Thursday, January 18, 2007

Usual oatmeal breakfast. WebCT interest group (WIG) meeting: Brian demoed WebCT 6, aka Blackboard followed by about 10 words (the name of Blackboard's product is really long). Fixed Acrobat 8 Pro and PageMaker 6.5 on Joel's computer. Acrobat no longer worked because there were problems installing Acrobat 8 Pro on his computer and I didn't get a chance to resolve it. PageMaker had the problem described in Adobe Knowledgebase document 328519 ("Cannot find PageMaker's registry settings") ever since I demoted his account from Power Users to Limited User status. I had resolved this previously on September 9, 2005 by giving his account Power User status since solution #3—the registry hack—did not work for me at the time. This time I dug deeper in the registry (search for certain keys with "PageMaker" and modify the permissions) and now it works—PageMaker can run when logged in with a limited user account. Finished apps training for Alyssa. Around noon today I began having sharp pain in the center of my lower back. There was no injury—it just came on suddenly without warning. I had to close my door and lie down on the floor for a few minutes. It was hard to do that without making the pain worse. After about 10 minutes I got up, still in pain, and did some quick searches on Google. No pain in the legs—a good sign. I still had pain 30 minutes after the initial onset, so I made a decision to go home and lie in bed. Canceled appointments, checked in with James who had a laptop setup scheduled for tomorrow, checked in with Lucia who had only minutes ago scheduled a meeting with a student on my calendar for this afternoon. I'll stay home tomorrow, rest through the weekend, and see how I feel on Monday. Home. Slept until about 5:30 PM. Made turkey burgers by myself for dinner. Patrick called from Aaron's place, and Aaron—"the queen of back pain"—gave me advice. HTML e-mail work for Cindy. I noticed something strange about certain keyboard shortcuts in IE7 today. The regular menus from IE6 are no longer visible, but they are not entirely gone. If you press the Alt key, they reappear. However, Alt+F will no longer open the File menu as it did in IE6. To open the file menu, you must now press the Alt key then let go of the Alt key then press the F key. This is annoying for three reasons: (a) it's a change in behavior over IE6 so I must learn a new behavior, (b) Alt+F doesn't do anything else in IE7 (so there's no obvious reason why the behavior had to change), and (c) the new behavior is slower than the old behavior. Lately I've also been very frustrated with trying to get DVDRW media to burn properly in both Windows XP and OS 10.4.8. I can't recall the exact error messages, but one says that it marked the entire disc as read only due to errors (Windows XP, Nero) and another in OS X says please discard the disc and use another one—on more than one kind of disc. I'm buying what I believe to be high quality discs, but it doesn't seem to matter—I still encounter errors. Over the past few years I've been increasingly feeling that local storage is growing less and less reliable, particularly since hard drive manufacturers today don't warrant consumer-level hard drives for more than 1 or 2 years when it used to be a lot more. Actually, ZDNet UK reported last week that Seagate is planning to restore 5-year consumer drive warranties in March 2007 (this after xbitlabs reported on July 26, 2004 that Seagate was planning to restore 5-year consumer drive warranties as of June 1, 2004?), so there seems to be a bit of seesawing going on in the industry. Iomega, as an example, has had a history of providing popular and innovative data storage solutions but its solutions, in my experience, are not always reliable when you need them to be. Let's say we have computers which use no hard drives—only solid-state storage to boot a Web OS (e.g., a modified and "embedded" OS X?)—and all other data is stored on networks. The people who make the OS would then be in a much better position to not simply provide "backup solutions" but rather to provide a level of robustness in personal computing which likely has never existed before. We shouldn't have "backup solutions"—we should have computing environments which don't fail. The existence of a backup solution implies an inherent problem—that your computing environment is not robust. Yes, hard drives fail, but people don't care that a hard drive failed, they care that data was lost. When your hard drives are in a RAID and maintained by professionals, data isn't lost, but this doesn't happen today in every home with a computer. How much would people pay for security like that? What if Google is planning to give that away for free? Imagine if you never had to worry about backing up your data and that you could revert to any previously saved version of a document at any time and that everything you touch is stored forever and that even after a devastating natural disaster you could still retrieve everything? If we presume the OS and its applications have been sufficiently designed to be reliable, the weak links then become the network connection and the hardware. However, we might eventually get to a point where it becomes inexpensive to build robustness even in personal computer hardware or network connections. For example, if you have multiple displays and one fails, there's no reason the OS can't detect the failure and automatically take the appropriate actions (e.g., move windows from that display to other displays, prevent the cursor from entering the failed display, etc.). Or if you have only one display, and that display fails, the OS could announce through a computer-generated voice what had happened and announce your options for continuing your work. ("Press 1 to save all documents and shut down the computer...") Let's say you have the whole kit: Web OS, network storage, redundant network connections and smarter hardware—let all of that mature for, say, 10 or 20 years, and then maybe we humans will have finally gotten personal computing right in terms of reliability.