I’m just completing a total reinstall of Windows on my Windows Media Center.  Not much fun.  I was having strange behaviors and finally trouble booting, and my attempts to reinstall Windows in place simply corrupted the system.  Eventually I learned my video card was burning up (not surprising running 24/7 in a poorly ventilated space for 3 years) and picked up a replacement.  By that time a total reinstall seemed the most likely way to regain some stability.

Anyway, enough whining.  The point of this post is that in order to remember the installation procedures and tricks I turned to - previous postings in this very blog.  Searching on "site:auburnmarshes.spaces.live.com media center" gave me a list of all the tricks I used previously to install the system.  The knowledge I recorded there to increase the knowledge base of the world in a miniscule way, turned out to benefit me.  I noticed Jon Udell recently doing the same thing - blog posting things he wanted to remember in a searchable archive - the World Wide Web.

Maybe that’s why many blog posts don’t seem relevant to anyone but the author.  But useful to one is better than useful to none!

One headache though - I’d purchased a DVD decoder from nVidea.  Yet when I dug up the links in the invoice to download a replacement those links were all dead!  Important links such as download locations and customer support should remain stable.  Anything in an invoice should remain stable.  Or at least redirect to the closest current equivalent.

Worse than that, after a mere 12 months, my account (forced upon me in order to purchase) had been terminated, and couldn’t be found even though the site advertises that they provide a stable re-download for two years.  They even removed the free 30-day trial downloads that would probably would have got me back on my feet.  I eventually found an install backed up locally so I didn’t have to wait for their customer service to get back to me (if ever.)  Anyway, my anti-props to nVidea.  Fire the webmaster.

Also the Microsoft OneCare UI now crashes.  So the firewall is activated but you can’t change its settings.  Guess it never ends does it…

Brother Jason’s new company Acesis decloaks their pilot program in Electronic Health Record startup.  Attacking the problem at it’s source - making the process of data capture better than paper, rather than pumping up the long-term benefits of electronic data, which are already well known but haven’t had any appreciable impact on physician behavior.

First public reactions are quite positive.  Look at other news reports too.

Wish them rapid success!

Suffering for almost 10 years at a max speed of 112K is over!  I’ve been trying to get broadband wireless service from the local provider (Newcastle Broadband) for a couple of years, but depsite repeated surveys and exploring relays and so forth, they were never able to complete a proposal to get service to the house (the barn gets great signal!).

Last fall Coy and I played with some wireless technology ourselves after completing the solar array installation.  At last we found a combination that worked - a 24" dish at home and a cantenna at the barn (two dishes didn’t work well - perhaps because of reflections off of the metal-clad side of the barn?

Then it took a couple of months of phone calls, web requests, and so forth before I reached the company CEO and was able to schedule an installation.  We mounted a 20′ pole to the barn to clear the trees and allow them some more room to grow.

Coming out of the Motorola Canopy reciever, I go directly into a Linksys 54Mb Access Point hooked up to the cantenna.  At home the dish hooks up into another Linksys 11Mb Access Point I’ve had for years.  That one gets set to "Access Point Receiver" mode and the output of that goes inside to my Linksys 54Mb Router/Hub/Access point.

I still have one bit of trouble - though the Canopy has DHCP, and my access points can get an IP address easily, my laptop doesn’t seem to get one very well.  That means I still have to have a router in the mix - which prevents me from getting directly to the Canopy’s web admin console unless I drive up to the barn.

I got one of the cheaper plans - 600Kb down, 300Kb up, but if that isn’t sufficient I can simply phone up and they’ll dial me up to 1.5Mb. 

Five times faster - one third the cost.  I’m a happy camper so far!

My Microsoft career left me a heavy user of Internet Explorer rather than Firefox or one of the other browsers.  But not surprisingly Firefox seems to be the preferred browser among the open source community, and at times I need to use it to test or debug content on.  One would think these two products would be pretty similar, especially given the anti-IE campaign waged by some Firefox users.  I was prepared to abandon IE for a better alternative if that’s what Firefox proved to be.

But I found there are substantial differences in the user experience between the two products.  Here’s my initial reaction to the strengths and failings of each of the products:

1. Cleartype rocks.  The antialiasing, especially on small fonts, makes reading content in Internet Explorer a far better experience than in Firefox.  Especially if you switch between the two, you get an unpleasant shock at the jaggies in Firefox, and breathe a sign of relief returning to comfort of IE.  Score 1 for IE.
2. Incremental find rocks.  IE7’s find (searching for text within a web page) is sluggish to bring up and primitive.  I often type control-F, start typing the search term, and then have to wait around for the find dialog to come up - and retype my search term that has fallen into the gap.  By contrast, Firefox’s find is snappy, unobtrusive, doesn’t obscure the page (it’s a toolbar on the page bottom), and the incremental behavior means it usually finds things before you even finish typing the phrase - like it’s mind-reading!  Again, it’s a hard jolt returning to IE after using this capability.  Firefox wins round 2 handily.
3. XML browsing support.  For most users browsing XML is a secondary or tertiary feature.  For me, it’s a crucial development tool.  And although I’ve been somewhat disappointed in IE for not advancing the state of the art there since what we shipped in IE5 way back in 1999, I’m even more disappointed that Firefox is still significantly behind.  For instance, IE does a much better job of displaying a raw XML file using the default stylesheet I wrote for it.  Firefox’s rather sluggish XSLT implementation doesn’t support namespace nodes and thus namespace declarations aren’t there, stylesheets that manipulate QNames in content fail, and so forth.  Imagine my surprise that Microsoft’s "proprietary" product supports open standards better than the "open" product!  This makes Firefox completely unusable as an XML development tool.  IE wins round 3 handily.
4. Integrated favorites and typeahead.  IE has a really convenient feature I use all the time.  When you add a page as a favorite (bookmark), it will appear in the typeahead list in the address bar.  This is my main navigational metaphor for my favorites, since once you get beyond 20 or 30 the menu approach breaks down.  One nit though - only top-level favorites work - ones grouped into folders don’t appear.  So you do have to choose between maintaining a navigable hierarchy and having a flat list with typeahead.  Firefox probably has it’s own navigational metaphors, but for my money IE wins round 4.

Many people love the extensibility features of Firefox, but although I installed GreaseMonkey, I haven’t taken advantage of it much to date, so I can’t give Firefox any props for that.  I’m going to have to leave the totally subjective score at:

IE 3 - Firefox 1

So for now I’m not planning to switch.  And I’m not going to give as much credence to those who badmouth IE as a an inferior product until there’s one that exceeds it for my personal productivity.

As far as I can tell, the solstice happened about an hour ago - placing it on either Thursday the 21st or Friday the 22nd depending upon your time zone.  These short days are pretty unpleasant, and I always look forward to lengthening days this time of year.  So the solstice is both a symbol of gloom, and a symbol of hope that it will all look brighter from here on.

Fitting with the gloom theme, the shortest day of the year was a cloudy, then drizzly, then outright gray and rainy day here in Auburn.  That adds up to the perfect opportunity to see what the bottom end of my solar panels performance is!  So as it grew dark I checked and found that in the worst imaginable conditions, I only generated 1.546 kWh - a far cry from our 40kWh average daily consumption, and probably just enough to power my laptop and monitor during the workday.  Depressing!

But true to the theme of hope, I updated my solar cost savings spreadsheet found that despite the lack of substantial solar output in these horrible conditions, during the first four months of operation I have still saved just shy of $1000.  Right on plan!  Even if electricity prices stay constant, inflation drops miraculously to zero, and for some reason the expected tax breaks don’t materialize, I’ll still break even in about 14 years; averaging about a 7% annual return on my investment.  I’m willing to accept that as the worst possible case!

By the spring solstice, I’m expecting much better news - the calculation (not just the forecast) of the value of this year’s tax breaks, longer and sunnier days, and probably some unavoidable electricity rate increases.  All adding up to a payback of under 10 years.  At least, that’s my solstice hope!

From Paul, a geography quiz that humbled me.  Even if you’ve heard of Burkina Faso, can you point it out on a map with a clock ticking?  Which of "Democratic People’s Republic of Korea" and "Republic of Korea" are North or South?

Took me three attempts to get an easy enough set of questions to squeek past Paul’s score ;-).  Thank goodness I got a string of South American countries instead of African!

The game is especially humbling in that it doesn’t give you the right answer when you fail, leaving you aware of your geographic failings.

Also check out Stained Glass, a fun little color puzzle on the same site (the side of each tile needs to match the color of the tile next to it.)

With a recent update to IE (not sure if it was IE7 or earlier), browsing to an XML file without a stylesheet on a local drive now gives a security warning.  The cause of this is the little bit of script generated by the default stylesheet to make the + and - collapsing behavior work.  Of course, for IE to warn it’s users against script that it ships itself seems rather kookoo, let’s hope they fix this oversight soon.

You can "Click here for options…" including allowing the script to run, but honestly that’s just too much work when you just want a quick view of the XML.  At the WSDL 2.0 Interop Event, others were complaining about this behavior too, and wondered how to turn it off globally.  So I got around to looking for a method.

What I found is in the Advanced tab of Internet Options - the "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer" option.  By selecting this option, clicking OK, and then closing all your browser windows, you can open local XML files without the annoying warning.

Of course, this is a pretty lame workaround, because not only allowing IE access to it’s own internal organs, so to speak, this option also has the potential to allow real security violations - such as attacks that might run by tricking the user to download a web page to their local drive and then open it from there - the useful warnings against Active content might be quite valuable.

Let’s hope IE get’s a little smarter about detecting what’s harmful and what’s not.

A rather obscure news story came to my attention recently, and triggered some musing.

On October 12, France passed a law extending the same penalties (a year in prison, 45K euro fine) for denying the Holocaust to the so-called Armenian Genocide, a horrific massacre back around 1915.  I accept that killing people in the 6 and 7 figure numbers may be considered genocide by all rational people.  But I also agree with this editorial from the Christian Science Monitor that penalizing free speech, even when that speech is a damaging lie, can have a high cost.

That reminds me (for reasons you will have to bear with me on) of some cool programming my brother did a few years ago.  He had a genetic algorithm that would grow digital plants.  Each plant had DNA of 100 instructions, and the instructions told the plant which direction to grow in.  He would generate some random DNA, put them in a garden, and see which covered the most ground.  The losers were all killed off (natural selection), and the winner would be randomly mutated into several new varieties, placed back in the garden, and allowed to compete for space again.  After a tens or hundreds of thousands of generations, some pretty sophisticated strategies would emerge, filling the screen with colorful whorls in an amazing variety of shapes.  Very cool that essentially random numbers could be coerced into creating complex and beautiful forms! (These aren’t images from the program, they are simply fractal images generated using Apophysis; I needed some illustrations!)

My brother started looking at the digital "DNA" to see how the plants’ algorithm actually worked, and to his surprise found that on average only about 5 of the 100 instructions were actually engaged - the other 95 were "dead code."  So he reduced the size to about 5 instructions - and the result was completely uninspiring.  Countless generations of mutating those 5 instructions simply never resulted in the variety and beauty possible with 100 instructions.  Those 95 unused instructions were vital, not to the "life" of the plant, but to the future evolution of the plant.  Despite having no present purpose whatsoever, they provided fertile ground for evolution to blossom in.

Geneticists find the same thing in real DNA - lots of sequences that appear not to serve any functional purpose, or may even have harmful effects, yet are there as a result of the evolutionary journey.  If we were able to remove all those dead or harmful sequences most organisms would probably be able to live just fine, perhaps even better in some circumstances.  But the potential for evolution would be flattened.

Tying this back to the Armenian Genocide, denying well-documented facts about history seems deluded and hurtful to a civilization.  It seems to have no beneficial purpose whatsoever.  However, over the course of history there have been many seemingly non-sensical and dangerous theories, a few of which have revolutionized human development and allowed our civilization to evolve in unimagineable ways.

We may not need to believe that well-documented genocides are hoaxes (I certainly hope not!) but a civilization that limits freedom of expression, a crude attempt to limit freedom of thought, is limiting it’s primary potential for evolving to ever higher levels of splendor.  That seems like a far graver threat in the long run.

Even an expert would have to look twice at this phishing URL I received (claiming to be from EBay):

http://signin.ebay.com.ws.eBayISAPI.dll.UsingSSL.Yes.SignIn.siteid.pageType.
copartnerid.aK5Z8dY21qSoLRwOAwX7ejfXWHh71P87nEUrhS1bcPXHQ.wildcat5.com/
~truehome/data/module.dll.php?SignIn=1&co_partnerId=2&siteid=0&ru=&
pp=pass&pageType=708XeMWZllWXS3AlBX&customerid=%TO_EMAIL&VShqAhQRfhgTDrf=
https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&UsingSSL=1&pUserId=&
co_partnerId=2&siteid=0&ru=&pp=&pageType=708&MfcISAPICommand=
ConfirmRegistration&708XeMWZllWXS3AlBXVShqAhQRfhgTDrfQRfhgTDrfA

How can you tell whether this is a legitimate link or not?  A Web site URL has the form:

http://[site-specific-stuff].[domain].com/[site-specific-stuff]

Check the domain carefully, it’s the clue to the true owner of the web site.  Even if it looks good visually you might want to check twice, e.g. http://MICROSOFT.COM and http://MICR0S0FT.COM are not the same (notice the sneaky switch from O’s to zeroes?) It’s always best to retype the URL to make sure you’re going where you think you are.

Stripping out all the officially-cryptic obfuscation from the above link, you can reduce it to:

http://wildcat5.com/~truehome/data/

Does that look like an official EBay URL?  If you don’t immediately reject it, you will find that this URL brings you to a fake EBay front-end, asking for your logon details, and I’m sure later on for your credit card number.

I used Internet Explorer 7’s Phishing reporting system on this link, and the link it redirects to, for the first time, and can recommend it!  You click on the phishing icon, say you’d like to report the site, and you’re taken to a Microsoft site where you can say "I think this site is a Phishing site."  Input a visual/aural code which prevents the phishing filter itself from being spammed, and the data will contribute to the community knowledge base, soon (one hopes) automatically flagging the site as a phisher for users unsavvy enough to have clicked on the link without close examination.

This summer marked a permanent reduction in our power bills, with the joyful completion of a 7.6 kW solar array!  I’ve wanted to invest in solar for years, but shopping for a reasonably priced yet competent installer always ended up on the back burner.  Despite the desire to do good by the environment and participate in an emerging distributed grid of clean energy, the costs are quite substantial, and is has proven quite difficult to determine what the payback on such an investment would be.  Between state rebates, federal and state tax credits, depreciation, choices of flat or time-of-use metering, a stack of rates based on consumption, which change seasonally and will probably increase in the future, figuring out the payback required too many assumptions to give me confidence in the resulting numbers.

My enthusiasm to figure this all out was renewed on a visit to the Horton Iris Farm, where they have a new 3+kW roof-top system.  The installer, Coy Ware of Coy Solar, has been a friend of the Hortons for a long time, and has a long history of general contracting, electronics, and eco-friendly technologies, so it didn’t take long for us to analyze our usage, figure out the parameters of the system, and get underway.  We calculated the payback at somewhere between 4.5 and 9 years - a pretty wide range but that was the best we could do.  At either end, I was willing to invest though.  Coy devised clever ways to move materials and equipment around the site since it isn’t very accessible by machinery.  It took about 6 weeks of steady and at times heavy manual labor to construct and install the system on the hillside below our pool, especially to Coy’s standards of excellence!

We switched it on about 6 weeks ago.  The system is a grid-tie, meaning that there are no batteries or other storage mechanism.  Excess power is pumped back into the grid, making the meter spin backwards - what a sight!

A new digital meter courtesy of the power company, and the System Lifetime readout on the solar has helped me keep track of how much I’ve saved - not a trivial proposition given the rate schedule involving baseline rates and increasingly expensive rates the higher over the baseline you go (the exact opposite of volume discounts).  I put together a rather complex spreadsheet simulating a virtual power bill and the resulting savings of $519.75 for the first 47 days.  Not factoring in the tax savings, a straight-line estimate at that rate puts the payback at around 8 years.  I hope to see that period shorten as rates rise (as they no doubt will within the timeframe), and the actual tax savings can be measured more accurately.  Over the life of the system, it should pay for itself many times over.

And the air is just a little clearer than it otherwise would have been. Those benefits will accrue for years as well.

I’ve been trying out the Windows Live Writer (beta) for a few days, to try and overcome some of the frustrating limitations of writing and editing blogs online.  I had some frustrations, especially in the realm of embedding photos, but the latest Update release seems to have solved those problems, so I’m ready to endorse the product wholeheartedly!

The first advantage of using a "rich" client application rather than a "reach" web site, is the availability of offline storage.  I’ve lost my work several times when "Save" falls prey to network issues.  I often write longer posts in an email message and paste them in so I have backup copy if something goes wrong.  Windows Live Writer has a Save Draft which saves it locally on the file system - much less likely to encounter problems.

Windows Live Writer integrates delightfully with Spaces.  One can create a post, publish it or post it as a draft with one click (minimal one-time configuration required), or open an existing post right of the blog for editing and reposting.  Sweet, an rich client experience no more complicated, and a lot more responsive without having to download all the fancy graphics, than the online experience.

You can view the content as you edit it in several ways: Web Layout, which shows you the content styled just as it will appear in the blog (it downloads the style of your blog and faithfully reproduces it in an editable fashion), or an HTML Code view in case you need to tweak the source (which I’m finding much less necessary now).  There also is a "Normal" view which isn’t styled like your blog, but I honestly don’t know why one would choose this option - maybe it makes more sense with non-Spaces blog editing.  There’s a Web Preview view as well, approximating the entire blog page with the content in place - not terribly necessary since Web Layout works so well.

You can also edit some properties unavailable in the online version - like the date and time of the blog.  The HTML generated is much nicer than the HTML editing control too, namely it actually uses <P> elements instead of forcing everything to a <DIV>, eliminating much of my manual work after completing a post.

Image insertion in the online version is a major, major pain.  Did I say major?  One would have to leave the page (or open another and get into edit mode), choose a photo album, edit it, add a photo, browse to the photo, upload it, view the photo album, right click and get the property sheet, copy the URL, go back to the blog and edit the HTML to insert and <IMG> tag.  In fact it’s such a pain that I mostly upload the photo to Flickr instead and copy and paste the suggested HTML fragment right from that page in.  Then you right click the image and go through a nested set of context menus to set alignment so the text wraps around the right way.  And then you edit the HTML to add hspace attributes

But image insertion is totally, totally awesome in Windows Live Writer.  You click "Insert Picture…" and choose your picture off the hard drive, and it appears.  Click on it, and you get a full set of image properties in the task bar - alignment, links, alt text, size (need little small/medium/large with a way to customize what those mean).  When you post or publish the entry, the photo gets uploaded to a photo album along with the post.  Trivial, as it should be.

There’s a spell checker (which I miss greatly in the online version, and you probably miss it even more when I mistype.)  There are some new features I haven’t really played with yet, such as a Flickr browser plugin and a tagging facility, I’ll have to explore those later but they sound pretty cool.

So after all those praises, I have a few very small nits with the program and it’s Spaces integration so far.  First, there is a neat facility for setting the margins around images - something I always have to do in HTML mode.  However, although it sets and shows the margins nicely, when posting the entry Spaces strips out the markup.  I have to go back and add in "hspace" attributes which are so obsolete they sneak past Spaces’ defenses.  I hope Spaces fixes this soon.

There is a nice feature that automatically applies a blurred drop shadow to your image before uploading too.  However, when you apply it it shrinks the photo area so the photo + drop shadow is the same size as the original photo was.  The photo body is shrunk and gets blurry as a result.  It would be much nicer to add the border without changing the size of the photo body.

There are some nice useful image controls too like rotating, adjusting brightness and applying a watermark, but along with it comes some features I can’t believe anyone would find useful like Gaussian Blur and Emboss effects.  Seems wasted to me.

All in all, Windows Live Writer rocks.  It is fast and lightweight just like the content one would use it on, and beautifully simple for simple things while having a smooth transition to more advanced features, and very little that you’d never find appealing.  Well done!

If you love maps and GPS coordinates as much as I do, you’ll find Flickr Maps irresistible.  I’ve become an avid user in the month or so that the feature has been available, and you can find many of my sets (especially those that are outdoors) sporting location information.  You can see a map of all my geotagged photos here.

First some history.  Flickr runs on "tags", or keywords that users give their photos.  These tags are vital for searching and grouping photos.  Flickr has some pretty advanced facilities for tagging, including third-party tagging (a user tagging someone else’s photo), and tagging just a part of a photo.  For a while a growing set of Flickr users have added latitude and longitude tags to their photos, and developed some mash-ups for displaying their photos on maps.  Now Flickr has built this capability in, with geospatial metadata given the same status as time, licensing, and viewing permissions.

Here’s a zoomed in view of part of my map with satellite imagery turned on.

Each geotagged photo shows up as a dot on the map.  Click on a dot and you get a series of thumbnails of photos shot in that location.  Click on Show detail and you get a larger view of the photos.

So, why is this cool?

First, for those of us addicted to photosets as a way to view photos in order (generally chronological) in order to tell a "story" documenting some event, the order that you view photos in makes a big difference.  And a map presents an interesting order in which to view your photos.  For instance, the dots imply that our circumnavigation of Echo Lake was part water and part on land.

Second, if you’re addicted to satellite imagery, you probably have found that while an overhead view gives you some sense of a place, when you actually go there you find that it can be quite different from your expectation.  The ability to see some photos helps build a much better sense of what it would be like to be there.  And you’ll find new places you want to see - like Desolation Valley’s Twin Lakes as captured by malaparte, which I found while reviewing my Echo Lake geotags.

Third, for the historical addict, grouping photos by location, and not by time taken, can give you a sense of how a place changes at different times of day or night, or even different seasons.  Eventually I might be able to look back and see what a place was like a decade ago…  This is especially valuable as the collective historical record grows.  Click "Clear all" and the dots won’t be limited to just your photos, but will mix in photos from everyone.

If you’re a photoset addict, a satellite addict, and a historical addict, you had best resign yourself now to becoming a Flickr maps addict.

But what was unexpected to me is that the act of geotagging, rather than the chore I expected, is rewarding in and of itself thanks to the Flickr map/Yahoo map user interface.  To walk through a set of photographs, and map them up either through GPS logs, or just manually placing them on the map from memory (which is surprisingly easy even for photos a year or more old), is like a trip down memory lane.  You have to remember where you were when you took each photo in order to place it on the map.  You correlate your experiences with the satellite imagery.  You look more closely at the dates and times the photos were taken, and the relation of different photos in time and in space.  You compare your photos with ones others have taken at the same spot.

In the end, it’s like reacquainting yourself with old friends.

The URL of this blog has changed, from http://spaces.msn.com/auburnmarshes to http://auburnmarshes.spaces.msn.com.  This is apparently to enable better scalability and responsiveness of MSN Spaces as it passes the 100 million user mark!  I appreciate the fact that, while this change has technical benefits, it also puts the user’s name right up front, which is a nice user-centric feature.  A win-win!

Apparently the IE7 picture uploading bug has been fixed too, which is nice (believe it or not, I resorted to Firefox - which I only use for cross-browser compatibility checking! Really! -  to upload my most recent blog image).

While I’m at it, I have another feature request too.  I recently had somebody unknown to me make some short and insipid comments (like "I like it!").  These show up as recent comments when I "Edit My Space".  Usually I can tell from this display whether somebody has spammed my blog, and delete the comments quickly.

However, the list only shows the most recent five comments.  Those five comments could mask other comments, which may represent spam.  I went through all my comments, at significant time expense, to see whether these comments were masking spam.  In this case I concluded not, but it alerted me to a new spamming strategy.  Comment-spammers please stop reading now.  Spam with a bunch of comments, then make 5 insipid but un-delete-worthy comments to mask the bad stuff from delete-conscious blog owners.

The most recent 5 blog entries show in the "Edit My Space" view, and one can switch to the "Blog" tab to page through a complete list and delete blog entries.  A reasonable counter-measure against masked comment spam would be to offer a corresponding "Comments" tab to page through a complete list of comments (most recent first).  Failing that, a "next 5" link would help.

Another reason to own a Mac is to avoid the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.  When your laptop takes a moment for intense self-reflection, visible to us as total frozen meltdown (as Paul’s Mac recently did), wouldn’t you rather be soothed by a calming collage of semi-transparent textures and colors?  Gorgeous!  Almost makes you look forward to the next complete system failure!