Monthly Archives: June 2008

Microsoft Rust

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I have forever claimed to be tolerant of Microsoft products.  As a user of both Windows and Unix based operating systems for many years, I can say I’ve seen both sides of this particular battle.  I give both Microsoft and Unix credit for many things, and I see tremendous superiority on both sides, but in different areas.

Unix stands as the true lineage of virtually all computing.  It represents an operating system worth using when the choices were non-existent.  To that end, they have a bit longer history than their personal computing counterparts, and thanks to a deft avoidance for a great many years (intentionally or otherwise) of personal computing, their focus was vastly different.  Operating systems spawned like rabbits over the ideas of networking, speed, efficiency, flexibility, and above all, stability.  Craziness like unifying them into a single operating system or end user happiness with pretty graphics were left out entirely.

Microsoft stands in my mind as the effective godfather of personal computing.  Without the near monopoly status of Windows (and of course DOS before that) as a computer platform, software development would simply never have gotten to where it is today.  Only in a world dominated by a single unified platform is it possible to sell a single product to so many people.  If Unix had its way, there would be 700 flavors of an operating system each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and each with an equal market share.  Imagine what software engineering would be if a single product had to be made so many times to make it work on each platform instead of the reality provided by Microsoft.  Write it once and instantly have literally millions of people available on your supported platform to sell it to.

For these reasons, Windows became pretty.  It learned to support the amazing amount of consumer level hardware.  It sidestepped durability and stability in lieu of usability.  In a word, it created the face of computing most of us know.  Unix continued to become faster and leaner and solid as a rock, but paid a price most fans argue was no real loss.  The price of usability.  Commands entered in some text mode console or other consisting of almost random pairs of letters predominated the operating system.  A graphical front end showed all the signs of being an after-thought.  It was ugly, slow, and offered some hardcore features that all but the most extreme of users would never need and usually they never even knew those features existed.

The battle raged on.  Swears and smearing of reputations from fanboys on both sides abound.  I stand on my soap box to proclaim loudly, “who cares?”  Both camps have their places.  Both have done greate things to the world of computing.  That’s good enough for me.

This story begins with a computer that is relatively new, running Windows XP x64.  Things worked for a while, I managed to avoid the problems you hear about all the time with Vista, and I got to enjoy the clean speed and smoothness of a GUI almost everyone is familier with at this point in history.  Basically every version of Windows ever created has a problem I’ve come to call “Rust.”  In simple terms, the usable life expectancy of a computer running Windows is limited by the fact that Windows will eventually clutter itself up into not working correctly.  The rust can be washed away by simply wiping the computer clean and reinstalling everything.  Not a task for the weak, and certainly not for the people that merely use computers instead of managing them.  It gets worse however.  The rust itself can, if not detected soon enough, get bad enough to all but entirely prevent proper data backups which are a crucial step in reinstalling.

In my case the rust manifested itself as a sudden inability to burn DVD’s.  I use DVD’s as backups of almost everything important to me.  They are cheap, durable, and store a relatively decent amount of information.  My symptom was my burning software claiming drive incompatibility with the discs I was using.  Not especially likely considering how many of them I’ve burned with this drive and software combonation.  If that wasn’t good enough, it also locked up my computer, wouldn’t let the disc out of the drive until a reboot, and neatly produced an impressive number of coasters as I tried adjusting my configuration over and over.

Fortunately I have a solid local network and several computers.  My backups would have to go over that instead of onto DVD’s while I got this situation figured out.  A swift evening of reinstalling my operating system, setting up my drivers and restoring backups back over the network fixed literally everything.  By swift of course I mean “it was running in a couple hours” and “it had everything I need back on it within about a week.”  Naturally adding things back is was on an “as needed” basis.

Global Warming?

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This particular topic is one that I’ve always been interested in, but frankly it also tends to be one I avoid talking about.  Simply put, people tend to be obnoxious about it.  The number of people out there that accept the tidbits of “evidence” provided by Al Gore and his friends is staggering and that tends to put people like me at odds with the masses.  My stance on the issue can be summarized as being that of a proper scientist.  I no more accept that global warming is simply a given than I believe the Earth is about to become little more than a nearly spherical ice ball winging through space.  My basis for this stance is information and an understanding of the scientific method.

In trying to be accurate to the nearest half a billion years or so I will, for the sake of conversation, accept that the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old.  I will ignore that the place wouldn’t have been much fun to hang out on while it was still cooling down into a vaguely solid blob of rock, and that dinosaurs that would eventually call the place home failed entirely to keep good records of the weather while they were here.  For them it probably seemed like the 165 million years or so they wandered around were just a lovely time indeed.  I’m going somewhere with this, I swear.  It is commonly accepted that the temperature on Earth was way higher when they were around than it is now.  I don’t mean when they were busy getting extinct either, I mean when they were thriving.

By comparison, us silly little bipeds that for all evolutionary evidence seem to have jumped out of trees, have only been hanging around for a mere handful of hundred thousand years.  If you are a big fan of cavemen that aren’t specifically homo sapiens, we could say the number is pushing 4 million years.  A mere drop in the pail next to dinosaurs’ stay.  People in some form or other have experienced several climate changes, in both directions.  Everything from mini-ice ages to warmer phases.  Looking back on history, both human and geological, it’s pretty easy to determine that as a species we do way better when the climate is warmer than we do when it’s colder.  For that reason, global warming, as people like to panic about, is not in fact so bad at all.

Add to this story the part where our little blob of cooled rock which, on a cosmic scale, cooled down like yesterday, is in orbit of an impressive ball of fusing hydrogen.  We like to call it the sun, and it has all sorts of funny patterns it follows with everything it does.  Loads of somehow detectible sine wave like patterns all superimposed on each other.  These include an apparent 11 year cycle of sun spot activity, a magnetic cycle that is around 22 years long, cyclic changes in the radiation output of the sun include a whopping 27 harmonic cycles lining up in a 273 month parent cycle, and several others falling into 87, 105, 131, 210, 232, 385, 504, 805, and 2300 year patterns.  In other words, the sun is practically random in its layering of patterns.  When several patterns line up on the same side of the sine wave the resulting change can be pretty impressive.

At the end of the day, the sun, for better or for worse, powers basically everything that happens on this planet.  Weather, planetary cooling, global warming, etc.  There are people jumping around about 0.2° C changes in one direction or the other and claiming that means something important.  In a statistical light, there are 3 time periods that people are using to determine whether or not global warming is happening.  Geological evidence duration appears to be able to reach back with any level of accuracy to around 10,000 years ago.  Human instrument records of weather and almost countless other things are limited on the outside to around 100 years worth of data.  Recent global warming panic can be traced back to 15 or so years worth of information. Go ahead and divide each of those numbers by 4.5 billion and see how statistically important the results are.

Human beings are proud.  We like to think that driving cars around powered by dead dinosaurs has a massive impact on the planet.  We also like to think that cow farts from Oklahoma have an impact, so it stands to reason that you may not be able to go by our opinions on this matter.  In truth, the planet has been here for a very long time, and us, not so much.  I certainly don’t discount that people can change their environments for better or for worse, but I also take that amount of change with a grain of salt when compared to local impact of things like a sun that pours out 3.86 decillion watts a second.

All I ask of my readers is to imagine for a moment the wicked number of influences that control something as complex as planetary climate.  Whether you take a couple of soggy ice caps to spell impending doom or sunspots failing to show up on time meaning we will all be popsicles, you should consider that no one really knows.  To pretend that you can take a nearly nano-scale piece of the curve and extrapolate an opinion is funny to begin with,  but to consider it more than an opinion is practically heresy.  Action taken to “correct” the perceived problem is downright dangerous.  We are almost equally likely to make the problem worse as we are to fix anything simply thanks to the fact that we are making decisions based on a system we do not, and likely cannot ever, fully understand.

Sterilization Frustration

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The first step in making your own wine is as simple as sterilizing everything you own, expect to own, think may pass near your wine, things your wine will pass through, sit in, be near, or be able to see from inside large glass containers. It stands to reason of course that if you are trying to give one kind of microbiology the chance to thrive in your grape juice, you should be pretty sure that none of the other kinds you don’t want are hanging around. There are loads of things that can happen to wine with other little baddies growing it it. The least impressive perhaps involve the addition of less desirable flavors to the wine. Some other fun ones include the inadvertent creation of jelly like you would consider putting on your toast in the morning, or simply wine that outright goes bad before you’ve managed to drink it. Thankfully, you have to do some serious work to make wine toxic thanks to the nature of alcohol itself being very effective at killing things off. However failure to deal with cleaning agents properly is about as likely to make poison as it is to destroy the wine entirely, and that’s relatively likely.

Every kit of wine, every book about making wine, and every container of sterilizer stuff known to man will mention, probably repeatedly, that sterilization is so important that your mom being hit by a bus shouldn’t be used as an excuse to skip or interrupt the process. Personally it would stop me, but I may be an oddball among wine makers for that reason. Being relatively well prepared to make wine, or so I thought, I set forth to start making my first wine kit. I read the instructions from top to bottom, as the instructions themselves of course informed me I should do. Upon returning to the top to start actually doing the steps I’d recently read about, I managed to make it as far as step 1.

I read “Sterilize […a small list of wine making stuff…]” and panicked having not done what most wine kit makers likely consider the easiest part of the process, even if the most tedious or time consuming. Now, I fully knew this was coming and I dug out my convenient little pouch of sterilizer stuff, and switched gears to reading its directions instead. “Add 1 Tablespoon to 1 gallon of warm water.” That’s all it said.

Well, that’s really not especially helpful to me. There is an expectation of understanding being made by the funny bag of white powder in my left hand, and I entirely fail to meet that expectation. What comes next exactly? Do I leave it in a jug on the counter and stare at it funny until everything in my house is made magically clean? Do I soak things in it? If so, for how long? How about my big ass plastic primary fermenter? It’s way too big to put into anything else, so perhaps I simply fill it with the stuff and add just shy of 7 tablespoons of my cleaner to it. What about the lid though? Clearly a lid intended to fit on a bucket will not fit into the same bucket, so how can it be sterilized? My brain ran around in circles with all these questions.

After much hopeless thought on the subject, I decided I needed to wait longer before starting. Ask more questions of people that have done it, read more books and web sites, and generally continue to be afraid to start. Perhaps someday I will feel prepared enough to actually proceed.

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