Terminally Incoherent

I just took a look at my backup progress bar on the windows box:

Check out the elapsed time - 18 hours and counting. This is why I only do backups once a week - I just can’t have this damn thing running 24-7. This is what happens when you have way to much shit on your hard drives, and you are backing up to an external USB device. Sigh…. I should get a firewire card or something. But, slow backups are better than no backups.

Oh, and one thing that is even more important than backups is auditing your backup files. Because a corrupted backup is absolutely worthless. I know becasuse I lost my Morrowind saves this way.

I designate this a backup thread. What was the best and worst backup strategy you have ever seen?

I was changing my password for my Verizon Wireless account and I suddenly saw this message:

If you can’t read that, it essentially says that passwords must:

1. be 8-20 characters long (somewhat good practice - more characters the better)
2. contain at least one letter and one number (very good practice)
3. have no spaces or special characters like @#$%^() and etc.. (retarded to the max)

In other words, Verizon tries to force people to make secure passwords by taking out the two strongest types of passwords: complex passwords, and pass-phrases. Why are these passwords so strong? Because they are hard to crack using rainbow tables (yeah, fuck the dictionary attack).

Let me demonstrate - to crack the verizon passwords I only need roughly a 3GB rainbow table table for alphanumerics and numbers. I’m guessing the size by looking at the available downloads from Project Rainbowcrack. What would happen if Verizon allowed special characters and spaces? Well, then I need the 64GB table, lot’s more time and much more RAM to boot.

So while I appreciate their effort to force users to mix up letters and numbers, and to get away from using very weak 4-5 character passwords, they still fail miserably at security. If you are implementing any password security at all why not implement the correct one - allow spaces, and encourage users to create 3-4 word passphrases that contain special characters, letters and numbers. Hell, I’d allow full range of accented unicode characters so people could use a password like: Śął@#$ Ó&*ż ćęŁ. And yes, I just made it up - I don’t use this string for a password.

Sigh… Half assed attempts at security like that annoy me. In fact, implementing such security may actually decrease the average strength of the passwords among your users. Some power-users probably will always utilize a strong passphrase if they are allowed, and some people will always use dumb passwords vulnerable to dictionary attacks. Verizon’s policy means that the passphrase users will have to use something less secure, while the security blind retards will just tack on their year of birth onto their regular password (ie their last name) and call it a day. And as you can imagine, this won’t make their password any less vulnerable to dictionary attack. So your cutting out large number of very strong and secure password schemes, without really forcing the worst offenders to use anything stronger.

I went out and bought the shiny, sleek and sexy LG VX8700. I know, I was thinking about getting the enV - but in the end this seemed like a better choice. The enV just felt bulky and clumsy when I held it in my hand. On top of that, I don’t really text that much. Part of it is of course the fact that I can’t type on the damn phone keypad to save my life. But was it worth the extra money, and dealing with the size of that phone for added convenience?

On the other hand look at the 8700 - thin, sleek and with a hit of awesome:

This is kinda what Razr wanted to be but never was. My cousin got one some time ago, and so far she is happy with it. I also read several reviews of this phone, and they were mostly favorable. The the main complaints seem to be that the SD-card slot is hidden behind the battery (I don’t really care about that) and that it does not have any front side buttons to control music volume, and switch songs. Since I’m not really planning to use this phone for listening music, that didn’t really bother me either.

The software is a fairly standard, crappy verizon POS but it seems fairly responsive. It has a 2 megapixel camera, a loud speaker, and big and bright screen. The keyboard is very flat, so it’s not very easy to type by touch. But then again, the keys are big, and they light up very bright in the dark so it’s not such a big problem. The device is supposed to have a GPS unit, but apparently you need to purchase the GPS software via the GetItNow feature, and pay a monthly subscription fee. Meh… They can shove that fee up their ass. I don’t really need a GPS.

The best part here is that this phone is supported by BitPim. All I have to do to be able to transfer my pictures, address book and music is to buy the USB cable on ebay for around $10. Which is a bargain, considering that these fuckers charged me over $20 for a shitty plastic belt clip that goes with my phone. Total ripoff - I probably should have went for some 3rd party product, or hit up ebay for it…

So anyway, the phone looks and feels good. It’s very shiny and weighs almost nothing. I like it.

One thing that always amazed me was how WinZip managed to maintain it’s shareware status after Windows XP included zip functionality in the explorer interface. I always figured that WinZip business model of nagging you untill you pay would crumple down after people would realize they can open zip files out of the box.

This however did not happen. WinZip is still around, it’s still churning out new versions, and each of them has a more annoying nag screen than the previous one. Why do I know this? Because WinZip is one of the packages we absolutely must install on company laptops. If we don’t, people call the help-desk and complain or go out and install it. I’m not sure what it is - I’m guessing it might be the convenience of having the additional options in the context menu. But several alternative products do the same - and yet when we tried installing them, users still went out and got WinZip. Brand loyalty perhaps?

Whatever it is, WinZip’s strategy seems to be working and we are paying them money. We might as well be throwing the money out the window, but oh well. I guess this is yet another example where customers choose the expensive alternative over the free one because, oh I don’t know - that’s what they are used to or something.

Personally, I’m a WinRar person. Yeah, yeah - I know. It’s not free or open either, but it does the trick for me. It supports both Rar and Zip compression, and can extract data from almost any format out there - including tar, gz, bz2, the native Mac compression compression formats, and even iso. Oh, and no nag screens - even if you don’t pay. I always end up installing it on my personal windows systems.

I also use 7zip, mainly because it is a good and open compression scheme, and there are increasing numbers of people who use it. Still, WinRar is my primary tool.

What is your favorite file compression tool on Windows? Do you use the built in Zip functionality? Are you a WinZip person? 7zip guy? Let me know!

If you picked “other” let me know what it is in the comments. Also, what WinZip alternative would you recommend for commercial use? What does your company use? Are you paying for WinZip like we do, or perhaps your IT found a way to ween the user base off that expensive habit?

I was catching up on my backed up on my feeds, and I stumbled upon a link to some whiny post that tabs are redundant. I’m not sure if you knew (and if you didn’t - welcome to the internet!) that there is no better way of letting the world know that you are a stupid n00b than complaining that you do not understand the tab paradigm in the modern browsers, and that IE 6.0 had it right. But this post was actually made by a blogger I usually respect and often link to - Jeff Artwood.

Jeff usually has lot’s of interesting, and thought provoking things to say and thus the frequent linkage from here. I mean, maybe he is getting old and can’t keep up with the way things are done these days or something? I don’t know. But I’m trying to take what he says seriously out of respect.

So what is he saying there exactly? He is complaining that it is really hard for him to find his GeeeeMail across his 16 monitors and 57 instances of the browser open. I’m not surprised. If I had a million monitors and kept opening multiple instances of Internet Exploder all over the place I would also get confused. Fortunately I do not have this problem for several reasons:

1. I use Gmail Manager extension for Firefox which shows me if I got any new emails in every instance of the browser
2. I hardly ever have more than one instance of the browser open - and if I do, it’s usually for testing so the second browser is probably IE or Opera - so no confusion there
3. My virtual workspace is organized by task - so I always know where my primary browser instance lives
4. Within the browser my tabs are organized:
   1. First tab is always Google Reader
   2. Second is always Twitter
   3. Third is always the Wordpress dashboard
   4. Rest are random websites
5. I bookmark and close the tabs I don’t use

So for me finding Gmail is trivial - jump to the nearest FF instance, and hit the bottom right corner of the browser where the Gmail Manager lives. Then I close it after use. If I want Google Reader, I just click on the very first tab in my browser. I never get lost on my own desktop because I usually try not to run millions of applications at once, and if I do, I find ways to logically separate them for fast access.

This statement kills me though:

(…) if GMail had been in its own browser window, I could have found it instantly by looking in the taskbar, or at worst, by visually selecting it from even a smallish thumbnail image. Because GMail was in a tab, I wasted my time trying to find it, and I wasted even more time needlessly launching another browser. And this isn’t an isolated incident. This happens to me every day. More times than I’d care to admit.

So how can we fix this? How can we integrate tabs with the existing navigational features of the operating system, such as the taskbar, and Exposé? I keep coming back to search as the dominant computing metaphor. The only thing I can think of is a plain-text search facility where I type “Gmail”, and the OS would automatically highlight that tab (or window) and bring it to the front. That presupposes a very high level of integration between the application tabs and the operating system, however.

Or, and correct me if I’m wrong - this suggestion might be way out there, you can just open frequently used applications in their own dedicated windows. So you would like have your Gmail in it’s own solitary instance of IE, your Twitter in another one and your Bloglines in yet another. Who said that since IE 7.0 has tabs you must use them? If you feel they are a productivity drain, use them sparingly.

Then there is this:

I wish I could “tear off” tabs into standalone windows on demand, too.

Jeff, have you ever heard of the KISS principle? When I want to “tear-off” a tab in Firefox I use the mysterious secret context menu function known as “Open in New Window”. Alternatively I can always do something like:

Ctrl+L Ctrl+C Ctrl+W Ctrl+N Ctrl+V Enter

It is a short sequence with one finger firmly planted on Ctrl that most Firefox users will find easy to follow. Jump to the address bar, copy URL, close tab, open new window, paste URL and go to it. If I remember correctly, IE 7.0 opens new windows with the contents of the current tab preloaded by default - so you can actually save like 3 keystrokes out of the above if you use it.

It’s funny but I can’t figure out what exactly Jeff wants. He says he likes tabs and uses them all the time. But then he says they are hard to use, and can’t be searched easily and they should be more like modular little windows that can be snapped in and out of place. But at the same time he says he hates the way Office implements exactly that kind of a feature.

I guess he is ranting for the sake of ranting. Personally, I love tabs. Tabbed interfaces create uniform workspaces that save screen realestate and prevent taskbar clutter. Right now I have 10 tabs open in Firefox, and two terminals open on the same virtual desktop. If each tab was a separate window, my taskbar would be full right now and would start grouping things, or scrolling in some annoying way. And I instantly know that first 3 or 4 tabs are my goto web apps, while the rest are just random. When I start a blog post, and do a lot of tab switching I drag it’s tab close to the front so it’s my 5th one on the tab bar for easy access.

But then again I’m working here with just a single display - not 1757 of them like Jeff has. So perhaps I’m just behind times.

Then I found a telling clue to what is Jeffs problem deep in the comment thread:

Again, the disconnect between Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Tab– it’s highly modal, and users hate modes. It’s so hard to remember which one you’re in at any given time. Is this a tab? Is it a window? Why should *I* have to worry about treating them so differently?

Ah! So this explains it. Jeff hates modal behavior. That’s why he seems to have a stick up his butt about the whole tabbing deal. I call this syndrome Vi Envy. There are three kinds of users in these world - those who understand vi, those who wish they could understand vi and those who are to clueless to know what vi is. Jeff seems to be one of those people who never really figured out how to deal with the modal approach of the Vi and it left him scarred for life, always seeking that unified UI experience.

Me - I don’t mind the modal behavior. Hell, I jump between operating systems all the time and it doesn’t bother me much. I adjust my behavior to the limitations and strengths of the system and/or environment I’m working with. For example - people always cry that Eclipse is slow, but I never notice. I used to use it all the time on a 700 MHz machine with 256 MB of tam, and the speed was acceptable for me because I figured out how to be gentle with it. If you know your OS, and know your applications then working efficiently within them becomes a second nature.