Tech by PC

The big question I had was whether or not entering a retail code into the RTM code would work. It did not work for me.

Now that I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 Professional on my Dell XPS M1210, I thought I’d go through a little of the process so far. First of all, I used the upgrade version, but did a clean install. I verified also that the old trick about installing without a key, not activating, and then using the upgrade key still works. I am upgrading from Vista, but I wiped it out first (dban) in order to try since I had heard conflicting reports on the net about that.

So now the reload process is in full-swing. First on were some windows patches that included a driver for my Nvidia GO 7400 card. A previous install I had attempted to find drivers directly through Nvidia. I went through a few attempts to install a version that wasn’t specifically for my card by changing the INF file. It worked, but I see no advantage of that over the built-in driver, and the built-in driver is certainly easier to install. I installed the Windows 7 compatible Synaptics driver as well because I like the scroll zones and a couple other features of the touchpad.

Next on was ESET Internet Security, my favorite AV software at the moment. Note that these things change as soon as a company starts getting the idea of packing their software full of useless additional components that slow a computer down more than help it (Symantec I’m looking at you, which I dropped shortly after 2000, and also Trend Micro which I dropped around 2007, but should have dropped sooner – you can thank a corporate agreement for keeping me that long).

Next on was Office 2007 Enterprise (thanks to work for the home licensing arrangement). Now I’m starting to see a trend of patch, reboot, patch, reboot for Microsoft things. I’ve done this 4 times now, and although Microsoft Update says I’m done, my AV software says it detects missing patches. Interesting.

Next on was TrueCrypt which recently updated to 6.3 for what they call full Win 7 support. I’m not sure what exactly changed, but it works fine. I run full-disk encryption on my laptop. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to do the same.

Next on was Free File Sync, an open source Windows based synchronization GUI which I used to restore my previously synchronized folders from the Windows Home Server that I’ve been evaluating. While that was synchronizing I kicked off the encryption process for TrueCrypt and downloaded Mozy. I remembered that I used my own encryption key and that it was stored in Roboform, so I downloaded, installed, and re-activated my copy of Roboform in order to pull out my custom key. I need to remember to locate and test my offline copy of that key or there’s little point in my using Mozy in a disaster recovery situation.

I made an image of my system with Acronis prior to wiping it out. For reasons I’ll describe later, I still do not trust Windows Home Server completely. I am not going to put Acronis back on for several reasons. First, Windows Home Server is supposed to be able to do image restores of my OS, so I’m going to do some testing to verify that works properly. Second, Acronis does a major release way too often, and I can’t afford to keep purchasing the software. The version 2009 of their software is not Windows 7 compatible, and they want another $30 in order to upgrade to 2010. If I need that image, and I probably will, I will install my license on another PC and use it to restore. Between Mozy, my offline backups, and Windows Home Server, I just don’t need an additional solution.

Somewhere in there I managed to get Firefox installed. The integration between Firefox and Windows 7 “feels” tighter than it did with Vista. It is hard to describe really, but links appear to open more quickly now, and I haven’t had anything strange happen yet.

I have a RTM build of Windows 7 on my work desktop. I brought up task manager after leaving the system on for about a week and found the following:

Now I am trying to use the machine just like I would use Vista or XP except that I, until this point, hadn’t yet loaded firefox to do the majority of my browsing. This machine has 8 total cores and 16GB of RAM in it, so wasn’t experiencing any performance issues using this much RAM, but it still seems excessive. Normally with past Internet Explorer use I try to make a habit of closing tabs and restarting the browser occasionally, but as I said I was trying to treat it the same way I would firefox and put it through its paces.

Anyone else experience this? I’m not sure if the excessive amount of RAM that I have is part of the reason this happened. In other words, would this have happened if I had 2GB of RAM? Are they caching data in RAM such as my browsing history to make it quick to go back?

I was reading about the recent Twitter DOS that also affected Facebook and particularly the comments posted on CNN about how not having Twitter made people feel naked. One person interviewed said that people knew everything about her life because of Twitter.

I have always been a little hesitant to post online status. After all, those really close to me already know what I’m doing, and those who are not so close to me could always fire off an email and/or ask to be put back onto my mailing list. Why does the public in general need to know if I’m heading to the grocery store, or even on vacation for two weeks.

Smart criminals are few and far between, however they do exist. It is not difficult to tie a twitter account or Facebook account to a physical address. If your schedule is half-way routine the smart criminal can take advantage of it, but if it is posted online the criminal doesn’t need to go very far to target your house, apartment, or vehicle. Even more concerning is personal safety and security. Do you twitter about when you are getting off work? Do you have a long walk to your car? Scary stuff.

What it comes down to is our desire as people to be popular and important, but the fact of the matter is that few of us are or ever will be. And if we suddenly were popular we probably wouldn’t be all that happy about it. There isn’t a lot of glamor in having news crews camp on your lawn day after day, and if someone is always around the corner looking for a photo opportunity, there’s little time to relax.

My suggestion to the die-hard Twitter and Facebook addicts: Be safe! Think about what information you post online and how it could be used against you both at your current stage in life and years into the future. Will your kids use it against you? Your relatives? A criminal? If you suddenly did become a public figure? Just think about it – and don’t get so attached to a single entity such as Facebook in particular. I know people who don’t use email much anymore because they can just message back and forth on Facebook’s mail. That’s all fine and good except for when Facebook disappears, suffers a DOS or decides to change their privacy policies. If you rely on Facebook for email, how would you contact your friends if it suddenly went away?

A co-worker of mine recently asked why we use commercial Linux rather than free counterpart software.

This is a great reason: http://www.centos.org/

In a nutshell it seems as if the lead developer for CentOS, which is a free Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, has disappeared. Now, before I begin, I’d like to point out that – and I come into this information late – it seems to me that step one would be to determine if the guy is actually alright and not stuck between a toilet and a door, or something similarly unpleasant. Maybe they have already done this, but I don’t know.

We’ve certainly lost a little sleep with the likes of LinuxNetworx who went under shortly after accepting payment on a 3-year support contract. Then SGI who stepped in to pick up the pieces but refused to honor the contract also went belly up and invalidated all prepaid support contracts leaving our old SGI machines in the lurch. Still, there’s nothing quite as disconcerting as a project as large as CentOS that relies so heavily on one single individual.

This is just a very brief rant, but if you run your business on or with Linux, use something that is supported commercially.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since I am on vacation at  the moment, this touches close to home. Why is it nearly 2010 and we still do not have cheap ubiquitous internet access anywhere? I arrive at my in-laws house and they don’t have a wireless connection, but they do have a DSL “modem” directly connected to a laptop. Makes sense?

Lucky for me I carry a Pocket Router with me wherever I go. Hooked it up and set the laptop to connect wirelessly and the in-law (out-law) didn’t know the difference. In the mean time I have access anywhere in the house which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Next stop on my journey I actually have a cellular signal, so Verizon cell access is available to me at $15/24-hours. It is useful in an emergency, but at that cost I wouldn’t want to use it for days on end. I looked up AT&T since Verizon isn’t available in my home town and they don’t have a pay-as-you go plan for a data card. The same pocket router plugs into an available port on their wireless router. No need to configure a new access point on my computer (or my daughter’s) and there is built-in firewalling and segregation from their network just in case anything is crawling around on it.

The inbetween is where everything breaks down. Sure, almost every truck stop is now outfitted with “free wi-fi” and every cheap hotel has it, so you can just drive into the Super 8 parking lot and get online, but that certainly isn’t convenient when you just want to check your email before going to bed, or if your passenger wants to research hotels or attractions in that town that is 100 miles away while you drive.

So the United States is just too big for its own good. Either that or cell phone providers are afraid to provide affordable connectivity that is not attached to a 2-year contract. My suggestion to Verizon (or AT&T) is to change that $15 plan to $15 for 0.5 – 1GB of data but with a 1-week duration. AT&T’s $60/month plan caps at 5GB so this pay-as-you go would be close to being in line with that but without the commitment. When someone exceeds the limit they could start the week over. For everyone else who really just wants to browse the web or use email it would last a week and encourage that ubiquitous environment that everyone wants.

Now the new iPhone would actually tempt me if they allowed tethering at a reasonable price. Until that point I am 100% uninterested.

There are a few camps of thoughts on certifications. But first I want to talk about the types of certified people. First is the certification nut who has half a dozen or more after his or her name. These are typically instructors, or people with a job that is relatively un-demanding enough to provide them the time and opportunity to pursue all these certifications. They may or may not be qualified, but it doesn’t matter much because most people will see all of those and immediately classify them in the “they know a lot” category. Also included in this category are people who feel personally validated by their certifications and will spend personal time, money, and effort to get certifications that really are mostly common sense.

The second is the “required certification” individual. These individuals have one, maybe two certifications, but typically don’t show them off. Typically these are people who perform a job that requires them to go get a certification to prove what they already perform, however it may also be someone who is attempting to further his or her career and managed to take vacation from their real job to get certified.

The third type is the person who has no certifications, but has more qualifications than any of the above. These are people who managed to land in a career, or make a name for themselves without the certifications. Their position and knowledge precludes the need for certifications. These people may find themselves in the second category because of a government or industry regulation that suddenly requires them to prove what they already know. This type typically disdains the first two categories.

The fourth type is the (typically younger) person who is trying to make their way in the business but doesn’t have a job that will fund their certifications or doesn’t have the job they want because they don’t have the required certifications. These type are envious of all of the above, but lack traction to get moving. Occasionally these people are self-taught starters that businesses could snap up for really cheap by dangling the certification carrot in front of them, although any time a business invests in the education of its employees it must be willing to follow through on the investment with increased compensation or improved work conditions, otherwise it sets itself up to lose its best employees.

Those are all general camps and some people won’t fall into any of them, or more than one. The craziest thing about it is that the people in-the-know understand that a certification is less about what you know but more about what you are willing to spend to get yourself to where you want to go. The certifications themselves mean little. Know any A+ people? I know a few who couldn’t tie their shoes let alone plug an IDE cable in the right way. There’s nothing worse than someone who brags about having their A+ certification because it immediately tells you two things: First, the person is proud of a certification that sets the bar so low that most people in the industry could walk into the test without studying and pass the test. Second, because the person hasn’t been in the industry long enough to realize this. Double whammy: go home, or go work at Best Buy and tell grandmothers that they need a $300 discrete video card so the pictures from their grandkids will look better.

It is similar with other certifications, but to lesser degrees. For example the CCNA cert is one that requires a decent amount of Cisco knowledge to pass, but not necessarily real-world experience. They have made the test more challenging by requiring a troubleshooting lab piece to it, but this increases the cost of the exam and throws CCNAs into situations they may rarely face in their jobs, depending on their jobs. For example, a WAN guy for a large company might be asked to configure a switch – something he never does on the job, or a LAN guy for a multi-site enterprise who, because of policy, can’t touch anything past his LAN. There is little doubt these people know their stuff, but either one would have trouble walking into the test and passing it based on their real-world practical experience alone. Yet there are IT managers with this certification who never touch a switch or router except when they are in training for certifications. They learn what they need to know for the exam, pass it, and then move on.

The more this happens, the more diluted (the less valuable) the certification becomes. Eventually it becomes like a Microsoft cert or A+ where no one really cares, and the people who hold those certs are scorned by their peers for being so naieve to think the cert is still valuable.

The company I work for recently published a policy forbidding blogging while at work. From first glance this looks like a natural and normal thing – why should they provide resources to enable people to blog. Blog from home on your own time and with your own resources. At second glance this is a little scary for the paranoid blogger. Read the rest of this entry »

This month marks two years for my Vista install on my laptop. It is absolutely the best operating system I’ve ever used. Here’s what would have happened to me had I installed a different operating system two years ago:

Windows XP – the next logical choice: My laptop would have been reloaded 3 times since and I would be getting ready to reload again now. Most of my XP installations had to be reloaded every 6 months.

Linux: Month of my life wasted on emerge (if Gentoo). Months of my life wasted on troubleshooting hardware and getting sleep, wireless, etc, just right. Don’t get me wrong, I love Linux, but I’ve never had any success making everything work perfectly on a laptop, and by perfectly I mean that I can keep it running for a month without rebooting it – just putting it in sleep and hibernation when not in use.

I’m looking forward to upgrading to Windows 7 when it comes out. I’ve been running Windows 7 on another test machine at work and so far it seems pretty nice, and faster than Vista on the same hardware.

I’m having something happen to me that has never happened before. I’m getting bored with an install. Nothing is going wrong on my laptop. There’s nothing for me to tweak, nothing to fix, nothing I need to change. It just works exactly how I need it to when I need it to. Maybe it is time to start dual-booting something else.

I switched from Packet8 to ViaTalk a while back, and while I knew the service wouldn’t be as reliable, I couldn’t ignore the drop by more that 50% in the phone bill. For VoIP Packet8 is expensive, but they are also a premium service. In my year and a half with them I had rock solid availability and voice quality. ViaTalk on the other hand dies on a regular basis. I’ll call home and can hear them but they can’t hear me, or they can hear me but I can’t hear them. There are also times where there is no dial tone or just a fast busy when we pick the phone up to make a call. When ViaTalk is working it is wonderful.

To fix the problem when one of these issues happens I have to remove power and plug it back in and everything is fine. I just hooked it up to an appliance timer with one 15 minute interval set to turn it off in the middle of the night. We’ll see what happens with daily reboots and if it gets any more reliable.

There are some things that never change. One of those is people’s need for distraction. Seems like it would be a good time for video game and entertainment companies to make a killing. If they are not, it is probably because they are charging too much. We finally got a console game system, a Wii, with the intention of using it for family time and fitness. The problem is that in order to do anything on it, it just costs so much money. Looking around on the Internet you’ll find GameFly with about the best prices and deal if you are an average to big gamer. If your kids can play through a game in a few days, then it doesn’t make sense to spend $50 for something that will be boring to them in less than a month. With a GameFly subscription, similar to Netflix, you can borrow games and send them back when you are bored. Their prices on used games are also very cheap.

I’m not subscribed. My kids are just not the gaming type (yet), and I certainly don’t have time. If I was a gaming company exec I’d try the move of reducing the cost of all my games to see how much better they’d sell in this economy.