LinLog

I weighed myself twice this week - yesterday and today. The Thursday number was 202.6, down 0.6 pounds from last week. I wasn't sure I trusted that number, though, because I weighed myself later in the day than usual and had been swilling ungodly amounts of water all morning. The Friday measurement of 201.2, down 2.0 pounds from last week, seems a little more in line with what I expected.

I was actually expecting to be down more than average this week because I spent most of it on a time-honored weight-loss system known as "the flu." I actually registered fevers of over 101 degrees on both Sunday and Thursday, with a brief reprive on Tuesday. It's the sickest I've been in a long time. This was probably canceled out by the fact that I didn't really feel up to doing any real exercise most of the week.

On the up side, I discovered that a cup of low-sodium Progresso chicken noodle soup only has 12g of carbohydrates and 1g of fiber. My other two primary foods, diet ginger ale and Advil, were zero in both.

There is one good thing about working from a cubicle: you get to overhear an interesting converstation every now and then. The following is from the tail end of a conversation I overheard this afternoon. It was between one of our a help desk techs and our telecom person about a user trying to send a fax from one office to another. Note that I was not involved in this conversation. I thought about sticking my nose in, but I had nothing useful to add and figured it would be unprofessional to ask about it just so I could mock the user.

Telecom: "I don't know why she'd dial that. It doesn't make sense."
Help desk: "But if it's a direct inward dialing, it shouldn't matter. She should be able to just dial the extension."
Telecom: "Yeah, but that extension was a phone."
Help desk: "But still, if the fax machine is on a DID line and she dialed its extension, it should have worked."
Telecom: "Well, yeah. But what really didn't make sense to me is why she would send a fax instead of just walking over and handing her the paper."
Help desk: "Yeah, I know. It's across the hall."

So there you have it. A user tried to fax a document to someone just across the hall, but screwed it up and ended up wasting her time and the help desks' time. What is the world coming to? The building isn't even that big, for God's sake! Even if the user was crippled, it still would have ended up taking less time to walk the paper across the hall.

Oddly enough, this reminds me of a Slashdot story I read some years ago about an interview with a well-known UNIX elder. I want to say it was Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie, but I really don't remember. Anyway, the interviewee said his current work involved moving multi-terabyte of GIS databases across continents. When asked what technology they used to do this, his answer was "FedEx." They just put the data on a server set up with some flavor of Linux with pre-configured NFS and Samba, so the customer can just plug the box into a network port and turn it on. His argument was that, when trying to move that amount of data, FedEx overnight shipping was actually faster and more reliable than a network transfer.

This incident is sort of the opposite of that: using technology, despite all reason, to make a five-minute delivery into a big ordeal. There truly is no limit to what mankind can accomplish.

I got my new monitor today.

It's a 19-inch widescreen flatpanel. I ordered it from NewEgg for $170 plus free shipping.

The monitor this replaces is an old 14-inch CRT.

And when I say "old" I mean it - I've been using this monitor for over ten years. I'd been hoping this would break down so I'd have an excuse to replace it, but it never did. I finally ended up overcoming my inherent cheapness and replacing it anyway.

The difference really is like night and day. I can actually sit back in my chair and still read the monitor now. I'm really liking the wide screen, too. I've only used it for a couple hours, I'd say this monitor is probably the best $170 I've spend on hardware.

Well, I just figured out why installing MonoDevelop installs Lynx on Ubuntu. Turns out it's monodoc-base that depends on Lynx, not Monodevelop. I'm still not sure why monodoc-base (or anything else, for that matter) depends on Lynx, but at least now I know where the dependency is coming from.

I learned about something new yesterday. While reading a blog entry on ClickOnce security, I noticed a little feed icon down at the bottom of the page. Actually, there were three icons. The first two were RSS and ATOM, which I already knew about. The last one was labeled CDF. I had never heard of that before.

It turns out CDF stands for Channel Definition Format. It's the XML format Microsoft used for the "channels" they tried to push on users some time back. You may remember these from the days of Internet Explorer 4 and Active Desktop.

Although the format is officially obsolete as of Internet Explorer 7, a few people are apparently still using it for blog syndication. I don't know why. I can't imagine there's much demand for this. After all, I'd never even heard of it, and I'm far geekier about these things than the average person. And while I haven't read any of the specifications for CDF, a cursory examination of the file suggests that this might actually have less information than a simple RDF feed, so I don't see much gain.

The only thing CDF buys you, as far as I can tell, is the ability to have blog entry links show up in your Internet Explorer favorites or your Active Desktop (if that even exists anymore), as seen above. Kind of like Firefox Live Bookmarks, but with less support. And I always thought live bookmarks was kind of a crappy feature anyway, so I don't know why you'd want an IE-specific format to get them. I guess it's no wonder CDF is obsolete.

The scale varied a bit again this morning, but it looks like the most reliable reading is 203.2. That's another three pounds from last week. That's considerably less that the 4.8 pounds from the previous week, which I found a little alarming. Hopfully, I'm moving back toward a more constant rate.

I'm trying to get in the habit of blogging more regularly. To that end, I've been trying to start entries ahead of time (taking advantage of that draft feature I added to LnBlog). However, that still requires a certain amount of work when I actually want to post an entry.

Therefore, today I'm going to cop out and just post a handy link that I remembered today: ConnectionStrings.com. Nothing fancy, just connection strings for a whole bunch of different databases, both file- and server-based. Very handy when you want to get that quick ADO connection to an unfammiliar database.

Here's an odd one. A recent Slashdot story last week linked to a summary of Mark Shuttleworth's comments on Dell and Linux. The Slashdot summary said the article contained a response to Shuttleworth that they described as "amusing and telling at the same time."

I found that link odd because I'm not sure if that was meant to be ironic or not. The "amusing and telling" response was, and I quote:

"i'm getting so sick and tired of hearing excuses and rationalizations. just put the cd in the cupholder, install it and sell it. period. there's no need to analyze or certify. what is so hard about this?"

As far as I can tell, the only thing that tells us is that I was right and the community really is full of people who need to grow the hell up.

You almost have to feel sorry for Dell when people say things like that. It's a classic case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't." First, people complain that they don't pre-install Linux because, after all, you just have to stick in the CD and wait. But if they did that, people would complain that the system came unconfigured and they had to just start over from scratch anyway.

It reminds me of an interview with someone from Loki Games that I read years ago. (Wish I could find the link....) For those who don't remember, Loki was in the business of porting popular PC games to Linux. They went out of business in late 2001.

Apparently, they got complaints from some people that they couldn't download their games for free. Sure, the game engines were free and ran on Linux, but the media were all licensed from the original publisher, so Loki couldn't give them away even if they wanted to. But people didn't care about that. They said they wanted games that were open-source and ran natively on Linux, but not enough to pay for them. And yet some still felt entitled to complain about it. I guess it's just human nature....

Last week, HConsumer published an article entitled 30 Days with Linux, in which the reviewer spent a month using Ubuntu. I have to say that this is probably the single best Linux review I've ever read.

Thre were two things thing I really loved about this article. First, I thought it was extremely fair. The reviewer seems to understand and accept that when 90% of the world uses Windows, there is a price associated with choosing to use anything else. In particular, he didn't blame Linux or Ubuntu for things like not supporting his favorite software or doing things differently than Windows, which you see that far too often in this kind of review. That little bit of understanding really made it clear to me that the reviewer was trying to give an honest assesment, as opposed to just cranking out enough words to fill a column.

The second thing I loved about this article was the length of the review period: 30 days. I think it's difficult, if not impossible, to fairly evaluate an operating system/environment in much less than that. Every system is different, and it takes time to adjust when switching from one to another. You need time to figure out how things are done in the new system, to find the shortcuts, and to really appreciate the more advanced features. A few days or a week might suffice for a shallow overview, but those aren't really useful to anybody.

I hope we see more articles like this in the future. The computing trade press has a nasty tendancy to be shallow and trashy, so it's nice to have some thoughtful, open-minded criticism.

While the diet is progressing nicely, there is one side-effect that I hadn't expected: I've completely lost my tolerance for alcohol. I had one glass of wine tonight and I'm light-headed. What the heck is that!?! It used to take at about three before I started to feel it. I guess that's not a bad thing...just weird.

Linux has spoiled me. I've gotten so used to things "just working" that I sometimes forget just how miserable the Windows world can be.

That probably sounds weird to some people, but it's true. Granted, lots of hardware vendors and ISVs don't even pretend to support Linux, game companies largely ignore it, and many online services don't seem to be aware of its existence. But there is an up side to that - no malware or crapware.

This was driven home to me he other day when I had to "fix" a user's flash drive. The flash drive in question was a SanDisk Cruzer Micro which the user had purchased to replace his "official" one which broke. The short version of the background is that this user needed a flash drive to work with a system I'll call TCSFOUBTS (pronounced 'ticks-fouts'), which stands for The Crappy Software Foisted On Us By The State (not its real name). Since the "official" keeper of the flash drives had no extras and it would take days or weeks to get a replacement (welcome to civil service), he just bought one on his own.

As with all such cases, this didn't work out well. TCSFOUBTS, being a crappy Widnows application, requires an administrator to set drive letter at which the flash drive will be mounted. However, SanDisk saw fit to include something called U3 on the drive, which adds an annoying systray icon that allows you to install and run software from the flash drive.. This apparently adds a second partition to the drive, which Windows sees as a CD-ROM. Naturally, this is the first partition, so instead of the writable portion showing up as D:, it shows up as E:. Needless to say, TCSFOUBTS was configured to use D:.

The up side is that SanDisk was considerate enough to provide a removal utility for this crapware. It would be better if they didn't include it in the first place, but as crapware purveyors go, this makes them a good citizen. Most of the companies that push this stuff go out of their way to make it difficult to remove. Funny how even annoying things can look good by comparison.

In the spirit of the "Code SOD" feature on Worse Than Failure (formerly The Daily WTF), I present the following image. It's from my organization's "electronic bulletin board," which is really just a few static HTML pages maintained. We impose this on our users by adding it to the Windows startup items so that it comes up with every log-on.

I am, mercifully, not involved with this particular item, but I can only assume that this code was generated by an older version Front Page, Word, or other intellectual abortion that Microsoft passes off as a "web development tool."

So, what's your favorite part? Personally, I can't decide between the italicized image and the nested, redundant font and italics tags.

It's Thursday again - that means weigh-in day. It looks like I'm down 4.8 pounds from last week. That makes a total of 27.4 pounds in the last 8 weeks.

This diet is progressing much faster than I expected. In fact, I'm afraid it might be going a little too fast. My rate of weight loss has been increasing in the last three weeks. In fact, of those 27.4 pound, 12.4 has been in the last three weeks. I'm supposed to be averaging about 2 pounds per week on the second phase of the diet, so I've been losing twice what I was expecting. I'm not sure why, though. My eating habits haven't changed appreciably in the last three weeks. Maybe my metabolism is up?

I'm with Clinton Forbes: I don't buy computer books either. Almost never. In fact, I can count the number of computing books I've bought in the last five years on my fingers. If I need information on a technical topic, I go to the web, not the bookstore.

It's not that I don't like books. I love books. My Saturday morning routine is to drop my wife off at work and then spend an hour or two sitting in the café at the local Barnes & Noble, reading and drinking coffee. (There are actually about a half-dozen regulars in the café on Saturday mornings, and I'm the only one under 40. I'm not sure what that says about me.)

It's just that technical books, like those 800 page volumes on C++ or VB.NET, are generally a huge waste of time, space, and money. They're almost universally boring, often poorly written, and usually cost upwards of $40 a copy. On top of that, the information they contain will be usually be outdated in five years and most of it is available for free on the web.

There's also the space issue. I have never in my life had enough shelf space for all my books. And if it comes down to choosing between my leather-bound volumes of Nietzsche and Plato or Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days, it's easy to pick the winner. Heck, even my 30-year-old, second-hand Bertrand Russell paperbacks, which I bought for $1.50 each in 1998, would beat that out.

But ultimately, the real reason is that I'm a competent professional. I can read online documentation, apply concepts acquired from past experience, and follow articles and blogs written by the experts. I don't need the hand-holding, walk-through kind of books you see in the stores. If I'm going to buy a book, I want it to open my mind to new ideas, not show me yet another iteration on "Hello, world."

You ever have one of those moments when you almost wish you could string Bill Gates up with his own entrails? I had one of those moments yesterday morning.

My problem was not Bill Gates or even Microsoft in general, but their representative to the common man: Windows XP. I was bitten by that annoying Explorer bug where it blocks for several seconds at a time for no particular reason. I had to clean off my D: drive because it's is a measly 30GB, which is just barely enough to house the data I've accumulated over the last five years, plus my collection of virtual machines. However, it seemed like every two minutes, when I clicked something, explorer would lock up. No apparent reason, no inordinate disk or CPU activity - it just stopped responding. Then, after 5 to 20 seconds, it would pick up where it left off.

Now, this has happened many times before, but never quite so often in one session. It was positively maddening. It's a good thing I was drinking decaf, or I probably would have ripped my monitor to pieces.

Things went slightly better today, but I did have an issue with deleting a file.  Basically, the progress dialog displayed for way, way, way too long.  Like a minute or two for a 1MB file.  It's just ridiculous.

The worst part is, it's not like I can just stop using Explorer.  If this were a UNIX, I could just switch desktops or file managers.  But on Windows, that just doesn't work.

Oh, don't get me wrong - there are alternative shells and file managers, but I've never found any of them to be very good.  At least not the free ones (I haven't tried any of the paid-for options because my boss is kind of cheap).  Most of the free file managers seem to focus on useless features like dual-panes and integrated file viewers (that's why we have file associations - duh!).  And the third-part shell replacements...they just feel like second-class citizens.  Plus I've found that things tend to break when Explorer isn't running. 

I've been losing more weight than I expected the last two week. This morning, the highest number I got on the scale was 211.0, which puts me down a total of 22.6 pounds. That's after seven weeks on the diet. That seems like an awful lot.

Come to think of it, that's four pounds since last week, assuming the number I picked for last week was accurate. And last week I was down 3.6 pounds from the week before. That seems like an awful lot. In fact, it seems like too much. I haven't changed my diet from the previous weeks, so I don't know why my weight loss would be accelerating.

Speaking of my eating habits, I figured this week would be a good time to talk about them. Diet or not, I tend to eat pretty much the same thing every day on week-days. This is mostly because I bring my breakfast and lunch to work with me every day. This is because 1) it's cheaper than eating out and 2) there aren't any good restaurants in the town where I work.

The recommended breakfast on the F-Factor diet is a high-fiber cereal and yogurt. I eat a half-cup or Fiber One and a container of Dannon Crave Control yogurt. It's actually surprisingly filling for a relatively small volume of food. I also have my coffee, but since the diet recommends limiting yourself to a single caffeinated beverage a day, I've had to switch to decaf. Well, less-than-half-caff, actually. This was actually quite the change, as I'm a pretty heavy coffee drinker. In fact, I'm actually drinking more of it now, since having too much decaf doesn't make me jittery.

For lunch, I've been having a turkey sandwich on two slices of that Weight-Watchers bread I mentioned last time, accompanied by a serving of carrot sticks and a piece of string cheese.

My afternoon snack is pretty much a repeat of lunch, with some deli-sliced ham and Laughing Cow brand spreadable cheese on some bran crispbread and another string cheese. Depending on when dinner is, I may supplement this with some veggies or another couple of crackers after I get home.

Dinner is the only part that I usually vary. We normally have a large spinach salad to start and finish with our serving of fresh fruit. I like raspberries for this - with a bit of the diet Cool-Whip added, they really feels like dessert. For the main course, it's some kind of meat and a side of rice, veggies, or whatever we have room for on our carb allowance.

The diet is progressing well, although I'm still having trouble with the scale. As I mentioned last week, I seem to be getting incosistent weights depending on where I put the scale and how I stand on it. Today, the highest weight I could get to come up was 215.0. I'm going by that one because the other options were 211 and 210, which can't possibly be right.

One nifty note: it seems the support aspect of fatblogging is working for me. Yesterday I found this comment on my last entry, from none other than Tanya Zuckerbrot, author of The F-Factor Diet, the book I'm following. Now that's service, huh? Thanks for the support Tanya!

So today I thought I'd talk a little about what I'm actually eating on this diet. The nice thing about it is that, if you're careful about what you choos, you can eat pretty much any kind of food. Some of it doesn't even feel like diet food.

The trick, of course, is to read labels. For example, I've been having turkey sandwiches for lunch. Normally, the two slices of bread would use up two of the three extra servings of carbs I'm allowed on phase 2. However, I've been getting the Weight Watchers whole-wheat bread, which has 17g of carbs and 4g of fiber in 2 slices.

Another good example is dessert. I've occasionally been using a serving of carbs to have some chocolate for dessert. Of course, things like Hershey bars and those oh-so-tasty Cadbury cream eggs are out of the question. However, a few dark chocolate products that are actually pretty good on the carb count. My favorite is probably the Guylian assorted chocolates. A 6 square serving only has 12g of carbs, 4g of fiber, and 160 calories. Another good one is the endangered species bars, several of which have 15g of carbs and 5g of fiber in a half-bar serving. They're not quite as good on fat or calories, but they're awfuly tasty.

Slashdot carried a story today linking to a blog post about Dell deleting a negative Linux-related post from their IdeaStorm site. There was angst, cries of censorship, and so forth. Too bad the /. editors didn't actually read the deleted post first.

For the record, I think Dell did absolutely nothing wrong here. If you don't believe me, go to the blog post linked above and read their screenshot of the removed post. It's a single-paragraph, semi-coherent diatribe with no useful or constructive content whatsoever. It's just one step above, "Hey Dell, you suck!"

Frankly, I'm glad Dell deleted this, because it makes the Linux community look like it's populated entirely by petulant teenagers with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. "What do you mean I can't have the moon on a stick?!? Screw you!"

As far as I can tell, Dell hasn't said they won't ship systems with Linux pre-installed. They've just said they're not going to do it right away. And this is a problem? I mean, what did people expect? Dell is a huge corporate bureaucracy with established business practices. It's not like they're the local computer store and they can just hire a couple of college kids to start installing Linux tomorrow. There's analysis to do, tests to perform, procedures to revise, employees to train. Organizations like Dell don't just change overnight and expecting them to is foolish and unreasonable.

The bottom line is that Dell is no longer going to pretend that Linux doesn't exist. This is unquestionably a good thing. Dell has given us an inch. The appropriate response is to push for more, not spit in their face because they didn't give us a mile.

Here's a funny one. I saw the image below while reading Kode Vicious's latest column on ACM Queue. Someone going by the name "Scanning for answers" wrote in with a question about static analysis tools. Note the ad that appears between his signature and KV's response.

I thought that was hilarious. Microsoft couldn't have bought better text placement. They should use that in their advertising campaign. "Scanning for answers... Found 1 answer: Visual Studio 2005."

Cheesy? Maybe. But seeing how they're the face of big, soulless corporations, Microsoft could use a little humanity injected in every now and then.