Hey, is this blog still on? It appears that I haven’t updated it in quite a while. The end of session got in the way, then the MSST program started and then we moved to a new place. During the move, I had yet another example of how important it is to back everything up on your computer.

I moved my computer over, plugged everything back in, and turned it on. Windows 7 refused to boot, halting at a blue screen. When I tried to boot into safe mode, I could see that the problem was with a file called CLASSPNP.SYS. I found this thread with a similar problem, but unfortunately replacing the file didn’t help. All the other searches I did turned up people with the same problem, and no solution. Eventually, I had to reinstall Windows to get it working.

Fortunately, though, I had backups of all of my data, and so I didn’t lose anything, most importantly the paper I was working on for class. It did take several hours to reinstall all of my programs and get everything looking right again, but I didn’t have to spend many more hours recreating documents. Remember: always back up your files, and back them up to more than one place!

Despite working in tech, I am not a terribly techy person. I am not an early adopter. I don’t have a lot of gadgets. I may have three monitors on my desktop computer at home, but I’m not one of those people who constantly upgrades to get the most performance. I didn’t have my own cellphone until 2005, and I always believed in getting the cheapest phone I could. Smartphone? No way. But I finally broke down and got one, and color me an instant convert to smartphones.

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• Current Mood: Mesmerized
• Currently Listening To: "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", CSNY

In a previous post, I talked about using disk imaging software for setting up Windows in a corporate environment. For years, I’ve used Symantec Ghost, specifically Ghost 8. I’d previously manually run Ghost from a network drive, booting from a custom floppy bootdisk with a DOS Novell client to allow me to log into our network (we still use Novell). A couple of years ago, I switched to running Ghost from an external USB hard drive that stored all the image files. To make it even more automatic, I wrote a tiny utility in assembly that reads the model info from the computer’s BIOS and uses the correct image file.

As time went on, though, the shortcomings of Ghost became apparent. The biggest one is speed: by running Ghost in a DOS environment, I was limited to USB 1.1 speeds. Ghosting a 20 GB Windows 7 partition would take around 40 minutes. When you are ghosting many machines at once, the quicker you can do it, the better. I knew of a great, free alternative in Clonezilla, but would it work for what I needed?

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Why am I so interested in issues of data privacy and data security? I think this story about “black boxes” in Toyota cars illustrates it well. In short, Toyota cars have airplane-like black boxes in many of their cars that can track data like speed, whether the airbags deployed, and so forth. However, the data is stored in a proprietary format, and only Toyota can access it; they only do so when requested by law enforcement. I am interested in security and privacy precisely because I want to see the end to what I consider to be horrible practices like this.

I don’t think it’s horrible because black boxes shouldn’t exist, or that they infringe upon privacy. On the contrary: my major problem with this is that it is far too private: only Toyota has access to the data, despite the fact that the owner of the car paid for the black box and the driver of the car is the one generating that data. Toyota should not store this data in a proprietary format that only Toyota has access to, and only when Toyota wants to divulge the information. The owner of the vehicle should have full access to the data at all times and should be able to control it.

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• Current Mood: Friday
• Currently Listening To: "Cityscape", Matt Hunstad

When I first got Windows 7, I ranted a bit about the install process. Since then, I’ve had no problems with Windows 7 at home, and I have to say that I like it. It’s getting to the time, though, when we will start rolling out Windows 7 at work, and in the past week I’ve been fiddling around with Windows 7 Pro from a corporate perspective. Once again, I find a few things lacking.

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• Current Mood: Sunny
• Currently Listening To: "Have a Cigar", Pink Floyd

Of all the political debates out there, the one that confuses me the most is the notion that some people would be against net neutrality who did not work for ISPs like AT&T and Verizon. There are liberal/conservative splits on many issues that have merit, but when it comes to net neutrality, I can’t see how any techy person can be against it, despite their political leanings. Why does it matter? Let’s travel back to the days before the internet existed, when people spoke not of ISPs but BBSes…

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• Current Mood: Grey

Here’s my computer desk. Three monitors definitely helps…

I’ve been using Windows 7 now for a couple weeks, and for the most part, it’s working great. However, I recently discovered another problem, and sadly, it doesn’t seem to be one that’s limited to me: problems with sharing a printer with a Mac

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So yesterday, I posted an email I wrote a bit more than ten years ago about what I saw for the future of the internet. How well have they held up to time? Pretty well, I think.

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• Current Mood: Tired

I’ve been going through my old emails lately, trying to see if I’ve ever written anything of importance. The jury is still out on that, but I did find something interesting: an email I sent to one of my friends about my predictions for this new-fangled Internet thing. I sent it on 14 September 1999, a bit more than ten years ago. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how my thoughts have held up over time and whether I can get a job as a professional prognosticator. Here it is below the fold:

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