IT

Yamaha announced they will exit the CD-RW drive market. They make the excellent CRW-F1 drive, which is unique in that is capable of imprinting messages such as titles in the unused portion of the disc. The user interface for this “Disc@T2” feature is somewhat clunky, but this is a great feature that is easily worth the price premium in my opinion. Unfortunately, it seems my opinion is not shared and most people would rather pay less for a commodity than pay for innovation.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, Kenwood discontinued its line of 72x CD-ROM drives a year or two ago. When mine failed, I had no spare and no alternative but to get a noisier, slower Sony 52x. The Kenwood drives managed this by using a Zen Research beam splitter head to read multiple tracks in parallel, and thus did not need to rotate the disc as fast and induce as much vibration as conventional designs.

This time, I am prepared and I am hoarding 2 of these Yamaha drives before stocks run out…

I used Bluetooth for the first time today, to Hotsync my Palm Tungsten T with my laptop using a D-Link DBT-120 USB Bluetooth adapter. Pretty spiffy, and not much slower than standard USB synchronization.

Update (2003-01-30):

I have also synchronized my new SonyEricsson T68i Bluetooth-enabled cell phone with Outlook, as well as with iSync on my iMac G4. The process is painfully slow (probably due to sluggish software), but the end result is pretty cool. It seems Bluetooth is where USB was in 1995, i.e. barely functional drivers and not that reliable (my Sony phone has a tendency to unpair itself from my Tungsten T or my PC), but it has potential. You will just have to wait a couple of years until driver support migrates deep into the OS (unless you use a Mac, of course).

I recently upgraded my laptop, and donated my old (but still functional) one to StreetTech, a group that trains disadvantaged youths so they can obtain certifications that will get them jobs in IT. I found them using the Cristina foundation, an organization that matches donors to groups like StreetTech.

If you are a compulsive computer shopper like myself, who has functional but not-quite bleeding edge equipment lying around gathering dust, or an IT manager in a company looking to upgrade its computer fleet, please consider donating them this way rather than putting them on eBay. It’s certainly a much better way of disposing of old computers than this one in China.

The key to running a reasonably reliable Windows system is configuration management. A typical Windows will have tens of thousand of files and hundreds of software components installed. It’s a numbers game: the more components interacting on the system, the greater the probability that two of them will conflict.

Windows gets a lot of heat from Unix zealots (I am one myself) for being unreliable, but any operating system that attempts to comprehensively support all the wide variety of oddball peripherals and software out there is going to experience the same integration problems; certainly, Linux is converging towards Windows in terms of the number of security advisories released. Of course, using an obsolete version like 98 or ME without modern protected memory is a prescription for disaster, but the NT-based versions, i.e. 2000 and XP can have reasonable reliability, at least for desktop usage.

The rest of this article describes my strategy minimizing entropy in my Windows systems.

Separation

The way I approach my Windows configuration is to establish a clear separation between Operating System/Applications and Data.

The OS and Applications do not mean anything special to me other than the amount of work required to reinstall. Data represent actual productive work on my part and must be protected. I separate OS/Applications from data clearly, and make regular checkpoints of OS/Apps after installation and every now and then before I make major changes like installing an application or OS service packs. If my system becomes unstable at some point in time, I can easily revert to a known stable configuration.

The specific tools used to provide this backup of system configuration are a question of personal choice. A number of commercial software like Roxio GoBack or Powerquest SecondChance (since discontinued) purport to do this, as does Windows XP.

I personally don’t trust these programs all that much, and prefer to make a total backup of my system using Norton Ghost. To ensure my data is not erased when I restore from a Ghost image, I have at least two partitions on each of my systems:

1. C: for Windows and applications (NTFS)
2. D: for my personal data (NTFS on desktops, FAT32 on laptops)
3. I: for my Ghost images on desktops (FAT32), on a different drive than C: so I can survive a drive failure

That way I can destroy C: at my leisure, in the worst case I will have to reinstall a couple of applications and reapply some settings that were lost since the last release. My data sits safely on the D: partition (and backups).

Backup strategy

I don’t trust CD-R media or removable drive cartridges for backup purposes, and tape is either too slow or too expensive in the case of DLT. I keep full duplicates of my data partition and some Ghost images on a pair of 100GB external FireWire drives, one I keep at home and one at work. I rotate them weekly so even if my house burns down I will have lost in the worst case only a week of work or photos.

Limitations of this method

This technique doesn’t work very well if the underlying hardware configuration changes too often, and assumes a linear install history. If I install software A, then B, then C, I can go back from A+B+C to A+B or A but not to A+C.

How-to

This section shows how to extricate the data from OS/Apps which Windows and most apps usually try and commingle. The TweakUI utility from Microsoft is an absolute must-have. It is a control panel that allows you to change the behavior of the OS in vital ways that are not accessible otherwise short of editing the Registry directly.

Outlook

Outlook files are the single largest data files on my system (Ghost images do not count). By default, Outlook will create its PST file in the Documents and Settings directory. You can either relocate this directory to the D: partition, or create a new PST file in a location of your choice and use Advanced properties in the properties dialog for the PST in Outlook to make it the default location for POP delivery, after which you can close the old one and delete it.

My Documents

And derivatives like “My Pictures”, can be relocated to D: using TweakUI.

Favorites

For IE users, TweakUI allows you to relocate the Favorites directory to another place than the default. This way, you will not lose your favorites when you have to restore your system.

For Netscape/Mozilla users, the Profile manager utility allows you to set up a new profile with files that are stored where you want, e.g. on the D: partition.

An interesting product from a young company called Cloudmark addresses the spam explosion.

It works as an Outlook add-in that allows you to flag a message as spam and uploads a signature to the network, and thus helps other Cloudmark users to block the spam, in effect acting as a distributed peer-to-peer Brightmail.

It remains to be seen whether this system will be resistant to denial of service or poisoning attacks.

Update (2002-07-10): I’ve been trying it out for three weeks, and so far it looks pretty good. Out of 353 spam I’ve received, it successfully blocked 233. It also gave 3 false positives from permission marketing companies (Art.com and MyPoints), which is not absurd as they have very poor optout management. But it also flagged an IEEE newsletter as spam, which seems a little bit excessive. So, use with precaution.