not42

Three years ago when I arrived in Atlanta, the price of a gallon of gas was below $1. Nice. Since then it has continued to grow more expensive, not long ago hitting $2, and now $2.5. This site shows a pretty graph, along with the locations of the cheapest gas around:

http://www.atlantagasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx

Currently people are betting on it hitting $3 by the end of the year, which sounds and feels painful, but I have a feeling is only the start. As a commodity item, demand is growing quickly in countries like China and India, and this impacts the rest of the world in a big way, as supply is not growing at the same pace. Given that supply is ultimately limited, things will only get worse too.

Now is the time for countries to invest in alternative power sources – primarily Nuclear, with supporting Solar/Wind/Wave. If we wait, we will have some painful years ahead.

Found this on the web. Must remember these hints when my aims in life include world domination.

Switch to Linux

An interesting new name. Spotted this around and it made me laugh:

‘ctrl-alt-del’ will now be known as : ‘hasta la vista’

For a while now I’ve been looking at upgrading my notebook to a newer model, but have been having problems self-justifying it to myself. This may sound odd, but my existing notebook, while 2 years old now, is a 2GHz Pentium 4 with 15″ TFT. Sure, it doesn’t have built in Wifi or Bluetooth, but I have the dongles for that. A year ago I upgraded the then 40GB 4200rpm drive to a 60GB 7200rpm laptop drive and that made a big difference. Big enough that I now have a simple test benchmark to use in a store… click Acrobat Reader and see how long it takes to load. It’s a subjective test, but I know that my notebook actually loads things quicker than most you can buy today.

It’s odd, but notebook size/weight/power hasn’t really changed a great deal in the last 2 years. You can now buy 3GHz machines, but how much faster is that going to make Microsoft Word run? Are they any more lightweight? Not really. Some are but the screens are so small as to be unusable. Do the batteries run longer? A little. Is the screen any more readable? Nope. So really notebooks haven’t really moved forward in 2 years. Amazing for an industry that once had so much forward momentum.

Recently though I’d noticed mine struggling when running lots of programs, so again started looking at alternatives. Did I buy a new notebook? Not at all. This time I choose to max out my RAM to 1GB from the 512MB I had previously. This has made as big a difference as upgrading the hard drive, especially when I leave lots of programs running, and I think it will extend the useful life by another year.

Who knows, by then perhaps something truely revolutionary will have changed in notebook technology and it will finally be time to upgrade? While we now have 64bit notebook processors from AMD, we need a reason to have to have one, which means the world is really waiting for the next version of Microsoft Windows, currently codenamed Longhorn. Until then, spend a modest $60-$120 and get yourself a nice leap in performance.

In one way compression is becoming less essential in a world of high speed internet. The difference between downloading a 500kB file and a 1MB one is a couple of seconds, however to the provider of the file, it can mean the difference between a medium or large monthly bandwidth bill.

I used to use WinZIP, but with every release it mutated into a larger and larger tool with more eye candy and less raw functionality. Don’t get me wrong, it has some neat things like the Setup button, but the fact that you have to pay for it lead me to look for alternatives.

7-Zip was my saviour. For a start it’s free. Secondly it handles most files you’ll encounter on a daily basis. ZIP, RAR, TAR, BZ2 etc, but perhaps the best feature is its native file compression ‘.7z’. Compression is a weird science. Prior knowledge of the type of data can help use algorithms enhanced to work well, and ZIP does a good job on most things but it can be beaten. For instance RAR files generally handle media files better than ZIP. .7z however appears to beat it under almost all circumstances I’ve encountered to date.

On a source branch I regularly compress, 177MB compresses to 40MB under ZIP, but to 17MB under .7z. Now the gains encountered are not always that impressive, but they’re normally good enough to make it worthwhile. Especially given the price tag.

Check it out here: http://www.7-zip.org/

Some daily humor… these are from actual court transcripts:

Q: What is your date of birth?
A: July 15th.
Q: What year?
A: Every year.
______________________________________

Q: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
A: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
______________________________________

Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke up that morning?
A: He said, “Where am I, Cathy?”
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Susan.
______________________________________

Q: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo or the occult?
A: We both do.
Q: Voodoo?
A: We do.
Q: You do?
A: Yes, voodoo.
______________________________________

Q: Now doctor, isn’t it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn’t know about it until the next morning?
A: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
___________________________________

Q: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
_____________________________________

Q: Were you present when your picture was taken?
______________________________________

Q: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
A: Yes.
Q: And what were you doing at that time?
______________________________________

Q: She had three children, right?
A: Yes.
Q: How many were boys?
A: None.
Q: Were there any girls?
______________________________________

Q: How was your first marriage terminated?
A: By death.
Q: And by whose death was it terminated?
______________________________________

Q: Can you describe the individual?
A: He was about medium height and had a beard.
Q: Was this a male, or a female?
______________________________________

Q: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to deposition notice which I sent to your attorney?
A: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________

Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A: All my autopsies are performed on dead people.
______________________________________

Q: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
A: Oral.
______________________________________

Q: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
A: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
Q: And Mr. Dennington was dead at the time?
A: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an
autopsy.
______________________________________

Q: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
______________________________________

Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.

My most recent call to HP was almost a recording of this:

http://www.illwillpress.com/tech.html

Just when will the corporations learn?

This year we’ve had some good movies including all round action like Star Wars and chick flicks like Hitch, but the film that has totally exceeded my expectations and in a way potentially revived a dead series (at least for me) was Batman Begins.

The original Batman movie was very good, but with each subsequent release, the films and actors just didn’t do it for me. All this has changed with an excellent film from Christopher Nolan, which takes a big step back in time and refines the history of Batman. At times you have to ignore the conflicts with the ealier(later) films, but the action, acting and excellent story telling far outweigh any possible complaints.

Liam Neeson is truly brilliant. Christian Bale makes the perfect Bruce Wayne and is supported by a cast that probably won’t be matched this year. Only Katie Holmes feels out of place, but I’m not sure quite why. Perhaps it is because she is so pure that you couldn’t imagine her having the job as a DA, perhaps it’s her acting, or perhaps because she’s one of the few American accents in the film, and so stands out a mile away.

The film is well worth a watch. So much so, that I may enjoy it again.

The door opens, two men dressed in Pilots’ uniforms walk up the aisle. Both are wearing dark glasses, one is using a guide dog and the other is tapping his way along the aisle with a cane. Nervous laughter spreads through the cabin, but the men enter the cockpit, the door closes, and the engines start up. The passengers begin glancing nervously around, searching for some sign that this is just a little practical joke. None is forth coming.

The plane moves faster and faster down the runway, and the people sitting in the window seats realize they’re headed straight for the water at the edge of the airport territory. As it begins to look as though the plane will plough into the water, panicked screams fill the cabin. At that moment, the plane lifts smoothly into the air. The passengers relax and laugh a little sheepishly, and soon all retreat into their magazines, secure in the knowledge that the plane is in good hands.

In the cockpit, one of the blind pilots turns to the other and says, “You know, Bob, one of these days, they’re gonna scream too late and we’re all gonna die.”

We used to use Visual Source Safe (VSS) 6.0 for projects, and so have some older projects that are not routinely accessed. So what happens when you forget the admin password a few years down the line?

There are various suggestions around the net, but this little tool should help: Reset VSS 6 admin password

Simply run in the Data directory of your VSS 6.0 project (where the file um.dat is located) using a command prompt, then rename the files as instructed and your admin password will become blank.