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I’ve found cygwin (cygwin.com). To me, it’s 100 times better than any sort of dual boot or mammoth virtual machine. It allows me to stay in windows, yet have a linux command window. It’s free. Cool!

It installs fairly easily, and runs on Windows. So now I have a linux machine that runs in a plain DOS-like window. But continuing a trend I’ve noticed, even the Windows-based setup applet (which you’ll run repeatedly, as you choose different packages or applications or options to install) is non-standard in strange little ways. There’s no cursor bar, so navigating the hundreds (thousands?) of packages is mousebound and a little tedious. But it gets the job done. It downloads whatever packages you choose, and installs them silently. No reboot needed, no close & rerun; just install and go. Nice. Decently simple and functional.

Installing GCC, however, was sort of crazy. The linux/unix crew, I’m beginning to remember, is a very different animal from the mainstream windows or mac crew. To install the gnu c compiler, which apparently is a grandfather and mainstream of compilers in the nix world, was a LOT more work than I’m used to. I was happy to find the instructions here. They work. But oh the hassle of it!

Since I gave up the command line (DOS and unix) in the mid-90’s, in favor of Windows, install has always been just a few button clicks. It’s gotten prettier, slower, and with more needless clicks added, but I never imagined how simple it is. The contrast with linux installs is incredibly immense. First you have to unpack the thing with certain command options, and you must know on your own where to put the whole mess. Then you run a “./configure” command, which says a whole lot of things on the screen, and if you take the time to read it all, you’re sunk. Apparently it runs a large script of pre-pre-install tasks, querying all manner of archaic abilities of your platform. Then you have to run “make check”, then “make install”, and “make clean”. The volume of text... (more)

I’m sorry. I really want to love linux. But so far I’ve had nothing but problems. People have been raving about it for over 10 years. I’ve tried to love Linux, but it just won’t let me near it…

My first experience was about 2001. I tried to install Linux (Ubuntu I think). But it wouldn’t recognize my mouse, so I couldn’t nav anything. I spent several hours trying to solve the problem, but didn’t get anywhere. I gave up.

A couple years ago, after hearing so much more raving about it, and expecting it to be a mature and capable competition for XP, I tried Linux again. I used a live CD of something (Ubuntu?) and the interface was sort of childish compared to XP, roughly like downgrading to Windows 3.5 (not as lame as 3.1, not as good as windows 95). I know there are a million tweaks and applets and whole gui engines that can improve on what I saw, but I’m really just not that interested to go digging and grazing for all eternity. As it is, to even CONSIDER switching away from my core library of some 150 drivers and applications and utilities, is very daunting.

I thought I was done with Unix craziness after college! I never had a compelling reason to switch. Now I do. I need to run maximally-fast mathematical computations, in my quest to win the Netflix $1M prize. (I’m currently in the top 400, out of nearly 50,000 teams.) I’ve been using C#, and I just learned that its best performance is about TEN TIMES slower than the same code written in C, running on 64bit Linux. (I searched and the only stats I found made C and C# look roughly comparable. Wrong!)

OpenSUSE is what I’m trying to install now. It’s been nothing but trouble. I downloaded the dvd, burned the image, and booted to DVD. First try it gave me “disk error 10″ right after announcing itself (OpenSUSE 11.1). Searching the web, all I could find was that the disc must be bad. So I burned it again. Now it doesn’t even announce itself on booting. The discs and the drives are known to be good.

I don’t mean to be rude, but what have you nix... (more)

It’s been over a decade since computer magazines and people in general were complaining about bloatware. Today nobody seems to mention it.

It seems that people were upset, most of all, because Windows 95 was taking up a large portion of their hard drives. Once hard drive sizes again grew to outstrip software size, all the clamor seemed to die off. One could interpret that people were merely resentful of giving up their expensive/scarce hard drive space. But the usurping of hard drive space is really the least part of the problem.

At present, a fresh install of Windows Vista takes around 12,000 megabytes (12 gigabytes). But this is only a small portion of a modern hard drive of 120 gb (for laptops) or 500 gb (for desktops). In terms of storage space, it’s not a problem.

The real problem of bloatware is bugs and performance.

Fatter is slower. Reading hundreds of megabytes and thousands of files, just to boot, is going to be very slow. While the largest hard drive today is approximately 500 times larger than 10 years ago, the fastest hard drive is barely 10 times faster than a decade ago. All this bloat slows down everything–from booting the computer, to hibernating, to running applications, to browsing files, or just opening a web page. But people seem perfectly happy to wait longer today for a bootup than ever before, despite the faster and faster computers they’ve been paying for.

But most importantly, bloat causes many kinds of bugs, unreliability (crashes/corruption), and failures of security. The bigger and more complex a program is, the more segmented its development must be. The more people, the less interconnected and aware they are of what eachother is doing. So a minor change by one group can and often does cause a total unexpected failure in the work of another group. Plus lots and lots of duplicated and incompatible work. The synergy of so much segmented groupthink is ever-increasing infestations of BUGS.

People think nothing of a printer driver today that’s bigger than a whole rich GUI application from 10-15 years ago. Likewise, Windows Vista doesn’t do much more than Windows... (more)

I recently found need for a download manager. I was downloading a lot of files, some of them very large, and I needed a more reliable way to do the downloading. The built-in downloader in the browser is fine for occasional downloads, but it has several problems. One of the most important is that it will likely fail all file downloads if you lose your web connect for a moment, especially if you’re connected to a server requiring login. Another problem is that downloading numerous links is very tedious (right click, move mouse to “Save As…”, left click, press enter, and if the filename already exists, you have to rename it).

I hoped to not have to hunt around for a good download manager. I searched for “best download manager”. Free Download Manager was the first hit, and it’s part of sourceforge (good sign). I used it for some time, gaining a lot of practical experience with it (as opposed to the cursory or clinical reviews that you’ll find in a magazine). When I ran into serious-enough problems, I tried FlashGet (also free), and GetRight ($20). They were not better.

Free Download Manager (FDM) has a very modern interface, with several niceties and aspects that I came to appreciate as superior to GetRight and FlashGet. With time it also showed several minor bugs, and some serious bugs as well, but it’s the best I’ve found.

The two most prominent advanced features of the interface are subtle. At first I didn’t like them. In addition to the main dialog of the application, there are two small semi-transparent dialogs which stay open all the time: a small down-arrow icon, and brief list of currently downloading files. The former is a place you can drag-and-drop files to, and the latter is very handy in that you can see detailed status without have to keep open the large full dialog window. Both these doodads stay open always, semi-transparent, in the lower-right corner by default, and they do not interfere with any other program you’re using.

The problem I had with FDM was small, but serious. When downloading from a server that requires login, occasionally... (more)

Here’s a bug I want to document, because after a great deal of searching I could not find it documented anywhere. I discovered a workaround, so I’ll share it.

You’re using VBA, visual basic for applications, and you need to automate the download of an html file; plain text. But you find a lot of ‘?’ question marks instead of the actual character. It acts as though perfectly valid characters are invalid, such as the reverse of ` which is a slash-like apostrophe, chr(60). Its ascii value is 60. There are many other valid but less-common characters that invoke this bug. Many of these characters are easily/accidentally generated in a program like microsoft word, so if you don’t want a bunch of question marks in your downloaded document, here’s what you do.

Your program looks something like this:

Set xmlHTTP = CreateObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") ' or "MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")
xmlHTTP.Open "GET", URL, False
If xmlHTTP.Status = 200 Then ' "Server call successful."
returnhtml = xmlHTTP.responseText
End If

What you have to do is read responseBody instead of responseText. ResponseText has some bogus filter. So use code like this instead:


dim ba() as byte
Set xmlHTTP = CreateObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") ' or MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP")
xmlHTTP.Open "GET", URL, False
xmlHTTP.send
xmlHTTP.waitForResponse 10
If xmlHTTP.Status = 200 Then
ba = xmlHTTP.responseBody
returnhtml = ByteArrayToString(ba)
End If

sAns = StrConv(bytArray, vbUnicode)
iPos = InStr(sAns, Chr(0))
If iPos > 0 Then sAns = Left(sAns, iPos - 1)
ByteArrayToString = sAns
End Function


I’m sure there are others who struggled/struggle with this problem, so I hope this helps.

Today, a Fry’s ad offers a 16 gb flash drive for $130 after rebate. It’s only been about 5 years since a 20 gb hard drive was standard for a laptop (today, 100-120 gb is standard). How long will it be before this cheap non-volatile storage will be in mainstream usage, inside, as a replacement for hard drive?

16 gb is not enough to hold all your music, nor more than a few DVDs. But 16 gb is enough memory to hold every file used for booting the computer, plus every file used in every application and data file you regularly use. Even just 4 gb of flash storage could effectively cache almost every file you regularly use, eliminate the drive seek latency time. How long will it be before this readily available technology will actually be used in very effective ways?

Windows Vista offers a new feature called ReadyBoost in this direction, but it’s very limited. It can use only one flash device, with a maximum of 4 gb. Furthermore, Wikipedia advises that its performance improvement is “negligible”. The problem is that a 7200 rpm hard drive can sustain transfer rates of 60-80 mb/s, which is about 6-8 times faster than common flash drives. High speed flash units are available, but they are prohibitively expensive. Interesting information here.

So the real hurdle for flash memory is not storage space, but speed/throughput limitations. Even the slowest hard drive can outperform flash on sustained reads. It seems that hard drives will remain mainstream for many more years.

Defragmenting software brings together the various pieces of each file into one continuous physical section of the disk. This helps speed up the hard drive access because the vast majority of time is spent moving between tracks. Defragmenting is vital, but it’s not enough.

If you listen to your hard drive while the computer boots up, you’ll hear a constant barrage of clicking sounds. This sound is made when the read/write head moves to another track. Moving the head is very very slow compared to the time it takes to read the data. When your drive is defragmented, there will be less clicking, but still far more than necessary, because the files needed are scattered all over the place. Ideally, all files for bootup (or any other intensive disk operation) should be right next to each other, in the correct order, so that only dozens rather than thousands of clicks are needed. This is a simple and important matter of optimization that the operating system should take care of, but it doesn’t. I’m not aware of any software that does.

The outer-most portion of the hard drive is the fastest. It holds more data per track, which means less clicks per megabyte. Ideally, you want all of your most-used files in this section, in the correct order. Unfortunately we have almost no control over the matter. Windows, Linux, and defragmenters all use the first space available. So over time, with every OS patch, files get physically scattered all over the drive.

This is a sad state of affairs. At this moment, you have many often-needed files in the slow section (e.g. security patches), and many trivial files (e.g. help files, rarely used apps, etc) in the fast section.

We can do two things about this:
1. Create dual partitions
2. Install programs in optimal order

Of course both assume you’re doing a fresh install, which you’re ideally doing every 6-18 months.

Partitioning
Make one partition for OS and program files, and one for data files. The advantage is that the OS will be nearer the fastest part of the drive, and patched-in files will be corralled not too far away.... (more)

I’ve decided to remove Windows Vista Business Edition. I was happy to try it, and liked it at first, but after a few hours of trying to get setup, I am very displeased with Vista. (read my impressions of Vista here)

Rep at Dell gold support told me that the keyboard delays are usually due to a bad driver; might be as simple as finding a new driver. So it’s possible that the worst negative could be fixable without buying something else. But I’m really not in the mood to wrestle with what appear to be a lot of incompatibilities and bugs. After barely starting installing all the drivers and programs I need, I have at least three incompatibilities so far. I did all the updates that can be done without buying new versions of recently purchase hardware/software.

A blogger described six months ago his reasons for uninstalling vista. Not much has changed, and the performance-related complaints will likely just continue getting worse. What people used to call bloatware a decade ago is today seen as quaintly small. But the problem of bloat is not about taking up more harddrive space–that’s just a symptom. The problem is unbounded complexity and expansiveness, which spawns ever-more problems with ever-more obscure causes. At some point, it becomes impossible to find all the bugs, much less fix them all, and it’s clear we passed that point many years ago.

It seems that every version of Windows–since version 3 until the present–requires at least one service pack and some new hardware purchases before most things work properly. Windows Vista is no exception. It’s discouraging to see that few people are complaining about this matter of selling unfinished software, especially since it’s happened again and again and again without fail for many years.

The rule with all microsoft software: Wait until SP1! If you can, you’ll be happier if you wait until SP2.

When SP1 comes out, I may try Vista again, but there still will be no useful advantage... (more)

In the beginning (from the 50’s, into the 80’s), the job of the OS was to handle user commands and talk to devices, including the hard drive and video display, and so on. In the last 20 years, though, the job has boomed and changed greatly. The underlying methods of talking to devices and file handling and so on became deeply embedded in a new type of OS. This new interface (typified by Windows) is less of a computer ringmaster, and more of an interface designed around people. The low-level interface has become subsumed as a given, or delegated to some other portion of the system (i.e. linux kernel). The change is fantastically huge, and in my opinion, progress is lagging.

Windows is the best interface I’ve seen. I’m not happy to say that; I wish I could say it was Linux or Apple, but Windows has a far more powerful and rich interface. The interfaces I’ve played with from Linux and Apple are just a little too dumbed down. They are more responsive, and probably better in some other ways too, but overall, they just don’t have the massive press of development as does Windows. I mean that 95% of users (and developers, no doubt), work on Windows. Linux is very impressive in plenty of ways, but my impression from each version that I’ve seen is that they’re far from on par from a power-user pov. As maddeningly defective as they are, Windows and Office and Internet Explorer are a very very powerful combination. And as blessed as is the massive amount of free development time that’s gone into various flavors of Linux and StarOffice and much more over the last decade or so, it’s still far from rivaling micro$oft’s combo from a poweruser pov.

The Future of Operating System

What’s needed at this point, I think, is not better graphics. The first priority ought to be responsiveness; reducing the lag and delay at various points in the interface, and reducing the dependence on the hard drive. This would mean making an effort to reduce the bloat that keeps growing ever-faster. (Linux and Apple seem to be better designed in this regard.)

The next priority would be accessibility.... (more)

It’s been about 6 months since Windows Vista was released. It was 5 years in development; longest in 20+ years of Windows. I’d used it casually several times, but never used it to any depth. I just bought a new laptop, and it came with Vista Business Version, so I’m trying it out.

Impressions:
- Graphically, it’s a modest improvement. Nothing terrible, and nothing great. Some of the standard new features, such as semi-transparent windows headers seem pointless to me; they don’t add any functionality, and they’re more distracting than pleasing (to me at least). The new screen preview when task-switching (alt-tab) is slightly helpful. The “glass effect” is ok, but nothing too special (perhaps not worth the high CPU cost at this point). The zoom-in and zoom-out of dialog boxes is novel, but after a couple of days I’m trying to find how to disable it, because it’s noticeably slower than XP. (I’m running a near top of the line Dell Latitude laptop, latest dual core (Santa Rosa) 2.2 ghz, 2gb RAM @ 667mhz, 120gb 7200 rpm harddrive.)
- Layout-wise (essentially, ease-of-use), I’m displeased. They’ve moved around all sorts of things, and they obscured other things behind groupings that are not very smart. Visually it’s pretty, but when trying to find something, it’s more of a dumbed-down, in-the-way interface. Searching help, I’m unable to find the visual effects settings which a couple days ago I stumbled on several times, from several places. Help gives a whole screen full of “solutions” that have nothing to do with the problem (and I tried at least 3 different key phrases). And more generally, redundant ways of reaching features can be nice, but it can also make exploring the interface to be very tedious and annoying (like now).
- I’m not impressed by the new start menu. If there were plenty of options for adjusting, I could be very happy with it, but it appears there are none. The start menu remains almost as dumb as Windows 95, except everything has been rearranged again, so there’s a pointless learning curve. By dumb I mean... (more)