Cool Tool Tuesday #4

I’m trying to work my way down this software list in value of importance.  I don’t have a list in my head, but I’m creating it as I go.  Ultimately, the list will be a repository of really cool stuff.  But I have no criteria beyond that for the ordering of the things on here.  Some of these are important (last week’s antivirus, and the initial category of backup).  The creme filling in that unnamed sandwich cookie was Irfanview, which is really cool but not critical.  Today’s entry is a bump smoother.

Firefox is the tool of the week.  This is an alternate browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (not-so-affectionately called “Internet Exploder”).  Firefox works the same way as IE – you put in a web address and you go to a site.  Aaaaah, but it’s about the trip as well as the destination.  Firefox lets you personalize your browser, in many different ways, and they give you hundreds of ways to customize it.

These little things are called add-ons, and they are added on top of the base Firefox program.  There’s a list of them here, but I’ll give you my favorites and tell you why.  Think of it as “cool tools for Firefox”.

The top one has to be AdBlock Plus.  This will stop most advertisements from coming to your screen.  You will be surprised at how smooth your browsing is without all the junky advertisements around.  This also lets you block pictures, either individually or by originating site.  This is especially helpful if one of your favorite sites occasionally has offensive pix (I’m talking about you, Matt Drudge).

A close second is FlashBlock.  This stops all those animations from happening.  The window that the animation would play in is replaced with a “go” button.  Press it to see the animation.  Very handy, even after the ads are blocked.

Xmarks keeps track of all your bookmarks, out there on the web (they call it “the cloud”, but it just means somebody’s computer).  Very handy if you’re helping on somebody else’s PC and you know you have a bookmark for it.  Or if you’re getting a new computer for Christmas . . .  use this now, and then install it on the new computer.  Voila – instant bookmark sync!  And of course Firefox can slurp all your IE bookmarks when you install it.

Gmail Manager checks for mail on a schedule you set, and tells you when you have something new.  And if you hover your mouse over the icon, it will show you a snippet of the unread emails.  You can choose to jump over and reply to your honey, or you can ignore the latest ad email (and wonder why it was again that you signed up for notifications from eBay on pink flamingos).

Go to Google does exactly what it says.  It opens up a new tab, opens the Google site, and switches you to that tab.  It doesn’t do anything more.  It just does it simply and perfectly.  I’m not a fan of the built-in searching that sits up top of browsers.  I want to search from the Google page.

There are lots of other good add-ons.  I use FoxClocks, which shows you the time around the world in as many places as you’d like to see.  Other people have used (and like) GreaseMonkey for customizing scripts.  They also use NoScript to stop JavaScript from running.  That is supposed to stop a lot of badness from being able to run on your PC, but I have not tried either of the last two.  Although with download counts of 26 million and 58 million, they’re doing something right.

Happy browsing!

Gold

The gold standard.  A golden touch.  “Golden boy”.

Gold has been a precious metal for millenia.  There’s nothing special about it – it’s just shiny and rare.  From a functional standpoint, at the human level, it’s not worth a lot.  The metal is too soft to be used as a tool.  Works for jewelry or ornamentation, and is durable if it’s mixed with some other metal.  It was used extensively in electronics, especially computers, because it had great electrical conductivity and would not corrode.  Some people made pretty good money from buying up “worthless” old computers (we’re talking mainframes, here) and melting them down to get at the gold inside.

The allure of gold, as a symbol of earthly wealth, has been documented throughout recorded history.  Edgar Allen Poe’s The Gold Bug is actually an insect, but it leads to a treasure worth some fourteen million dollars (and many have caught the “gold bug” across the years).  In the Bible, a river flows out of the garden of Eden and splits into four different rivers.

The first is named Pishon; it flows through Havilah where there is gold. The gold of this land is good.

From Genesis 2:11-12.  We see Abram (before he became Abraham) described as being “very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold”.  He must have been – when he was looking for a wife for his son Isaac, he had his servant offer Rebekah a nose ring and arm bracelets weighing 4.25 ounces.  At prices from today, that would be pushing close to five thousand dollars.  And that’s just a “Hi, how are you?” gift!

Not everyone wants gold.  Dave Ramsey recommends against it, because it barely keeps its value in relation to inflation.  The US government no longer backs its currency with the gold stored at Fort Knox.  Overall, though, I’d accept gold if someone gave me some.

I’m not sure I’d want to live in a golden house, though.  I’m not God.  From 1 Kings 6:20-22, in The Message:

This Inner Sanctuary was a cube, thirty feet each way, all plated with gold. The Altar of cedar was also gold-plated. Everywhere you looked there was pure gold: gold chains strung in front of the gold-plated Inner Sanctuary—gold everywhere—walls, ceiling, floor, and Altar. Dazzling!

All I want for Christmas

We are not “doing” Christmas this year.  We’re celebrating it, but not buying gifts.  Perhaps next year.  This year, we’re concentrating on getting debt down and making the payments on our one house (YAY – only one house!).  Bettie and I are spending a nominal amount on each other, but not being at all spendy, even though we’d like to.

That extends to food.  We’re cutting down our meals, and eating out almost nonce per week (I have kept a weekly lunch with a friend).

We are doing almost all of our shopping at thrift stores, and buying more generic food instead of brand-name items.  Bettie picked up a bag of older apples for under a buck, and is going to be making her mom’s apple crisp for cheap.  We’re not doing without, but we’re being very conservative with our money.

That extends to cell phones.  Ours are almost four years old.  That bothers me, because if the phones are cheap and we subsidize them with our monthly payments, and if we can get new phones every two years, then we’ve been dumping extra money into Verizon for almost two years and getting nothing for it.  The itch for new phones is almost physical.

My dream phone would be a Droid from Verizon.  Google goodness, and tons of apps (and more all the time).  Unfortunately, the phone costs $200, and would require an extra $30 a month for email (not sure if this is the full “all you can eat” plan, or is limited to email).  That’s $30 per phone.  For the two year agreement, that’s an extra $1440 for the two of us, on top of $400 phone prices.  I can think of better ways to spend two grand.

But what about this new Google phone?  The Nexus One is reported to run on T-Mobile’s network.  It looks good.  Real good.  And if they give it away for free –

Wake up, Steve.  You’re dreaming.

Murther most foul

It’s mouse time again.  Story and non-bloody pictures after the jump.

Set it and forget it

One of the joys in life is getting to do things with your computer.  You might be a social butterfly and spend all your time tweeting about how your Facebook page absolutely trashes that MySpace coverage of LinkedIn.  You might be exercising your photo and captioning skills for that one perfect photo.  You might be setting up a spreadsheet to figure out gear ratios.

No matter what you want to do, you don’t want to be dealing with the plumbing behind the scenes.  Here’s one thing you can do to help that along.  Set your DNS and don’t worry about it.

Oh (you say), which DNS service should I use?  I gave you a couple ideas not long ago, but now we can be scientificker.  Steve Gibson has written a cool utility that will go knock on the doors of several DNS providers, and tell you which one works the best.  Steve G writes great, small utilities in assembler.  He writes real close to the metal, so these things are dinky (this one is 150K) and fast.

Download it, run the test, and see who’s the fastest.  It will take a couple minutes to run.  The red bar is the cached lookup – checking out something the DNS provider already knows about.  The green bar is an uncached lookup, where the provider has to go look deeper.  The blue bar is going out to that provider’s dotcom provider for more info.  In all cases, shorter bars are better.

The program defaults to showing you response time (the pretty bars).  You can switch back to the Name tab to see who’s doing well.  And you can check on their Conclusions page to see the recommendation from the program.  All tabs are clickable – it doesn’t forget the information until you close the program.  Interestingly, for me, the number 3 provider is from the same company as the very bottom-performing provider.  Not sure if something is very wrong with that one, but I was surprised.

So you makes your choice and makes your changes.  For me, this time, OpenDNS came out above Google.  Not by a lot, but both OpenDNS entries scored better than either Google provider.  Now understand, we’re talking hundredths or thousandths of a second.  Either one would do fine.  I’m going to stick with OpenDNS for now.

For actually making the change, use Microsoft’s write-up, or one with a picture here.  Write down your original settings in case you want to go back.

And then forget it!  Unless you make a drastically, intentionally wrong choice for your DNS provider, it will crank along happily in the background, freeing you up to design the perfect Christmas guitar cupcake cake.   And a big Oh Oh Oh to you, too!

(Thanks to Dave Farquhar for the DNS utility tip.  He had nothing to do with the failures.)

Cool Tool Tuesday #3

(Thursday edition)

Today’s cool tool is free.  There is no reason to avoid this.  We’re talking anti-virus software from AVG.

AVG is a big company, not some little fly-by-night place.  They would be very happy to sell you their software if you are a business, or if you want some extra benefits.  Me, I’d rather run lean and mean.

Download the software here.  The installation is pretty straight-forward.  Make sure you get their updates, and then go ahead and scan your whole computer.  Not just parts of it, but the whole thing.

And then set it up to get updates daily and do a full scan weekly.  It’s best to schedule these for the middle of the night sometime, so it won’t interrupt or slow down your regular work habits.

If you are a business or want the extra benefits described here, it will cost you.  Additionally, you may get occasional requests to upgrade to the pay version.  You can, but you don’t have to.

AVG is a great support for your computing safety.  Twenty thousand people at CNET have given it a 4-star review (out of 5).  Give it a try yourself.

Save energy: crash a car

Well, no, it’s not as straight-forward as that.  This is a story about the Law of Unintended Consequences.

It seems the whole country is in a pretty big push to go green.  Sometimes it’s to combat global warming Global Warming, sometimes it’s done as part of a job stimulus thing, sometimes it’s just to spend less on the electric bill.

One of the places for that last one is replacing light bulbs.  Compact Fluorescent bulbs (CF) are generally great replacements for incandescent bulbs.  A couple of drawbacks are that the light is a different color, and they don’t handle being on a dimmer circuit too well (although that might be changing).

The next step in nifty light technology is LED bulbs.  These guys are still early in their lives, and the prices are real high.  But they’re probably going to win out over CF bulbs.  LED bulbs can be color-corrected, handle dimmers pretty well, last forever (practically), and use up almost no electricity.

There is one down-side, though.  They’re not hot.  When I say they’re cool, I mean it both ways.

This is good for people who decide to save money by not heating their houses.  This is bad – real bad – for traffic lights.

Think about the functionality of a traffic light.  Its purpose is, surprisingly, not to display red, yellow, and green at the correct time.  It has to do those things, yes, but it has to communicate those colors to the driver.  A traffic light in the middle of a cornfield doesn’t do much good for the intersection a half-mile away.  A traffic light hidden by trees doesn’t help the drivers know what to do.

And an LED traffic light that ices over in a storm so people can’t see the colors is as useful as a chocolate teapot.

They’re working on solutions to the problem, including weather shields and heater elements.  And manually cleaning the snow off the traffic lights.

I have a suggestion, folks.  Leave the energy savings to the southern states.  Go ahead and put incandescent bulbs back in.  Save a life.

Snow-covered traffic light from fatal accident in Illinois (Photo from Oswego IL police)

God likes me

We had another round of layoffs today.  I made it through, but lost a friend and some co-workers.  On one of the prior rounds, they let go the manager who hired me almost fourteen years ago.  I’ve been in his house, bought a computer from him, attended a special program at his church, been to a funeral together.  And then, as with my friend today, BOOM.  The rug gets pulled out from under you.

One of my first thoughts when I heard I made it through was “even if I didn’t know, I’d think that God likes me”.  Wrongo, bucko.

God loves me (and did before I was born).  He loves me no matter what happens at the place I’m currently employed, and the place after that.  He loves me whether I keep my job or not.  And he loves the other people at my company (and those soon to be “not at my company”, and those who have never heard of my company) just the same way.  Unlimited.  Boundless.  Infinite.  Without conditions.

Doesn’t mean that there won’t be good and bad days.  Doesn’t mean that there won’t be layoffs and financial struggles.  Doesn’t mean that there won’t be wet pillows tonight, and then a fresh face for the workplace tomorrow (or at church on Sunday).

And God’s love doesn’t mean that I will see all these people in heaven.  Romans 6:23 says

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

For some, the employment decision was made for them today.  But for all of us, the choice of where we spend eternity is ours, every day.  We’re not perfect, any of us, but we do choose (with the help of the Holy Spirit) what we do and say, what we think, what our reactions are.

I hope to see these people again, upstairs (and that’s not on the executive floor, either).

These are a few of my favorite brands

I’m a baby boomer, supposedly one who lives and dies by his brands.  I know I used to be that way.  Not so much anymore.  In fact, I thought I was down to just one.

Heinz ketchup.  Yes, it’s what I grew up with.  And yes, it’s the official ketchup of NASCAR  (and the Bengals).  But it has been judged the best ketchup in the world by an international panel of expert.  I like it!

And that was it for my brands.  Until I remembered M&Ms.  There are knock-offs that I might eat in a pinch, but there’s really no comparison.

And then I thought of Windham Hill records.  And Baen books.  And Google software.  And the NASB.  And Palm software.  And Planter’s dry-roasted peanuts.  And Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

I’m very flexible on what brand of gas I get, and where I shop for food, and which restaurant I go out to, and what jeans I buy and shoes I wear.  There’s a lot to be said for cheapness and availability.

But boy oh boy, there’s not a lot better than M&Ms alternating with Planter’s dry-roasted peanuts.  Delicately followed by a pint of Chocolate Fudge Brownie.

Puts a smile on my face, just thinking about it.

Editor needed. Reply to . . .

I’m reading Truth, Lies, and O-Rings (subtitled Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster).  It’s a hard slog.

The book is written by Allan McDonald, who was an engineer at Morton Thiokol, the company that made the solid rocket boosters for the shuttle.  Engineers are known for being very detailed, and Mr. McDonald fits the mold.  I know more about tangs and clevises (clevii?), zinc chromate putty, and filament-wound cases than I ever thought possible.

And yet there are lapses.  McDonald includes a harmful story about how his boss had hand-applied some of that putty before every test of the solid rocket booster, in a procedure different than what was used for every launch.  The boss was skewing the tests!  Yet instead of naming the boss, McDonald refers to him as “my boss”.  True, but not accurate.  McDonald writes that the missing putty “had been repaired by my boss” and that McDonald “was very upset with my boss” (both on p.31).  On the next page, “I told him this was stupid” and then “[h]e wasn’t too happy with me”.  So is McDonald writing a tell-all without telling all?  Nope – he names his boss on page 62.  This is just sloppy editing.

Capitalization problems: “shuttle” is always capitalized.  I can let that one pass, I guess, since it McDonald’s main focus (in the book and in his professional life).  It seems as if he’s speaking about it with reverence every time he talks about it.  That could be a stylistic thing.  But when he fails to capitalize “Air Force” and “Navy”, that’s a goof.  Those are their names, and should be capitalized.  See p.10 for “air force” and p.11 for “navy”.  And to be clear, McDonald is not talking about the color, he’s talking about “the navy’s Trident” submarine missile.

There are times when he seems to be showing off.  At the bottom of p.29 he complains about the acronyms that NASA uses, and he whips off a list of fifty of them to demonstrate how overwhelmed he is – without an explanation of them.  There is a list of abbreviations on p.585, but the list in the text seems like a glory-hog moment.  And then on p.73 McDonald relates how a replacement manager in NASA didn’t know the ropes.  People ridiculed him by saying that when he “was told to hold the LOX”, he went out and bought some bagels.  The joke is funny if you know that LOX is Liquid OXygen, not smoked salmon, but McDonald assumes that everybody understands one of the same abbreviations he was complaining about earlier.

At one point there is an explosion in a Utah plant where the boosters are created.  McDonald had been on a plane to another state at the time.  He reports that when he landed, another Morton Thiokol employee ran up to the plane shouting

“A major fire has just occurred in the propellant casting area where the Space Shuttle solid rocket motors are manufactured back in Utah.  The early morning radio reports indicated that several explosions had occurred and a large number of people may have been killed!”

Oh, please stop.  If a guy runs up to an airplane with big news like that, he does not include detailed explanations.  I’d accept “There was a big explosion in the propellant casting area!  Might have lost some folks.” with a followup in the book of where the casting area was and what it did.  But as written (on p.19), it almost sounds like an opera.

A couple other points: the book is published by the University Press of Florida, so there probably wasn’t a commercial editor involved.  There may have been a professional one, but not one with an eye for making this an easy read.  And the book is co-authored by James R. Hansen, who happens to share most of a name with James E. Hansen, who works for NASA and is a big backer of global warming (and the fact that We Have To Do Something Right Now!).  The author Hansen warns us in the book’s foreword that

The account that he has put together is, yes, detailed to a fault and tremendously meticulous in the telling, because that is who he is, and that is what his engineering has all been about, and that is the only way the real truth behind the Challenger accident can ever finally come out.

Kinda rough when your co-author warns people about the finished product.  And I have a quibble about publishing engineering papers as popular books.  I found this in the local library, not in a university’s science section.  This was presented as a book for the public.  If I didn’t have a passion for space, I’d have dumped this.

I really hope I don’t feel the same way after I finish reading it.  I’m on page 80 out of about 600.