brainsnorkel.com

I think it was Andrew who pointed me to Soluto as a method of improving boot times on Windows PCs.

I have mentioned before that my Vista-running X61 tablet takes a while to boot. Soluto measured boot time at just over 10 minutes. I followed its advice, and through delaying and removing various crapware and legitimate startup programs I got boot time down to 5 minutes and 10 seconds.

Emboldened, this weekend I took some advice from Ian’s comments on my last post and shelled out AU$300 for a copy of Windows 7 Professional (upgrade).

Now, with a few tweaks recommended by Soluto I’m recording a consistent boot time of 1 minute 35 seconds.

My aging tablet feels like new again (during boot).

Update: Actually, it feels pretty snappy all over since the Windows 7 makeover and some hybrid SSD drive loving. Boot time is now a shade under a minute and application launches are snappier then they’ve ever been.

In a previous post I had talked about the rate of decay and the usefulness of a fairly shiny new X61 tablet. Now three years later it’s time for a quick update on how it’s travelling.

As you can see, the tablet is pretty much the same as it was at 3 months old. There are legends about how hard-wearing ThinkPads are. After lugging it back and forth from work, and on vacations, for three years it’s looking like a role model for laptop longevity.

The screen is a bit blotchy with grease now, I haven’t found a good cleaner that I trust to not melt or damage the surface, so I put up with a dirty screen. The screen is also pulled away at the bottom exposing some glue that picks up dust and won’t let it go, but the problem is just aesthetic.

The pen is still held together by sticky tape.

The hard disk is now a 500GB Seagate 7200rpm drive, and I have added 4GB of RAM. The battery is now a non-Lenovo battery that works fine except that the Lenovo power management software courteously questions my commitment to safety and morality every time I log in. The original battery went stone cold dead with error messages from the power management system along the lines of “Get this battery thing outta me NOW! Stat!” when it was just over 2 years old.

None of the keys have come off the keyboard. The marvellous screen-rotating and reversing hinge feels as firm as the day it came out of the box.

The biggest problem is still Vista and the load of Lenovo crapware required to keep it alive. It has always taken a long while to boot and get settled (5-10 minutes), so I’m tempted to start from scratch with Windows 7, but haven’t made the investment in time yet.

After checking the PHP options and benchmarking hosting & database speeds at spry.com’s dirt cheap hosting against options at the dirt cheap hosting I have at GoDaddy.com I decided to move Brainsnorkel to the garish world of GoDaddy.

While moving I found a couple of things of interest.

1. That the Freshy2 theme I use has been bequeathed to the open source community by its creator, so I will move to a newer theme when I find one and modify it to taste. (Ignore the WordPress 2.9 incompatibilities for now, ok?)
2. That exporting MySQL defaults to latin character encoding, and phpMyAdmin defaults to utf8 for import.
3. That TPG has one of the slowest to update DNS servers in the world:
   

   sh-3.2$ nslookup brainsnorkel.com 203.12.160.35
Non-authoritative answer:
Server: dns1.tpgi.com.au
Address: 203.12.160.35
Name: brainsnorkel.com
Address: 64.79.220.169
sh-3.2$ nslookup brainsnorkel.com 203.12.160.36
Non-authoritative answer:
Server: dns2.tpgi.com.au
Address: 203.12.160.36
Name: brainsnorkel.com
Address: 97.74.215.189

Oh strange new Internet that has such people in’t.

The few very hasty blog posts in the last year is a clear indication to y’all that Brainsnorkel is barely registering in my consciousness. I don’t blog about work, and work is hard at the moment.

Actually, home is hard too.  To make our house bigger, we have to squeeze into one end of it for a while. Hopefully all of this squeezing will be a thing of the past soon. We’ll move back into our proper places and the sardines can move back in to where we’re living.

Enough excuses! Brainsnorkel doesn’t need excuses.

Brainsnorkel needs the dust blown off it.

Given how consuming work is, maybe meta-work is fair game now. It has been in the past.

There is so much to love about this music video.

I can’t review my new iPhone 3GS. Frankly, I haven’t used it enough. I’m still waiting for my old carrier to port my number so I can use it as something more than a very expensive iPod Touch.

One of the first things I did after getting it was to sit down with a couple of our kids and show them the maps, video camera, photos, some Wall-E, Phineas and Ferb and then an iPhone version of Peggle which they had played on PC extensively.

When I had decided that demo time was over my 3 year old daughter insisted that the iPhone was hers. To encourage me to hand it over she started ripping up and throwing things around the house with some impressive, wanton, and very primal, rage.

This experience has brought me to the realisation that slavish iPhone desire is nature, not nurture.

I’m seriously considering buying a decoy.

This (and the clip that follows) has to be the best Colbert segment for some time.

When I recall very good TV series like Six Feet Under and The Wire I feel could go back and watch the final episode any time for a reminder of the quality of the series and the characters in it. Battlestar Galactica is an excellent TV series, but I think I’ll be watching the pilot episodes, season 1, and not the finale.

Tonio sums up all that was good and bad about the series finale (beware, here be spoilers):
Battlestar Galactica Ends

Here’s my take on the end of the best Science Fiction TV series in history: it hit the right emotional notes, and it was reasonably satisfying, but it was not a worthy ending to the series, and I suspect that as we all go back and watch the whole thing through we’ll find a lot of threads left dangling or essentially forgotten by the writers.

I’m in leadership training.  It’s pretty good so far.

Notable occurrences:

1. Though the Chris of 2000 was an INFJ, the Chris of 2009 is an ESTP. Abracadabra!
2. The 2×2 leadership analysis grid keeps reminding me of this…

Christmas can be a long day. Hopefully these two YouTube gems will help pass the time.

How to fold a T-shirt in 5 seconds:

Orange teeth:

It crashes a lot.

I’ve been using Soundbooth to clean up speech from about 10 people recorded in a conference room, on a tiny digital recorder, while it sat next to a projector’s fan, under an air-conditioning outlet, in a slightly echoey conference room, open to a common area where people gather to take the elevator.

Cleaning up the audio was a reasonably fast, if crashy, experience.

Once I had a reasonably clean recording I thought I’d try out the automatic transcription feature. This feature performs some cursory speech recognition on an audio file to produce tags that match recognised words to their location in the audio file along with the speaker’s identity (e.g. speaker 2). As it’s only 75% accurate (for my samples, forgivably, it was much worse) it’s more useful for finding points of interest in an audio file than as an auto-transcription service.

I don’t think it ever completed the transcription task. At some random point it would offer to send Adobe a copy of a crash report.

Though it doesn’t have transcription capabilities, I think I prefer Audacity.

Tomorrow, December 5th 2008, marks the 20th anniversary of my starting work in “the industry.”

This calls for five minutes of reminiscing.

I turned up for my first day of work as a trainee systems programmer at a big Australian bank’s EDP department. I recall being more than a little shocked at having to be at work before 8:06am each day. I was introduced to everyone I’d be working with shortly before being sent off to North Sydney to do MVS and IBM System/360 Assembler training for a few weeks.

At training I learned that the most powerful instruction in Assembly language was the no-op. The coding standard dictated that you sprinkle them throughout your code so that smarter programmers than you could patch your code, in memory, while running by overwriting your no-ops with useful code and then adding a statement to branch to the patch code over the defective instructions.

The bank had some great people. Some were consummate professionals and some were real cowboys.

Towards the end of my time at the bank I was introduced to the pointy-end of the economics of software development and process improvement.

A colleague returned from a long liquid lunch and let me in on the “big secret.”

He said only fools write good code. Code has to break for you to get called in. Being called in gives you overtime and visibility. Overtime is extra money. Being called in is heroism. Develop skill in writing bugs that are serious enough to call you in about, yet easy enough to fix soon after you get into the office. Overtime was paid for in four hour minimum units. Nobody notices people who write reliable code because they never get to perform heroic acts. Notice that the people who get promoted are those that handle high stress situations. Notice that the people handling these high stress situations are generally responsible for creating the high stress situation in the first place.

It was good motivation to find a new job.