Hugh's Worthless Blog

This weekend when I booted up my aging Dell Latitude E7440 it was installing yet another Windows 10 update so I let it do its thing until it was ready to let me log in. Unfortunately, once I was able to log in, the system was running at a snail's pace and simple tasks were taking several seconds instead of instantaneously as they had just a day beforehand. So I thought I would try using System Restore to take it back to a restore point in late November when I know the system was running in its old perky self. Unfortunately, the system started into a painful loop where it would keep rebooting and trying to repair itself until it came to a point where it said it could not repair. I tried booting it in Safe Mode and it would not even boot in Safe Mode. I was resigned to reinstalling Windows 10 on the system when I noticed I had an Ubuntu 18.04 boot flash drive here at home so I thought I could at least boot it up with it and copy over a few files on the local SSD I had not copied ove...

With Whitney Houston's untimely death this past week, it made me think back to the mid 80's when I first heard her amazing voice. At that time my sound system consisted of a component stereo system with a turntable, a cassette deck and a FM tuner connected to a Sony amplifier and with my old Synergistic speakers from high school. But by late 1985 I had heard a new technology was coming out, digitized music on optical disks where there was no pops, crackles or tape hiss to hear and incredible dynamic range (not like the compressed stuff on the radio.) So in 1986 my wife and I purchased our very first CD player, a standalone Teac deck we purchased at a now defunct appliance store near Crestwood Plaza back when people actually visited that mall. As a full-time grad student at the time, the CD deck was quite an extravagance, but as a audio geek, I just had to have one to try out the digital technology. On the night we purchased the CD player, however, I knew I should purchase ...

Today I received an e-mail message from my friends at TIAA-CREF who holds the bulk of my retirement assets. Included was an interesting webinar that talks about a retirement asset to salary ratio that can be used to see how well you are saving for retirement especially after stocks took the big hit in 2008/2009. When I saw that I knew it looked like an on-line calculator in the making to me, but TIAA-CREF did not have one on their site! So I knew I had to create one . First I interpolated their graph so you do not only have every 5 year increments on the retirement, but every year in between, and then I calculated the ratio for anyone who wants to enter their asset balance and salary (since dividing two numbers is so much work!) If you are going to make the 70% or 90% of salary goals I tell you, and if not I tell you now much more you need to get there. Hey, it sounded like a fun little calculator for me to write, so here it is . I also saw that Firefox 8 was just released ...

I was happy to see that the original mock up photo of the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway is not how they ended up designing the sidewalks leading from the new Preston Green Hall . Wash U actually did "cut the corners" of the sidewalks as they had been laid out before, with a sidewalk already in place right now in front of the massive new Washington University sign they erected on the corner. The original photo has little bits of greenery jutting out keeping people from cutting the corner, but as they probably know from the ugly pedestrian formed path cutting the corner from Forest Park Parkway to Hoyt Drive in front of Whitaker Hall (yes, it is visible from Google Maps! ) people will cut corners when then can: So now instead of their original plans pictured below (which I stole from Clayco's site ) , I have created a new image of the corner using the ever powerful and always open source image editor, GIMP . Original view: My update view: I think there migh...

I was not expecting it, but I received an unsolicited e-mail from mozilla.org today telling me that the latest version of Firefox was out, not just an update to 4.0.1, but the fully updated and just released version 5.0 . Although I have been quite happy with version 4 (especially over the bloated version 3), I felt compelled to try out the latest version. The big test -- Frontierville on Facebook! I play Frontierville as well as Farmville and Cityville on Facebook, and Frontierville must be the slowest Zynga game there is to play, especially with my overcrowded frontier with its many buildings, animals, trees and everything else. When Firefox 4.0 first came out, I was pleasantly surprised how much better it seemed to run Frontierville than Chrome did at the time, but now even Firefox 4.0 seems to run it slowly, even with our very fast Internet connection at the university (it is painfully slow at home over DSL.) So now I am trying Frontierville on Firefox 5 during lunchtime St. Lou...

Someone in our department wanted a couple YouTube videos burned to DVD so I figured out how to do it without any new purchased software, so I thought I would document how I did it so I can always remember in the future. This first step is just to grab the YouTube videos to a computer, and my favorite way to do this is using the YouTube Downloader from BienneSoft. This is terrific, free software that downloads the Flash FLV files from YouTube so they are sitting on your hard drive. If you have a copy of VLC Media Player that is really all you need to watch YouTube videos offline, but if you want to watch them on a standard DVD player you must go a bit further. I took the files off my Windows PC and moved them to my iMac for the next step. Since I have an iMac in my office and I was familiar with iDVD, all I needed was something to convert the Flash FLV files into a format that iDVD could read. The easiest solution was to convert them to QuckTime MOV files, so I used FLV Crunch wh...

I was pretty excited that Firefox 4 was released yesterday since I had been testing it out quite a bit during pre-release, and I have found that it runs the Zynga games on Facebook (Farmville, Frontierville, Cityville) much faster than Chrome 10 had on the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 Dell desktop I was using. That alone should make it worth switching! But since it was released I decided to see how many hits we had received using Firefox 4 on our university's very popular meteorites website ( meteorites.wustl.edu ), so I thought I would get some general statistics on browser usage there. I broke the statistics down by the browsers and their versions since I was curious on the version breakdown, especially of the just released (Chrome 10, Firefox 4) and beta versions (IE 9) of browsers. Chrome 8 0.19% Chrome 9 4.29% Chrome 10 2.68% 7.16%    Firefox 2.X 0.19% Firefox 3.0 0.59% Firefox 3.5 ...

I haven't written up a more techie relating posting in a while so I thought I would speak what has been on my mind lately. I was reading in eWeek and online about how Oracle has been stalling further development of OpenOffice.org and how Linux distributions like Ubuntu are therefore switching to the fully open LibreOffice variation of the free office suite (Ubuntu 11.04, the "Natty Narwal", will ship with LibreOffice 3.3.1). Therefore I decided to uninstall OpenOffice.org from my Ubuntu desktop and switch over to LibreOffice since it was a pretty easy procedure to do using apt-get. I have used both Writer and Calc and it pretty much feels the same to me as OpenOffice.org. They have posted the latest fixes and features in version 3.3.1 which sound nice but I have never really needed to use them. It is more about future enhancements and support by an open source community as opposed to the current differences between the two projects. If Red Hat, Canonical and Novell...

It looks like the people at Google have been very busy working on both Chrome / Chromium and GMail . First the good news. Since all the other browsers like Firefox 4 are working on speeding up their JavaScript engine so they can claim vast performance improvements, well the Chrome folks have done so too. Since I always just use the latest release of Chromium on my Ubuntu desktop, I checked my version I just updated to using apt-get today and see that I am now using Chromium 11.0.676.0 (75353) which I am guessing is using the updated JavaScript engine as used in Chrome 10 (still in beta ). Frankly, I cannot tell much difference since Chromium was already pretty darn fast. Perhaps at some point it just does not make any difference anymore. What concerns me more are the little pesky changes they do that annoy people. For example, last night my son demanded he had to use my laptop so he could more properly play Minecraft  since he was done with all his homework and his own laptop...

I have always enjoyed reading Thomas J. Stanley 's books since he wrote the Millionaire Next Door over a decade ago. His latest book, Stop Acting Rich , came out in 2009 and I did not even realize it was out. He is another geeky numbers guy like me and I love all the numbers he gives in his books. I wrote up a wealth calculator years ago based on his equations form the first book, but now I have modified it to include the "wealth equation" from "Stop Acting Rich". He has since accumulated a lot more data which provided him with more specific threshold values for when someone becomes balance sheet affluent (BA) or income sheet affluent (IA). These are more specific than his earlier under accumulator of wealth (UAW), prodigious accumulator of wealth (PAW) designations he had in the past. In his earlier books his cutoffs were simply 1/2 the "expected wealth" and 2 times the "expected wealth" as cutoffs. Now with real data he has changed the cu...

Okay, I will admit that I love searching for information on the Internet, but sometimes things can be too easy. I was on one of my favorite property sale sites, stlouis.blockshopper.com , and when I was doing a search on someone, it instead redirected me to another site called spokeo.com . Okay, I thought I could try that one out, but when I did I was amazed what all I found. Not only did I find the person I was looking for, I found out their age, their spouse, their children, and a nice picture of their home (along with its estimated value.) I realize much of this is public information, so I had to do a search on myself. Sure enough I could find our address, ages, marital status, phone number, home value, home picture, and even my children's names (I am guessing from Facebook relationship listings.) Luckily they have an easy to use privacy link which allows you to remove your own listing, so I did so for myself, my wife and my children so they no longer appear on a search. I will...

Sure, enough, now that I have started looking more into online backup and having promoted Mozy 's $4.99/mo unlimited plan to many folks, it sounds like that it is no longer available . They have now made it $5.99/mo for a 50 GB plan, which makes CrashPlan 's $49.95/year unlimited plan look even more appealing. Right now CrashPlan is even giving Mozy users an additional 15% discount. They may not have the big EMC name behind them, but I am not sure how much that helped Mozy (how many typical folks on the street know who EMC is?) If you want a bigger name than CrashPlan hosting your online backup, how about the anti-virus folks at Trend Micro ? They acquired humyo and now offer SafeSync as an unlimited backup plan for a special price of only $29.95/year. There are also BackBlaze and Carbonite who are also eager to acquire old Mozy users, but if a company like Trend is supporting an online backup costing less than these lesser brands, why not go with the more trusted name? ...

Our department at the university has started looking into doing remote backups for desktop users, and I, of course, had to look for the open source alternatives after pricing commercial products like Retrospect. The usual suspects showed up on my google search such as Amanda , Bacula and BackupPC . But since I was also looking at commercial online providers like Mozy , I ran into CrashPlan which sounded very intriguing. Whereas CrashPlan makes money like Mozy does providing online backup services , you can actually use their software completely for free so every computer where you install the software becomes either a client or a server or both. They have downloads for Windows, Mac and Linux (and Solaris if anyone cares anymore), so I tested it by installing the Windows software on one XP system and putting the Linux version on two Ubuntu systems. It appears to run as a Java service in Ubuntu, and I bet it does the same for Mac OSX and Solaris. On Windows it runs as two processe...

My wife recently began substitute teaching to help her network to find a full-time teaching position in the future, and the school district where she subs just switched to the online substitute system called Aesop  from Frontline Placement. To try to get a substitute job you must login via a web browser to their site and then repeatedly refresh your page for hours until a job finally shows up (unless you pay extra yourself to get their own customized software called Jobulator .) That sure does not seem like a fair way for them to set up their system. It definitely gives preferential treatment to people who pay them for the supposed "extra" software. However, I googled for Jobulator alternatives and noticed many substitutes who used Aesop were using Firefox and an extension called Check4Change to do essentially the same thing as Jobulator. The Check4Change plug-in allows you to set Firefox to periodically refresh a page and then check a section to see if it changes. If ther...

Since I have to support the classes for our department  at the university, I have to deal with some folks who really like some very old software for their classes. One faculty member had a program written with the 1995 version of Macromedia Authorware that she distributes to her students to run every year. Unfortunately, that software is now over 15 years old and it does not run on 64 bit Windows 7 (and of course not on a Mac.) The solution? I built a small VirtualBox virtual disk (.VDI) file with 32 bit XP (Service Pack 1 even!) and the ancient Authorware presentation together on it that runs on just about anything that can run the VirtualBox application. I tested it on a 64 bit Windows 7 Dell Optiplex 780, my trusty iMac, and also my even trustier Ubuntu 10.04 Dell Precision. It runs like a champ on all platforms since that is the beauty of VirtualBox! And since VirtualBox is open source it is also free! The virtual disk file ended up being over 800MB, but over our fast gigab...

Well, this Sunday was 10/10/10, and in celebration the Ubuntu folks at Canonical came out with their latest release, Ubuntu 10.10 the " Maverick Meerkat ". I love the goofy animal names, but then again I am a big Ubuntu geek as well. Local St. Louis folk can download a copy of the ISO images from my university archive at wubuntu.wustl.edu . With the new release out, I decided it was time to do some upgrades. No, not of my 10.04 system to 10.10, but to upgrade some of our 8.04 servers to 10.04 now that it has been out for six months. Since 10.04 was a long term support (LTS) release, I had planned on upgrading our very stable 8.04 systems to 10.04 over the summer, but I never got around to it. With 10.10 being out, that reminded me they needed updating. Since 10.04 is a LTS release, it will be supported for 3 years for everything and for 5 years for the server packages (i.e. the core kernel and service packages.) So if I update everything to 10.04, they should be supported u...

Today I was trying to apt-get a package onto my linux desktop when I realized it was taking forever to connect to the Ubuntu APT repository. But that made me think, "Is today the day?" And sure enough with a quick Google search, I realized today was indeed the day of the final release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS , the Lucid Lynx! Since it was such an exciting event I thought I should join in the fun and download a copy to play with tonight. I grabbed the torrent and started up  bittorrent to get my own copy of the desktop i386 ISO image. It is nice to be using bittorrent to download open source software -- which is what it is legally supposed to be used for (not for movies, pirated software, music, etc.) I booted my old iMac on the freshly burned CD and it fired right up to a very purple desktop. There are a bunch of new features to play with that should keep me quite busy tonight. I used to maintain the repository of Ubuntu ISO images here at Wash U, but the infamous WUARCHIVE se...

Since Microsoft decided to advertise Bing during the Olympics, I thought the least I could do was try it out a little bit. One thing I noticed is that the images they have on Bing Maps are actually newer than the ones that Google Maps has on either their normal maps or Streetview maps in the St. Louis area. One way to tell is by looking at highway 64 and the soundwall construction. My sample location is a house that is for sale in our area, namely 9062 Monmouth in Richmond Heights (63117). If you search for it on Google Maps you will see the highway is shut down and under construction but there is no wall yet constructed. If you then use Google Streetview and look at the house, as you move by its left side you will still see all the old trees and brush behind it which is how it looked even before the highway construction began. To see the pre-construction aerial view, you can use Bing and just look at the aerial projection. You will see a whole bunch of trees between the house and ...

Well, the forecasters were actually a bit closer this time and we did get a few inches on the ground, but since the snow was pretty much over by this morning the road crews were able to do a great job clearing them out. That made my son very sad, until we received a late phone call at 6:45am from Ladue Schools saying that the district was closing school because they did not have enough bus drivers to drive all the buses. I know Parkway, Rockwood and other larger districts had already closed schools, so you would think those drivers could have covered the Ladue routes. It looks like Brentwood, Clayton and some other inner county districts are still holding classes today, though, so not every child had the day off. I thought about it awhile and decided to stay home too, more for the bitter sub-zero wind chills than the roads which do not look too bad. I know my favorite way to check the weather conditions is to just look out the window, and to check how it looks on campus I use the Clay...

I just finished reading a very  appropriate book to lead up to the Grammy Awards this past Sunday, Ripped , a non-fiction piece by Greg Kot following the changes in the music industry over the past decade or so, primarily dealing with digital distribution. It follows the rise of peer to peer file sharing beginning with Napster, and also how specific artists like Prince, Radiohead and NIN tried to change how music could be distributed from the artist directly to the music consumer. I was hoping he would get into more of the other P2P networks and software that have come and gone over the years (Kazaa, eMule, LimeWire, BitTorrent), but he left that stuff out. I remember during some little speech during the Grammy broadcast someone was indirectly hinting about how piracy and file sharing were a bad thing, especially hurting the artists. They did not mention how most artists only receive a very small fraction of the proceeds of any CD sale. Since I tend to purchase primarily Christian...