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How Necessary Is Windows? Part 1: Overview

Nov 14th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
19 comments

Still dealing with neck problems here, but in the background I’ve been pursuing a long-term, low-intensity project aimed at discerning how necessary Windows is for my daily operations. Back in 2001 or so, Keith and I considered publishing a book called Dumping Microsoft, but after I looked closely at the Linux releases of the time, decided it would be premature. Windows 2000 was mighty good, and Linux had yet to break out of its all-hail-the-console, pain-is-good hacker culture. It may be time to reconsider the necessity of Windows (and perhaps that book) which is what my upcoming series here is about.

I’ve changed operating systems often enough in the last 30 years not to get too attached to any of them, and have no tribal/emotional investment in Windows 2000 or XP. An OS is just a workbench, after all: It does very little work by itself, and exists almost entirely to help applications do what they must do in the most productive way possible. Too much of modern OS versions is just gratuitous glitz, which eats machine cycles and doesn’t get a page laid out any faster. My reaction to Windows Vista was pretty simple: What’s in all this for me? The primary purpose of Windows Vista was to make itself harder to steal, which is something of a fetish over there–and all the glitz was tossed in to persuade people to upgrade. Furthermore, the damned thing was slow. No sale.

You’ve heard me say many times here that personal computing is mature. I help out people at our parish with their computers, and an astonishing number of them still use Office 97. They may use the latest IE or Firefox, but they haven’t seen the need to spend more money on word processing or spreadsheets. That’s because the need isn’t there. Office ’97 probably has 90% of everything useful in an office suite; if you want the rest, get Office 2000, which I myself have been using for almost ten years now.

It’s taken Linux longer to reach parity with Win2K/XP because it’s written by volunteer programmers and not highly paid engineers on continuous death-march. It’s also required the vision of a consumer-oriented distro firm to package up a version of Linux amenable to non-technical people. The testing I’ve done over the past year (in parallel with revising my assembly language book for Linux) tells me that Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux is ready for ordinary users, and if it were widely available as a preinstall would be considered no geekier than Windows. (Installing Ubuntu from CD is actually loads easier than installing Windows XP. Microsoft would be perhaps a third its current size if not for Windows preinstalls.)

What makes it urgent now is a creeping suspicion I have that Windows malware is unstoppable. I see articles on tech sites several times a week describing new and increasingly clever exploits of flaws in Microsoft and Adobe software. This is troubling on many fronts, from the technical–Why in hell do we still have buffer overflow exploits after all these years?–to the purely political: How do we know that exploits in closed-source software have really been fixed? Linux is not immune to infection (it’s secure at least in part because of its rarity) but the fact is that infections are difficult and rarely seen in the wild. I want to take advantage of that security, whatever its origins.

Hence the current project. I’ve talked about bits and pieces of it here and there in the past year, and it may be time to present what I’ve learned in more detail. Stay tuned.

Karmic Koala and Grub

Nov 7th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

I twisted my neck funny earlier this week, and since then have had intermittent neck pain and nearly constant back-of-the-head headaches. If you haven’t heard from me here, that’s mainly the reason. Things are better now, but this neck thing is a serious issue. It doesn’t take much to much to set it off, and alas, flying kites and looking at the stars have both been implicated.

The pain hasn’t allowed me to get much writing done this week, but I did decide to take a chance and do an early upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. I usually let new major releases of OSes cook for a few weeks so that somebody else will spot the obvious bugs and fix them before I put my own arse in the line of fire. In this case, my neck hurt so bad that my arse didn’t care, and I said, Make it so, #2.

Others have complained of problems with 9.10, so I was gritting my teeth a little as the process proceeded. It took about three hours, but the install went without incident, as had upgrades to 9.04 and 8.10 previously. When nothing obvious blew up, I then spent a couple of hours just trying things: Showing videos, listening to MP3s, playing games, opening documents and spreadsheets, and so on. Having declared the upgrade good, I tried to run KGrubEditor…and realized that it was gone. Its icon was blank, and double-clicking on it did nothing. Apparently the upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic uninstalled KGrubEditor without asking me, leaving me an empty launcher on the desktop.

I thought this might have had something to do with Ubuntu’s moving from Grub to Grub 2 with the 9.10 release, but that’s true only for new installs: Upgrades to 9.10 leave Grub in place and only update menu.lst. So I don’t know why it happened, and I remain a little annoyed. Grub should already have a GUI settings manager/applet in the Administration menu; it shouldn’t be up to some guy to write an independent app to do the job. Editing menu.lst is one of the things I do so rarely that I don’t get good at it, which is precisely why GUI settings editors are necessary.

KGrubEditor is nowhere in the list of apps available through the Synaptic Package Manager, and when I tried to add the KDE4 PPA repository containing KGrubEditor, Synaptic could not access it for some reason. (It may have been an old URL; I’m not an ace at such things and don’t know how to be sure.) I eventually just went up and downloaded the damned thing manually and installed it, but the app can’t find its OS icons and doesn’t correctly set the default boot menu item. I guess I have to uninstall it and reinstall it, but I’ve killed enough time on it this weekend and will leave that task for later.

The takeaway is simple: As good as Ubuntu Linux is, it still has some gaping holes, and bootloader settings management is at the top of that regrettable list.

Am I Blue?

Oct 30th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

In a word, no. And yet looking at recent operating system UIs, you’d think blue was the only color there is. Everywhere I look, I see GUIs that look like they were carved from a block of sea ice. (I guess that’s why modern GUI designs are so…cool.)

I’ll be doing an immersion experiment with Kubuntu 9.10 once it’s out and has had a few weeks to yield up its birth booboos, since KDE deserves a second chance. (I tried version 4.0 last year and it gave me no end of trouble.) But…KDE is so damned blue. Ditto Windows 7, which I haven’t seen a lot of yet but will probably be using sooner or later. And Mac OS/X as well. Now, don’t tell me that these OSes can be themed in any color you want. I know that. But why is blue so pervasive in every big-time OS except Ubuntu?

Well, there’s another blue distro out there, which I finally burned onto a livecd and played around with yesterday afternoon. It’s Puppy Linux, which I tried in its first release years back wasn’t impressed with. Puppy is now four, and much improved. It probed the SX270 graphics system and monitor here, and set itself up to use the default 1600 X 900 resolution with nary a whimper.

Puppy is unique in several ways. It’s not derived from any other distro, but was created from scratch by Australian Barry Kauler and is maintained by its own community. It’s a “lightweight” distro and was designed deliberately to make use of the fact that mermory is much cheaper now than it used to be: It loads into memory and mostly stays there. This is true even if you install it on a disk partition (as opposed to running it “without a trace” from the livecd) and includes the major apps as well as the OS itself. When installed on the hard drive it still plays from memory, writing changes to a disk file but avoiding disk access whenever possible. This makes it feel snappy in the extreme: Click on the Abiword icon and pop! Abiword is there in front of you. Other preinstalled apps include the Gnumeric spreadsheet, the Seamonkey email client, paint and draw programs, and a lightweight browser created for Puppy Linux. (There are more; those are the major ones.)

There are some additional FOSS packages available for download from the Puppy respositories, but in truth not nearly as much as you can get for Ubuntu and other major distros. There’s no apt-get; the Puppy installer format (PET) is unique, and if nobody put a FOSS package into Puppy’s PET format, you have to fool with tarballs etc. and do the install manually from the console.

There is also a mechanism (which I didn’t try) for repackaging changes to the Puppy system into distributable derivatives called puplets. Many of these can be had, always free. One makes Puppy look a great deal like Mac OS/X; others are tweaks to look/work well on hardware like the EeePC. Some come with a specific emphasis and preinstalled apps, like composing music or bioinformatics, of all things. In a sense, you’re creating an app installer that includes the OS along with the apps, which is an interesting idea. This can be done with other distros, but the Puppy remastering mechanism makes it trivial. Puppy or its puplets can be installed on a thumbdrive and will thus run on any machine that can boot from a USB device, with configuration changes written to the thumb drive. (Ditto a rewriteable optical drive, if the session wasn’t closed and there’s room on the optical disk for a change file.)

On the downside, certain simple configuation items hid well: I have not yet found the way to run apps from icons with a double click instead of the default single click. Nor did I find the way to add an app shortcut icon to the desktop for newly installed apps. I admit that I didn’t spend a huge amount of time with Puppy and probably won’t, but such simple things should be easily findable and obvious how to use.

So on Puppy I’m lukewarm. I don’t really need it for the sake of old slow hardware, but the idea of a lightweight RAM-based Linux on a bootable keychain thumb drive is fascinating, and I might download one of the puplets and try them in just that way. However, if you’re just looking for an easy-to-use Windows alternative, I think Ubuntu is a much better bet.

SX270 vs. SX280

Oct 13th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
13 comments

SX270SX280Comparison500Wide.jpgI’ve had a few days to play with the Dell SX280 Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF) PC that I bought on eBay for $90 some time back. It’s worth describing here, in case you’re looking for such a very small machine. The one I got was a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4/512 MB/40 GB system with XP Pro installed. It came with a USB keyboard and optical mouse. Both the mouse and the keyboard look brand new; the PC itself has obviously been used, but it’s quite clean and has no stickum blotches on it anywhere. I’d say a pretty good deal for $90.

SX280Interior500Wide.jpgThe SX280 field strips very easily. The photo above shows what you’ll see under the side panel, with the bright blue plastic fan shroud removed.

Here are some points of difference, between the Dell SX270 and SX280 USFF machines:

  • The SX280 is slightly larger (see photo above) and two pounds heavier. The SX270 weighs 7 pounds 5 ounces, and the SX280 9 pounds 4 ounces.
  • The SX280 uses 3.5″ SATA hard drives. The SX270 uses 2.5″ ATA hard drives. 3.5″ drives are cheaper, so that’s a plus.
  • The SX280 hard drive is very easy to remove. You pull the power and SATA connectors and it lifts up in a tray. The SX270 internal drive uses a more fragile ATA ribbon cable and connector system.
  • The removable drive bay is a different spec. Removable drives are not interchangeable between the two systems.
  • The SX270 has a reasonable internal speaker. Not hi-fi, but if you’re not listening to music it does fine for system notification sounds. The SX280 has no internal speaker at all.
  • The SX270 has PS/2 connectors on the back panel for mouse and keyboard. The SX280 lacks PS/2 connectors. You need to use USB peripherals, or get a PS/2-USB adapter.
  • The SX280 has 7 USB ports. The SX270 has 6. Remember that on the SX280, at least one of those must be devoted to keyboard and mouse.
  • Both systems have two internal slots for memory, but the sticks are not interchangeable between SX270s and SX280s.
  • Both systems have DVI video outputs only. (There’s an SX260 model, which is largely identical to the SX270, only with a VGA video connector.)
  • As best I can tell, neither the SX270 nor the SX280 can be tweaked to add video modes like 1600 X 900. This was a big disappointment, since the SX280’s Intel 910GL Express chipset was supposed to allow custom resolutions, but so far, utilities like PowerStrip can’t make it work. Oddly, Linux can do 1600 X 900, but there’s a custom driver for Linux. Intel’s standard driver seems peculiarly limited. (Some think it’s a BIOS limitation; me, I’m not sure, unless Linux ignores BIOS settings.)
  • Both systems have Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus DB9 serial and DB25 parallel ports.
  • Both systems use external power bricks. The SX280’s is about 25% larger and runs a little hotter.

Given that the SX270 and SX280 can both be had in 3.2 GHz versions, the SX280 is a minor win, especially without the ability to tweak the graphics drivers for 16:9 widescreen modes. SATA drives and a newer Intel chipset is about all the SX280 has going for it, and if you can deal with the less vast and slightly more expensive hard drives, the SX270 is smaller and currently cheaper. The SX280 is going to the church office, and I think I’ll be sticking with the SX270 for other uses.

Review: Banting’s A Letter On Corpulence

Sep 16th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

“Do you like Banting?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never banted.”

Unlike the oft-quoted line about our man Rudyard, this isn’t really a joke. I have banted, I’m still banting, and I do like it. However, I didn’t know it had a name until a couple of months ago, when I read William Banting’s A Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public, and began to research the booklet’s background.

Dr. Atkins, shove over. Mr. Banting was here first.

In London in the early 1860s, an overweight undertaker was talking to doctors about his obesity. He had watched himself put on weight over the previous thirty years until, at age 65, he weighed 202 pounds, and stood only five foot five inches. He was having trouble getting up and down stairs and doing simple things like tying his shoes. He was annoyed. He had tried everything local physicians suggested, including buying a boat to row on the Thames and walking briskly every day, and taking various medicines that we would today consider worthless nostrums. Nothing worked. Then he came upon Dr. William Harvey, who made a suggestion that seemed too simple to be useful: give up beer, sugar, and “farinaceous” (starchy) foods.

Banting did so, beginning in September, 1862. And fortunately for us, he was of a scientific turn of mind, and wrote down both what he ate daily, and what he weighed every three weeks, for the following year. And in that year he dropped 46 pounds, eating mostly meat and non-starchy vegetables, plus a piece of dry toast or rusk (zweiback) for tea. And he lost the weight even eating four meals a day and drinking an amount of alcohol that would leave me unconscious on the floor.

After losing about a pound a week for that year, he felt better than he had in two decades, could navigate stairs without hyperventilating, and do whatever he needed to do in terms of ordinary activities. He felt that his eyesight and hearing had improved. He was, in short, a happy guy. And having achieved his goal of losing significant weight, he did a remarkable thing: He wrote up his experience as a pamphlet addressed to the public (what today we’d call an “open letter”), printed it at his own expense, and then handed it out to anyone who was interested.

It was popular enough to warrant two sizeable addenda across several printings, but even with those included the whole thing is only 25 pages long, and available as a free facsimile scan from Google Books. You can read it in fifteen minutes, though people who are not used to Victorian diction may find the text a bit of a slog. The pamphlet became popular and was much discussed in the London area at that time, enough so that “to bant” became a new verb, and meant to adopt Banting’s diet as a means of losing weight.

The Google Books edition include two longish contemporary commentaries, one from Blackwood’s Magazine, the other from Harper’s Weekly. Both are snarky wanders intent on demeaning Banting’s experience, and neither confronts the truth face-on: Banting did an experiment, recorded his results, and made them public without any attempt to profit from them. (In fact, he gave 50 pounds to a local charity hospital in thanks.) Instead, Blackwood’s tries to convince its readers that Banting was not all that fat to begin with, and besides, fat people tend to be affable and law-abiding citizens, so it’s good to be fat! There’s not a lot to be taken away from the two reviews except the sense that things don’t change much; many of the same groundless arguments are thrown today at low-carb diets, simply because “everybody knows” that eating fat makes you fat and the best course is a “balanced diet,” which, as always, means “a diet that I favor.”

William Banting is important because his experience predates the modern carb wars by close to a century. He wasn’t trying to debunk Ancel Keys’ fraudulent research or establish a diet-book empire. He was just writing down something that had worked for him, and he cautiously suggested that, under advice from their own physicians, overweight people might try the same method. It may not work for everyone, but (in contradiction to the ridiculous critique in Blackwood’s) that does not mean it will not work for anyone.

Highly recommended, especially since you can read it over your eggs and bacon at tomorrow’s breakfast. (I read it on my X41.)

Review: Fat Head

Aug 18th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

fatheaddvd.jpgFor twelve years now I’ve been intrigued by the fact that every time I cut “habitual carbs” from my diet (and by that I mean carbs I eat every day, and not a couple of cookies or an ice cream cone now and then) I lose weight. I was even more intrigued when I spent a few weeks eating almost no carbs at all (basically, lots of protein and animal fat) and lost even more weight. I’ll have my latest bloodwork results back in a week or so, and (as requested) I’ll summarize the numbers here. I’ve read several books on the topic, as well as a pamphlet on obesity dating back to the Civil War. And having read the history of the carb wars in some detail, I see it as a classic “bad science” issue: Egos, agendas, lobbyists, grant money and slimy politics distorted the public message on diet and health, and even though the original science has long been discredited, too many people would lose too much face if the health establishment abruptly reversed itself…so the low-fat nonsense persists.

It’s a rich field of study, and if my last six months hadn’t been swallowed by rewriting a 600-page programming book, I would have begun reviewing the material here already. So let’s get started.

Tom Naughton’s DVD Fat Head is known mostly as a counterpoint to Morgan Spurlock’s much-hyped video complaint Supersize Me, but that’s not fair. Spurlock is a very small part of of it. What Naughton’s done here is create a witty 104-minute video overview of the carb wars that touches all the bases, from the historical origins of our low-fat hysteria to Flash-style animated illos of basic carb/fat metabolism, as well as a chronicle of a personal eating experience that weirdly echoes mine. (I had not heard of Fat Head until a few months ago, and did not watch it until last night.)

Naughton has done stand-up comedy, and it shows. He’s a disarming and engaging interviewer, buttonholing people outside of McDonald’s to see whether those people think fast food is high-calorie or unhealthy, or whether they feel addicted to it. At one point, he buttonholes a young woman with an accent. “Where are you from?” he asks. “Russia,” she replies. “Oh–can you say ‘Moose and Squirrel?'” She looks at him funny, but then she does say it, and it’s perfect.

I’m not a big consumer of video, documentaries least of all, but the lighthearted approach kept me going through a systematic debunking of Spurlock’s lard-it-on experience in Supersize Me that was in many respects the least interesting part of the film. Tom ate 2000 calories per day at McDonald’s or some other fast food joint for a month, and recorded what he ate. At the end of that period, having ingested a boggling quantity of what most of us could not have put down without vomiting, he found that he had lost weight. (At the end he said he was really tired of fast food–so much for it being addictive.) Most damning there is the fact that Spurlock refuses to release his food logs, suggesting that there was some exaggeration going on. (If not, why not just come clean and post the stuff?) And that’s one suggestion I have for future releases of this DVD: Put Tom’s food logs in a file on the DVD and allow people to view them without hunting for them. (The logs can be found online here.) My view: If you do not publish the data, what you’ve done is not research.)

As if that were not enough, after the McDonald’s month he spent another month doing what I did this past January: Eating almost no carbs at all, but feasting on bacon, eggs, marbled steaks, cheese fried in butter, and other yummy things that most people today find as frightening as the mythical Com’nists were in the 50s. When it was over, he had his blood numbers run again, and they improved.

Whoosh, can you spell “cognitive dissonance?”

That out of the way, Tom gets down to business, and explains how this came about, and then what the real story is, according to the best science we have today–rather than 1957, when the whole thing started going sour. He has short interviews with physicians and academics like Drs. Mary and Michael Eades, Dr. Al Sears, and Eric Oliver. He summarizes the whole problem with the 1950s-era research of Ancel Keys in a minute or so: Keys cherry-picked his data points correlating fat consumption and heart disease, ignoring nations where the two do not correlate. (He had data from 22 nations. He threw out all but 4 because the others made his graph a random walk.) Keys was originally opposed by almost everyone (including the American Heart Association) but he was a Right Man and would not back down over piddly things like additional research. Once politics got into the act in the early 1970s, government money started flowing to the low-fat partisans, and the war on fat began. (Funny how the obesity explosion began just about the same time.)

Probably the best part of the DVD is the summary of the health science behind his conclusions, done in simple animated diagrams. It’s not tremendously detailed and there are no citations to follow, but by watching it, you get your bearings. And that’s really what Fat Head is: orientation, and a starting point for further research. It doesn’t stand alone. After seeing Fat Head, you have to hit the library or the bookstore and pick up a few books, particularly Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, Fat Politics by Eric Oliver, and Protein Power, by the Drs. Eades. I would add Calories Don’t Count by Herman Taller (1962) and Banting’s Letter on Corpulence (1865). (I’m still working through Barry Groves’ Trick and Treat and have a few others on the shelf.) People cite much-ridiculed Dr. Atkins as well, but there’s nothing in the Atkins books that isn’t mentioned in many other places, and his conclusions have been vindicated in research that he had nothing to do with.

Finally, the closing credits roll over a wonderful original funny song (I guess you could call it a filk) called “The Experts,” which in some respects is worth the price of admission. I don’t see the lyrics on Tom Naughton’s Web site, but damn, don’t miss it!

Highly recommended.

Jaunty Jackalope in Only 2:45

Jun 5th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

I finished and packed off the introduction to the book today, which doesn’t leave a great deal more to do. I’m still “discussing” how to handle my two ASCII charts, which I laid out in InDesign and exported as PDFs. It boggles to imagine that nobody there knows how to insert a PDF into a print image, but that’s the impression I’m getting. Now and then I think publishing was better off when we strung books together with X-Acto knives and waxers.

Let it go, I keep telling myself. Nobody’s going to hang me if I don’t include a concise representation of the IBM-850 code page, as useful as it might sometimes be.

And my do-it list is calling to me. I knocked off an item today that’s worth relating: I upgraded the Ubuntu 8.10 instance on this machine to 9.04. I let the updater do it, just to see how automatically and how accurately it would happen. I’ve got a lot of software installed there (including several Windows apps under Crossover) and lots of configuration tweaks.

It happened completely automatically. I was asked twice if I wanted to keep the existing menu.lst file, which I didn’t recognize and didn’t run downstairs to look up. Alas, I told it to keep the existing one, which it obediently did–and thus didn’t update the menu display for Grub. I can fix that, but I’m annoyed at myself for being too lazy to look first.

Beyond that, as best I can tell, nothing was corrupted or left out or changed in any significant way. It took two hours and forty-five minutes, most of which was spent downloading 1,413 files from the repositories. It didn’t demand to reboot until the end of the process, which is a trick Microsoft should learn.

I admit, I was a little disappointed that there’s no funny animal in the default wallpaper. I liked the Hardy Heron art a lot; and Intrepid Ibex wasn’t bad once I got used to it, as much as it resembled a soda glass ring on a leather couch. Jackalopes don’t exist except in our imaginations (though there was one on the wall of the Pie Pan restaurant in Sauganash where we lunched with my grandmother in the early 1960s) so perhaps omitting it makes a rough kind of sense. Come October we’ll see what a Karmic Koala looks like. Maybe.

Anyway. It went great. Completely trouble-free so far. Highly recommended.

The Sugar Bowl Is Back!

May 24th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

sugarbowl.jpgWhile going over to get my shirts back from the cleaners last week, I noticed with delight that the Sugar Bowl has reopened under new ownership, having been closed since early 2007. The Sugar Bowl is a venerable restaurant in downtown Des Plaines, a little to the east of the even more venerable Des Plaines Theater, which has been a Bollywood cheaps house for about ten years now. My cousin Maggie McGuire worked at the Sugar Bowl for 17 years until a very peculiar incident forced it to close. It was sold and reopened for a few years in the early oughties, then closed again and sat empty for more than two years.

Carol and I walked over there this morning about 7:30 for breakfast, and I was most pleased. The Sugar Bowl was purchased by two Greeks, who rehabbed it down to the bones and made it sparkle. Around here, nobody does breakfast places like the Greeks, who also operate Kappy’s in Niles about four blocks north of where Carol grew up (along with countless others). Their coffee is strong but not in the least bitter, and probably ideal for the breakfast-out crowd. I had two eggs scrambled with bacon, and Carol their cheese blintzes. The eggs were completely cooked (not always the case in restaurants, and important in this Era of Salmonella) and the bacon done to a perfect crisp. Carol would have liked her blintzes a little bit warmer. We think they’re trying to make an impression by being fast, and they were, but you have to finish the job.

They’re open every day from 6:00 AM until 3:00 PM. It’s great to have a Greek-run breakfast and lunch place within a quick trot of our condo, and while it’s not “fine dining,” it’s still dead-center in the grand Chicago tradition of locally owned one-off family restaurants. Highly recommended.

For Small Values of “Thumb”

May 20th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

tinythumbdrive.jpg

The last time we had the nerd gang over, Eric Bowersox gave me a couple of the smallest USB thumb drives I have ever seen. The unit shown above right is 1 3/8″ long X 1/2″ wide and holds 512MB. It was a promo giveaway branded with AMD’s logo, containing tech spec PDFs for AMD’s CPUs and motherboards. I included a 4 GB Cruzer Micro Skin in the photo for comparison, but what doesn’t show well is the little gadget’s thickness, which is just about 1/16″, or a hair over 2 mm.

The unit Eric gave me is a Kingmax Super Stick, and in case that’s too big for ya, there is also a Kingmax Super Stick Mini that is another 4 mm shorter. I was not surprised to see that they have higher-capacity units, from 2GB up to 16GB. The 4GB unit sells on Amazon for $6.95, and the 16 GB for only $35.75. Kingmax knows its market, or at least understands careless geek laundry habits, since the product is advertised as “…washer and dryer SAFE!”

A drive that small is basically the size of the glass-epoxy connection tang inside a conventional USB flash drive, minus the metal guide that ordinarily surrounds it. The downside to a thumb drive without the metal guide is that it can plug into a USB port two ways, only one of which is useful. I made that mistake the first time I tried it, but I recognize that there’s no harm done plugging it in the wrong way, because in that event there’s no electrical connection between drive and port.

It’s a little small for my own personal thumbs, but may be a reasonable form factor for plugging into netbooks or smuggling across borders stuffed up one nostril. What I find more notable is the fact that 512MB flash drives are now so cheap that they can be produced as trade-show freebies. The size of our data isn’t increasing, and the capacity of cheap storage is expanding astonishingly fast. What’s the bandwidth of a $5, 64 GB nostril drive crammed full of 25,000 MP3s and passed from one hand to another? Media creators are wondering in their nightmares, and if they aren’t, they should be, because we’ll be there before you know it.

Cranky Insight

May 19th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
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I haven’t posted for eight days, and people are starting to send me notes asking if I’m all right. I am, though I’m not sleeping well and don’t have my usual energy. Whatever time and oomph I haven’t had to devote to family issues here I’ve been pouring into the book. I’m now 161,000 words in, of about 180,000 total, so the end really is in sight–but seeing the end isn’t enough. I still have to grind through the material.

I will take an opportunity to gripe a little, this time about the Insight GUI shipped for and with the gdb debugger. Insight isn’t perfect, and parts of it are excellent–especially compared to the molasses marathon of using naked gdb in a console, God help us–but a good deal of it is simply awful. I chose Insight as the example debugging tool for my third edition, in part because it’s technically a component of gdb and not an add-on. However, it comes closer to the truth to say that after I interviewed Linux debuggers for use with C-free assembly code, Insight was the last man standing. Most debuggers assume that they’ll be dealing with clib and C source code, and don’t know how to load a C-free executable, even if contains valid STABS or DWARF debug info. At least Insight allows assembly language source debugging in a window.

As grateful as I am for it, certain things about Insight make me nuts. Good example: The Memory view. This is an ordinary hexdump-style memory display, with only two means of navigation. You can scroll the dump up or down for 16 bytes by clicking the arrows, or you can type in a new address in an entry field. And I mean type–the GUI does not recognize paste from the clipboard. If you want to fill the field with a new address, the keyboard is all you get. Worse, moving up- or down-memory by clicking the arrow buttons takes one to three seconds to refresh the window. (This is not an exaggeration. I timed it.) An operation like that, on a 2.8 GHz machine, should be instantaneous. How about buttons to take us to the address currently in ESP or EIP? Or sheesh, maybe implement paste from the clipboard to the address entry field!

I’m tempted to blame it on the fact that Insight is written in Tcl/Tk, but I’ve actually used Tcl/Tk and I don’t think it’s inherently that slow. The only guess I would hazard is that because working in naked gdb is horrendously ponderous but still nearly universal in the Linux world, the guys who wrote Insight didn’t know any better, and thought that their results were transcendently wonderful. Not true. One click is often (if not always) worth twenty or more frantic keystrokes. To me, that’s a win. You command-line people should get out more.

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