I recently installed an add-on Blu-Ray Recorder on my Dell desktop machine here at work, and I had some troubles. You might too.
The physical installation went fine, although they didn’t include a SATA cable in the box with the drive, which I found annoying. If you’re buying one of these, keep in mind you need to pick up a cable as well unless you’re ditching your existing optical drive.
When I went to install the Power2Go 7.0 software that was pre-packaged with the drive – so that I can actually burn Blu-Ray discs – I got a popup error:
Error 1327.Invalid Drive Y:
“Weird”, thought I. I have Offline Folders set up on this desktop pointing my documents folder at a server, and that folder is mapped as drive Y. Well, it can occasionally happen that software developers hard-code a drive letter in their installation (bad practice, boo!) for use as a virtual drive, so I disconnected the mapped drive and tried again. Still no dice.
It turns out that if you have Offline Folders set up, even if the drive is not connected, the Power2Go installer borks. Turning off Offline Folders isn’t enough to fix it, because the Offline Folders setup, itself, leaves registry keys in the registry even after you turn off Offline Folders. You actually have to run the registry editor and remove the legacy entries for the drive mappings to get the installer to not freak out. Be cautious when you run the registry editor, as you can brick your machine.
Click Start, and then click Run. In the Open field, type regedit, and then click OK. The Registry Editor opens.
In the Registry Editor, locate the following registry key:
For Father’s Day, Kitty and I packed Jack and Hannah up in the car and headed over to Silverlake to have brunch at Millie’s (by the way, if you’ve never had brunch at Millie’s and you live in Los Angeles, you have a quest to perform – I recommend the Devil’s Mess).
Millie’s is mostly sidewalk seating, and we’re plunked down on a rickety table next to two guys who are sitting with a couple of young women. Age pegged right around 32.
Now, these two gentlemen were regaling each other (and to a lesser extent their company) with stories about personal computers in The Elde Days. Snippets of the conversation included, “Dude, I remember when the Commodore 64 came out, and it rocked the competition on graphics…”
Reality-check time. The Commodore 64 came out in 1982. I was 11. I remember when the Commodore 64 came out. I’m turning 40 this year.
If these guys were alive when the Commodore 64 came out, they were younger than 5. Okay, so maybe their big brother had a Commodore 64. But if these two dudes had the capacity to judge graphics quality at age 5, I’ll eat my Atari 400 Basic cartridge.
So my question is: are these guys fronting their nerd kred to each other… or is this an actual conversation that 32 year-old menfolk can use to get 32 year-old girls? Because if so, it’s definitely true that nerd has gone mainstream in bad, bad way.
Just yesterday, I walked through one of the Borders that is in the process of shuttering its doors as part of their retraction strategy. Everything in the store was 30%-50% off.
This isn’t a bankruptcy, but it’s close. When you’re closing a retail outlet of any sort, you have to dispose of the inventory. At this point, a lot of your normal decision-making is inverted, when it comes to pricing. In normal business operations, you’ll often sell some very popular items at or below your unit cost (what’s referred to in the retail world as a loss-leader), just to get bodies in the door. One example germane to the book business is the last Harry Potter book; you could find this brand-new bestseller for %30 off at Borders. You walk in the door, you browse the new hardback section, you pick up Deathly Hallows, but you browse the magazine rack and the classics and maybe buy a cookbook for Aunt Mabel while you’re there. Profit! They don’t make any money off of Harry, but you helped move some of their other inventory.
In a liquidation scenario, though, you’re balancing two opposing factors: you have a strong incentive to sell the *entire* inventory, so that you don’t have to pack it into boxes and ship it elsewhere (in the Pasadena Borders, they’re even selling off the furniture – need a bookshelf?) However, for the inventory items that have good turnover rates you’re actually less inclined to fire-sale, because if you *do* have to pack some stuff up after you close the doors, the boxes of books that will move anyway are less likely to be a major loss than the 80 copies of The South Beach Diet that you still have in the back, that are likely to just wind up, after shipping, in the back of whichever store they’re destined to live out the rest of their bookish lives.
This leads to a whole different set of economic incentives both for the seller, and the buyer. The buyer who only buys new releases or bestsellers might hit the store in the first couple of days, looking for a bargain. But the other new-releases-and-bestseller buyers are also there, so the popular book will be (maybe) 10-15% off. As you get closer to the “shuttering the doors” deadline, you might drop the price another chunk. But the books that are unlikely to sell are unlikely to sell everywhere, so the discount will be much higher.
This is a very long winded way of noting the following: in the Pasadena Borders store, the following genres were marked down by the following rate:
Science Fiction and Fantasy: 30% off
Mystery: 30% off
Romance: 40% off
Computer Howto/Fix It books: 40% off
Fiction/Novels: 40-50% off
Philosophy and Classic Literature: 50% off
Pleased that our economic overlords are indicating that the general public likes Mysteries and SF more than Romance Novels, but wryly amused that Homer and Shakespeare and Hobbes are really in the “nobody will buy this unless we dump it” category.
Sitting here in class (Crisis Management, so far a fun class!), I was struck by an observation that you, general public, may find useful.
Every competent information technology professional I’ve ever met has uttered the phrase, “So what happens when (foo) gets hit by a truck?” If your IT people don’t ever ask you that question, you may want to look into hiring some new IT people.
Eighty-five percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2009, meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (14.7 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 5.7 percent with very low food security. In households with very low food security, the food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food. Prevalence rates of food insecurity and very low food security were essentially unchanged from 14.6 percent and 5.7 percent, respectively, in 2008, and remained at the highest recorded levels since 1995, when the first national food security survey was conducted.
These numbers are essentially unchanged for 2008 and 2009. The insecurity numbers were 11.1 percent and 4.1 percent in 2007. 10.9 and 4.0 in 2006. The recession has clearly hit the poor pretty damn hard. Remember that the next time you want to complain about how bad things are for you.
I don’t program for a living. However, I know a bunch of programmers, as part of my job I talk shop with Computer Science people, and programming languages interest me from the standpoint of logical systems.
I was chewing the fat with one of those aforementioned Computer Science folk this morning, and I offered a classification system for programmers that he found entertaining. Since I needed something to write about to get me back into the blogging gig, here it is for your consumption, with some embellishment.
Class One: The Directionless Hack
How to recognize them:
These people don’t know much about anything. They’re the type who learned how to program by reading “Java for Dummies”, or by hammering away at their computer to get something specific done (like, building the web site for their band or their buddy’s motorcycle shop). Edited to add: as Corey points out in the comments, you can have a degree in Computer Science, from a reputable university, and still be a directionless hack. How you learned what you know is less important than what you haven’t learned, and “just getting this next thing done” is a very common approach to formal education, too.
In and of itself, self-taught programmers aren’t necessarily a bad lot (many of the below classes started here), but these yahoos haven’t got an enormous amount of intellectual curiosity about how programming works and their “self-taught” skills stop precisely at the place where their current problem ends. They generally keep solving the same problems over and over, as they fail to realize that the problem that they’re trying to solve is something that someone else already solved a couple of decades ago.
They program almost entirely in Perl, PHP, or JavaScript, because that’s what they can hack together with a minimal amount of abstract work, and they run everything over the web that they can. They’ve built at least one database in their lifetime, and anyone who understands normalization will scream in abject horror if they see the database schema. Generally, they need complete access to everything to get anything done, because they can’t explain what they’re doing while they do it, at least in part because they’re not sure what they’re doing. Within a very short period of time after they leave their code up and running, it will collapse in a way that only the original developer can untangle. They don’t use version control; or if they use version control a typical change comment will include, “Checking in some changes”. Comments in the source code will be likewise either nonexistent, or include no useful information. They don’t work well with systems administrators, DBAs, or networking folks.
Common statement: “Well, it works for me.”
Class Two: The Directed Hack
How to recognize them:
These are the people who know they need to get something done, but figured out somewhere along the line that it might be a good idea to pick up at least a couple of books about programming concepts instead of just “howto” manuals. If they graduated with a CS major, they paid enough attention in their theory classes to grasp what “layer of abstraction” means, although they may not be able to explain it. Like the directionless hack, they usually need full access to most things to get anything done, however unlike the directionless hack they’ll have learned enough about at least some things to know they don’t want to mess with it any more. If they have more than 5 years of experience, they’ll have some comments in their code (precisely at the location where most of the bugs are), because they occasionally want to go on vacation. They program in whatever language is currently en vogue wherever they are, or they will default to Perl or Python. They will have an opinion on what the best language is, but their strength of their opinion will be directly correlated to whether or not they’ve worked primarily on writing their own code (in which case they will prefer an unstructured language), or supporting the code of someone else (in which case they will prefer a much more rigorously structured language). Depending upon the stage of their professional development, they will work well with systems administrators, database administrators, or networking personnel, but never all three at the same time. These people actually make up the bulk of systems administrators, industry-wide. Programming editors vary wildly.
Common statement, in comments: “# I know this sucks, but it works. Do it yourself if you don’t like it.”
Class Three: The Mercenary Professional
How to recognize them:
They know Java, ASP.NET, and/or C#. They’re at least conceptually familiar with SOAP and/or Ajax. They hate whichever database they’ve relied upon that had the least competent DBA, and like whichever database they’ve relied upon that had the most competent DBA. They want version control, they want detailed specifications, they don’t want to have more than two meetings with the customer. They regard most of what they learned in college (if they were a CS major) as useless and unnecessary. These people want to get stuff *done*, and they don’t want another phone call about it afterward. They regard systems administrators and networking staff as necessary evils. They will love good DBAs, and set fire to bad ones. They will have a love-hate relationship with XML. They will likely prefer Waterfall development, and use NetBeans or Visual Studio IDE.
Common statement: “File that bug report with the maintenance team,” or “That’s not in the spec.”
Class Four: The Cabalist
How to recognize them:
They have a very, very strong opinion on which language is teh best evar, and the list of candidates includes Lisp, C, Modula-3, and Haskell. They will be able to write up at least six different logical diagrams of any project before writing any code… although they probably won’t write up logical diagrams because they can move from one layer of abstraction to another, on the fly, in their own head (or at least, they think they can). Their first approach to most software projects will be to suggest a complete re-write in a language that doesn’t suck. They will hate most programming languages, including any language that is proposed by anyone on their programming team that isn’t a Cabalist or a Professional. Good Cabalists will work well with good DBAs, but bad Cabalists will annoy the hell out of them by offering suggestions on how to improve the database. They will often argue with systems administrators or networking staff about technical limitations (of the systems or network) as if problems with deviation from RFCs are the technical staff’s fault. They will likely prefer some sort of agile programming methodology, and have a strong preference for their particular favorite incarnation. Cabalists typically will use Emacs (and have a very strong preference for a particular incarnation of emacs), and sneer at any IDE.
Common statement: “Only a complete idiot would do it that way.”
Class Five: The Theoretician
Closely related to The Cabalist, the Theoretician goes one step farther. They will have done one of the following: written a major software program in Assembly, written their own compiler in a language *other* than Assembly “just to do it”, written their own programming language, installed a C compiler on their HP calculator, contributed a driver or a chunk of the kernel to either the Linux, FreeBSD, or NetBSD projects, or installed and run Plan 9 on their home network un-ironically. These people are nearly useless in a team environment as nobody else can understand them except a Cabalist, and Cabalists and Theoreticians rarely get along. However, they also can be the sort of Free Electron that can re-write an entire application over a weekend. Almost all Theoreticians use vi.
Common statement: “Yeah, I wrote about that in the 2001 issue of IEEE Interactions between Compilers and Computer Architectures”
Class Six: The Weary Wise One
These guys and gals used to be one of the above classes, but have passed into programming Nerdvana to Enlightenment. They will have opinions, but no longer care about the strength of those convictions. They will re-write the entire code base, but only if necessary, or hack it if that’s the best way to get the job done. They will cheerfully reuse another programmer’s code (even bad code), or buy an off-the-shelf component if that’s legitimately the best way to get the job done nearly on time, basically on budget, and with quality good enough to make everyone happy. They will hate most operating systems, programming languages, and programming methodologies equally. Typically they will prefer vi or emacs over an IDE, but will use an IDE if it gets the job done.
Common statement: “This is still better than my dot-com days.”
Mrs. Telsch was the woman who ran the boarding house my grandfather Maurice stayed in prior to shipping out for the Philippines in 1941. She wrote this letter to his parents, Ory and Lettie, on March 5th, 1945.
My Dear Folks
At last I can say were are a very happy family and I know you folks must be too. Maurice arrived in good old U.S.A. Thursday, March 1 evening late and Friday they took him to a San Francisco Hospital. Saturday he called you folks and us up on the phone. My it did seem good to hear his voice. We were so overjoyed and excited.
Then Maurice called a friend of ours in San Francisco and he and his wife came to the hospital and got Maurice and brought him to Woodland Saturday afternoon in there car wich is about 75 miles from here. We had a very nice visit with him in the short time he was here. As he had to be back at the hospital by twelve o’clock that night.
I had a nice dinner for them and it seemed so good to have him at our table again, and that big smile on his face again. Maurice looks good, considering what he has gone through with. He is thin but has gained fifteen pounds in one month which shows he is in good health and another month or so he should be fine.
His mind is good and he is not shelled shocked at all and nerves seem to be very good which is wonderful. He does not look a bit older than when he left here.
I told him it did not make any difference how much the war had messed him up. As long as we had him back, and he could have come back much worse off. But I am sorry I half to tell you he has lost both of his Legs. He did not have the heart to tell you on the phone that day and asks me to tell you.
They took his legs of just between the knee and the hips about halfway. This why they are sending him back East to Washington D.C. to a hospital that makes the artificial limbs and fit them and then teach him to walk. When this is done he will be as good as new. I do not have any Idea how long it will take.
He left yesterday and I guess he is back there by now. He will send you his adress and you can go see him as he is only 300 miles from you. He bought himself a Wheel Chair and he gets arouond very good in it. It folds up and you can put it in a car. Very nice.
This is why he can not come home until he gets fixed. But they are feeding him good and doing every thing they can for him.
So I do hope you will understand and being good Christian people will not take it too hard. It did him a lot of good to visit us while he was here.
Yes I had to break the news to him about Marie getting married which was the hardest thing to do. She and her husband came over to see him while he was here. I thought she treated him very cold did not even shake hands with him. But her husband did when he did I could see Maurice wanted to haul off and let him have it. But he tried so hard not to let on he cared. But I could see it hurt just the same. But my girls helped to cheer him and he soon forgot about it. He has gone through so much I guess nothing matters any more. When I ask him if he wanted to see them he said “Hell I guess if they can stand it I guess I can”. But I wish she had waited until he came home. But that is the way life is, I guess.
I read your letter to Maurice and will forward it to him as soon as I get his address.
Yours Sincerely,
Mrs A.C. Telsch
On the 28th of January, 1941, my grandfather enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps at the age of 19 at Fort Macarthur, San Pedro. A year and two weeks later, he was wounded in action during the battle of Bataan, on February 9th. His parents were informed of his wounding via a letter from the War Department on February 23rd, 1942, but no details were available.
On April 9th of that year, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese, and participated in the Bataan Death March. During the three years of his internment, he sent a few form postcards through the International Red Cross to his parents that provided no real details of his situation other than the fact that he was alive, and once participated in a Japanese radio broadcast during which he was allowed to read a short message which also included no details.
On the 19th of February, 1945, he was officially logged as repatriated to the U.S., less the legs he used to walk into the enlistment office. This letter above was the first notification his parents received with verifiable news of the actual extent of his injuries.
Just two weeks prior to this letter being written, on February 22nd, Ory and Lettie had received a previous letter from Mrs. Telsch, which mentioned that Maurice had been in Bilibid, a POW camp that had been liberated 16 days before. There were 1,200 prisoners at Old Bilifid, about 1,000 civilians and 200 military personnel, most or all of whom were amputees of one sort of another.
“Grandpa Moe” died in 1988.
Today’s for you, Grandpa, and the 22 million veterans still alive in the U.S., and the millions more who have died since 1776.
Pat's Daily Grind 