Farewell to Dropbox!

I’ve just had notice from Dropbox that it will cease functioning on my computer at the end of August.

Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

I’m just wondering if there is any other similar “cloud” computing system that will work across different platforms, including different versions of Windows.

I’ve found Dropbox useful for making files available on different computers, so that my wife and I can work on the same file at different times, and always find the latest version, as well as having a cloud backup in case things go wrong. Perhaps we need to study the working of our home network a bit more to see if that can accomplish the same thing.

Here’s the message I received from Dropbox:

We noticed that you’re running the Dropbox desktop application (client) on Windows XP. We’re writing to let you know that as of August 29th, 2016, Dropbox will no longer support this version of Windows. You can find which devices connected to your account are running Windows XP by visiting your account page.

Don’t worry — your files and photos aren’t going anywhere! But you’ll need to update your computer to Windows Vista or later to access them through the Dropbox desktop application. You can find instructions on how to update your operating system on Microsoft’s website.

If you don’t want to update your operating system, your files will still be available through the Dropbox website. However, on August 29th, you’ll be signed out of your Dropbox account on your computer and the Dropbox desktop application will no longer be accessible.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause. For more information, please see our Help Center.

Well, it will cause quite a bit of inconvenience, but not nearly as much as reinstalling Windows would. Reinstalling Windows would take me the rest of my life, which I’d rather spend doing other things. Spending days and days searching through hundreds of CDs and DVDs looking for installation discs, and editing setting everything up all over again is no fun.

Dropbox was especially useful when travelling: we could enter notes and collect data on research trips, and sync them to Dropbox whenever we found and Internet connection, and everything would be waiting on my home computer when I got home. I suppose one could revert to the pre-cloud practice of backing up to small DVD discs, and mailing them home by snail mail.

And for the rest we’ll just have to forego the convenience of Dropbox and go back to using USB flash drives for everything.

When cloud computing is no longer available, can you call it a drought?

Can we blame El Nino?

 

Telkom upgrade: lots of freebies, but what are they for?

One of those Telkom salespeople phoned a couple of months ago and offered us a faster Internet connection for an extra R100.00 a month, and it included free datadownloads between midnight and 6:00 am.

Since one son does computer animation which requires regular huge program updates, and the other likes to watch videos of motor racing, that seemed like a useful deal, so I signed up for it.

It came with a lot of other benefits. One was that it included Telkom-Telkom calls 24/7 instead of just during “CallMor” time. We don’t make many calls anyway, so it’s not really a benefit, but nice to know in case we need it.

But there were a lot of physical goodies too, which came in a big box.

The trouble is that there were no instructions, and only the barest descriptions, so we don’t know what half these things are, never mind how to use them, and for what.

So this is a plea for help: can anyone tell us what these things do, and if they are at all useful? Or do they just incur more liabilities?

Can we use any of them, or should we just advertise them for sale on an online auction site?

You can see the web page with the list of goodies here: Telkom Smarthome Premium ADSL.

And here are the goodies that came in the box:

1. D-link ADSL Wi-Fi Router
2. 3G Hauwei E5330 Mi-Fi Router
3. Huawei Wi-Fi Range Extender
4. Microsoft Office 365 (x2)
5. SIM 1 with 1GB Data Every Month
6. SIM 2 with 1GB Data Every Month
7. SIM 3 with 100min Talk Time Every Month
8. SIM 4 with 100min Talk Time Every Month
9. Free DStv Explora

(1) The D-link ADSL Wi-Fi Router may be useful if our existing router gets struck by lightning.

(3) The Huawei Wi-Fi Range Extender may be useful for using laptops away from the router — is that what it does? How do we get it to work?

3G Hauwei E5330 Mi-Fi Router

(2) 3G Hauwei E5330 Mi-Fi Router — Am I right in assuming that this could be used to connect to the Internet while travelling or during load shedding, using SIM cards (5) or (6)?

If so, it could be the most useful thing in the box. We’d just need to learn how to set it up and get it working.

MS Office 365

(4) and (9) —Microsoft Office 365 and Free DStv Explora seem to be the gifts that go on taking, since it seems that you can’t use them without paying expensive monthly subscriptions. Should we try to sell them on an online auction site?

(7) & (8) the SIMs with 100min Talk Time Every Month seem to be useless without extra cell phones, or are they the kind that you can transfer your existing number to when your present contract expires?

Any ideas/comments/suggestions anyone?

 

Windows XP: to upgrade or not to upgrade?

Someone recently retweeted the following warning about the need to “upgrade” if one’s computer is running Windows XP. Here’s the warning:

Still Running Windows XP? Upgrade Now to Reduce Security Risks – Cloud Computing | Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Blog – Site Home – TechNet Blogs:

Back in April, Microsoft’s Windows team began reminding customers that the company would discontinue support for the Windows XP operating system in a year’s time. As of April 8, 2014, customers and partners will no longer receive security updates for Windows XP, or get Microsoft tech support for Windows XP.

I’d be a lot more willing to “upgrade” if Microsoft didn’t make it such a schlepp to do so.

For one thing, one might find that a new version might not run on one’s existing hardware, so that’s a lot of extra expense right there.

Then there’s the schlepp of reinstalling a lot of software.

First you have to find the original discs from which you installed the software, and that can take quite a lot of time. Then you find that you’ve updated it several times since you first installed it, and that can take yet more time.

Then you find that the “upgraded” operating system comes with little or no documentation, so you have to traipse from bookshop to bookshop to try to find third-party documentation, and eventually, at the fifth shop you go to, you find Windows Whizz-Bang11.35 for Dummies and lash out as much as you paid for the upgrade itself to buy it, and spend hours looking for the information you are seeking (like how to set the PATH to make your batch files work) and find that it still doesn’t tell you.

And until you find that piece of information you have to spend an hour each day transferring data files one by one from desktop to laptop and back again instead of simply typing the name of a batch file and letting the computer do the work.

When I upgraded from Windows 98 to XP (because the motherboard on my old computer died) it took about a year to get my computer working properly again. And there is still a lot of disk space taken up by software that doesn’t work because I haven’t reinstalled it in Windows XP yet.

And then there’s the uncertainty about whether ones software will work at all with an “upgrade”.

When my XP laptop was stolen, I replaced it with one that had Windows 7 pre-installed — the 64-bit version. I found most of my data was inaccessible because it would not run MS DOS programs. Fortunately it came with a DVD with the 32-bit version, so I was able to install that, and then the programs worked, but three years later the screen icons still show blank white squares, while with Windows XP I can put pictures in them.

So one of the problems with “upgrading” is that I fear losing access to my data — stuff that I have collected over the last 30 years. And if “upgrading” means that I have to start itn all from scratch, well I’m not going to live that long, am I?

This “upgrading” is a huge schlepp, and not just the operating system.

Some days I can’t work on my computer for an hour or more because it wants me to update my browser, and Flash-Player (which is disabled most of the time anyway) and this reader and that add-on and that widget, and something else — and all this before I can start my computer to look up a phone number or something.

I keep hoping that computers were made for man, not man for computers.

But “upgrading” swiftly dashes those hopes, and means I have to spend hours and hours and days and months working for my computer instead of my computer working for me.

Yes, the possibility of a virus means that there is a risk that you will have a lot of schlepp getting your computer working properly again.

But with an “upgrade”, there’s no risk, it’s an absolute certainty.

If Microsoft want us to “upgrade” they need to devise a simple way to install the new operating system, and have it update the registry so that it can find all the installed programs and have them work right after installation of the operating system, without having to reinstall them one by one.

If they did that, I bet a lot more people would be willing to upgrade.

And if the new operating system is so superior to the old one, then the software wizards at Microsoft could surely find a way of doing that, instead of filling the “upgrade” with useless bells and whistles.

 

 

 

The 1950s and today

Sixty years ago my father gave me a pocket diary that some business firm he dealt with had given him, and I began recording what I did each day. Well, some days.

Since then I’ve transcribed most of my old hard copy diaries into a database, and each day I look back to see what I was doing 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 years ago. Sixty years ago today I didn’t do much that was worth recording. But sixty years ago yesterday I went to the circus with Elizabeth Dods. She was 14 and I was 11, and she was crazy about horses, and used to come to ride ours. She eventually married Frank Hodgkinson (and her brother David married Frank’s sister Vanessa) and I lost touch with them.

But today someone posted this on Facebook which got me thinking about the 1950s again, and the differences between the 1950s and today.

And thinking about the differences between the 1950s and today, I think that graphic on the right is pretty accurate. The thing that was most inconceivable about today back then, the thing that never entered even our wildest dreams, was the personal computer, and the computing power now incorporated into cell phones.

Back then computers were enormously expensive machines that filled whole rooms. They operated with valves, because I think transistors were only developed in the late 1950s.

I remember standing in our cow paddock one night, probably in 1952 or 1953, looking at the rising full moon and the stars, and a friend, Eddy Viles, said, “One day soon a rocket is going to the moon.”

That was conceivable. And before the 50s were out, by the time I was 16, the first artificial satellite was launched, Sputnik I. It caused such excitement that we used to rush out of prep at school to see it fly over. And within 12 years a rocket had reached the moon, and much of it was controlled by computers, but personal computers were still unimaginable.

De Havilland Comet

One of the things that still amazes me is the development of passenger airliners. In 1952 we had jet airliners, and three times a week the De Havilland Comet I used to fly over our house from Palmietfonein, south of Johannesburg, to the still uncompleted Jan Smuts (now O.R. Tambo) airport in Kempton Park. The runways at the old Palmietfontein airport were long enough for the Comet to land, but not long enough for it to take off fully loaded, so it had to fly empty to Jan Smuts and load up there.

Less than fifty years before the Comet, the Wright brothers had not yet made the first powered flight in a heavier than air aircraft. Compare their machine with the Comet, and ask what someone fifty years earlier might have imagined.

More time has passed since the Comet I began regular flights between London and Johannesburg and today than passed between the the Wright brothers and the Comet I, and in the 60 years since the Comet I the changes in aircraft design have been minimal. A Boeing 747 is bigger, but the main design difference is that the engines are in nascelles under the wings rather than in the wings themselves. The biggest changes are inside, not seen in the external view — in the navigational equipment, which brings us again to computers. I think the Comet I still had an astrodome in the roof, for the navigator to take sightings of the stars, and that was in fact a fatal flaw, for metal fatigue in some of the joints caused some of the early Comets to crash.

But looking again at the Comet, I think that people born the early 1890s saw more change in their life time than any generation before or since.

Someone born in 1893 would have been 10 when the Wright brothers flew, might have been a fighter pilot in the First World War, would have been 60 when the Comet flew, and might have travelled on it as a passenger. They would have been 76 when men first stepped on the moon, and might have used a personal computer before their 90th birthday.

Thirty years ago: entering the computer age

Thirty years ago I got my first computer.

It was a NewBrain, which I had seen demonstrated at an exhibition of educational technology, Instructa 82, in Johannesburg. Quite a lot of microcomputers were on show there, and the most popular micro computers in those days were the Sinclair ZX 81, Atari, and the Commodore VIC 20, which I’d also read about in computer magazines.

I’d never heard of the NewBrain before I saw it demonstrated, but it seemed to have a better specification than most of the other computers at the show, and also claimed to be expandable.

It had 32k of RAM, which was enormous for those days, and a built in one-line display. It could also be connected to a TV, for a full-screen display, and programs and data could be stored using an ordinary cassette tape recorder.

The guy from the agents who sold them in South Africa delivered it to our house in Melmoth, Zululand, and we began to play with it, and so entered the computer age, and a different way of doing things.

I was interested in computers mainly because I thought they had potential for recording family history. We’d been interested in family history and genealogy for about 8 years, and had accumulated enough material in files to make it difficult to remember what we had and where we had found it. It seemed to me that computers would be ideal for keeping track of such things, but until the advent of microcomputers such things were only available to medium and large businesses. I began reading computer magazines to see what was possbible. And the NewBrain, with its capacity for expansion, seemed to be the best starting point. It had lots of ways of connecting to other computers.

To begin with we just tried to learn how it worked, using its built-in BASIC programming language. There were a couple of elementary game programs listed in the manual, and we invented a few more. One of the things we did was to do random PEEKs and POKEs to different memory locations, and then ran the program to see how long it ran before it crashed, and what appeared on the screen in the meantime. I suppose it was the equivalent of giving the computer an epileptic fit. Since the BASIC was in ROM it could not harm the machine, and all one needed to do was to switch it off and on again to start again. But that is not something to try on a computer with a hard disk — it might do permanent damage.

The expanded NewBrain, with disk controler and memory expansion sitting behind the main box, a proper monitor (not just a TV screen) and the two floppy-disk enclosures on the right.

Eventually we expanded the NewBrain — there were two other boxes, about the same size as the original box, which plugged into the back of it, and sat on top of each other — a memory expansion module and a disk drive controller. The memory expansion module expanded the memory to about 128k, and the disk drive controller enabled us to connect two 180k mini-floppy disk drives. It used the CP/M DOS, which was quite popular in those days.

The main problem was that just about every brand of micro-computer had its own way of formatting floppy disks, and so disks that were formatted in one make of machine could not be read or written to in another. I read in computer magazines about a genealgy program for microcomputers, called Roots/M, but one could not get it on NewBrain format disks.

Eventually I got a database program called Superfile which ran on the NewBrain, which was quite versatile, and enabled me to do some useful work. For me, databases are the most useful app, and the ability to put information into the computer and get it to spit it out again has been the thing that has made the biggest difference in my life.

The trouble with the NewBrain was that it was expensive. The two floppy disk drives cost over R1000 each, which is about R10000 in today’s money. Now you can get a couple of 2 Terabyte drives for the same price, in today’s money.

But the NewBrain got us started, and long after we had replaced it with more powerful computers our children asked if we could get it out of the cupboard so they could play with it, and learn BASIC programming. So it was an aid to computer literacy as well. And there is something sad about the progress that has been made, too. Nowadays, with GUIs like Windows, Gnome and KDE, there is virtually nothing useful that one can accomplish by tinkering around with amateur programming. Except that I think it might be worthwhile trying to learn to do something with AWK. It might just be possible to have some fun and do something useful with it as we did with BASIC thirty years ago.

One other thing astounded me.

We still have our NewBrain. It’s stashed away in a cupboard somewhere, but it would be a bit of a schlepp to get it out to take a photo of it to illustrate this post. So I took a chance and did a Google search for a picture of a NewBrain, without much hope of finding one. But it popped up immediately, and I found that not only are there pictures of them on the web, but some people actually still use the things, and write software for them, and there is even a NewBrain emulator for running on other computers. So if you want to know more about the NewBrain, you can look here and here.

There was also a rather nice game for the NewBrain. It was written by the South African distributors, Avisa, and they spent almost as much time writing the copy protection module as they did on the game itself. The game was called Mazeland and it came on a copy-protected cassette tape. One had to travel down a maze through various levels battling ever more powerful monsters. There was a similar game for MS DOS computers, called Rogue, but Mazeland was better. We never actually finished it, because someone nicked our tape recorder with the cassette still in it. One of the most powerful monsters we encountered was called a Nothingness, and it would say things like, “The Nothingness has hit you 238.984506 times”. It needed more imagination than the graphics-intensive games of today.

Upgrading hardware

This is my first blog post on my new hardware, so it’s a kind of test to see if everything is working, and so far it does.

My old computer had a 30 Gig and a 40 Gig hard drive, and about 6 months ago I upgraded the 40 Gig one to 500 Gig. It was quite difficult to find one, as most of the hard drives being sold now are SATA, and I wanted an EIDE disk to match the other one. Eventually I found one, backed up all the data on the old drive using Acronis disk imaging software, installed it on the new drive, and everything still worked.

This time, however, was more ambitious.

The old computer was getting rickety. I dared not switch it off, because it might not restart. If the power went off, I’d have to sit pushing the power button for half an hour before it would run.

The CPU fan was also getting noisy, and it sounded rather ominous.

So that meant replacing the motherboard, and both hard drives (both now 500 Gig SATA). I’ll see if I can use the 500 Gig EIDE drive an an external housing as a backup USB drive – it’s only about 6 months old.

It took me a day to get this far — backing up the 30 Gigs of data on the G: drive took 9 hours, and nearly 2 hours to restore on the new drive. And the C: drive was the critical one, because that had the operating system (Windows XP) — would it work on the new drive? It did. Everything seems to be working fine.

The only problem is, Windows thinks there have been too many hardware changes, and wants to be revalidated. If that goes as smoothly as the rest of it, all will be well.

Oh, and my printer has a parallel cable, and the new hardware has no parallel port. But perhaps a USB cable will work, or I can nick a parallel card from the old one, if it fits the new motherboard.

Things that are being automated that probably shouldn’t be

Computers can save a lot of time by automating reptitive and boring tasks, but there are some things that are being automated that probably shouldn’t be.

Journalism is one of them, as this article notes — hat-tip to A conservative blog for peace

5 Things That Are Being Automated That Probably Shouldn’t Be | Cracked.com:

Statsheet wants to create a program to write entire sports blogs from basically scanning box scores, blogs that readers will think are written by a human. This article includes a sample. These automated blogs might someday be read by an algorithm like Infonic’s or Reuters’ which scans and analyzes hundreds of news articles a day to tell you what people think of different companies (in Infonic’s case) or athletes, or political issues, or anything you don’t want to read about yourself.

And just this morning I came across something that illustraded the downside of this. I have my blogs linked a a blog aggregator called Amatomu, and when I update them a message comes on the screen saying “Your feed has been updated”. Google targets its ads according to the content of the post, and so down the right hand side of the page was a column of ads, all dutifully picking up the key word and telling me about the scientific feeding of farm animals.

On the other hand, I recently discovered something of the sort that seems to have a plus side. That is Twitter daily newspapers. It gathers the content from the Twitterers you are following, and presents them in the form of a daily newspaper. If there are URLs mentioned in the tweets, it often goes to them and displays the pictures. What it means is that I can go there once a day, and see the most important stuff about the people I am following on Twitter, quite nicely presented. And you can see the Steve Hayes dauily paper here: http://paper.li/hayesstw.

What’s more, you can also create such “daily papers” based on hashtags. I’ve done that with one in my field of interest, which is missiology. You can see that here: http://paper.li/tag/missiology.

So automation seems to work quite well, as far as I can see, though I’m still not sure if it’s picked up all the tweets of the people I’m following.

Some useful e-mail utilities

Someone sends me a “crime report” of crimes that have taken place in our neighbourhood. I’ve thought of saving these in a database that would make it easier to refer to them — to see if a car registration on a vehicle behaving suspiciously has been recorded as being involved in crimes elsewhere, for example. But what deters me is all the extraneous headers in the e-mails. All I want is the to, from and date lines, and not all the routing information and spam checks and the like.

And suddenly someone has pointed me to a utility that does just that, for Pegasus e-mail, the mail-reading program I use. And lots of other useful utilities too.

LEXACORP – Information Systems Development : Papua New Guinea:

Note that none of these utilities has a ‘Setup’ or ‘Uninstall’ procedure. They do not write to the Registry and do not put DLLs etc in other directories. To remove any of these utilities from your system just delete them.

I notice that Windows 7 doesn’t have a built-in e-mail system. This is an improvement, since it gives the user a choice of what e-mail program to use, and I use and recommend Pegasus, partly because in its default setup it is immune to a lot of the spam and malicious e-mails that seem to go around.

Pegasus Mail:

Welcome to the North American Web Site for Pegasus Mail, the Internet’s longest-serving PC e-mail system, and for the Mercury Mail Transport System, our comprehensive range of Internet Mail Server products. Pegasus Mail is a free product, dedicated to serving all who need it, while Mercury is a modestly-priced commercial system.

I suppose I am a bit old-fashioned about e-mail: I think e-mail is e-mail and web pages are web pages, and that HTML codes should be kept out of e-mail, and reserved for web pages. Using HTML in e-mails is wasteful of bandwidth and disk space. A two-line message in plain text can take 200 lines or more in HTML, yet the content is exactly the same. So I don’t like HTML in e-mails, and Pegasus lets me send and read message in plain text.

Pegasus also, by default, blocks “lazy html”. That is, HTML codes that refer to an external web site and not something in the message itself. It is something most often used by spammers, scammers and distributors of malicious software, designed for more tolerant and less protective mail readers like Outlook and Outlook Express. Pegasus by default blocks them and displays a warning, and anything in the message that refers to a remote site is displayed as a blank grey block. Sometimes such a message will display something like “Your mail reader cannot display this message” and tells me what hoops I need to jump through to read it. But such messages are almost invariably unsolicited spam anyway, which I don’t want to read.

I prefer that if people want me to look at a web page, they describe it and give the URL. Then I can decide if I want go there or not. Pegasus displays the URLs in clickable form, so you click on them and it calls your web browser. But it also displays the real address at the bottom of the screen, both for e-mail and web addresses. That is useful for exposing phishing expeditions. When you are asked to send details of your bank account to an address like:

accounts@absabank.co.za

amd Pegasus displays it as

xyz@yahoo.com

you know something phishy is going on.

Linux hates me

I’ve been trying on and off for almost 11 years to install Linux on my computer, but still haven’t succeeded.

The first version I tried, in October 1999, was Mandrake v 6.0.

It installed OK, and I could run it, load the shell, and play with shell scripts and the like. But it would not recognise my graphics card or monitor, and so would not run a GUI.

Now I have new hard disks, and a new graphics card and a new monitor.

I installed Fedora 12. It doesn’t boot to the shell, but loads a GUI, but still doesn’t recognise my monitor, and won’t display at any higher resolution than 800×600.

I tried booting from a “live” CD of Ubuntu 9.10. Same thing.

Mandriva. Same thing.

Even though the hardware is completely changed, Linux still doesn’t recognise my monitor, and still won’t tun a GUI properly. And I can’t even boot to the shell — it loads the GUI (badly) and I have to go to a terminal to play with shells scripts etc.

My monitor is an LG Flatron W1542S

The graphics card (output of “lspel|grep VGA”) shows: 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller nVidia Corporation NVCrvxnII [GeForce 2 MX Integrated Graphics] (rev b1).

Am I the only one who has this problem?

Why does Linux hate me?

The price of progress

I bought a new laptop computer the other day, since my old one got nicked.

It was quite interesting the way it got nicked, too. The burglar alarm went off at 2:45 on a Saturday morning. I got up and found the laptop mouse and power cable lying on the floor in the hallway, the burglar bars in the dining room window broken (with a vicegrip). The dogs, who were sleeping in the front, only barked when the alarm went off.

The thieves clearly knew exactly what they wanted. They came over the neighbour’s fence, which they had cut in two places, and right across their yard, and came from the back. They operated like a smash and grab — broke the burglar bars, ran in, grabbed the computer, and scarpered before anyone could catch them. It was obviously very carefully planned.

Well, I wish them luck with it.

I doubt it’s much use without the battery charger. I was thinking of replacing it anyway. It took 25 minutes to boot and 7 minutes to shut down. Automatic updates meant that new versions of programs got bigger and bigger and consumed more and more resources until it spent more time swapping to disk than actually processing anything. Sometimes I would just press and hold the power button to switch it off and wait for the 25 minute boot rather than wait for the hard disk to stop thrashing around. As they used to say, Windows 99 will be released when Windows 98 has finished loading. Only this was far worse. It was Windows XP, and the machine had a 40 Gig hard drive (nearly full) and 256 Mb of RAM. No one sold extra memory for it any more. I was thinking of buying one of those netbook thingies, but the price doubled after Christmas. The nice thing about the netbooks was that they had Widnows XP.

But when it came to a replacement the bigger ones didn’t cost all that much more, and the ones with Windows 7 were actually cheaper than the ones with Vista. And there is some progress — Windows 7 loads in about a minute, and shuts down in about half that. Trouble is it will take me about 3 weeks to begin actually using it.

First thing is to find where it has hidden stuff — like file extensions. Creating a short cut to a program when there are four identically named files, and you don’t know which is the executable is somewhat frustrating. There is, of course, no manual with the thing. Eventually found how to see the extensions, made a shortcut to the program, and found, ooops, it won’t run under the 64-bit version of Windows. Fortunately, they give you a couple of discs with the 32-bit version which you can install. That took most of South Africa’s innings against India in the first ODI of the cricket tour.

So, having got the programs I use most onto the new computer (by a roundeabout method — it’s optical drive doesn’t like CDs created by its predecessor, so I have to take them to the desktop computer, and copy them from there), then it keeps telling me that one of the programs isn’t recognised by Windows. I have to reduce the warning level in the warner to zero before it will shut up. But that means there’s no protection against malicious software — but I don’t want a warning every time I use a program I’ve been using every day for the last 20 years.

Setting up a new computer must be one of those major stress-inducing life events like moving house, or getting divorced or something. It’s far more stressful than the break-in and having the old one nicked.