StigmergicWeb

A few days ago, I got a BSOD on the old Wintel laptop. I’ve had the computer for nearly 4 years, and this is the first BSOD that I’ve got on it. Sadly, it may also be the last.

This particular BSOD informed me that my Windows registry was … well, I think I can summarize by saying that the registry is hooped! Thankfully, I’ve had the new Mactel laptop for over a month, and I’ve been using it for a lot of day to day stuff. The only hitch was that a lot of my files - from University, for school and some family pictures - were still on the hard drive of the old laptop. Most had not been backed up.

My first task, then, before I started poking around on the hard drive, was to back up all that stuff. Faced with a corrupted registry and an un-bootable computer, most people would probably give up, cry or call their local PC repair shop. Luckily, I had an old Ubuntu Live CD so I didn’t need to do any of these three things! A bit of googling gave me the instructions to mount the Windows (NTFS) hard drive (I’ll put instructions up soon if I remember) so I could copy the files over to a USB external 120 GB drive. This went smoothly.

Now that my data is safe, I am faced with a decision - what to do with the old computer? As I see it, I have three choices:

1. Try to fix the registry. My computer creates restore points every week, so if I can move the old registry files and insert the repair registry files, I should be just fine. Sadly, I haven’t figured out how to do this yet using Ubuntu. I hear that Knoppix is good for this, so I may give it a try. Any other suggestions for repair CDs would be useful.
2. Re-install the system from scratch. The CDs that came with the laptop will reformat the drive and re-install the original installation. Sadly, they will not allow me to do a simple fix of the registry as it currently exists.
3. Remove the Redmond virus once and for all from the laptop, and just install Ubuntu. If I do this, I may just get a bigger hard drive while I’m at it.

I’m back in black, with a Mac
I’ve been too long, I’m glad to be back.
(with apologies to AC/DC)

Just found this on Digg - Gert Stahl found a piece of plastic covering the vent on his MacBook. When he removed it, the machine became a lot quieter and cooler (go figure!). He has also posted some pictures showing the removal of the plastic. A big salute to him for posting this information.

G-Stahl.com: MacBook’s vent blocked

I’ve got too many interesting stories in front of me on Digg to read them all right now. I could just digg them, but I thought I’d share them with you.

• Commodore 64 emulated in flash - ah, this brings back some happy memories. Some of my earliest computer hacking involved playing around with sprite graphics on the C64.
• Is Windows on a Mac really drawing in new users? - Probably, and along with some great new software, it is luring some old users like me back. (Details to follow).
• Student faces expulsion for Web post - Apparently, the school district is no longer including Voltaire in their curriculum; y’know - the guy who said I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. I guess ideas like this don’t count any more.
• Ringtone for teenage ears only - Considering the above link, this is a perfectly appropriate action. Looks like the kids are allright.
  

Notice to Linux users

In response to demand, Statistics Canada has removed the restriction for Linux. This change takes effect May 13th, 2006.

I think this is the first acknowledgement by a government in Canada that Linux exists, let alone that people might actually be using to fill in census data. There are still a lot of sites at different levels of government that still require IE on Windows so that ActiveX can be used, mostly for functions that could be replaced quite handily by some half-clever scripting on a LAMP platform.

Kathy Sierra, in her great blog Creating Passionate Users, writes about The myth of “keeping up”.

You’re not keeping up. I’m not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything.

Wow - those are encouraging words to hear. I’m just getting some last minute work done before I leave to Saskatoon for the TLt 2006 conference, so I haven’t had time to read the whole thing. Would someone mind reading it and leaving a summary for me here? ;^D

I’ve been enjoying a superb Easter break, spending lots of time with my family, and even getting a few projects taken care of. I knew that going back to the routine of work would be a bit of a chore after such a great week off, but it got topped off yesterday morning. I was putting away some groceries when I poked my head around the corner into my home office yesterday to do a quick e-mail check. The screen was black, and I thought it had gone into power saver mode, so I wiggled the mouse around. No effect. I used the trackpad. No effect. I pulled the plug and pulled out the battery, then restarted the computer. It came up beautifully, except that my screen was still black.

Many words went through my head. I try to keep gratuitous cursing out of this blog (note to self - need to start a new blog for gratuitous cursing), but I’ll summarize my thoughts as “Oh gosh darn. Well, that is a bit of an annoyance now, isn’t it?“

Luckily, if there is a silver lining here, when I hooked up an external monitor everything seemed to be OK. I just got a shiny new 120 GB USB hard drive, and I will be backing up my data tonight! Just in case.

The downside is that I am without a laptop. My wife and I discussed options last night, and a new laptop for me is certainly a possibility. My use of the laptop has definitely changed in the time (three and a half years) that I’ve had it. I’m doing a lot more media production - screencasts, podcasts - now than I use to, and I’d really like to be doing some video editing as well. Of course, I’d love a new MacBook Pro from Apple, but having used WinXP for the last three and a half years, I’m comfortable working with it, also. And I’m not sure if I really need the Mac, or if I want it enough to make up for the price difference with something like the Dell Inspiron 6400.

Any thoughts, rants, advice or guidance? Please comment (and Mac fanatics are certainly welcome).

Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, SimCity and many other wonderful Sim- games has an article in which he asserts that games are unleashing the imagination. I would argue that games always have unleashed the imagination, but he is arguing from the point of view of electronic games. Fair enough, but we shouldn’t forget that there were games that fired up people’s imaginations before the computer game era (any other D and D players out there - IMHO, real games are played with paper and dice). Here’s the article link: Dream Machines

Here’s the pithy quotation - there’s an implication in his article about the upcoming clash between the learning styles of the gaming generation and the teaching styles of traditional schools:

In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers’ mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

I would say that blogging, podcasting, and the whole read-write web thingy also trains participants to be creators of media. Gaming is perhaps a particularly well-defined facet of this, and something that has a wide participant base. It also offers some great possibilities for learning as well (I’d love to get SimEarth running for my Biology 20 class, but I don’t think it would run on our school’s Linux terminals). A major shift will be required in our ideas about assessment in order to make this fit in with school-based learning.

Google is a strange company in the technology world. There are a lot of companies that people either love or hate - Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Intel - but Google is unique in the reaction it provokes. I love it and fear it at the same time.

There’s many reasons to love Google - great search and best web mail experience ever, to name two - but here’s the latest: Gtalk integrated into GMail. This is what I saw when I logged into Gmail today:

Hmm - kind of interesting. And when I moved my mouse over the name, a little box appeared (Holy AJAX, Batman!) with buttons for me to e-mail or chat with that person (if they were using a Gmail account, natch).

Cool! I decided to see if I could chat with Dean, since he was logged in to Gmail talk. Here’s the result:

And when I click on that little pop-out link, I get a brand new chat window like this:

Afterwards, I can look through the whole conversation in the new “Chat” section in my Gmail. Fear not, privacy fear mongers, for I can choose to go off the record while chatting, which prevents the chat from being archived (hopefully on either end).

OK - chat integrated into webmail. That’s definitely cause for some love. But here’s the fear - Google’s new Google Desktop version 3. One new feature in this version is the ability to install Google Desktop on multiple computers and perform a search across all computers. There are some valid reasons for this - many people will have a home PC and a laptop, or a home PC and a work PC, but the electronic frontier foundation is urging consumers to beware the new Google Desktop:

Google today announced a new “feature” of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user’s computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who’ve obtained a user’s Google password.

The Google Desktop is only available for Windows. This seems as strong a reason as ever to migrate over to linux!

I have played around some with SuprGlu, a web service that allows you to take some RSS feeds and munge them all together in one blog-like page (I have an example that pulls together the web sites for various members of the EdTech Posse).

Never content with the web services where the code is locked behind closed doors, Stephen is starting to put together some similar services, which he refers to as MyGlu, complete with code so the you or I or your great-aunt Mathilda can run it on our own servers, and even tweak the code to our requirements. I suggest you take a look at the code, then spend the rest of the day playing with it.