I remember getting my first hard drive that was bigger than 1GB, and thinking this was amazing. Today it takes half an hour to take 1GB of photos, so I obviously need much more space. Before this morning, my setup had one “500GB” and two “250GB” drives, but this actually added up to 927GB. This is because the manufacturers’ definition of a gigabyte differs from a computer’s definition of a gigabyte. Today I added a second “500GB” backup drive (I saw far too much data loss this week, and it scared me) and passed 1TB¹ for the first time. Meaningless, but a little milestone nonetheless.

I’m trying to work out if I’ll ever hit the next milestone: 1024 terabytes = a petabyte. Let’s say I become a professional sports photographer, or something, and take 8GB of photos per day. Even with that, it’d still take 342 years to hit a petabyte. I’d need 55GB of photos per day to hit a petabyte within 50 years. For my camera that would be 6875 photos/day, while the most expensive Canon SLR, at 22MB/photo, would need 2500 shots. Nah, I can’t see individual photographers needing that much space for a long, long time.

1. and 1 tebibyte [↩]

It’s not that I’m obsessed with Strictly Come Dancing, it’s that…

er

Anyway, today they launched the publicity machine for the new series. Most exciting. It starts on the 20th September, and there are two extra couples this year - although three new professional dancers, as Nicole Cutler is bizarrely missing - so it’ll run 14 weeks. Hooray!

The Sunday results show is back, and is extended to 45mins. I was a bit unsure about the Sunday show last year - it’s all filmed on the Saturday night, so it can feel a bit false when Bruce / Tess use ambiguous time references. And I have to be careful to avoid the Strictly sites on Sunday, as the studio audience hit the forums on Saturday night and report the results. But it did win me over eventually, as they put on a good show, with a decent professional routine every week (and I’ve no idea where they find time to rehearse those). The main site is also explicitly pointing out that Sunday isn’t a live show, which is a step up.

It Takes Two is also returning on weeknights, with Claudia presenting (yay!). Thankfully I’m not so obsessed with the show that I watch…

Anyway, all this means that from mid-September to Christmas there’ll be Strictly every day. THIS IS AWESOME.

Today was also the first official reveal of the celebrities. First jumbled thoughts:

• Totally unfair initial impressions suggest there are at least four very strong couples, but you couldn’t write any of them off, other than possibly John+Kristina. It seems a little more balanced than previous years, and could be quite the scrap.
• I’m glad Karen has a possible contender this year. I like Karen.
• Gotta feel sorry for Anton. Gillian Taylforth isn’t that old, obviously, but is probably a bit above the average. As ever.
• I’ve had complaints about the dearth of young male totty. I pointed out Sam Strachan (I think he has a real name, but that’s who he is in my head), and was informed that this does not compare to Rachel Stevens, Christine Bleakley and Jodie Kidd. Fair enough. Can’t bring myself to care, though.
• Christine Bleakley is going to have a hell of a workload if she goes on presenting The One Show. I think she’s well positioned for the insanity of the public vote, though - I mean, who doesn’t like Christine? (not like that, although yes, but she’s generally very endearing on The One Show. Not that I watch…oh, who am I kidding).
• I note they’re all ex-Eastenders actors this time around. I imagine the two can’t coexist, as every Eastenders dancer so far has left the show the same winter.
• What’s going on with the Heather Small / Brian Fortune photo on the contestants site? Couldn’t he have picked her up or something?

Tickets are randomly selected via a lottery, thank goodness. I’d better update my previous posts on the subject, or I’ll be inundated.

23 days to go.

A few weeks ago I blogged about spelling & grammar. As is traditional in such situations I was wrong about pretty much everything, but at least the distinction between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ was a valid point.

Except, not so much:

…this is yet another a case, like imply and infer, where the segregation of meanings between the two words is emergent and incomplete, rather than traditional and under siege. This is an interesting and curious feature of the ecology of peevology. In most areas, what is fashionable is seen as new, and out-groups are censured for being behind the times. But there are some things, English usage among them, where disdain must by convention be directed at innovators. This convention is so strong that it overrides mere fact. When a word’s meaning is becoming more specialized, with an older sense being abandoned, those who hold to the old ways must be castigated for failing to maintain a traditional distinction.

Gotta stop typing things. That or actually do some research.

I’m trying to rescue a dying hard drive today. It’s suffering from the Click of Death, which means it’s going down no matter what, but it’d be really, really nice if I could get at its data.

I regularly deal with laptop hard drives. 95% of the time they’re slowly dying, and once a Windows system file conks out, I get called. This almost always turns out fine: I quickly copy the still-intact data, slap it all onto a new hard drive, and run a repair install / restore disk. But just occasionally the drives go downhill fast. In today’s case Windows broke at the weekend, and by the time I got there on Tuesday the drive was clicking. Clicking is not good - it means the drive is physically failing to read the data. If it won’t spin up, I can’t do anything.

There’s a solution, but it’s not cheap: you can send the disk to a data recovery centre. They’ll open the drive in their cleanroom and (I assume) transfer the data platters to something which reads them directly. Assuming the platters aren’t physically damaged, this will probably work well. But it’s very expensive - quotes this morning suggested ~£300 for a 40gb drive - and I don’t know anybody who’s actually done it. Because, with laptops, the lost data are usually sentimental rather than critical. It’s not worth that expense, but people are still sad to lose it. This sucks.

I hate it when I can’t recover data. Obviously, everyone should have backups etc., but saying so is all well and good - in practice, most people don’t¹. And it’s still heartbreaking to lose, say, years of photographs. But there is one last, desperate trick you can try before paying a fortune / giving up. Put the drive in the freezer.

Honest. It contracts the metal, and has been known to bring drives back from the dead. Until they warm back up…but I only need 15mins for a drive image. I’m trying this today.

The drive in question refused to stop clicking, so I shoved it in the freezer for an hour. I then quickly slapped it into an external usb caddy, hit the power and…I’m pretty sure it span up. Laptop drives are very quiet, but if I tilted it there was a definite force, so something was happening. Windows said “I’ve found a drive!”. And then sat there. And sat there. I reset the enclosure to try and kick things back into life, and this set it clicking again. Damn.

As I said, this is a last-ditch strategy. I’m really hoping that a bit longer in the freezer will do the trick - some say they’ve had drives fail after 4h but work after 24h. I’ll give it another few hours and try again. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try it overnight. I’d really like to get this one.

Update after another 2hrs: still nothing. It spins up, then starts clicking. Can’t think there’s much hope, to be honest, except there was that all-too-brief ‘disk drive found’ message from Windows…

Update 2: Sadly, this didn’t work. After an overnight freeze it refused to do anything for a minute, then just clicked as ever. I guess this type of click wasn’t the freezer-solvable one. Damn.

1. backing up is still far too irritating for the average user, if you ask me. Norton Ghost is the most user-friendly system I know, but it’s confusing to set up. This should hopefully change as broadband speeds increase, as far simpler online backups will be able to handle music / photos [↩]

I don’t know much about music, and I like listening to those who do. As such, Mark Radcliffe & Stuart Maconie’s Radio 2 evening show is endlessly fascinating to me. They both have a remarkable ability to take a completely innocuous track - Wichita Lineman, say - and spend ten minutes pointing out lyrical touches that would never have occurred to me, telling behind-the-scenes stories (they both have endless brainspace devoted to trivia, it seems) and generating thought-spirals that continue every time I hear the song. Now you come to mention it, that lineman is obviously terribly lonely, but he keeps working anyway. Are the lyrics his thoughts, as he’s driving? Huh - it’s actually surprisingly poignant. And all in, what, 15 lines?

They do this every time I listen. They also play - to my ears - a wide variety of newer bands, and a few weeks ago introduced me to Glasvegas. I’ve been picking up their singles on iTunes since. I adore the lead singer’s voice and accent, as well as the general atmosphere¹ of the tracks. Here’s their latest, ‘Daddy’s Gone’:

Geraldine is also worth a listen, imho.

(incidentally, I’m happily feeling a bit calmer today, having left the house, delivered the RAID computer, comforted a baby and walked a dog.)

1. can’t be any more specific - told you I don’t know much about music [↩]

I totally messed up this weekend. I spent the whole time on my own, trying to fix that RAID array, and pissed off at least two groups of people I was supposed to meet up with. The computer’s finally all working as of 0130, but I can’t possibly charge for all the time I spent. I hate being beaten by problems, is the thing, and I have a bad habit of taking it personally when I can’t figure things out. But this was just silly, and I crafted a situation with no upside. Damn it.

I’ve been grappling with a broken RAID setup this weekend. I was given the computer with little more than “it’s broken”, and it’s taken a while to diagnose.

It wasn’t booting. It got so far as ‘listing pci devices’ and conked out. Usually you’ll see an error in such situations, but this one, helpfully, just hung. This was when I discovered the RAID0 setup. As far as I can tell, it came from the store with this configuration, which is stupid. RAID0 sucks. It lets you link multiple drives into one big space, and I think there are speed benefits, but this is all outweighed by the data being dependent on all the drives staying healthy. If any drives fail, you lose everything. Not good.

But the drives were fine: both passed a sector scan without issue. The RAM checked out too. For a while I thought it might be a boot sector thing, then eventually I slipstreamed an xp disc with the required RAID drivers, and the initial install process reported no partitions. Ok - maybe they got deleted somehow. But how best to investigate? Usually this is easy - just whack the drive into another computer, and run whatever data recovery is appropriate. But RAID is finicky, and I was wary. One wrong move and you’ve broken the array and made data recovery infinitely more difficult. I really wanted to leave the drives alone as much as possible.

Eventually I shoved in another drive, installed XP onto it (which wasn’t without evil BSOD complications), hooked up the RAID and ran Active@ Partition Recovery. This took an hour to find two deleted partitions, one of which contained all the user data - perfect! I hit the ‘Recover’ button and Active@ said ‘Please pay for the full version’. Now, I’m sure there’s freeware that can undelete partitions. I’m sure I could even do it manually, if I did the research. But the hell with it - the ‘recover’ button was right there, so I paid the £27 for the full version. This fixed the mbr and boot sectors, and mounted the drive in Windows.

Windows said ‘wtf something is b0rked here’. The partition was back, and Active@ could list its files, but Windows couldn’t quite figure it out. This is the kind of thing which at which Scandisk excels. It usually works very well. But occasionally it’ll break things beyond belief, and a backup is advisable. So I switched to my favourite data recovery program: Restorer 2000 Pro. This little utility has saved me many, many times over the years. It scanned the major partition, and has spent the last six hours transferring all the data to yet another drive.

I’m currently waiting for scandisk to complete. I think it’s adding index entries to every file on the disk. Either that or it’s stuck in an infinite loop. Time will tell.

Charging for this kind of work is always difficult. Half the time is spent waiting for scans to complete or data to transfer - I’ve got through half of The Diamond Age this weekend - but it’s not like you just leave it running, either: there’s always some query that means you have to check it every five minutes (Restorer 2000, for example, has a strop if you try to recover too many directories from the root at once, so you have to be on hand to manually start the process every quarter of an hour). Charging a full hourly rate would obviously be hideously expensive and morally wrong, but you obviously don’t want to feel like you’re wasting your time. You also can’t always predict how long something will take, so you can’t say to the client “I’ll do £x amount of work then give you a call”. It just doesn’t work that way - oftentimes stopping halfway through would mean leaving the computer in an even worse state. I tend to add it up and see what feels reasonable. I’m not going to charge more than the computer’s worth, even if the job has taken that long. I know people who tell me I’m wrong, but most of my work is for individuals with their home computers, and I don’t think it’s fair to charge silly money.

Ho hum. Scandisk is still indexing, and the drive’s chugging. Man, I really hope it’s doing something useful.

Ascending the Uncanny Valley:

The final shot is curious - it’s obviously a very impressive recreation of the original actress, but it seems like all they’re doing is copying her actions. So it’s not a full we-can-recreate-humans-from-scratch system, but it’ll still do wonders for gaming / general animation. YouTube’s high quality version is much clearer.

Overheard this afternoon:

They want to put cameras up between the motorway junctions, so if your average speed is over the limit you’ll get fined. Isn’t it outrageous! There are so many more things they could be doing. I’ll just stop at the services and have a cup of tea.

It’s curious that the laws the police apparently needn’t enforce happen to be those this man wants to break.

I’ve previously blogged my opinions on anti-speed-camera campaigners (I find them pathetic) and won’t rehash them here. But the above is particularly amusing, because average-speed cameras wipe out many of the common whinings - they wouldn’t cause ‘emergency braking’, for example - yet campaigners are still opposed to them. How very transparent.

I went to a ceroc dance class this evening. It’s a mixture of jive and salsa, but very different from my usual style in that it’s a party dance.

Cha-cha, samba and jive are the flashy, fun Latin dances, but each needs a particular rhythm. Most songs don’t fit the pattern, so if I go to a party where people are dancing to, say, Girls Aloud, I’m just as lost as every other guy in the room. But salsa and ceroc just need a beat, so are arguably more useful.

Here’s how ceroc is meant to look:

I had a great time. Teacher Lady stood on the stage and demonstrated the steps, then watched as we stepped through them, looking for common problems and fixing them as appropriate. Every couple of minutes she’d call for the women to move along, forcing us to dance with unfamiliar partners. This was entertaining. I did my best to be friendly, and some people reciprocated, and some were…less than cheery, let’s say. Still, most were very nice, and it’s a good way to quickly improve.

The steps themselves weren’t easy, but I can’t pretend they were particularly difficult. Four of us went, and nobody struggled. Our three and a half years of dancing means we can pick up steps pretty quickly, and the ‘taxi dancers’ - very friendly dancefloor helpers - said it was obvious we’d all danced before. The hardest part was not lapsing into jive halfway through, or stepping back to ‘complete’ the step. I did the latter a lot.

Then came forty minutes of open practice, during which we were instructed to ask strangers to dance. I’ll have to build up to this. That kind of thing leaves my comfort zone for dust, and one lesson’s worth of steps isn’t much to offer. Maybe in a few weeks.

The dancefloor was then used for intermediate lessons, but any interested beginners could have a smaller lesson in the corridor. We did, and got to ask questions about the rules of the dance. It’s far less structured than Latin: it doesn’t matter what foot you step forward on, or how you fudge a turn, as long as you make it without falling over. I’m sure that the higher difficulty levels require more thought, but it’s just not rule-based in the same way. This is pretty liberating.

Then came a second open practice session, for all difficulty levels. I plucked up the nerve to ask the taxi dancer to dance, and picked up a couple of tips. I thought this would be the extent of my leaving the shallow end of the pool, but a couple of minutes later I felt a tap on my shoulder, and Teacher Lady asked if I’d like to dance. I should mention that Teacher Lady was about my age, and distractingly attractive. I am incredibly nervous around such people at the best of times, and she was obviously very, very good at ceroc. So I was pretty intimidated as I walked onto the floor. I didn’t make a total fool of myself, though! She was indeed excellent, but it’s always lovely to dance with someone who knows what they’re doing. Admittedly I sent her into at least one jive spin, and made a mistake when - I swear to Darwin - my brain started composing this paragraph instead of thinking about the next step, but generally managed to concentrate and keep up. So that was fun.

The atmosphere was informal and very relaxed, and completely open to beginners. I think I could enjoy this.

The Catholic Church didn’t want schoolgirls to be given anti-cancer-STI vaccines, because doing so would encourage sexual behaviour. As a compromise, the Church has now agreed to support the vaccines, provided the schoolgirls receive no advice on contraception. Said advice would explain that the vaccine only works against two strains of cancer-causing STI, and others are out there. This policy will apply to all schoolgirls in Scotland.

Just so we’re clear, here’s the previous Catholic hierarchy of Things That Are Important:

1. Not using contraception
2. Not using a ’sex-encouraging’ vaccine
3. Not dying of cancer

And here it is now:

1. Not using contraception
2. Not dying of cancer
3. Not using a ’sex-encouraging’ vaccine

What a wonderful compromise they’ve made.

If this is your worldview, you are a raving lunatic. Your right to express your opinion does not extend to anybody paying you attention, let alone consulting you on health/education policy.

This is why secularism is so important. Lunatics can and will try to harm children. Non-secular governments will let them.

For the last two days I’ve been struggling with a particularly irritating computer problem. I was called on Monday morning to say a Windows 2000 machine had a virus. An initial glance suggested spyware was killing processes: Explorer worked fine, but anything else - task manager included - was shut down immediately. This is pretty standard stuff for spyware, and I didn’t anticipate much trouble. Sadly, I was wrong.

I deleted an obvious ‘Windows Antispyware 2008′ to no effect, and virus / anti-spyware scans revealed nothing. I shut down all the non-essential services I could find, and even ran a quick scan for rootkits, but couldn’t find anything.

The problem was also there in Safe Mode, but not, I discovered by total chance, in Safe Mode with Networking. That was weird. The latter *should* just be the former + a network driver. This seemed consistent, then it happened once in SFw/N, and I started to think it might be hardware.

Admittedly it all felt a bit specific for that - you’d think hardware would kill everything, not just certain programs - but it could be to do with power draw. Plus, PSU problems have been known to have very weird symptoms. But a test PSU made no difference, the RAM checked out fine, and the (8-year-old) hard drive passed its fitness test. I thought I was onto something when I spotted the cpu fan slowing down and stopping in everything but SFw/N, but this was a red herring¹.

I eventually tracked it down by comparing the running processes in Safe Mode and Safe Mode w/ Networking (by repeatedly opening task manager and writing down names before it got nuked). The former, bizarrely, had an extra svchost.exe running. svchost.exe is a generic holder for background programs, and I needed more details. This is easy enough in XP, but in Windows 2000 you need the tlist support tool. The process turned out to be RpcSs: Remote Procedure Call. This was a new one on me, but it essentially controls background communications between programs. Disabling it solved the problem, but created a thousand more.

Turns out, RpcSS is vital. And here’s where I got stuck. I just couldn’t find any elegant ways to fix it. RpcSS is too low-level and important, and can’t simply be reinstalled. Eventually I went with the old-school Magic Fix: the repair install. This just installs Windows over the top of itself, and while it’s often equivalent to using a sledgehammer to crack a wotsit, it generally solves the problem. Not this time. Windows died, and wouldn’t come back. In the end I was forced to reinstall from scratch, which is always the last resort².

That’s really irritating. Usually, the hard part is diagnosing the problem. Once I know what’s going wrong, it’s just a matter of research and thinking it through. It’s rare that I can know what’s wrong but be unable to do anything about it. My best guess is the initial spyware somehow took out RpcSS. Windows 2000 is a bit old-and-busted now, and I’m hoping XP is better secured against such things.

I’m mainly blogging this for googlers facing similar issues. I couldn’t find any references to problems manifesting in Safe Mode but not Safe Mode with Networking. Very odd one.

1. the motherboard was actually slowing down the processor so it could disable the fan and keep things quiet. I turned this off. [↩]
2. Also I’d forgotten Windows 2000 comes with IE5.0. Ugh. [↩]

We’ve been learning the routine from Thriller for five weeks or so. It’s great fun, providing you leave your dignity at the door, or just don’t care There are 15 of us, and with the first 2/3 of the dance roughly sorted, this evening we looked at the last section.

I don’t think anyone anticipated the levels of hip-action this would involve. I have never done such things before. We’re consoling ourselves that one day we’ll perform at a wedding, and it’ll totally be worth it.

One of our teachers filmed the routine, blessedly stopping after the first 2/3. If this makes it to YouTube - and, let’s face it, this is inevitable - I’m going to have no choice but to blog it. Despite what it may do for my readership, and their associated mental health. Sorry in advance.

Jim From Neighbours, the world’s most prolific actor, will appear in ‘Renaissance’, a one-off ITV drama in the style of the recent Moving Wallpaper / Echo Beach:

Renaissance features [Jim From Neighbours] as a family man flying home from a holiday when the plane is attacked by zombies.

Obviously this sounds brilliant. Zombies on a plane. But even so, I bet some of you are still thinking ‘isn’t this a step down? Jim From Neighbours has been in Lost, 24, The West Wing…What’s he doing in ITV’s slightly odd drama/sitcom thingy?’.

My friends, you underestimate Jim From Neighbours:

In the panic, Dale’s character is thrown together with another passenger, played by [Kelly Brook].

Jim From Neighbours is truly a god among men.

I saw the Sex and the City movie a few months ago. I enjoyed it, but what I’ve read of other people’s opinions suggests I’m in the minority, mainly because the film’s characters committed the unforgivable sin of, and I can barely bring myself to write this, liking to own things. Materialism has its own private stratum in the tiers of liberal disgust. That the characters were generally decent people was irrelevant to their capitulation to capitalism. This was at first amusing - anything that spent five paragraphs calling them vacuous made me laugh - then tedious, and I got bored.

So it’s nice to see New Humanist taking a different approach, and actually saying something interesting. They focus on Carrie’s obsession with shoes, particularly those with extreme heels. In modern society the stiletto apparently reigns supreme - but why, when they’re painful and bad for you? It’s a well researched article, and the historical tour starts in 14th century Venice, where the well-off wore 20cm platforms to keep away from the muck of the streets, but couldn’t actually walk in said apparatus, so needed sticks / slaves to balance on. Prostitutes adopted them too, so beginning the common association of high heels “with both the aristocracy and the brothel”. Marie Antoinette was executed in high heels¹, and their popularity in France varied with the rise and fall of the ruling classes.

There’s lots more, and it’s all quite interesting if, like me, you find the desirable shoe thing a mystery. Then, about 2/3 of the way through, it dips into the underworld for a bit:

In The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, William Rossi claims that men derive a variety of pleasures from observing the sashaying buttocks and undulating hips of the high-heel walk. The “erotic magic” of high heels feminises the gait in a way that makes women appear helpless, so appealing to men’s instincts of chivalry while at the same time resembling the position of the foot during orgasm.

I somehow had a discussion about this last month. Why are heels considered more attractive than wedges(?) that raise women to the same height? You’d think they’d have exactly the same qualities of reshaping the walk, etc.. We assumed it was a balance thing. Bit of an ad-hoc evolutionary-psychology explanation, but still makes more sense than the above, if you ask me.

But he warns there’s a darker side to such stimulation. “Not a few men are sexually aroused to erection by observing women walk with obvious distress in tight shoes. One man confessed: ‘Even when I hear a woman say her tight shoes are killing her – that’s enough to bring an instant erection.’”

“Not a few men”? Seriously? Having said that, I once read that one (male) objection to breastfeeding in public is that the objects in question become de-sexualised². In conclusion: you can find men with any sexual quirk imaginable, but paying any attention to them is probably a bad idea.

Then there’s some bonkers Freud stuff. Also Judith Butler, a social critic whose often obscure ideas kept turning up in last year’s uni lectures, generally followed by many mutterings of ‘wtf bullshit’. Then it’s back to normality, and some tricky feminist issues - given the pain inherent in such shoes, isn’t it demeaning to wear them just to appeal to men? Phil Plait addressed something similar this week in reference to the Nerd Girls, and there was heated debate in the comments. I tend to think people can dress however they want, and, if they’re really making their own decisions, it’s just as silly to accuse them of betraying-the-cause as it would be for them to pander to men. But I can’t pretend this is particularly informed.

Anyway, what I thought would be a five-minute read turned out to be fascinating, and it’s pleasing to see Sex and the City being used for something other than snide remarks. Found via the New Humanist Blog.

1. I like Marie Antoinette. She supposedly went to a party with a birdcage - complete with bird - in her hair. [↩]
2. can’t find the link now, and google searches are, um, disturbing [↩]