Programs continue to run even after I close them in Vista

RecallSomething I’m finding quite interesting with Vista Home Premium is the propensity for some programs to continue running even after I close them.

For instance, if I’m playing any kind of media in Windows Media Player (audio or visual) and just click the little “X” at the top of the application, the window closes but I still continue to hear the audio track until I either re-open WMP or go to the task manager and kill it.

The same goes for Azureus. I had it open a couple of days ago to check something and closed it. Today I happened to be reviewing libraries on my Roku Sound Bridge  and see that Azureus is still serving up content if I wish to use it.

Checking  Windows task bar I can see no trace of Azureus, but open up the task manager and, sure enough, there it is. I do need to look into this…

For smiles ‘n’ giggles I just closed iTunes and can see from the task manager that it closes just fine. I re-opened it and started playing a song and then closed it while the song was in progress and it closed just fine.

So I’m not sure what the thread is here.

co-incidence or Kwality?

RecallA friend pinged me a couple of days ago with this question:

“Oct 7th you said you were getting a new PC with “vista”
Oct 9th the last post to your blog.

Co-Incidence? I think not….

So how is the new machine?
How is Vista?”

You know who you are 🙂

His question is well posed. My new computer has Windows Vista Home Premium installed on it. Although it’s been out for a while now, there are loads of interesting quirks with it.

Let me say that I really like a LOT of the new paradigms. The search is actually GOOD! I like the fact that I can hit the Windows key and just start typing a search for a program that I want to run, a contact name or a filename and they rapidly appear in the start menu. The Aero theme is pretty slick too. I’m VERY glad that I didn’t bother to try to retrofit an existing machine with Vista. Take my advice, unless you absolutely *love* tinkering with your box, just wait until you get a new one before indulging in Vista.

It took exactly 3 days before I went in and disabled UAC (directions here). As a friend at work stated “UAC is great if you don’t know anything about computers but it really gets in your way if you’re comfortable with them”. He’s right. UAC is that annoying feature that *will* prevent malware from taking over your machine. But if you normally like digging into the guts of your machine you will find it annoying very quickly. i.e. Open your hosts file with notepad, make edits then try to save, ooops! you should have opened notepad in administrator mode. Too bad so sad.

One problem that I faced was in using the task scheduler. It looks like there is a bug in the Vista Home Premium edition only that causes it to try to run under the system account even when you specify an account and password that you want it to run under. This might not be so bad except that it fails anyway. From my research this has been a problem for nearly a year now with no fix in sight (SP1 I await you). So my nightly backup has changed from running at a preordained early morning time via “Scheduled Tasks” to runnning “Daily” via “Syncback SE’s” own scheduler. This, of course then becomes dependent on when I restart my machine as to when backups are taken.

Also, Vista comes with a “Photos” screen saver, which seems to be the nicest one I can find for displaying both still and moving image files. But it consistently crashes (caught by Vista before it can do any damage. But I’d prefer my screensaver not to fail regularly. I’ll update this entry with window’s cute name for this (**update** “Data Execution Prevention”) but the actual Application event log shows as

“Faulting application PhotoScreensaver.scr, version 6.0.6000.16510, time stamp 0x467b2825, faulting module xvidcore.dll_unloaded, version 0.0.0.0, time stamp 0x41c6a36e, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x0d16f684, process id 0x1e48, application start time 0x01c8163284872183.”

More to come…

**Another update October 26, 2007 ** keyword: photos screen saver was closed

Product Recalls – Why not use what’s already in place?

RecallI was listening to Clark Howard recently and he was citing some staggering statistics regarding product recalls and the terribly low response rates. One of the items, some toy purchased through Target, had sold about 200,000 units yet the response rate for recalls was only 700 HUNDRED (!) returns.

This is pretty dismal, especially in circumstances where safety and health are at issue. Most people don’t spend their free time scouring product web sites or looking for product mentions on the evening news, assuming they even watch the news… or are in the room for the one, tiny mention of a recall that might come on… assuming that the station that was on even carried such stories… etc, etc.

I was then thinking about how our credit card providers feel perfectly comfortable sharing our personal information with “interested third parties”. I would suggest that the VAST majority of folks purchase items these days with either credit / debit cards or checks (nothing I can do for those cash purchases). The retail outlets that have been informed about product recalls are pulling merchandise off of their shelves. They also keep computerized inventories of their products. They further have access to when items where purchased as well as what credit card or (now with those instant checks) what checking account number was used in the purchase of those goods.

What we now need is a system (it should be a very simple system) whereby the retailers automagically notify the financial institutions regarding the recalls. All of the pieces are there. Now the consumer, rather than (more likely in addition to) the inane notices on their credit or banking statements, they can also have notifications of any relevant recalls.

This is even easier for online users as they usually must provide an email address or they have some kind of financial-institution-associated mailbox that can notify them the next time they log onto their account.

Admittedly there is plenty of opportunity for mischief. As you know I don’t have the greatest trust in our financial institutions to not abuse such a ripe potential “cross marketing” vehicle. But perhaps we can find a way to minimize their abuse and this can help to get the word out.

New Computer on Order

I just went ahead and ordered a new Dell Inspiron 530 computer.

Here are the specs, looking forward to seeing it in action!  I managed to dig up a $350 off coupon online. That, along with free shipping made the price pretty good IMHO.

1 223-2222 Inspiron 530,Intel Core2 Duo processor E6550 (2.33GHz 1333FSB) w/Dual Core Technology and 4MB cache $1029.00
1 311-7240 4GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz $0.00
1 310-8025 Dell USB Keyboard $0.00
1 310-7966 Dell Optical USB Mouse $0.00
1 320-3000 Video ready option w/o monitor $0.00
1 320-5747 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT- DDR3 $0.00
1 341-4811 500GB Serial ATA II Hard Drive(7200RPM) $0.00
1 341-5517 Dell 19-in-1 Media Card Reader $0.00
1 420-6540 Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, English $0.00
1 420-5769 Internet Search and Portal $0.00
1 420-5924 Icon Consolidation Application $0.00
1 463-2282 Dell Owners Manual installed on your system,click on icon after system set-up to access $0.00
1 420-6436 Vista, PC-Restore, Dim/Insp $0.00
1 420-6995 DELL SUPPORT 3.4,DIM/INSP $0.00
1 313-5582 Dell Resource DVD with Application Backup $0.00
1 420-7244 Dell Support Center 1.0 $0.00
1 310-1966 Mouse included with Keyboard purchase $0.00
1 430-0412 Integrated NIC card $0.00
1 313-4593 56K PCI Data Fax Modem $0.00
1 420-7468 ADOBE ACROBAT READER 8.1 DIM/INSP $0.00
1 313-5270 16X DVD+/-RW Drive $0.00
1 420-6464 Roxio Creator Basic $0.00
1 313-2758 Integrated Audio $0.00
1 313-2198 No Speaker Requested $0.00
1 412-0940 Security 30-day trial $0.00
1 412-0148 No Internet Service Provider Requested $0.00
1 412-1397 No Productivity Software requested $0.00
1 950-3337 1 Year Limited Warranty $0.00
1 987-3137 Dell Hardware Warranty PlusOnsite Service, Initial Year $0.00
1 982-4310 Type 3- Third Party At Home Service, 24×7 Technical Support, Initial Year $0.00
1 987-6238 No Warranty, Year 2 and 3 $0.00
1 960-3249 Banctec Service Agreement $.00
1 983-3680 Warranty Support,Initial Year $0.00
1 466-7687 Thank you for choosing Dell $.00
1 464-9572 No Preinstalled Software $.00
1 310-8626 You have chosen a Windows Vista Premium System $.00
1 420-7091 DataSafe Online Dim/Ins/XPS $.00
1 420-7092 DataSafe Online Dim/Ins/XPS 1YR-FREE $.00
1 987-4817 Insp Datasafe 3GB,1YR(Incl in price),DHS $0.00
1 988-0099 To activate your online backupaccount, go to Start, Programs, DataSafe Online $.00

Superheros have their problems too

I’m somewhat a closet fan of “Robot Chicken” on Adult Swim. It has its hits and its misses but the absolute funniest vignette was a “Real World” parody featuring a bunch of the superheros from my childhood. If you get a chance to catch it you won’t regret it!

This little video reminded me of that skit and really is very well done. Minimalist in its execution it’s just a good laugh.

James Randi explains homeopathy

Wow! Pretty succinct… well as succinct as 14 1/2 minutes can be. But a very good description of Homeopathy nonetheless.

When I was younger I explored a lot of alternative practices and was very seriously considering entering the field as well. Fortunately, my grades in university in computer science were so much better than my grades in my pre-med subjects that they convinced me that my forte really lay in programming and analytical pursuits.

There is so much to know in this world that you often have to pick your authorities for the things you don’t have the time or inclination to pursue yourself. You end up trusting folks’ word and believe that they know what they are talking about. Of course, implicit in this is the assumption that they have either done the research themselves, reviewed the research first-hand or that their choice of a trusted authority has a good handle on the subject.
Homeopathy, was something that I was never able to reconcile with reality. The testing modality assumed “energies” that could not be measured and treatments that relied on “vibrations” or “energies” that could not be detected or explained.

The premise of “like cures like” was a wild stab in the dark from a pre-science era and was pretty cool reasoning for its time. But with the advent of the scientific method, understanding that perhaps 60% of anything you’d see a doctor about will fix itself ultimately anyway, and knowledge that the placebo effect is quite a powerful one, it seems clear that folks need to weigh the efficacy of such a questionable and unproven modality. Especially one that can be so expensive.



I *do* rather wish Mr. Randi had taken a few moments to explain Avagadro’s number a bit more carefully. Basically, Avagadro’s number expresses how many molecules would be contained in a quantity of a substance whose mass in grams is equal to it’s formula weight (thanks Wikipedia!). i.e. a mole of Carbon-12 atoms would be 12 grams. So his argument for the odds of finding even a single molecule in the quantity represented is modestly tainted

Fluid Robot Movement

Regardless of your opinion of wrestling (and it can’t be any lower than mine), the fluidity of motion of that little orange robot is incredible!

I don’t know what materials were used to create it, but this is definitely another step forward to achieving mechanical biomimicry of motion.

Man, where were these cool toys when I was a kid? 🙂

Podcatching – Goliath is the winner

Until very recently I was using “Doppler” as my podcatching client. It allowed me a degree of control in managing my subscriptions that I simply cannot get with iTunes. However, I was finding more and more problems – even with the older podcasts – as they focused on ensuring that the RSS tags were iTunes compatible and not necessarily other podcatcher compatible.

Also, I was finding some content available exclusively on iTunes which had me using its podcatching features anyway for those select offerings. For example I’m currently in the middle of a GREAT astrophysics lecture series from Berkeley that is available as part of many educational institutions’ efforts to make such content generally available.

Add to that the fact that the creator of Doppler has been really dragging his feet on updating the podcatcher and I had to reluctantly transfer all of my feeds to iTunes and find some new ways to manage my content.

iTunes doesn’t offer a feed-by-feed way of discarding unplayed podcasts (for instance, if I haven’t listened to a “Clark Howard” podcast in a month, then I’m just not going to listen to it) and there is no really good mechanism for marking a podcast as “done with” – you can do this in Doppler by simply assigning a rating to the podcast and it will automatically remove all with that rating if you have set that podcast up to be managed in that way.

In iTunes the only feedback mechanism I have is to run the podcast to the end so that the play count goes above zero. Then I have an “Obsolete podcast” Smartlist that picks these up. Periodically I go to that Smartlist and delete everything in it. I *know* I can have iTunes automatically delete all played podcasts but sometimes I do not want this to happen right away.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with my iTunes podcatching experience so far. It’s sort of like when I finally joined the mainstream and installed Windows 95 after being a die-hard OS/2 user for so many years. I can finally do everything everybody else can do, the price being that I have to give up some of my prized features that just don’t seem to be in demand by the mainstream.

If you are interested, here is my current podcast list in OPML format: OPML File as of September 20, 2007. If you want to know how to import/export OPML files from iTunes, click here.

Below is a list of my current podcasts in order of preference. I enjoy ALL of these, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t download them. But some are more relevant, informative or fun than others.

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
Astronomy Cast
Astro 10P: Introduction to General Astronomy – Fall 2006
TEDTalks (video)
Slashdot Review – SDR News
CBC Radio: Quirks & Quarks Complete Show
Skepticality: The Official Podcast of Skeptic Magazine
IT Conversations
Cato Daily Podcast
Cato Weekly Video
Science @ NASA Feature Stories Podcast
Humanist Network News
Mr. Deity
Career Opportunities
The Finer Points – Aviation Podcast
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Video and Audio Podcasts
The Economist
The Clark Howard Show
Clark Howard’s Scam Alerts
Clark Howard’s Call Of The Week
Battlestar Galactica Podcast
Astronomy Magazine Podcast
David Allen Company Updates
David Allen Company Podcast
43 Folders
Pilotcast – Aviation Podcast for Pilots, by Pilots
Slacker Astronomy podcast
Slacker Astronomy Video Podcast
The Skeptic Tank
Astronomy a Go Go!
SETI: Science and Skepticism: Are We Alone?
Cato Institute Event Podcast
Gmail Podcast
The Ellen DeGeneres Show in a minute
IdoNotes (and sleep)

De-cluttering our home and our lives

Garage SaleWe’ve been a bit busy for the past little while. In the post renovation euphoria, we realized that we really like the quasi-minimalism that we had in our newly re-invented rooms. We can find what we’re looking for and we like the feeling of lightness that comes from just knowing that there is not a mountain of *stuff* either behind the closet doors or filling up the drawers in the desk/cabinet/you name it.

Add to that Mich has been watching various home improvement shows and eventually zoomed in on “Clean Sweep” and has even ventured so far as to buy the “Clean Sweep” book (It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff) and started taking it’s philosophies to heart.

So we’ve been working our way through the house re-evaluating EVERYTHING. We’ve been discarding old papers that at one time we thought were so important – who really cares about those pay stubs from 15 years ago? And re-evaluated our “time capsules”, which are boxes of items that we didn’t want to get rid of for one reason or another and thought that they’d be interesting to us many years in the future. We went down from 4 time capsule boxes to 1. It *was* a little interesting going through some of the items we thought were so precious 15 or 20 years ago, but it was much more cathartic evaluating them and either selling, giving away or discarding them.

On the whole, digital pictures and smaller mementos to trigger memories of good times past are sufficient for our purposes.

Our neighborhood has a couple of garage sales a year – where the homeowners association does some advertisement and folks know to come through ’cause there will be a lot of sales concentrated in the area. So we participated in the one that was held last week and divested ourselves of a BUNCH of stuff and cleared a modest profit as well 🙂

Combining this de-cluttering with the philosophies embodied in our focus on “Getting Things Done“, we’re finding ourselves much clearer in our expectations for our free time and our lives and goals in general.

We picked up DVD storage pages, the kind that fit into a 3-ring binder, and we’ll be collapsing our DVD collection down from a couple of shelf-fulls to a handy binder size. This AFTER culling the collection for the garage sale.

Today we’ll finish assembling the shelves we picked up yesterday and complete organizing the back room we’ve designated as our “storage room”. We have no basement and there are some things that you simply do not want to store in a shed or the garage (Christmas items, party supplies) and so we’ve designated a room in the house that will host such items. But only after a THOROUGH vetting – do we really want/need to keep these things?

It takes a LOT of energy and effort to work through this kind of project, the renovation was a good shaking-up / taking off point for us. Hopefully the momentum from this effort can roll through the rest of our life as the satisfaction of finding what you need when you need it as well as being pleased with how your place looks is almost beyond description.