TO-Tech Blog

I’ve been trying to clean up and organize my home office. In the process I found a bunch of old Iomega 100MB Zip Disks. I also found my old parallel port model Iomega Zip drive. The problem was finding something with a parallel port to plug it in to. It turned out that the PC I had upgraded to Windows Vista has a parallel port. Unfortunately. Iomega does not support Vista and the parallel port drives (not a huge shock). Fortunately, I have an old 2001 era HP notebook running Windows XP Pro with a parallel port that Iomega supports. So, I plugged it in and move all the files off the Zip disks. It turns out I had 45 disks in my collection. That’s roughly 4.5GB of total storage or roughly the capacity of the 4GB USB flash drive sitting in front of the disk collection pictured above. About one-fourth of the disks were empty. And, of course, none of the Zip disks were at capacity. It turned out I had 12,061 files taking up 1.03GB on the Zip disks that were used.

I was lucky to have an old PC (notebook in my case) with a Parallel port still running an OS supported by Iomega (Windows XP). I’m already out of luck if I want to deal with 5.25 inch floppy disks. And even the 3.5 inch disks are getting more problematic. It was also fortunate that only 1 of the 45 disks (which are 10+ years old) was unreadable. And, even more fortunate was the fact that it looks like 95+% of the files I found had been migrated to other media over the years. Still, I found a couple of old photos and even two short video clips of my daughter that I don’t recall seeing in my collection.

Paper photographs may be difficult to preserve. But, they are accessible by any sighted person without any special tools. What happens to digital family photos decades from now when the person who organized them is gone and the retrieval technology is difficult or impossible to obtain and use?

I rarely use the HP Photosmart C6250 printer/copier/scanner connected to my Vista PC. Moreover, if it is turned on when I boot the PC, Vista locks up. So, the Photosmart is usually turned off and stays that way until I need it. This has worked out ok for the past couple of months.

However, something happened after this week’s monthly Microsoft Patch Tuesday. If the printer is off, the HP Digital Imaging Monitor uses nearly all CPU resources if the printer is not turned on. This brings the PC to a near grinding halt. I’m not sure what the specific cause is. But, this definitely started happening only have the Patch Tuesday updates were installed.

Yet another reason I am never buying another HP printer.

PCs running Windows XP or Windows Vista take a long time to boot up. This is especially true if you use a Mac which seems to be responsive soon after its boots. I’ve used a variety of Windows PCs over the years. And, everything including the Dell Latitude D620 with a Core 2 Duo processor took many minutes from booting to being usable. In fact, the much older and less powerful Dell Dimension 2400 with a Celeron processor booted much faster and was usable much sooner than the Dell notebook. This was because the Dimension ran Windows XP while the D620 ran Windows Vista. And, the Dimension had a faster 7200rpm hard drive while the notebook had, if I recall correctly, a 5400rpm drive.

A third factor that messes up boot times are the various security and call-home-for-update processes that all fire at start-time. If you look at the processes running soon after boot (as soon as Ctrl-Alt-Del can actually work since it is stymied by the slow boot process too), you will see all kinds of junk apps calling home for updates while various security apps perform their tasks too.

This all leads to what for me is up to a 5 minute wait until my various Windows PCs are responsive and ready for actual work.

I’m constantly amazed and annoyed that printing takes up 100% of CPU resources on any Windows based PC I use. The dips you see are the lulls while the printer waits for one side of the page to dry before printing on the other side of a duplex inkjet printer.

This Windows Vista driver war with my HP Photosmart C6250 gets nuttier and nuttier all the time. In February, HP’s scanning software decided to store scanned images in folders by month. It did not do that for December or January. Over the past few months, Vista seems to lose sight of the HP printer and reinstalls the driver again and again. It just did it again this evening as I was preparing to use the scanner.

Anyone have any comments on the Canon multi-function fax, scanner, copier, printer devices? I’m probably going to be in the market for one by the end of the year.

Dave Winer’s blog post titled Plan B got me thinking about my own plan B. Winer created a new business venture (NewsJunk) that relied on Twitter. I had just started using Twitter by feeding my own 140 characters or less tech news comments and links on my personal blog sites to provide more tech info. But, when Twitter crashes, which happens daily these days, my web pages don’t render making them difficult or impossible to view. I think I have a Plan B. It is not as easy or simple to use as Twitter. But, it seems very stable and provides a clean RSS feed. Will play with the idea later today.

This Information Week article…

Windows 7 Testing Must Start ASAP, Microsoft Warns Hardware Makers

…notes that Microsoft is imploring hardware vendors to test with Windows 7. That’s good, of course. But, it would also be nice (nicer, in fact) if they would test hardware with Windows Vista now too! Vista still encounters daily internal blue screens with auto-recovery (i.e., I see the message but not the blue screen). Nvidia has been doing a pretty good job of providing updated drivers for my, hmm, four year old PC? But, it hasn’t helped much so far.

Based on the comments on this blog, it looks like I’m not alone in having various hardware driver issues with a PC running Windows Vista.

Information Week has a useful article titled….

How To Tame Microsoft Windows Vista’s UAC

Among other tips, it talks about using the impossible to remember utility name Icacls that I learned about when trying to delete unwanted OneCare backup files from my external hard drive.

I don’t want to turn off UAC. However, it is so annoying that I find myself using a Mac more often these days.

Technology Review’s article…

Alarming Open-Source Security Holes: How a programming error introduced profound security vulnerabilities in millions of computer systems

…is alarming as-is. However, there is another issue I want to point out here. Note the last paragraph of the article’s first web-page:

So how did the programmers make the mistake in the first place? Ironically, they were using an automated tool designed to catch the kinds of programming bugs that lead to security vulnerabilities. The tool, called Valgrind, discovered that the OpenSSL library was using a block of memory without initializing the memory to a known state–for example, setting the block’s contents to be all zeros. Normally, it’s a mistake to use memory without setting it to a known value. But in this case, that unknown state was being intentionally used by the OpenSSL library to help generate randomness.

I’ve never used it, but I’m sure Valgrind is a fine Open Source source code profiler. However, it is just that: A tool. It is meant to augment human work, not replace it completely. The end-result of trusting Valgrind to the extreme resulted in what appears to be a very very serious problem for many of us who use anything that uses the OpenSSL library (like SSH/SCP). Even worse, this problem has existed for two years now. And, there’s more. The patch distributed doesn’t correct the problem on systems that have deployed keys in the past two years based on the broken code. Ouch.

Google continues to amaze me. Google Doctype is a completely open wiki that is an: encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

Looks like a great web developer’s reference.