New To Me: RSVP

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Years ago, I took a sped riddin' class. I increased my reading speed a bit but found the whole thing unsatisfactory. Along the way, though, one of the exercises had one reading text presented in a column, one or two words at a time. That seemed to work for me.

Since then, sometimes, when I have something long to read that I'd like to get through as quickly as I can, I narrow the window as much as possible. Sometimes I have to copy the text into an editor in order to do so.

The other day I was reading a provocative piece to which my friend The Misanthrope had sent me a link. When I was finished reading it, I thought I'd see what else was on that site. The thing that caught my eye was that a piece of software called Vortex xStream was offered for sale.

Remembering my experience with columnized text, I checked around and decided to buy it since I had not, by that time, found any alternatives. I found code snippets that people had written to do a similar thing, but I'm not good with code snippets and just wanted a program.

I'll have to write to these folks about some deficiencies in their product, but I think I'll keep it. My primary tool for this purpose, though, and assuming I continue reading some things this way, will probably be a free add-on for Firefox called RSVP Reader. RSVP Reader could use a few tweaks, too, but it's pretty close to prime time. It adds a toolbar to Firefox with a few controls and a space to present text. You select what you want RSVPed and push the Play button. Works pretty well.

RSVP, by the way, stands for Rapid Sequential (or Serial) Visual Presentation. Vortex xStream calls itself MARS, for Machine Assisted Reading Software.

Since I started playing with this stuff I found, as usual, that there's nothing new aside from my awareness. There are lots of options. Here's one person's writeup.

In my short experience so far, going through most documents at anywhere from 450 to 600 words per minute is satisfactory. I find myself reading things I would normally pass up simply because of my reading speed and available time. I find that I retain enough to make the exercise worthwhile.

Apparently, researchers have discovered effects such as reduced or confused retention when the reader encounters repeated words. Surely there are other findings, but I'm not sure I'm motivated to dig deeper. In other words, it's a mixed bag. Overall, I'll keep it.

Now maybe I'll finally get around to reading a few books I've downloaded, like Sam Cohen's Shame.

From FAS.org:

SAM COHEN'S "SHAME" ONLINE

Nuclear weaponeer Sam Cohen's memoir "Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb" is "not a good book in any conventional sense," Secrecy News observed a while back (SN, 01/16/01).

"It is long, whiny, profane, and self-indulgent. It seems to have escaped editing altogether. Part reminiscence, part crank manifesto, it is a mess. But it is an honest and compelling mess that students of nuclear history will not want to miss."

It is now available online here:

http://www.athenalab.com/neutron7-t.pdf

Seems that Shame has been renamed F*** You Mr. President.

Laptop Schmaptop

When I bought a new laptop several weeks ago, I bought it at Costco for one reason: their return policy. Costco offered a six-month return policy (since then cut to three months), and since I had never owned a laptop before, and since it came with the brand new Vista operating system, the only way I would have bought one of these things was with a long return policy like Costco's.

Now it's going back, not to be replaced.

Several things about the computer lead me to return it. Primary among them is continued incompatibility with iTunes videos. It's hard to know exactly what the problem is, but the effect is that there's no sense in having any iTunes videos on the machine. Up until Apple's most recent update of Quicktime, one could copy the videos from the hard drive to a thumb drive, from which they would play perfectly. Coupled with the machine's having two gig of RAM, a dual core AMD Turion processor and nVidia graphics, this means the problem is not a lack of oomph.

Now that I've gone through several iterations of trying this and that at the suggestion of HP's support people, and with their last suggestion being to restore the machine to factory condition (and failing that, to send it in for hardware repair), I'm packing it up to get my money back.

A few things greatly reduced my confidence in the machine. For example, I understood that it came equipped with an SATA hard drive, but the Device Manager wrongly reported a SCSI drive instead. The support people confirmed it is an SATA hard drive, and dismissed the SCSI part with a comment that it was only a device name. Well, maybe so, but it's not right and it doesn't inspire confidence.

A couple of nights ago I got a sudden blue screen of death. It said that the operating system had been stopped to prevent damage of some sort. When the machine re-booted, I was presented with

Windows Vista license alert

Windows has detected that an unauthorized change was made to your Windows license. This alert appears when a copy of Windows in unlicensed or if Windows activation has been bypassed.
...
... To purchase Windows Vista now, go to the Windows Vista website.

No thanks.

For the past year or two I've been trying to use online applications rather than having software on my computer. I no longer use an email client, having found webmail acceptable. I resisted the urge to put Office on this laptop, and so far Google and ThinkFree's services seem acceptable. You can do all sorts of things online that used to require on-board applications. I think that's liberating, and it certainly made ditching this laptop an easier decision. Sure you're dependent on the the Internet, but so what? I'm dependent on the interstate highway system, the electricity grid and a whole lot more public infrastructure anyway, so why worry about it?

Enough.

iTunes HP Vista nVidia SATA video

I'm starting to get pissed off at the combination of iTunes, HP, Microsoft and nVidia. I'll mention them all because I don't know where to place the blame for an apparently intractable issue involving what seems to be all of them.

To make a long story shorter, among all the compatibility issues involving iTunes and Vista, none has affected me, and the one that does affect me (and others) is never mentioned except among posters in Apple's support forum.

It seems that any iTunes video stored on an SATA hard drive is unplayable on a Vista machine. You can take the same video and put it on a thumb drive and it will play perfectly.

I just wish that Apple would say something about this issue. iTunes users have been posting about it on Apple's forum for some time, with at least one poster claiming that Apple is aware of the problem. It's been a long time, though, and it's annoying that Apple isn't saying anything.

If this problem isn't fixed, I will probably return my laptop before the six month return policy expires. Trouble is, by then I'd be so pissed off at Apple that I wouldn't get a Mac to replace it.

Come on Apple. Say something!!! Keep your customers informed. I can accept that sometimes there are challenging technical issues, but I don't see any justification for the silence.

Vista (and iTunes video playback)

About three weeks ago I bought a Windows laptop computer at Costco (sorry Apple, I would have preferred a Mac but I could not afford the one I'd have been satisfied with). Nowadays these things all come with Windows Vista, which, being new to me, made Costco's generous return policy especially important. The machine I bought is an "HP Pavilion dv6253cl Entertainment Notebook PC".

So far so good. Pretty much. A couple of things have bothered me, though.

I've not been partial to Symantec security products for some time, but that's what's bundled with the machine so I'm using it for now. Along the way, something prompted me to run Microsoft's free online "Windows Live OneCare Safety Scan for Windows Vista" (beta). Son of a gun if it didn't report several instances of something called "Trojan:HTML/Bankfraud.M" buried in some gzip files in my Firefox cache. I don't know why Norton didn't notice these things on the way in, nor am I all that confident it wasn't a false positive by OneCare. What I know is that, for reasons rational or not, I have more confidence in Kaspersky and will buy a second license to put on my laptop.

The other thing that bothered me was the incompatibility with iTunes. I read all I could find about the incompatibility that's widely known and figured it would be no big deal. It hasn't been a big deal and iTunes is working well on my new computer. With one exception, that is: video playback. Watching videos with iTunes on Vista was only possible if a slow slide show would have been acceptable. The video playback remedies on Apple's website had no effect. Scratch videos on iTunes.

Now it turns out there's an issue with iTunes on Vista with SATA hard drives, and that's what's been bothering me all along. A post on the iTunes support forum said the poster had been able to get videos to play properly by copying them to a flash drive to avoid the SATA hard drive. Sure enough, when I tried my thumb drive the video played beautifully.

I suppose Apple or Microsoft will have this problem fixed before too long. When they do, I'll be about as satisfied with this new computer and this new operating system as I expected to be.

As I type I'm reminded that the keyboard seems to be defective, failing to register spacebar strokes rather frequently. Maybe it's just some stickiness that'll clear up with usage. In fact, I think I just cleared it up by forcefully striking the right side of the spacebar a few times. It's OK as I type now.

If I had to do it over again, I would. I think Vista is solid enough, and will get better as issues are discovered and patches issued.

Recurring interests, (useful?) obsessions

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Several times, over the years, I've become interested in computer security. Each time, I eventually wound up getting tired of the subject and consciously decided to drop it. Security being just an illusion anyway, why not move on to something more entertaining?

For example, seven or eight years ago it occurred to me that computer security at work was lacking because senior management and employees generally didn't place much importance on it. Everyone thought things were fine because we had a perimeter firewall and Norton anti-virus. I did what I thought I should do to raise awareness, but wound up pissing off the poor security manager (at that time it was just a grunt position with no authority) so I backed off.

A few years later I had a run-in with a scamming fraudster. During this episode I again became interested in computer and network security. I learned a little about packet sniffing, port scanning, protocols and so on (emphasis on a little). Eventually, after failing to resolve multiple signs of unwelcome guests in my computer, I simply nuked it and all backups, adopted a new paradigm and left my sniffers and scanners behind. I still tried to practice safe computing, but paranoia gets tiresome.

My most recent interest in cyber security was sparked by a little toy I bought a few months ago, DU Meter. One night I decided to start DU Meter's stopwatch before going to bed. The next day I was surprised to see that there had been a lot of outbound traffic overnight. (I might have mis-read DU Meter. I've not seen such a thing again.) I could understand occasional inbound peaks from automatic updates to this or that, but an unattended outbound peak seemed, well, interesting.

Now I've got a few new toys and interests. I replaced my router with an old 600 MHz PIII computer running the Smoothwall firewall. I've learned how to run the tcpdump sniffer on the firewall machine, how to transfer the capture file to a PC, and how to analyze it with Wireshark. I've learned how to compare what's captured on the firewall machine with what's captured on the PC using Port Explorer, and now I'm assisted by the macro functions of my new text editor, EditPad Pro. Along the way I became interested in "regular expressions" and now I've started doing the tutorials to learn a little Python programming.

I've also upgraded my internal network to gigabit, and converted another old computer into a network file server using NASLite+. It's just the main PC and the NASLite box that are running gigabit so far, but the cabling and switches have been changed out.

When I set up the Smoothwall box, I included the unprotected DMZ option. I keep thinking about getting another old PC to set up a honeypot in the DMZ, but I don't think I'll go there (at least not yet). Any script kiddie can run circles around me, and while a honeypot might be interesting, so are matches and gasoline.

I won't go into the books I've started reading but not finished, or the various things I should be doing but am neglecting. Hey, I'm getting old, OK? I'll do whatever the hell I want, responsibility be damned. (I can't believe my KMA day (Kiss My Ass day - early retirement eligibility) is less than four weeks away!)

OK, now for an hour or so of Python tutorials, and maybe some paying attention to the world. Bye!

XP - SiS PCI to USB Enhanced Host Controller - Unknown Device - Simple Things First!

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[Update:

No, sorry, I don't have the hotfix. When it didn't work for me I un-installed it and trashed the download.

It really wasn't much trouble at all to get the hotfix from Microsoft. I just called them on the phone, gave them the KB article number and explained that the KB article said to contact them for the hotfix. Then I got transferred to someone who made sure I knew what I was talking about, and that I understood the hotifx might not work and had not gone through all the testing. This second person then sent me the link and a time-limited password to open the file via email.

You did try unplugging everything for half an hour and holding in the power button for a minute, didn't you? ;>) I'm still mad at myself for not trying that first.]

Summary:

If your XP computer's integrated USB hardware stops working, try shutting it down and disconnecting it from the power source for half an hour.

Long version:

The integrated USB2 hardware on my confuter's motherboard quit working.

The machine is a three or four year old 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 running Windows XP Home SP2. The motherboard itself (Gigabyte RZ Series, 8S651MP-RZ) is newer, having replaced the one whose cazapitors blew a year or two ago. The machine is kept up to date with OS patches, and is as well protected from creepware as I can make it. It's also reasonably well protected from power glitches.

Nothing lasts forever, but there wasn't any reason for the USB to have quit working. What might have precipitated the problem was installation of the APC PowerChute Personal Edition software that came with my new APC UPS, and connection of the new UPS's comm port to one of the ports on a powered USB hub connected, in turn, to one of the computer's USB ports. The APC software is supposed to allow the UPS to shut down the computer if there's a power outage of a given duration. I didn't test that function while things were still working, but if I re-install the UPS software and reconnect the UPS to the computer, I will certainly test it. For now, though, I'm a bit hesitant.

I became obsessed with fixing the motherboard's integrated USB hardware, and probably spent more time on it than I should have. At first I was pretty happy because a bit of googling pointed to the "SiS PCI to USB Enhanced Host Controller" part of the USB setup in the Device Manager*. Following the suggestion, I disabled the "SiS PCI to USB Enhanced Host Controller" in the Device Manager and, like magic, USB started working again. That being the case, I started an incremental backup to my USB hard drive before I went to bed.

(*You can get to the Device Manager through Properties on My Computer, or by hitting the Windows and Pause/Break keys on the keyboard at the same time.)

In the morning I was surprised to find that my incremental backup was still running. That led to the realization that what I had actually done was to disable the faster USB2 while reviving the glacial USB1 functions. Better than nothing, but unacceptable. Back to Google.

I was reasonably certain there was nothing wrong with my hardware since the USB still worked under version 1, so I carried out different suggested remedies such as obtaining the latest drivers, removing the USB entries in the Device Manager and re-booting and so on, most of which I'd already tried.

One authoritative-sounding suggestion was to simply give up early and install a USB card instead of wasting time trying to fix the integrated USB.

I tried a few things I thought might help, like disabling USB support in the BIOS and then running my registry fixer program immediately after rebooting. RegSupreme Pro found a lot of stuff to toss, but this did not solve the USB problem. Nothing I did solved the USB problem. The Microsoft web site was not helpful at all when I went looking for USB-related help (or maybe I didn't look hard enough). My motherboard manufacturer didn't help either, simply saying something to the effect that due to Microsoft licensing they only made the drivers available on CD.

Eventually I found something referring to a known issue with XP and USB, so I went back to the Microsoft site and searched a little harder, eventually finding an article (892050) acknowledging the known issue and mentioning a patch file. One would have to contact Microsoft to obtain the patch file, though, apparently because it hadn't gone through all the testing they do. I contacted Microsoft on the phone and in short order had a link in my email inbox to download the patch. I applied the patch to zero effect, and since the problem persisted I uninstalled the patch.

I was about to break down and install a USB card, feeling like an ass for not heeding the earlier advice to give up early on fixing things, but it was already past my bedtime. I remembered the advice to shut down, unplug the machine from the wall, push the power button for one minute and then wait half an hour before firing it up again. I went a little further than that and unplugged all peripherals in addition to the power.

After a minute of holding the power button in, and about 40 minutes of waiting, I came back, plugged everything back in, fired it up and, you got it, it worked like a champ.

Lesson (re)learned: Try the simple things first.