The best cellular headset ever: Etymotic

Amazon.com: Etymotic Monaural Cellular Headset: Cell Phones & Service: $40 and excellent Amazon reviews, plus a personal recommendation from a trustworthy friend. Alas, it's not sold direct by Amazon. One of the most annoying defects of Amazon is there's no way to constrain search to items they sell. J&R is a good source, but you need to add shipping to the price.

Is email finally failing?

Cringely tells us Earthlink's been dropping large volumes of incoming email -- and has kept that secret from their customers.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . In a Jam | PBS

... The trend continued so my friend, who has long been in the networking business, himself, started running experiments. He sent messages from other accounts to his Earthlink address, to his aliased Blackberry address, and to his Gmail account. For every 10 messages sent, 1-2 arrived in his Earthlink mailbox, 1-2 (not necessarily the SAME 1-2) on his Blackberry, and all 10 arrived with Gmail.

Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink's mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn't bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn't mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain. The two groups affected are those who get their mail with an Earthlink-hosted domain and those with aliased e-mail addresses like my friend's Blackberry.

Earthlink is clearly an ISP to avoid -- they've been going downhill for years. What I find more interesting is that this might be a leading indicator that our email/ISP infrastructure may be failing. Email's been in a bad way for years, maybe we're reaching the end of 'business as usual'.

Google again using the meta tags?

Common wisdom years ago was that Google had abandoned the meta tag on web pages due to widespread fraud. Perhaps this is no longer so:Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag.

MIPS then and now

Storage cost has fallen even faster than MIPS cost; even so, Free the MIPS! has some good comparisons for processors. Intel's Core Due (in my MacBook) claims 20,000 MIPS. In 1977 the Cray-1 supercomputer held the record with 150 MIPS.

The Cray-1 would not have liked rendering an 8 megapixel RAW file.

PS. A comment on the GMSV post references this 1989 internal research paper on why perceived performance was not matching CPU improvements. It's a great reference, the article reads sadly well today.

The Backup Market: It's awful

One of my family (call her "Z") members had a nasty laptop drive failure. I've had three in the past year; two on a work laptop. one on a long-abused home laptop. Laptops are hell on hard drives. Annoying for me, since I'm obsessive about backup. Worse for Z, because she wasn't.

Z asked me about backup, especially for images. I started to give her an update on my longtime backup strategy (Backing up a mixed OS X and Windows 2000 Home Network is dated now, but the general approach is unchanged even though Retrospect Pro is now zombie-ware.). Midway through my email I realized I was ranting.

Ranting. That's what blogs are for. So I'll do the email here instead.

Backup solutions really suck today. I used to do tape backup with multiple redundant offsite rotating tapes. A backup took all night, but I didn't care -- I was asleep. Dantz Retrospect was great back then, and even on the PC there were decent home products. Fast forward 10 years and the options are lousy. I use zombie software - the basically abandoned Retrospect Professional for Windows to backup my XP/OS X LAN. When it dies (probably when 10.5 comes out) there will be no automated alternatives.

Instead of multiple redundant off-site tape backups I use two rotating 300GB USB drives. It would be nice if they both had reliable quite fans and powered down when not in use to keep the drives alive. Nice, but not so. Redundancy is limited to Retrospect's incremental backup -- nice, but it only lasts as long as Retrospect.

I've been waiting for a year for Google to deploy an offsite backup product, but nothing has shown up from them. There are several products built around Amazon's S3, but I hear nothing about how well they work. Apple's offsite backup solution is pathetically small and very expensive. I trust Google to get this right and stick around, but not a small startup.

So what's the average person to do? In Z's case she has only to backup a single XP machine. So, although I've not tested the software, I'd suggest this:

1. Dual rotating USB drives like I use. Every 1-2 weeks carry one offsite. I keep my offsite drive at work. Encrypt the backup, it wouldn't be good to lose an unencrypted backup. Good luck finding one that will spin down when not in use.
   
   
2. Find software that supports the USB drives and encryption. Alas, I don't know a product to support. You want it fully automated; even the push-button solutions aren't automated enough. (Anyone with ideas?). Look for an external drive/enclosure software solution that gets decent reviews and buy two of 'em. Expect to pay at least $500. Real-time backup is nice in theory but it doesn't work with today's machines (RAID excepted, but that's not a real backup). Once a night for everything is enough.
   
   
3. In XP it's almost impossible to backup all your data without backing up the entire hard drive. What can I say, XP sucks too. So plan on backing up EVERYTHING, not just data. You need that to get all the nooks and crannies that XP stuffs data into.
   
   
4. Use a separate, intermittent backup solution for your most precious stuff. Typically burn CDs and DVDs of images and toss them in a drawer at work. Use a photo sharing site that supports full uploads and has a restore service (for a fee send images on DVD). SmugMug does this, Picasa WebAlbums (Google) might.
   
   
5. Test your ability to restore from backup every month or so. Randomly select some files and try the restore. You will be impressed how often this reveals serious problems.
   
   
6. Real geeks also mirror their most important systems every few months. It's easy to restore a mirror then restore data from backup. Even I don't do this religiously however.
   
   
7. Future: If Google ever does offsite backup, I'll switch from the rotating USB drives to a gibabit ethernet network access storage device (NAS) with a RAID array (warm swap). That way one of the backup disks could fail without a problem and I'd have a completely distinct offsite backup solution. Actually, what I really want, is for Google to assemble and sell the NAS device and the software that backs up the NAS to Google's network. They could even lease it as part of a service offering ...
   

That's the best I can come up with. I'll have more specific backup software solutions when I finally have to replace Retrospect Professional.

Which leaves the interesting questions - why is backup so bad? It's even lousy at the corporate level. If I had to rely on our corporate backup solution those two drive failures would have been much worse than annoyances -- I have my own personal backup at work too. My best guesses as to why it's so bad now are:

1. Laptops. I'd guesstimate laptops have quadrupled the risk of large scale data loss. We didn't used to keep all our data on them, now we do. This is not a stable situation. We need to migrate to devices with 20GB of solid state storage (never crashes), intelligent caching and synchronization, and remote network accessible primary data stores. Laptops with 200GB hard drives are a tool of Satan.
   
   
2. Cheap storage: CPUs have disappointed for years, but hard drives have really lived up to Moore's "law". Honking hard drives have allowed for iPhoto and iMovie, and enormous data stores we can't back up.
   
   
3. Historically most people didn't care about their personal data. They really didn't mind that much if it vanished; in fact, it kind of simplified their computing existence. That's only changed recently with digital photography; not enough time to build a market, especially given #7.
   
   
4. Probability estimations were not very important for our evolutionary success. We just aren't much good at probability. Consider the Iraq War as exhibit A and America's 'no-fly list' as exhibit B. Since we can't deal with probability properly, we underfund backup. Since we underfund backup, there's no market for backup solutions.
   
   
5. Since we don't value backup enough, vendors haven't written backup support into file systems and operating sytems. (Apple may do this with OS X 10.5 -- at last.) That makes backup software harder to write and less reliable - especially in XP.
   
   
6. Since current backup solutions are awful, it's easy for almost everyone to basically do nothing.
   
   
7. The expectation that either Google or Microsoft will take over offsite online backup has blocked any serious capital from going to build a competing solution. Why spend all that money when the big guns will take it all away?

Update 12/22/06: More on online backup solutions.

The memory could not be read: Anatomy of a complex series of Microsoft defects

This is how it began. A notice on startup from svchost.exe that referenced memory at 0x00000000 could not be read.







Not a very helpful error message. Then I looked into the XP event log, that invaluable and invisible resource that Microsoft hides from users. The only thing worse than an unresponsive fire alarm is a silent fire alarm. Microsoft's technological indictments include hiding fatal errors from users.

There I saw a number of cryptic messages indicating that my automated updates had been failing -- and that this might also have been causing my automated Retrospect Professional backups to fail (that's by far the most serious problem here). That's when the detective work began, a series of probes and explorations powered by Google. The bottom line fixes were, I think:

• Turn off Windows Automatic Update (aka Microsoft Update)
  
• Use Regedit to find "LocalCacheDrive" settings for Office. Notice that the drive letter is "D" when it should be "C". Change it.
• Repair the Office installation.
• Manually run Windows Update.
• Discover Flash update still doesn't work.
• Download Flash uninstaller from Adobe/Macromedia. Uninstall Flash. Reinstall Flash.
• Windows Update now has no errors.
• I also, though I'm not sure it was necessary, did: "net stop WuAuServ", remove "windows\SoftwareDistribution" and "net start WuAuServ"
• Changed Windows Automatic Update to download but do not install.
  

It all seems to have resolved. In retrospect I think this all began when I installed Office with the 'remove install file option'. I use that option because I kept my install files on a hard drive. Alas, a separate hard drive in those days. Drive letter "D". Nowadays drive letter D: does not exist. The bug bites when Office looks for its install files using a drive letter that no longer exists. Office doesn't produce a dialog box or a reasonable error message, it just dies. The automated install process persists daily in the futile update. (Update: I've been told this was an ancient bug with Windows update too.)
I've written recently about Microsoft's mess This is a good example. In the process of debugging I ran into:

1. Listool.exe: the app that was supposed to fix this no longer works the way Microsoft thinks it does. My guess was they found a serious bug in it, stripped out the dangerous functionality, and never updated their many references to it.
2. All those critical alerts in the XP Events log that one has to dig down to find.
3. Incredibly obscure hex error messages.
4. Thousands of web pages related to automatic updater problems.
5. XP error messages with embedded URLs that no longer work or redirect.
6. An incredible bug in office where a change to a drive letter causes an incredible pile-up of cascading bugs.

I can't break the repair process down in much more detail because it was an insanely complex process. All I can do below is provide a set of links to web resources and some of the many different error messages I got along the way. I hope the time I spent putting this together will help someone; it's my way to repay those who's work helped debug this.

Here are of the more and less helpful web pages:

• Office updates are not successfully installed if you deploy updates by using Windows Server Update Services or the Microsoft Update Web site after the path of the local installation source changes
• Office 2003 Tool: Local Installation Source Tool: This looks promising, until you discover that Listool.exe has been broken and Microsoft hasn't noticed. The recommended fix is (remove=all) is not a supported command line option with this version. I suspect they lost the new version and somehow replaced it with an old one.
• Office updates are not successfully installed if you deploy updates by using Windows Server Update Services or the Microsoft Update Web site after the path of the local installation source changes: This was part of the problem, but of course LisTool.exe doesn't work any more. Still, it was a valuable clue.
• Windows Update Broke My Machine (svchost.exe -- application error), and How to Fix It: This was closely related. I followed some of the advice here. In particular "net stop WuAuServ", remove "windows\SoftwareDistribution" and "net start WuAuServ". I also turned off Windows automatic update - permanently.
• You receive a "Error 1327. Invalid Drive... " error message when you install Office 2003: This generally useless article was critical because of this one sentence: "Before you try to install Office 2003, check to see if the MSOCache folder exists. If it exists, you must move it to the location that is specified by the LocalCacheDrive registry subkey. To do this, use the Office 2003 Local Installation Source Tool (LISTool.exe)." I knew LISTool.exe was defective, but now I knew what registry key to manually edit using regedit.
• MS06-020: Vulnerabilities in Macromedia Flash Player from Adobe could allow remote code execution: This Microsoft automatic update failed with "Error Code: 0x643". I had to find the Flash uninstaller, run it, then run the Flash installer. Note the Flash installer has no UI -- it doesn't even say that it completed successfully.
• There are LOT of knowledge base articles related to automatic update failures.
• The Generic Host Process error. I got that one too, but this wasn't all that helpful.
• Solution available for Windows XP "Generic Host Process" error: This was one of the few links from Microsoft's logs and crashes that wasn't broken. I followed the recommendations, but I can't recall if this did anything.
  

Here are a few of the many error message and long entries I worked through:

Faulting application , version 0.0.0.0, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address
0x00000000.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Product: Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 -- Error 1327. Invalid Drive: D:
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Product: Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 - Update 'Security Update for PowerPoint 2003
(KB923091): POWERPNT' could not be installed. Error code 1603. Windows Installer can create logs to help troubleshoot issues with installing software packages. Use the following link for instructions on turning on logging support: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=23127

Error Code: 0x52F
Try to install the update again, or request help from one of the following resources.

Product: Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 -- Error 1327. Invalid Drive: D:
Product: Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 - Update 'Security Update for Excel 2003 (KB923088): EXCEL' could not be installed. Error code 1603. Windows Installer can create logs to help troubleshoot issues with installing software packages.

Faulting application svchost.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x00000000.

Update 3/27/07: I think this bug with Windows update scattering files across external drives may be a related flaw. Microsoft might have cleaned up the offending updater, but you need to delete the junk folders. I found I could not delete "updspapi.dll" from the update folder until I assigned full control permissions to myself as administrator.

Update 4/11/07: Another windows update (five fixes) again broke XP with the same error message, but the LocalCacheDrive setting was unchanged. I've disabled Microsoft Update for now. I really need to get rid of my last XP machine.

keywords: drive mapping, drive letter, windows update.

OS X blogging tools:

Five blogging apps I'm thankful for - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

It's a good read. I'm going to try MarsEdit again with Blogger.