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Toward a Better Computing Experience | Walt Graham, CTPC President |
There’s no meeting this month. Since our meeting place was unavailable and we hadn't firmed up a program for July we decided to cancel the July meeting. The mid-summer turnout is often light and this also gives Ben Wilson a well deserved break after arranging what I believe were two of our all-time best programs: Richard Frisch's comprehensive look at smart phones and the Norwalk Police Department field trip where we saw first hand the amazing new license plate reading technology they're using on two of their patrol cars so far.
Since we won't be together again until August, I wanted to share a few random thoughts.
I mentioned this at a meeting a few months ago. My wife had found that a batch of jpeg files on her computer had become corrupted. They were files from our old Canon camera that I had moved from her old Windows XP drive to a new drive when I updated all our computers to Windows 7. Some of the files wouldn't open and the ones that did had blank lines or gray bands running through them. I did a Google search and found that this is a known issue with .jpeg files and it has some professional photographers scared to death because there's no assurance that their large portfolios are intact. The files appear to be normal and the only way to tell if there's a problem is to try to open the file.
I had backed the photo files up in several places (including Mozy - more on that later) so I was able to restore the uncorrupted copies to her computer.
Then this past week I discovered another batch of corrupted jpegs, this time it was on my notebook - they were the first 90 photos we had taken with our current Casio camera. Fortunately these photos resided in other locations including my wife's hard drive where they were fine. Again, I replaced the corrupted files.
Years ago I had a similar problem with audio .wav files that I'd copied from one drive to another. In that case it turned out to be a known issue when transferring large files with a particular MOBO's hard drive controller - the one I happened to have. I assume the .jpeg issue is similar and I guess the lesson here is that even our backups aren't bulletproof. Don't assume anything.
This week I received an email from someone I’d never heard of. It said, “Hi Walt, I set up a Facebook profile where I can post my pictures, videos and events and I want to add you as a friend so you can see it. First, you need to join Facebook! Once you join, you can also create your own profile. Thanks, Giuseppe.” The email also contained two elements of Facebook boilerplate: “See who else has invited you to Facebook,” and, “Other people you might know on Facebook.” The invite was from Richard Frisch as part of his CTPC presentation awhile back, so that’s fine, I was fully aware of it. But the “people I might know” are indeed acquaintances; mostly work related, who probably commented on their Facebook page that they had been to my studio, and the Facebook stealth marketing ‘bots must have picked it up.
I've always resisted having anything to do with Facebook, mainly because I'm not really interested in what people are up to, especially if I haven't seen or heard from them in 40 years. I find Facebook superfluous. With a website and an email address, why do I need a third-party site to communicate with anyone? I am a member of a couple of forums, but that’s to discuss specific interests, not just to chew the fat.
My wife points out that Facebook is a good way to keep up with our granddaughter, and she's right. But I think it’s a shame that more people haven’t learned to set up their own websites where they can be in control instead of relying on Facebook. To me, Facebook is the 2010 equivalent of America Online in the 1990’s – a proprietary community where users are at the mercy of the proprietor.
And while Facebook is prowling around your private pages, letting others know you’re thinking of them, I suspect they’re even more eager to let a few local car dealers know that you happened to mention you’re in the market for a new car. Not a big deal, I suppose, but it seems creepy to me.
While I puzzle over why so many people I know use Facebook, I can’t understand why so few people I know use Mozy (or Carbonite.) Both these companies provide secure, unlimited online data backups for around $5 a month. I happen to use Mozy.
The real beauty of Mozy (or Carbomite) is that it’s automatic – you don’t need to think about it. It runs in the background and it not only keeps a mirror of your current data, it provides “versioning” by saving another copy of every file you change. Those individual versions are stored by date and stay active for a month. If you accidentally delete a file, or overwrite one as I did last week, all you need to do is log into your account, choose a prior date and you’ll see your hard drive exactly as it looked on that date. Select the missing or overwritten file and retrieve it.
In my case it was a file I revise each week by accessing last week’s file and doing a “save as” with a new name. I had forgotten the “save as” step and a week went by before I noticed that the previous week’s file had been overwritten. No problem.
Last week Mozilla released the initial beta of its version 4 Firefox browser. I switched from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Firefox 1 several years ago but jumped ship last year when Google released it's Chrome browser. Chrome was elegantly simple, extremely fast and virtually free of bloat compared with Firefox 3. Now I believe the game is changing again. I've been using the Firefox 4 portable version which can be run from a thumb drive but, if used on a hard drive, has the advantage of keeping all its files in one folder instead of scattering them around in various obscure Documents and Settings or Application Data folders. Just like the old days!
Firefox 4 has a new, fresh user interface remarkably similar to Chrome. The speed is very close -- I haven't done any time tests but it feels fast enough. When I switch to it from Chrome I don't notice a difference anymore. It seems rock solid which is a great sign for an initial beta. Firefox is configurable in many ways that Chrome is not and it doesn't keep track of your Internet travels the way Google is likely to with Chrome.
I think I'll be switching back to Firefox. The lesson here, in my opinion, is that competition is a great thing! In this case the increasing popularity of Chrome woke up the Firefox development team and we now have two excellent browser choices. Will Google's Chrome OS do the same for Microsoft Windows? Stay tuned.
I started writing this article on my netbook in WordPad. Then I remembered that WordPad has no spell check so I saved and reopened the document in Word. After awhile I noticed that my spelling was perfect – not likely – so I hit F7 for a complete document spell check. A message popped up saying that various dll’s related to the dictionary could not be found. Later I opened the document on my notebook, then on my desktop machine – same problem!
By now I realized that the problem was with this particular document and not Word itself. I tried cutting and pasting the text to a new document – no luck. I saved it as an .rtf (rich text format) file – no luck. The only way I was able to finish the article with spell checking was to save as a pure .txt file and then reformat it. Gee, computers have become so much easier and more reliable these days!
Have a safe and happy rest of the summer and I’ll see you in late August.