Blessed by the Potato

FYI for all the Rogers users out there: I just got a message that they are going to lock down the SMTP servers even further. In addition to needing to log on, you are now going to have to register every outgoing address you use (and you have to do that through the web-based email — hope you remember that password!). If you (like me) generally just use your account to have access to send outgoing mail for your variety of POP/IMAP accounts (and thanks to work and school, I have 6) then you’ll have to get this set up to continue doing that. Once in the webmail interface, go to options, and then mail accounts.

Oddly enough (or completely true-to-form for Rogers, depending on your point of view), I only got the notification sent to my London Rogers account — nothing at my parents’.

I’ve been fiddling with all the settings I can find, and I can’t for the life of me properly adjust volume on YouTube videos. There’s the little slider in the player that I can use to turn the sound down, but for the most part they’re far quieter than anything else on my computer. So of course, I turn the volume control on my speakers way up to compensate, just to get blown away by the intensely loud sound of an incoming email or MSN message. Does anyone have any ideas of what to do? I’m tempted to just keep my speakers turned up, and try to turn all the other sound settings down, but then there’s always some damn thing that won’t get turned down with the wave control and something else might come blasting out… plus things usually sound better when the hardware (speakers) don’t over-amplify noise…

For the new year, I don’t think they’re keeping the PC-Cillin name: now it’s just Trend Internet Security 2008. There are a number of changes from the 2007 version. First up, the UWO site license/student version isn’t good for unlimited installs. One copy, one install. Granted, it’s still cheaper than buying a retail copy with 3 installs, but combined with the price increase per disc, it has driven the cost of antivirus software up by a factor of 11 for my family (from a bargain basement $12/year to $135/year). They (and here I’m not sure if “they” are the university, trend micro, or a combination thereof) used to be of the opinion that giving cheap-as-free antivirus to students protected the network as a whole from virus outbreaks and security threats, and was a good loss-leader to boot. I don’t know why what was good in 2003*, 2005, 2006, and 2007 is suddenly not profitable enough, especially since you could only renew those student licenses through the campus computer store, so any and all graduates (and lazy distant family members) would be prompted to pay full retail price if trying to renew over the internet. (* – 2003 was good for 2 years)

Internet Security 2008 is a lot quieter than 2007 was: no more nag messages for everything — 2007 used to nag about windows update trying to access the internet, and for each update that tried to install. It would nag about firefox and thunderbird, twice, every time one of them had an update. Now I’ve had windows updates and a firefox update, and still no peep from 2008. It also doesn’t pull up the updating progress window on top of whatever you’re actually working on whenever it wants to update, it just animates the taskbar icon. However, it does still manage to steal focus when updating or starting a scan — if I’m in the middle of typing something and it decides to do something, even though I don’t get the giant pop-up covering my work as in 2007 (which was, admittedly, turn-off-able for some cases) my cursor still magically disappears and my keystrokes stop registering in that window. In some ways, that may be worse, because it takes longer to register what happens, and I still get just as angry.

One real annoyance for me is that the icon in the taskbar will change to a yellow hazard symbol (yellow triangle with a !) indicating that there’s a problem. This last week, the “problem” was that Internet Security 2008 was “out of date”. Well, it wasn’t: I had automatic updates on, and tried to manually update a few times. I was using the latest version. The problem was, the stupid thing is set up to flash that warning if it hasn’t been updated in 3 days (and Trend usually pushes updates something like every 12 hours), but for some reason the script kiddies were taking the week off and there hadn’t been an update available in weeks. I haven’t found yet if that’s user-configurable. If the default is 3 days to a warning though, then Trend should consider releasing “empty” updates every 2 days just to keep the program happy and to keep people from freaking out.

Well, I had a disappointing day: I found out that a large SPSS file I was working on was somehow corrupted or had a data entry error all along. Basically, in a file with something like 8 rows and 500 columns full of data, about 200 rows down the data got all mixed up across the columns. I don’t know yet if it’s gone wrong in a predictable way that can be undone, but even if it has I’m still going to have to manually comb through all of that to make sure it’s right now before I can finish analyzing it and getting a paper out.

It’s a real bitch to have that sort of thing happen, especially after massaging a data set for a while to try to plumb the depths of its secrets. It’s a lot of wasted work. Drawing a simple scatter plot for myself might have been enough to catch the error earlier. Of course, if it wasn’t for the fact that one data point went way above any value that column should have had (a 91 in a column that should only have numbers 1-60 in it), I probably would never have noticed the scrambling in the first place. If the data was a little less screwed up, it might very well have gone on to get published in that state. Then we’d be stuck trying to defend that dirty data (assuming anyone read the paper). It makes me a little afraid working in science knowing how many little unconscious mistakes can potentially go into an experiment to really change things around. The (external) replication step seems even more important now.

Way back in 2004 or so, my dad bought a new laptop for himself, but found out after getting it home that it was widescreen, and he didn’t like that, so he stuck to his old 4:3 for a while longer. I started using the new laptop, which he was keeping as a spare in case anything happened to his old one (he can’t afford to go a day without a computer). It was a pretty powerful model, a heavy desktop replacement with a P4 3 GHz processor, and a dedicated graphics card (a mobile radeon 9000, pretty crappy by the desktop standards of the time, but a revolution for laptops). That was good enough to play World of Warcraft on, which I did, and slowly the laptop went from something I borrowed from my dad while I was in town visiting to my laptop, which I brought to conferences, presentations, etc.

It’s always been a heavy, hot beast, and any little bit of blockage of the fans (even just a tablecloth on the table) will cause it to overheat and crash — if I’m going to use it for a long period of time, I prop the back up with something to improve airflow. That’s been kind of annoying, but it was something that could be manged. Then it started developing problems with the power supply not working properly. A loose connection of some sort that could be fixed by putting something under the power cord to keep it up at an angle and force a connection. Lately though, that’s been getting harder to accomplish, and it’s also been overheating and crashing more often. While at my parents’ house for the holidays it crashed over a dozen times (and I’m not even gaming on it much!).

I’ve tried to repair the bad power connection before, but after taking apart the case, I found some sort of plastic connection right there that I couldn’t remove, snap our, or unscrew, so I couldn’t even see the board the power connector attaches to, let alone find a way to solder it. For a while I’ve been thinking about just getting a new laptop: while this one is still reasonably powerful, responsive, and all the other things I need in a laptop, it’s just too damned annoying and unpredictable to use. Of course, a new laptop is really expensive (especially if I insist on getting a dedicated graphics card “just in case” I need to game on it), even with the boxing day sales (I’m still looking at about $1000!). That’s a waste of a lot of money, particularly since I only need one for visiting my parents and going to conferences. At my parents, I could set up a desktop somewhere to just check my email, or borrow one of my siblings’ computers. And I could borrow a laptop from Wayfare or even take one of the slow work ones when I have to go to a conference…

Fortunately, I’ve found instructions for repairing this apparently systematic problem with the Toshiba A70’s. I finally got around to doing the repair today, thanks especially to diassembly instructions I found. It took me about 3 hours to do total, with disassembly about 2 hours of that (largely because I was nervous and had never stripped a laptop down that far before). I have to say that having a half dozen Tim Horton’s cups in my office to collect screws was quite handy, since there are at least 4 different kinds of screws in there. The disassembly didn’t go perfectly smoothly: a large number of parts are held together by snap-together plastic, and it’s really held together well. At one point I snapped off a tiny plastic tab trying to free the upper case cover, but I don’t think I could have been any more gentle with it since a lot of pressure seemed to be needed to free pretty much every part, and I scratched up the case a fair bit using a tiny screw driver to pry those parts off. After that, I got really nervous about the part where I have to take the motherboard out of the case to get at the “top” side of the power supply connector. Looking from the exposed/”bottom” part where the solder is, the power supply terminal had been visibly burned out and looked like a poor connection. It tested fine with a multimeter, though I think resistivity was not a problem, but rather intermittent complete contact breaks. Not having much experience with solder I got someone from work to do it, which took him all of 30 seconds. I haven’t had much of a chance to test it, but the power lights did light up immediately after I plugged it in upon reassembly. No jiggling or holding it at weird angles required! Since I didn’t take it out to really clean off the power connector like the instructions above recommend, there’s a good chance this problem will recur. However, I figure I bought myself another year or so, and now that I have experience at it, this process shouldn’t be too bad to repeat in that amount of time. One more round (for a total of 2 extra years) and this beast will be thoroughly obsolete and ready for replacement.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera anywhere handy to document the process. I did learn a bit more about the weight distribution of the computer. I figured it was something like 1/3 battery, 1/3 system case, 1/3 screen, but it’s 8.5 pounds are actually mostly concentrated in the battery and screen. Despite the intense amount of heatsinks and how seemingly strong the case is, the keyboard/motherboard part of the computer is actually fairly light. While I’m not impressed with the crappy power supply connection problem with this laptop, I have to say that I’m glad Toshiba stamped most of the plastic bits beside screw holes indicating what size screw goes where. Very helpful for putting the right screw in the right place when reassembling.