Windows Vista still sucks after 16 months

When it launched, I commented that all those people floundering around in the video represent the new Vista users figuring out how to make the damn thing work. Now, after a full year and a service pack, plus numerous security updates, it's time to take another look at Vista.
We tried for a long time to suffer along with the UAC ("User Annoyance Control") message, but eventually I gave up. The time it has taken for the dialogue box to come up and then go away again after clicking has increased progressively over time: 10-15 seconds waiting is just too long, when CCleaner only takes about that long to run. So now we have to put up with Annoyance #2: the warning message that Annoyance #1 is switched off.
Vista Service Pack 1 fixed my other main gripe: printing. Our HP1020 printer is connected to Penny's Vista machine, and each time I wanted to print out a page I would have to send the page to the shared printer, and then go to her machine and reboot it to get the page to print. I kid you not! After SP1 I can now print correctly. It was nice of Microsoft to make me wait over a year for this bug fix. Shared printers are obviously not big in Redmond.
Of course the related bug is still not fixed: the HP 1020 driver for Vista and XP makes horrible little black rectangles down the right hand margin of the page whenever graphics are used. HP is unlikely to fix this because they don't care about their old HP1020 customers. So I will probably not buy another HP printer, even though I have owned 3 or 4 over the years. Enough is enough.
That gets rid of the main issues. But of course Office 2002 still doesn't work with Vista correctly, and there is no sign of a bug fix either. Each time Penny wants to collect her email Outlook 2002 asks for her password. It doesn't do this on my XP machine, and I have exactly the same version of Outlook. I'm not prepared to spend a fortune upgrading to a newer version of Outlook just to fix this bug.
Speaking of upgrades, I'm not prepared to spend money upgrading Office 2002 just to get the Office Assistant (i.e. Clippy) to work either. I'm not even sure if Office 2007 has one, but it has those dreadful toolbars and no option of a menu, so Microsoft in all its wisdom has lost another Office customer.
Then there is the brain dead "Power Off" button in Vista that actually does a "Standby" (there is NO hibernate option) instead of a "Shut Down". I finally found out from Paul Thurrott how to change it, so now at least it does what it is supposed to.
Vista Home editions don't have a "fax" option, unlike Windows XP, so each time we need to send a fax from home (we don't have a fax machine at home) we have to use the modem in my laptop, because I'm still running WinXP. Another Microsoft brainwave: the fax option is only available in the Business editions of Vista, because fax machines are found in most offices, but not in most homes. Genius!
So if I get a laptop with Vista on it, I'll probably have to get the Business edition, and hope that it can do "home" things like play music and DVDs. Only time will tell. Of couse, I can't to an "anytime upgrade" because that isn't available to HP South Africa customers. I guess I probably won't be buying an HP laptop after all.

Tracker Makes More Noise

Tracker, our noisy neighbours, seem to be returning to their helicopter "joyride" days. Their offices are less than 400m (as the crow flies) from a functioning helipad, but that's not good enough for these guys. They'd rather the helicopter lands on the lawns in a designated nature reserve, where there is no wind sock, with tall trees and buildings nearby.

Click on the picture for a more detailed Google Earth image

I hope they got CAA permission this time, although I doubt it. And, of course, their public liability insurance wouldn't cover a helicopter crash in a suburb if it was unauthorised.
Tracker specialises in noisy behaviour at their offices. On Thursday 17th April, during the middle of a "load shedding" blackout, they held a noisy function in their parking garage, playing their music loud enough to be heard blocks away, especially since the only other sound that could be heard was the noise of their backup generators in an otherwise silent neighbourhood.

Reserve Bank Policy Madness

I'm not the sheep type. I always believe in asking questions. After the umpteenth increase in the bank rate, I finally have had enough, so I went to the Reserve Bank web site and clicked on the "Contact Us" button to ask the following question:

I understand that inflation occurs when prices are raised, such as electricity, fuel, food, wages, bank charges, etc.
I don't understand why inflation is supposed to be reduced by raising the bank rates, in particular home loans. If the cost of my home loan goes up, how is this different from the cost of fuel or electricity going up?
Please advise

I will post the SARB response. If anyone would like to explain this anomaly in non-jargon terms, please feel free to leave a comment.
Update: "Patrick" from the reserve bank sent me some "Fact Sheet" PDF files, that you can find at the reserve bank's web site by going to the "About Us" section and clicking on "Fact Sheets". I guess if they need to explain it in 8 fact sheets then the simple answer is that there is no simple answer and we must just shut up and pay. Thanks for nothing.

UltimateDefrag Announces Freeware and Special Offer

After announcing the new UltimateDefrag 2008 product, Disktrix also announced a freeware version 1.72 (with no technical support), as well as special offer: $10 saving until the end of June on the purchase of the new version 2008, which normally costs $39.95.
I will be publishing benchmarks and a review of version 2008 sometime soon, and the older version was reviewed a year ago, with a "thumbs up", especially for performance junkies. Disktrix have also announced improved boot time support, to be released shortly.

Eskom Unplugged by Noseweek

I love reading Noseweek ("news you're not supposed to know") because they are one of the few publications in South Africa that keeps us honest.
I bought their May issue only last week, and now courtesy of their web site you can (for a limited time) read their fascinating account of how Eskom has mismanaged themselves and put the entire economy at risk. Here is the summarised version of how to run a mega-corporation into the ground in seven easy steps:
Step 1: Look after number one
This involves lucrative "special contracts" with key employees and high flyers.
Step 2: Put your hand in the cookie jar
Sell off assets but keep the best ones for select employees who can then make a fortune by selling them at a profit later
Step 3: Take in a lodger
Rent space to SARS at a special low rate for 15 years, so you end up having to build extra space for your own needs and spend R50 million doing so.
Step 4: Be too clever to take advice
Set up a special relationship with the Reserve Bank and then ignore it.
Step 5: Do some truly weird stuff
Pay for a lavish junket to Iraq in an attempt to get business from Saddam Hussein.
Step 6: When the shit hits the fan, lie!
When power blackouts occur, give out little or no real information on how bad the grid is maintained and run. If in doubt, give out the wrong information.
Step 7: Give jobs to the boys
Give out contracts to ANC front companies so the party can make a cool R3billion profit from the deal. Never mind the contracts are late and way behind schedule, or that the pricing and product was originally not good enough.
You can subscribe to Noseweek online at www.noseweek.co.za

Little Brother: are you paranoid enough yet?

I bought and downloaded the audio (MP3) version of Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother", but you can download the text version for free. I found it fascinating, scary, entertaining and challenging. The book is nearly 12 hours long, and I found it difficult to stop listening. You can check out the Amazon reviews as well.
In the story scenario the school kids use a fictitious Linux distro called "Paranoid Linux" that tries to keep its presence on the net invisible, and uses Public Key crypto for sending secure emails. It's a pity that it would require a severe crackdown on civil liberties to get people to use this kind of email.
One thing you can do right now to secure the privacy of at least some of your data is to install and use TrueCrypt so that if (when) your computer gets stolen, your private files remain private.
What's the big deal about privacy? If your home has ever been broken into, remember how you felt to find that someone had invaded your space. Now apply the same feeling to your personal documents. Do you really want some criminal syndicate getting hold of your credit card statements, or finding out who your business associates are? Do you want your investment broker getting instructions to sell your bonds and send the proceeds to your "new" cheque account that doesn't belong to you?

Kauai Floo Fighter

Yesterday I popped into the Kauai coffee bar at my local gym, and tried their "floo fighter" hot beverage. It consists of Twinings Peppermint tea, fresh ginger, fresh lemon juice, Cayenne pepper and honey.
Quite a mixture, and strong too! It's definitely one of those anti-flu remedies that feels like its working, without tasting particularly vile. In fact, it was just the thing for a cold winter's day after a tiring swim. (It's nearly winter in the southern hemisphere, particularly on the highveld.)

UltimateDefrag 2008 Debate: I

Regular readers of this blog already know that I had an unfortunate spat with DiskTrix over their marketing emails. Since it was a genuine mistake I have removed the article. In the meantime I have had an interesting conversation with Robert Ferraro about UltimateDefrag, file placement, benchmarks and the like. I will include some extracts here, and hope to add some more soon. He writes:

"I just read your quick spiel on Defraggler before. You said that you’ve never come across a program that could analyze any faster than Defraggler.
"I am sorry but this is highly untrue….
"On a 500 Gb drive with 348 Gb and 405,001 files this is the result of my analyze:
Defraggler: 160 seconds
UltimateDefrag: 37 seconds
"We analyze a drive 432% faster than defraggler or in other words in 23% of the time – less than a quarter. When you minimize our display – we actually analyze that same drive in 33 seconds.
"I can assure you that with 3 years of perfecting our analysis routine – it’s as overhead free as you could get by all coding standards.
"Please note also that with UltimateDefrag – Fragmented Files Only (FFO) …. We can get you from program start to completely defragged much faster than Defraggler since we save all that time on analysis and you don’t need to select files manually. Of course one feature of UltimateDefrag is that we can defrag individual files or just all files in a folder for that matter. So while we have all of our advanced features – the most simple of all defrags – Fragmented Files Only – is there too.
"One “secret” about our Fragmented Files Only routine is that for this most basic of all defrag routines, our algorithm functions in the favor of promoting consolidation of free space. In FFO mode we defrag files in LCN order – meaning it finds the first fragmented file towards the outer tracks and puts it in the nearest available free space. If the space is now cleared then the next fragmented file, if it fits will be placed in an earlier space – so it’s always, where it can, tending towards the outer tracks and filling free space from outer to inner.
"There’s not much we haven’t thought about with our product – any true purist will see that our product does much much more than initially meets the eye and for defragging is as close to the holy grail for defragging as you can get. Our list of to-be-included features stands at around 86 more features to be added at this point."

In fairness to Defraggler, it is the quickest utility currently installed on my laptop, and I only have two 30GB partitions. I have noticed that it is slower on other drives. However my experience of UltimateDefrag 1.52 in June last year was not good: it took over 14 minutes to analyse my drive, because there was a large (>4GB) compressed file on the drive. I wrote to Robert about this, and was told to try various options, but he was unwilling to admit that this might be a problem. I plan to do some tests to see if the problem has been fixed.

Update: I obtained a license for UltimateDefrag 2008, and tried a quick test (see comment #1) on my Iomega 500GB external USB drive: I timed the "analyse" times (I ran each one twice, and used the second result) for the defrag programs currently installed on my laptop:

Program	"A"	"B"
Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) for XP SP3	20.03	17.65
Defraggler 1.01.068 beta	23.17	36.50
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	26.53	176.56
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	44.81	34.68
JKDefrag 3.34	47.31	47.28
PC Magazine Defrag-A-File 1.1	53.56	49.09

UltraDefrag gave an error, and PuranDefrag doesn't have a separate "Analyse" option.
Column "A" refers to the analyse times (in seconds) of the drive with a several large files, including a 9GB data file. Column "B" refer to the analyse times with the same files, but an additional copy of the 9GB data file, this time stored as a compressed file, containing 123235 fragments.
This confirms the behaviour mentioned in the UD1.52 review, but not nearly as bad as before: 3 minutes compared to 14 minutes.

Update 2: I noticed during the tests above that some programs took longer to load than others, so I did some timing (see comment 1).

Program	load time (sec)
Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) for XP SP3	<3
Defraggler 1.01.068 beta	<3
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	10
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	9
JKDefrag 3.34	N/A
PC Magazine Defrag-A-File 1.1	<3
Paint Shop Pro 8.10	8
Microsoft Word 2002	3
Microsoft Access 97	5
Microsoft Excel 2002	4
Microsoft Visual Basic Professional 6	9

These numbers are not particularly scientific, since it isn't easy to measure with any degree of accuracy, but it does confirm my feeling that UD2008 and PD2008 are larger, slower apps than the other smaller ones listed. Bigger is not always better.

Update 3: Rob (see comments) asked me to do the fragmented file test on my laptop drive. I couldn't manage the 9GB file because of space limitations, but did manage to create a 6GB file that was compressed, with 476,192 fragments. My timing results (not scientific) are shown here:

Program Analyse Times	mins:secs
PerfectDisk 2008 build 52	1:01
JkDefrag 3.34	2:00
Defraggler 1.01.073 BETA	7:53
UltimateDefrag 2008 ver 2.0.0.48	21:44

This is not a typo: UD2008 took nearly 22 minutes to analyse the drive. It takes 20 seconds to load the program on my machine, partly because it takes time to draw a picture of the drive.
As soon as I deleted the 6GB file, UD2008's load time dropped to 8 seconds, and the analyse speed dropped to 18 seconds.