XP: Edit the My Places list in the save dialog box

Add a place to store your files - Help and How-to - Microsoft Office Online

Turns out Microsoft Office apps have a hidden tool, seen only in the save dialog box, that allows one to add icons to the left side of the save/save as dialog. Thanks to Andy M. for pointing this out.

Very obscure, very useful.

Office is editing a registry setting. There must be a non-Office utility for managing these 'My Places' entries, I'll look around for it. In OS X one can do drop and drag to add or remove the equivalent shortcuts. Also in OS X, though little known, is the ability to drag and drop an icon from the desktop to the save as dialog to change the target ...

Update 12/3: Alas, the changes only affect Office. So it messes up my workflow by creating application specific behaviors for routine file management funcitons. Thank heavens I don't use XP as much as I once did ...

Update 12/4: XP Power Tools TweakUI allows one to change the standard Windows My Places list. The custom list allows five options. One of my five is a 'shortcuts' folder I use, it has about 20 shortcuts to the projects and files I'm working on currently.

Update 12/11/06: Check out the comments for a way to extend the list by directly editing the registry. I don't know if it's safe to add more than five entries.

Parallels: for OS X: now to try Windows 2000

I had mixed conclusions to my earlier Parallels trial, but seeing it in use by some friends, and thinking about what I need, I'm giving it another go. Microsoft seems to have done a good job getting rid of the cheapo gray-market XP Pro OEM supply, so I'll probably have to either get XP Pro Upgrade through the U (I teach) or use XP Home. Of course if I use upgrade, I need to install something -- and Windows 98 install on Parallels is miserable. So I was interested to read that Windows 2000 used to work nicely. I'll try installing Win2K in the new beta with my trial license while I wait for the copy I ordered from Amazon (via Macintouch) to arrive. (I could have gotten it for $10 less via a friend, but then I'd have to pay shipping. Amazon was about the same price even if I ignore the $10 "rebate".)

Updates pending.

Update 12/2/06:

Well, that's different! Win98 on Parallels is awful, but Win2K on the new beta is merely geeky.

True, all of the embedded strings have grammatical errors. True, my initial Win2K install crashed with a fatal error (secret was to manually enable CD attachment). True, you have to manually install Parallels tools and the documentation is worthless (Install Tools is an option on the Parallels menus, use that). BUT, it's really fast. Win2K boots on the VM about as quickly as OS X boots natively. It feels uncannily solid. Win2K is fundamentally more robust than XP (Windows hacked XP to make Win98 apps run better) and there were no device driver issues with the install. My license ends in 4 days but my copy from Amazon has been ordered.

Even the install flies (except for the crash). It was faster than the XP install.

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.