I'm glad that day's lay torah reader isn't one to get spooked easily. :-) (Though he might not have known about the last; I was introduced to her Friday night, but I don't think she mentioned her background Saturday morning.)

The third rabbi will be focusing mostly on education (including adults). He's an excellent teacher, and I'm looking forward to having more chances to learn with him. I presume that our adult-ed program is going to get a boost; yay!

( Read more... )

Dear LazyWeb,

What is the conventional wisdom these days for casual, computer-assisted accoustic recording? If I want to record myself singing against some computer-generated (or at least -rendered) tracks (MIDI, maybe), and I'm looking for basic demo quality, not studio quality, what should I be using (software and hardware)? I have a PC (XP) and an iBook (X.4) available; both have unremarkable sound cards. I have no mic or headphones; I assume I need the latter to avoid feedback from speakers. I assume the headphones don't much matter if they get sound to my ears and the mic matters somewhat. What should I be buying (hardware) and. ideally, downloading (software)?

It's a new millenium; I can upgrade hardware.

My mostly-trusty HP LaserJet 5L has fussed at me one too many times. (It's ok; it's a senior citizen. I think I bought it in 1993.) Every now and then it decides it doesn't want to correctly feed paper; sometimes it just wants different paper or a dusting-out, and sometimes it wants a more thorough cleaning. I've done all the usual things this time short of breaking out the screwdrivers. It's been a good printer, but new ones are $100 and there's a lot to be said for lower hassle levels. I wonder if I know anyone who places the time/money balance-point in a different place, or who likes playing with hardware. It's not dead, just cranky.

I took today off to deal with assorted errands before leaving for Pennsic tomorrow morning. One of those errands was printing some stuff to take to Pennsic -- hence this post. So since I was home anyway, I ran over to Best Buy to pick up a new one. For old-times' sake, I got a modern HP LaserJet. Time to first print (from when I left the house) was just over an hour, which is pretty good.

(Reminder to self: I didn't have a spare USB cable after all, so right now the printer is hijacking the scanner cable. I should fix that after Pennsic.)

Once upon a time we bought a Linksys router and configured it to hand out IP addresses dynamically. I forget why, but we specified a range of 100-150 for the final byte. (The router itself is 1. Practically speaking we'd never need as many as 50. These might have been defaults; I don't remember.) What this is supposed to mean is that it hands out addresses in order as needed, starting with 100, and if you ever have more than 50 machines on the network you have a problem.

This chugged along fine for a while until it started handing out out-of-range numbers. (No, we have never had so many machines that we exhausted the set range.) We couldn't stop it from giving my machine 192.168.1.2; when it did that my machine couldn't see the internet (presumably because this was out of range). We assigned fixed addresses (in range) to all the resident machines and carried on. I forgot about this until we switched DSL providers recently and found that my network settings were still referring to the old provider. (Once you specify IP address, you also end up specifying DNS servers.) Ok, back to DHCP. We replaced the router a year or two ago, so for all I knew this wasn't even an issue any more.

This morning I couldn't connect to the internet (after a reboot). After the usual diagnostics and quick fixes, I got around to looking at ipconfig. My IP address was, once again, 192.168.1.2. WTF? So this time I decided to change the router; I told it to start handing out addresses with 2 instead of with 100. That didn't fix it. So, finally, I assigned my machine a specific IP address, just like we did before, and it worked.

I still have no idea why this happens. I have a workaround, but the mystery still bugs me.

New word: bloggerrea. I'd been wondering why sometimes an update causes the RSS feed to spew old entries. Pretty annoying.

Clever, in that "uh-oh" sort of way: one piece of spam-sending malware installs its own anti-virus program, because it doesn't want all your other viruses slowing it down. (I recommend Security Mentor to pretty much everyone, even the tech-savvy. Syndicated here as securitymentor2.)

Unclever, in that "uh-oh" sort of way: A few months ago I replaced my anti-virus software (moved from MacAfee to BitDefender). I disabled MacAfee but didn't uninstall at the time. This weekend my subscription expired -- and something (MacAfee? Windows?) decided that since I was obviously unprotected, it would be best for all concerned if I couldn't see the internet. Ahem. Fixing that was much more hassle than it should have been.

When I was in Boston one of the LJ folk I talked with (I forget who) mentioned t'fillin Barbie. I've now forgotten where I got the link too; I think a (different) LJ source. Twisted, very twisted. (The Barbie, I mean, not my friends. :-) )

I found this article on reaching the 20- and 30-somethings in congregations interesting. Excerpt:

Jewish community leaders would do well to examine the changing nature of today's 20 and 30 year olds. For Baby Boomers, synagogue membership and Jewish institutional affiliations were primary markers of Jewish identity. In the past, Jews showed their support for synagogue life by paying dues- whether they were enthusiastic participants or not. Today, that sense of obligation is gone: young adults do not feel compelled to join a synagogue if they have no intention of attending. However, when they to do decide to join, they participate as active, invested members.

Dear LJ brain trust,

I'd like to get an inexpensive laptop. It won't be my main machine; it's for travel and other situations where portability is useful. So it doesn't need to be studly; it just needs to be reliable and support basic tools like Firefox, emacs, SSH, FTP, and that sort of thing.

This would be a prime opportunity to explore the Macintosh, which some of my friends rave about, except for one little thing: I can get a (new) Dell laptop for around $400, but Macs start at $1100. Is there some less-expensive option I'm missing?

I'm pretty disgusted with Congress right now. There's a reason we have consitutional guarantees of pesky little things like due process. I hope the pre-election ploy backfires.

This map provides a pretty nifty visualization of 5000 years' worth of conquest of the middle east. (Link from goldsquare.)

On lighter notes...

I was delighted today to learn about TweakUI from a coworker. (Google for it with your version of Windows to get to the right page.) This tool supports a bunch of UI modifications that I haven't explored yet; the one that got me to download and install it is "focus follows mouse", which users of X-Windows may remember. Sometimes there's not enough screen real-estate and I just want to type a command into that mostly-buried shell; why should I have to bring it to the top first? The surprising thing is that this was published by Microsoft (though they say very clearly that it is not supported). I guess there are developers at Microsoft who don't agree with the standard-issue UI. :-)

Some things are Deeply Wrong. As evidence, I offer the can of cat food labelled thus: "white meat chicken Florentine in a delicate sauce with garden veggies". I don't know what's more disturbing: that someone brought that to market, or that Erik loved it. (No, I didn't buy this; it was a free sample.)

A couple of weeks ago an electrician we hired pointed a finger at Duquesne Light. They said they didn't think it was their problem but they replaced the line from the pole to the house anyway. We've had no further problems; I hope that continues.

I ordered a memory card for my printer, which had become cranky about printing full pages. It came in yesterday's mail, so this afternoon I popped it in and things are now printing normally. I'm glad that it turned out to be an inexpensive solution. The pictures in the HP documentation didn't match the physical card, but fortunately there were enough similarities to work out the correct orientation.

Erik's appetite was back to normal as of a couple days ago. Today it's above normal; he's eaten two whole cans of food so far today (and I'll bet he'll want a bedtime snack). The vet suggested I water him daily for a few days (starting last Monday) and then drop down to every other day; I think given what he's been eating I can make tonight the transition into "every other day". The fluids do help a lot, though I really hate having to stick him with a needle to administer them. I can tell he's uncomfortable; I would be too!

My laser printer has been acting up lately, and based on the symptoms a friend suggested a problem with the memory card. (Possibly time to replace or augment, or possibly it just needs to be dusted off and reseated.) Armed with a screwdriver and Google, I set out to try to reseat it.

( nothing is ever easy )
Edit: Once I determined that I should try expansion memory, I called some stores to see if they have it in stock. Best Buy's phone system had the decency to tell me they're closed today. (It then went on to tell me that hours are Sundays 11 to 7, so nothing is perfect.) CompUSA and Circuit City both abandoned me to hold and/or ringing phones; my best guess is that they, too, are closed today, but they didn't remember to reprogram their phones to reflect it. Fooey on them! So if I'm not going to get instant gratification anyway, I may as well order via the net.

My printer has started acting up in a weird way. For a while now, it has declined to correctly print certain pages from one application (Trope Trainer); it'll print most of a page, then feed a new piece of paper and print the rest on that page (in the correct position), and then do the same thing on subsequent pages. But since the break is usually in the middle of a line of text, with some bit loss, that's not helpful. And it only happens with the larger-print Hebrew pages, which is weird -- so it's not the program itself. Well, tonight I tried to print my sermon for this Shabbat -- just an RTF document, printed from Wordpad -- and for the first time it's doing the same thing to me with text. WTF? This is not a normal failure mode for laser printers, in my limited experience. I wonder what it means. I hope it doesn't mean "ten years is more than you should expect from an infrequently-used printer", but I suspect it does.

Amazon has this thing called "gold box", where they offer you slightly-discounted prices on products they think you'd like. Sometimes they're right; I've bought a few things that way. But I'd really like to send them a message: I will not buy (1) things I already own (and that I bought from you, so you should know); (2) a bike via mail order; (3) golf clubs; or (4) fancy-schmancy purses priced in the hundreds of dollars. (Heck, I wouldn't buy a purse priced in the tens of dollars.) Where on earth do they get some of these ideas? I had assumed paid placements, and maybe that's true, but I've been seeing the purses (or sometimes wallets, also around $200) for months, intermittently. Huh?

Our congregation is hiring an associate rabbi, and we're going through placement with HUC for someone from this year's class. The process was described as similar to assigning residencies for medical school: each employer produces an ordered list of students it would hire and each student produces an ordered list of jobs he would take, and then the matching is done and you find out who you got. I found myself wondering today whether the algorithm optimizes locally or globally. Suppose you have a student S1 who chooses congregations C1 and C2, and another student S2 who chooses C3 and C1, and suppose C3 doesn't choose S2 and C1 will take either student. Do they match S1 to C1 to give S1 his first choice (and it's just too bad that S2 lost out), or do they match S1 to C2 so that S2 gets a congregation, each student getting his second choice? Does C1's ranking of S1 and S2 matter in this case? I wonder if participants are allowed to know this stuff, or if they fear people gaming the system.

Links:

The Straight Dope on the number of the beast (history and humor). I particularly like "$665.95: retail price of the beast". I had previously heard "668: the neighbor of the beast". Link from cvirtue.

This was posted to lj_nifty: a map showing where your LJ friends are located (replace my user name with yours in the URL). As of this posting it only covers North America. It's also very slow at the moment, though it worked fine for me earlier.

On Windows XP (probably up to date), does anyone know of a way to make the mouse cursor bigger? I had to set the resolution on this laptop above my preferred 1024x768 because that resolution absolutely sucked on this display, and then tell Windows to use extra-large fonts and twiddle my applications. (Mozilla's minimum font size is now 20, to give you an idea of the magnitude of the problem.) But this means that everything graphical is still down at its "normal" size (per the resolution). I can live with not being able to see images well for a week; it's not like I'm doing much browsing or graphics manipulation, after all. But the mouse cursor is also a graphic image, and that I care about.

I've already found the accessibility option for "tell me where the cursor is on demand" (it animates), but if I could make the mouse cursor itself bigger, or bright red (inverse-video would be better but hard, I imagine), or something, that'd be really helpful.

With the way technology is advancing, I'm guessing I'll never be able to reasonably buy a laptop of my own because of stuff like this. When a resolution I can actually see is considered non-native because it's "too low", I'm in trouble. (Yes I did try 800x600 too. No dice; it looked as bad as 1024x768. And there's nothing between the two..)

Update: Problem solved. Thanks everyone!

On every past computer on which I've run Encore (my music-composition software), I could pop open the "instrument selection" dialogue and choose a named instrument for each track. This is useful if you're, say, trying to evaluate a choral piece and you want to hear the voices distinctively rather than piano all across. (Piano is the default.)

On my current computer, I can choose a number between 1 and 128. No names. This gets old really, really quickly if I just, say, want to find the damn violin. I can't seem to find the map.

Annoyingly, I don't seem to know enough about this to conduct an intelligent search. Or, at least, so far my time with Google is bringing me no answers.

My sound settings report that my MIDI playback is via "Microsoft Software Wavetable Synthesizer Featuring Roland Sound Canvas digital samples". My digital audio output device is "Realtek AC97 Audio". (I could have sworn that the guys at CompUSA said the sound card was SoundBlaster, which I at least recognize as something that would work, but one of us was mistaken.)

If anyone reading this has advice to offer, I'd be grateful.

Tonight I was defeated by my synagogue's IT people -- who, I might add, are probably not doing anything especially clever, and certainly weren't out to defeat me.

During the trope class the instructor gave us an exercise to do and then went across the hall to set up Trope Trainer on the computer. We're using the classrooms in the religious school; this will be relevant later.

Five minutes later he was back. He pointed toward me and said "you're a computer professional, right?". Ok, not in the sense he meant, but this shouldn't have been hard and now my reputation was on the line. So I went across the hall to see what the problem was.

Trope Trainer runs from the CD -- that is, you have to have the CD in the drive to run the program. I wouldn't be surprised if you could copy everything to your hard drive and then lie to the software somehow, but that's not how it works by default and they don't offer the option. Ok, whatever.

So we run the program and start getting "disk access blocked" messages. They are coming from the firewall. Inspection of the firewall reveals no way to configure it or temporarily disable it. Ok, I say, off to Control Panel. This machine is running XP, so it takes me a little while to find the security settings. When I do, I'm told "access denied".

Lookie, I said, someone who actually set up a computer such that the default login doesn't have administrator access. Wise, but right now it's in our way. Does the teacher know the administrator password? Ha, silly me -- they don't tell him things like that.

One of the students is on the staff, so I asked her if she has admin access. Nope. And then I got the rest of the story.

They were, apparently, having trouble with kids bringing in computer games and playing them when they were supposed to be using the computer for studying. It's not that anyone cares about the games per se, but there's only the one computer and they were tired of having to monitor it. So they set up a firewall to prevent that. No one realized that there was any legitimate-for-this-context software that would also be hindered.

So sometime before next week they will fix this somehow. And I am glad that people there take security seriously -- the administrator password wasn't anything obvious, nor was it written on a post-it note next to the computer. But alas, I was not able to deliver working software into the hands of the teacher and my classmates. (I didn't think of the copy-the-CD trick until later, though I think all access to the drive was being blocked anyway.) I am disappointed.

The Norton personal firewall that came pre-installed on my new machine is interfering with the McAfee anti-virus package I immediately installed. These days, that's just plain bad manners. I guess it's time to shut the Norton firewall down and consider replacing it with McAfee's. (I wasn't previously running with a personal firewall, relying on the router to do that for me. I'm not sure I need it.) The firewall is probably a trial copy anyway; the machine also came with Norton anti-virus, but only for 60 days.

(I prefer McAfee anti-virus to Norton; it does a better job of telling me what it's doing and it doesn't demand to restart my machine after practically every update the way Norton did when I was using it. I have no opinion on the firewalls, other than a sneaking suspicion that it'll work best if from the same vendor.)

Apropos of nothing, I just made an appointment with my vet for "Erik plus one". She wants to see Erik in a few weeks and they're all due for checkups, but I they could only fit in two cats on the target night. So we'll see who I manage to catch that night. :-)

Thus far I've been unsuccessful in getting the new machine to talk to the digital camera. I'm awaiting a response from tech support for the camera. Aside from that, the new machine is behaving splendidly so far.

My old machine (called, for the nonce, Bouncy) is now failing in the exact same way its predecessor (Doornail) did: after increasingly-shorter periods of uptime, it reboots and, more often than not, produces a blue screen. Attempts to reboot at that point always fail; turning the machine off for a couple hours and then trying again gets a short-lived boot. This says "overheating" to me, but it's not appreciably quieter than normal, so I'm guessing the fan is still running. All the usual precautions have been in place all along -- UPS, antivirus, automatic updates (OS and virus), safe computing practices... I don't get it. If I knew what I was looking for I'd pop the cases and look around. But I'm pretty clueless about hardware. (And we just had Bouncy open a couple months ago to poke a graphics card, so I know it's not full of dustbunnies. I don't think Doornail was the last time I powered it up, either.)

The questions in my mind right now are: what happened to Doornail and Bouncy, can it be reversed, and what do I do to prevent it from happening to my new machine?

Could I have a faulty UPS? Could a faulty UPS do damage consistent with these symptoms?

(Oh, and just to clarify: this failure pattern is not the only reason I replaced Bouncy; it's just the final step in a series of annoying failures. The CD burner hasn't worked in months... stuff like that. If it were just a hard drive, that'd be different.)

Shabbat was pleasant and fairly normal for me. Dani, on the other hand, worked all day and well into the night, as the start-up he's working for reinterpreted its Friday deadline as a Monday deadline. (They also reinterpreted their party Saturday night as a January party, rather than encouraging employees to bring laptops, including for their spouses, to the party. :-) ) So he worked in the morning, had Shabbat lunch with me, headed into the office... and returned sometime after 2AM.

Meanwhile, I headed out to ralphmelton and lorimelton's traditional holiday party last night, where much fun was had. I had thought they were going to go light on the baking, what with job stress and stuff, but they went into overdrive again. Anyone who went home from that party hungry did it to himself; there was a great variety of very tasty food. I spent time chatting with a bunch of past coworkers from Claritech, met some of Lori's coworkers, and saw some other folks I know. A few of the usual suspects weren't there this year, but there were other people who were new to me so it all worked out.

However, that was clearly too much fun and could not be permitted without a balancing force. ( Read more... )

Monica

Office 2007: accessibility problems

argh!

random bits

cascading effects

short takes

[Boston] Sunday lunch (and other administrivia)

interviewed by talvinamarich

new monitor

last few days

random bits

recording?

time for a new printer

DHCP gone bad

random bits

cheap Macs?

random bits

repairs

no user-servicable parts inside

assorted mysteries (and some links)

random accessibility question

MIDI frustration

hey, that firewall isn't supposed to block me!

software clash

hardware joy

action-packed weekend

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