Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

When XP’s svchost.exe Takes 100% of the CPU

I have computers the way some people have mice (those other mice, with legs) and two days ago, a couple of them went nuts. Carol’s SX280 went to 100% CPU usage and roaring fans, and when I turned it on, a second machine (an older SX270) did the same thing. Rebooting changed nothing, though it took a minute or so after reboot for the problem to reappear, which allowed me to do some hasty troubleshooting.

Meanwhile, my quadcore purred along without incident. All three machines use XP SP3, and all three are set for auotmatic updates. I pulled an older SX270 off the shelf that I knew was still at XP SP2 and hooked it up on the bench. Nothing so far. I booted into Windows 7 on my GX620 (it ordinarily runs Mint) and have not seen anything out of the ordinary.

The module sucking all those cycles is the instance of svchost.exe that runs all of the miscellanous Windows machinery, including updates. Hmmmmm.

This is not a new problem; in fact, this rang some bells so old the cloud of dust took an hour to settle. As long ago as 2004, people have reported svchost.exe suddenly taking the whole CPU. Quite a few reports indicated that the culprit was the Windows Update automatic updates client, wuauclt.exe. I turned off automatic updates on the misbehaving machines, rebooted again, and the problem went away.

That’s only a partial solution, of course. And the problem is evidently still with us. In the comments to that post, a user suggested this command series as a fix:

net stop “Automatic Updates”
del /f /s /q %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\*.*
net start “Automatic Updates”
wuauclt.exe /detectnow

In essence, you disable automatic updates, delete all the files from the subdirectory where wuauclt.exe keeps its logs and other data files (you can’t do this if automatic updates is running), restart automatic updates, and then force an immediate check for updates. This worked, and I dusted my hands together in triumph.

Alas, yesterday noonish, both machines again went nuts. Both are scheduled for replacement, so I just let them run. After about two hours of screaming fans, svchost.exe let go of the CPU, and everything returned to normal. In the meantime, my quadcore and that creaky old SP2 machine have shown no symptoms.

I still don’t know precisely what’s going on, but it’s almost certainly some kind of bug in automatic updates. (I’ve scanned all machines for malware and found nothing.) XP updates end next April 1, and by that time I’ll have replaced the two wonky machines with much newer Win7 boxes. (One is already on order.) In the meantime, I’d be curious to hear if anyone reading this has seen the same issue. I expected to see a flurry of online reports and found nothing, right up to a couple of minutes ago. So maybe Carol and I just got to the top of the XP karma fairy’s little list. Still looking, and certainly open to suggestions.

A Venerable Old Con

Oct 8th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

I got the email below this morning. It’s similar to messages of this sort that I receive regularly, with the single difference that I know the supposed sender. I say “supposed” because I know damned well it didn’t come from her. Here’s the text, minus identifying characteristics:

Good morning,

I Hope you get this on time, I made a trip to UKRAINE and had my bag stolen from me with my passport and personal effects therein. The embassy has just issued me a temporary passport but I have to pay for a ticket and settle my hotel bills with the Manager.

I have made contact with my bank but it would take me 3-5 working days to access funds in my account, the bad news is my flight will be leaving very soon but i am having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let me leave until i settle the bills, I need your help/LOAN financially and I promise to make the refund once i get back home, you are my last resort and hope, Please let me know if i can count on you and i need you to keep checking your email because it’s the only way i can reach you.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Ms. Real Person

REAL_HOME_PAGE_URL.com

FAKE@aol.com

REAL_BLOG_URL.com

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter

This con has been around forever and most people have heard of it, but in case you haven’t, beware. Everything in the contact info is real except for the email address, which will not put you in touch with Ms. Real Person, but the scammer. I checked with Ms. Real Person and she had not yet heard that she was being used in the scam. It’s possible that the mass mailing used many scraped contact blocks to avoid popping up immediately on scam reporting sites.

Scams appealing to greed (i.e, 419/Spanish Prisoner) are way down here, and scams like this appealing to goodheartedness are on the upswing. I’d be curious to see if the same is true for all of you.

It’s a Zoo Out Here

Oct 4th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

9 comments

Yesterday afternoon I walked down to the mailbox to see if the held mail notice was still in it. Just as I slammed the mailbox door, an adult black bear rounded the corner of Stanwell and Langdale, and ambled down the middle of the sidewalk, straight at me. It was fat as bears go, granted that this is the time of year for bears to be fat. Fat or not, what impressed me was that it saw me and didn’t stop ambling. On it came. Forty feet. Thirty feet. Twenty-five feet. There the bear paused, still in the middle of the sidewalk. This was closer than I’d ever been to a black bear without lots of iron between us, and way closer than I’d prefer to be. My first thought was to look for cubs. Not the time of year for that, and nothing in view. My second thought proceeded from my training as a fiction writer: What does this character want? No clue. My third thought was to start backing up, slowly. I’m thin. The bear was fat. It was about 100 feet to my front door. I started doing the math.

After I backed up ten or fifteen feet, the bear ambled across our neighbors’ gravel landscaping and galomphed down into the gully between our houses, where there is a galvanized iron pipe under Stanwell carrying runoff from farther up the mountain. It’s gotten a lot of use this (wet) summer, and was still trickling a little. The bear hunkered down and started lapping water from the open end of the pipe.

I had gotten between a bear and what it wanted, which probably isn’t a good idea. At least the bear was courteous enough to wait for me to figure that out.

Today’s animal stories don’t end there, Uncle Lar. No indeedy. On Tuesday, a skunk got into Jimi Henton’s back yard. Jimi boards the Pack when we travel (we bought three of them from her, in fact, so they’re basically family) and the four of them much enjoy the luxury of having a back yard where they can run around in circles. Aero likes to bark at animals that he sees, generally out the kitchen nook window. Here was one of a sort he doesn’t see often, and he headed off at a gallop to protect his breeder and his pack from the interloper. Shortly afterward, Jimi smelled skunk in the house. She has a doggie door into the back yard and assumed the worst. But no, it was skunk by proxy. By the time she cornered Aero in her living room the whole house reeked.

Four baths and all sorts of exotic remedies later, he still smells a little. But here’s a tip for the skunklorn: Take off the dog’s collar. Much of the smell that remained was in the leather, which is now double-bagged in the big garage trash can.

Oh, and earlier today I saw nine deer right across the street, eating the grass. This is one reason we didn’t plant grass.

Tonight I will grill a good steak in honor of the animal kingdom. I will grill it from my main deck, which lacks stairs and is 23 feet above the ground. If I see any of my animal friends down in the gully, I will wave, hold up the steak, and say, Don’t push your luck.

37 Years of Joyful Determination

Oct 2nd, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Wedding Rice Thrown - 500 Wide.jpg

Carol and I just got back from Chicago last night, after twelve out-of-breath days largely spent marrying off our older nephew Brian. Done! More on this later; it was a wedding like no other. I’ll post pictures when pictures start trickling in. (The photo above is another couple you may know, dodging a mixture of rice and punch-card chad.)

Brian and his lady Alexis are now at the beach on an island on the opposite side of the planet, and Carol and I are still cheering for them. They’re not our children, of course, not precisely (Brian is Carol’s godson) but we’re very proud of them for a great many things. Among these are a sense we see in them that marriage can work, and a determination to make it work that we recognized instantly. We recognized it instantly because that determination lies at the very heart of our own lives together.

Thirty-seven years ago today, Carol and I took that determination and made it explicit: We would stand beside one another no matter what. Marriage is friendship sanctified, and we had been working hard on our friendship for seven years by then. It’s difficult to describe how much deeper and stronger our friendship is now. The best we can do is let our friendship stand on its merits. Time shatters what cannot hold, and perfects what cannot be broken. You’ve seen us, spoken with us, worked with us, and celebrated with us. I think you all know which way Time has taken us.

For Brian and Ali and all the rest of you who have chosen the path of marriage, we offer our encouragement and our applause, in the hope that Time will grant you all that it has granted us, and more.

Pat Thurman K7KR, SK

Sep 13th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

I’m numb. This past Tuesday we lost Pat Thurman, K7KR. He had been struggling with multiple medical issues for a couple of months, and at some point they simply overwhelmed him. Flesh is fragile, even when the spirit is strong.

Like many people, Pat knew of me from my books and my magazine work, and when I announced in my DDJ column that Carol and I were moving to Arizona at the beginning of 1990, he sent me a note and told us to get in touch once we arrived. We did. Pat and his wife Sue became instant friends, and within a year, neighbors, out in the wild dirt-road country at the northern tip of Scottsdale.

Pat was a DXer and contester of formidable skill. While I watched in awe, he put up a 75′ winch-up tower with a highly engineered ground system and a couple of very large steerable beams. (I contented myself with a 200′ longwire and a 6M vertical.) His thunderous signal was heard around the world. His official DX count is 245 countries. (There are 340 right now.) Mine? 17.

We did a lot of offroading in the Tonto National Forest in his high-clearance Jimmy, and visited Sheep’s Bridge. On one of those early trips, Pat stopped the Jimmy for a tarantula in the road. We got out and gathered around the tarantula, which was the first (though it would not be the last) that I had seen in the wild. I wanted a picture, and for scale Pat tossed a quarter onto the road about a foot away from the spider. I worried that the quarter would scare it away. Not so: The tarantula pounced on the quarter so quickly we figured it just teleported. Then once it realized that quarters weren’t edible, it ambled slowly off into the brush.

Pat and Sue were early and eager beta readers for The Cunning Blood, and the inspiration for my Filer Fitzgerald character came from a character in one of Sue’s shows that promoted reading for grade schoolers. It was for that same show that I built The Head of R&D, as I mentioned here some time back. We ate a lot of dinners together, drank a lot of Dornfelder, laughed a great deal, and talked about all kinds of things.

If I can point to any single force that hauled me out of the spiritual mailaise I’d been in for twenty years back in the early 1990s, it was Pat and Sue, and their aptly named parish, Our Lady of Joy. My childhood religion was grim, Hell-centric, and focused on self-denial well beyond what I would call “a healthy discipline.” We originally attended the Sunday night “teen mass” with Pat because Pat and Sue had twin teen sons, and Sue was in the music group. I was astonished: The music they played and sang was downright exuberant: “Send Down the Fire,” “The Canticle of the Turning,” “One Is,” and many more. It made me wonder if there were more to Catholicism than a celebration of human and divine suffering. Our Lady of Joy allowed me to imagine a Catholic tradition that celebrates the physical world, and a God who will not settle for partial victories. Pat and Sue didn’t follow us to Old Catholicism, but without their influence, Carol and I would never have known the journey was even possible.

The older I get, the more I’m certain that friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit. Alas, the older I get, the more I see my friends leaving this world for other realms. I’m 61 now, and I know enough math to understand that that’s just how things work. Does friendship even have a point, if death can end it so easily?

But…maybe it does, because…maybe it doesn’t. If you get my drift.

K7KR DE K7JPD / TNKS GUD LK ES 73 CUL SK.

Ohm’s Law Is a Bitch

Jul 10th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

Jimi Henton, the local breeder from whom we got Aero, Jack, and Dash, brought me her dog grooming dryer some time back to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. Carol has the exact same dryer, a Chris Christensen Kool Dry. It’s basically an SCR-controlled variable-speed fan in a box, putting out 114 CFM through a hose.

Jimi said it wasn’t blowing as much air as it used to, even after she cleaned the filter and made sure nothing else was gummed up with dog hair. It still blew, and the pot still varied the fan speed, but it wasn’t as loud and clearly didn’t have its out-of-the-box oomph. Worse, she’d had a new motor installed last year. The first one had gone for eleven years before dying; this seemed kind of premature.

I wanted to compare the two dryers to get a sense for how much air was being lost in Jimi’s. I have no way to measure airflow here, but sitting on the laundry room floor I noticed Jack’s little soccer ball, much reduced from its original size, but still round enough for my purposes. With only a little skill I managed to get the ball levitating over the nozzle, as any kid who’s bright enough to put a vacuum cleaner in reverse has done. On Carol’s dryer, the ball wobbled between 18″ and 24″ above the nozzle. On Jimi’s, it was maybe 4″.

So there was work to do, somewhere. Upon opening the dryer up, at least one problem was obvious: The 1,025 watt AC motor was wired to the speed control with #24 telephone wire, and too much of it. (You know, the stuff with the two-color, bands-on-solid insulation.) Close inspection showed two cold solder joints, coincidentally (heh) where the #24 wire hit the speed control pot. The plastic insulation on the phone wire was blackened with heat. The dryer slowly was cooking itself from the resistance of all that skinny wire. No need for a fork; it was done.

Jimi had ordered the motor from the manufacturer and then had somebody local put it into the dryer. She called him an amateur. No. I’m an amateur, with a callsign to prove it. I do electronics because I love it. Whoever installed this motor was…an idiot.

All fixed now, using some #14 stranded wire and soldering skills I learned when I was eleven. Both dryers now loft the soccer ball two feet hgh. Ohm’s Law is a bitch, dude. Please go back to sharpening scissors.

Summer Doldrums

Jul 9th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Yes, I’ve been gone for awhile, and for any number of reasons found it inconvenient to put anything together until this evening. I’ve been having some trouble with that old book-hauling injury in my left arm, spent ten days in Chicago, fixed some stuff (including an interesting repair on a dog grooming hair dryer) and learned some new things that I didn’t expect to learn, including a few that I probably didn’t need to learn.

In short, I’ve had nothing much to report, and in the summer heat just felt better reading books and taking it easy in the cause of getting my whiny supinator to shut the hell up. The gruel here is on the thin side, but that’s summer.

My younger niancee, Justine, made me aware of something called Prancercise by demonstrating it in front of the whole family. Damn. I thought she was kidding. Then I watched the video. Wow. It has nothing on the Invisible Horse Dance, but it could be the next craze at weddings. Or maybe not.

Weddings. We did attend a terrific wedding, of the daughter of my oldest friend Art. At her reception I saw something called the Casper Slide–not to be confused with the skateboarding stunt of the same name. And if you are confused, you’re not alone. I think this is why the real name of the dance is the Cha-Cha Slide, developed by a Chicago DJ named Casper. I watched the dance, and apart from some stomping, it looked a lot like the Electric Slide. But hey, what do I know about cultural tropes?

Another bit of knowledge that was true but unwelcome is that Barnes & Noble comtinues to come apart at the seams. Their CEO quit the other day over the failure of the Nook tablets to capture any significant part of the tablet market. The Nook division is for sale, and Microsoft is making slobbering noises. The Nook guys have been on my you-know-what list for some time, for pushing down updates that freeze in mid-install and can’t be removed. (I don’t use AMV, but I wonder if it works at all after the installer gets stuck.) Leonard Riggio wants to take back the retail division. A lot of stores are closing, and half the remaining stores have leases that expire in 2016. And everybody’s wondering what happens after all this happens. Especially publishers.

I learned that the Chicago Tribune has a page dedicated to documenting every single homicide that happens in Chicago. That this would be a big, frequently updated page is bad enough. That is exists at all is worse. I guess Chicago is a terrific place to be from.

There’s a video on domesticated fox, pointed out to me by Pete Albrecht. I mentioned the Russian research on Siberian fox years ago, but this is the first time I’ve seen videos of the animals themselves. It’s sad in a way; the poor things are stuck somewhere between fox and dogs, and are at best unreliably tame. It’s pretty clear to me, however, that this was the same process our ancestors used to turn wolves into dogs. And it didn’t take thousands of years.

I learned that the backlight behind the controls of my new car stereo changes color continuously.

Ok, ok, I can see eyes glazing over. That’s it for tonight. I hope to get back on my usual schedule shortly.

Dude, Where’s (the Rest of) My Thumb Drive?

Jun 21st, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

My new knobless car stereo worked beautifully…except that it couldn’t keep time. The LCD clock display was erratic from the beginning. For the first day or two it was gaining five minutes per day. Then the whole thing reset to January 1 at midnight. I set it again to the current date and time. It ran fast for a couple more days. Then it reset itself again. Nothing was done to the car in that time frame, so it wasn’t that the battery was disconnected from the stereo.

It was just a lemon. So I invoked the 30-day warranty and took it back.

Yesterday I had them swap it out for a Sony XAV-601BT. I’m watching its clock (and everything else) but so far it’s glitch-free. Oh–and it has a volume control knob! It can do hands-free Bluetooth phone wrangling, and a lot of other stuff I haven’t figured out yet. But in addition to all that, it has a USB port on the front panel. That means I can plug a thumb drive right into the stereo itself, and not into a wire dangling off the back of it.

Skin and Fit.jpg

Of course, having bent more than one thumb drive by careless use, I wanted to be sure that a casual hand-wave wouldn’t destroy a drive with every damned MP3 I own on it. So I bought me a thumb drive unlike any other: The 16GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit. Once you plug it into something, the part that sticks out isn’t quite 1/4″ long.

Dude! Where’s the rest of my thumb drive? But no, that’s all there is. It’s just a bump on the stereo front panel.

The stereo is still on probation, of course, but I’m thinking this one is a keeper. More as it (hopefully doesn’t) happen.

The Black Forest Fire From a Safe Distance

Jun 11th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Black Forest Fire June 11 2013-1.jpg

I hope.

Actually, it’s about 17 miles NNE of here. I drove down Broadmoor Bluffs to where I had a good NE horizon to take the shot. The location is about 200 feet higher than downtown Colorado Springs, so it’s as good a vantage point as I’m likely to get.

We’re just looking over our shoulders a lot today. I don’t think we’re going to stop any time soon.

Something’s Burning…Again

Jun 11th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Noonish today, Carol asked me to go out on the porch and sniff. There was a haze in the air that we don’t generally see, and the faint whiff of fire. I knew that there were a couple of fires over a hundred miles SW of us, and didn’t give it a lot of thought. I had a writers group meeting at 1 PM up at the Pikes Perk coffee shop at Academy and Vickers. We wrapped up a little before 3, and when we got out into the parking lot, Cynthia Felice began gesturing wildly to the northeast. I was already in the car, but I jumped out and looked where she was pointing.

Immense plume of black and gray smoke. I watched for the motion of the billows to get a sense for its distance. My guess was 6-7 miles. Once I got home it was all over the local news, and we learned that it started in the Black Forest area northeast of Colorado Springs. Measured distance from Pikes Perk to the fire is about eight miles, so I was close. From our house on the other side of the city (we’re less than a mile from the NORAD entrance, if you know where that is) it’s about 18 miles to the fire. I should have snapped a picture on my phone, but I wanted to get my butt home ASAP.

And there’s another one. A new fire broke out down near the Royal Gorge to the west of Canon City at about the same time. That one is even farther away; I measure about 30-35 miles from here. Still, we’re seeing the smoke from here, and the air smells a lot more like fire.

The Black Forest fire is blowing toward the northeast, directly away from us and away from more populated areas in Colorado Springs. However, several houses have already burned, and it doesn’t sound like there’s been any progress yet in controlling the fire.

I’m putting the dog kennels in the 4Runner. I’m watching things on TV. We’re in no immediate danger, but cripes! Up in Black Forest homes were burning half an hour after the fire was reported. When there’s a 30 MPH wind, these things happen fast.

I’ll report here and on Facebook from time to time. Check Facebook first.