I have no opinion on the authenticity or otherwise of the decor in Stalin's bunker, as depicted in a series of pictures on English Russia.
But I think whitewall tyres on an armoured vehicle are pretty darn sweet.
Reality show idea: "Pimp My BMP"!
Whisker storage unit
12 August 2007 — danIf you own one or more cats, you will occasionally find a shed whisker lying around.
Unlike the little delaminated bits of claw, dismayingly frequent piles of vomit and prodigious amount of ordinary hairs that cats also leave lying around, shed whiskers look as if they ought to be good for something.
Regrettably, the cat's-whisker detector used in classic crystal radios does not use an actual cat whisker.
I'm also not a painter, so I don't need a super-fine single bristle for putting highlights in eyes.
I do own a microscope, but have not recently needed to push any minuscule shells around on a slide.
And I have no interest in enraging a cricket.
So I am, at the moment, unable to think of anything to do with spare whiskers. Until such time as I do, I've chosen to store them.
Like so.
I welcome any suggestions regarding what to make and/or do with this impressive collection.
The Case of the Vanishing Icons
12 August 2007 — danOne of the great entertainments that awaits you whenever you reinstall Windows is seeing what new and strange personality features your fresh install exhibits.
It happens almost every time, and usually within days, or possibly even hours, of the reinstall; some weird thing arises that you've never seen before, even if all you've done is reinstalled the same version of Windows on the same computer you were using before.
Munged icons are a pretty common Windows problem - the OS messes up the pointers to its cached icons file, so each class of file or folder gets a semi-random new icon. But this new install of mine just came up with a variation on that theme which is a new one on me.
Yes, it munged the Quick Launch icons!
(In case you're wondering: No, none of those icons match the programs they're connected to.)
No problem, said I. I opened TweakUI and used its "Rebuild Icons" option, confident that everything would now be fine again.
Instead, I got this. Now all but one of the icons is invisible!
More "Rebuild Icons" attempts caused the single still-visible icon to change, and more and more icons on the desktop to disappear.
Well played, Windows! Well played!
The sad saga continues
10 August 2007 — danThe slow death of the Firepower fuel-enhancing-pill company continues, chronicled as usual by Gerard Ryle of the Sydney Morning Herald.
The latest instalment of this somewhat predictable story tells us that Firepower's pills - which, they of course now say they've changed, again - contain naphthalene, as seen in some other bogus fuel pills, and the previously mentioned ferrocene. Neither of these ingredients does anything remotely approaching what Firepower claim, as you'd expect. And yet it seems that Firepower really do have quite a lot of money.
It takes so long to unravel these claims, and so little time for the people who come up with them to switch to a new scam. Serial scam artists can be positively famous, and still end up hanging out with leaders of nations.
Until the average investor learns more about critical thinking, none of this ever going to change.
Today's dumbest quackery
9 August 2007 — danThe Oak Ridge Associated Universities' Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum has a marvellous online collection of Radioactive Quack Cures.
I was already familiar with radioactive water jugs, the most famous line of which was the "Revigator", from Theodore Gray's Periodic Table Table site. He's got a Revigator, which he was alarmed to note is still quite hot even now, about eighty years after it was made and lined with the uranium ore whose decay contributed "healthful" radon to the water inside.
There were plenty of other allegedly radioactive medicines and devices on the market not long after the discovery of radium. "Radium" was used as a pretty generic term for anything radioactive in the quack market, and it took over the "science magic" medical role previously occupied by electricity. But this definitely wasn't a change for the better. Most of the electrical quack devices, then and now, were at least harmless. The radioactive ones often very definitely weren't.
If you were lucky, there was no real "radium" in the tablets, water jug or pillow you bought. If you weren't, there was.
The thing that blew my mind about the Oak Ridge Universities site, though, is the revelation that radioactive quack devices are still being made!
We're not talking about brachytherapy devices here. Those are genuine and useful, though hardly a mass market product.
No, these are good old fashioned allegedly-radioactive things that you're meant to affix to your person, or apply to food or drink (or cigarettes!), to charge yourself up with those friendly little cartoon atoms from the '50s educational films.
It boggles my mind that anybody today would think that exposing yourself to significant ionising radiation could possibly be the sort of "general tonic" that's the hallmark of so much quackery ("general tonic" has been replaced by "strengthens the immune system", but the principle remains the same).
But here the darn things are.
Hot pottery, limb-soothing fabric, water treatment doodads... oh, and naturally a thing to make your car run better.
Almost all of the modern quack products, even more bizarrely, come from Japan. If you asked me to name the one place in the world where radiation wouldn't be believed to be healthful, I think I'd probably go for the Ukraine before Japan, but it's a close-run bloody thing.
I mean... what?
The other distinguishing feature of modern ionising radiation quackery, fortunately, is that these devices are definitely much less harmful than the worst of the old ones, and probably barely radioactive at all. The days of radon bulbs for your soda syphon are well past.
The modern products all just seem to be allegedly doped with a bit of thorium, a weak alpha-emitter that does indeed have radium and radon as decay products, but is really only worth worrying about if you're eating or breathing it.
Thorium-doped gas mantles for camping lanterns are still on sale in most countries, and they're about a zillion times less dangerous than whatever mode of transport you use to get to your camp site.
Still and all, though, the very existence of these products depresses me. Yes, I know about all of those surveys where 80% of respondents think the sun orbits the earth, and the popularity of Creationism, homeopathy and "detoxification" has also not escaped my notice.
I even know that some of the customers of these quacks may have formed a genuine, informed opinion against the linear no-threshold model, and thus believe for at least somewhat rational reasons that a slightly above-background radiation dose may be good for them.
But still.
Ionising radiation?
Seriously?
(See also: Can you make a nuclear explosion with your bare hands?)
DirectX problem, how I loathe thee
7 August 2007 — danSometimes, your computer decides that you're not allowed to get any work done, or have any fun, today.
Mine did it to me today, by suddenly deciding (according to the DirectX Diagnostic Tool, dxdiag) that my graphics card had no memory and was not capable of DirectX acceleration of any kind.
Yes, as per Microsoft support document 191660, "The DirectDraw option or the Direct3D option is unavailable when you start Microsoft games for Windows".
The "Adapter" page in Display Properties (I'm running Windows XP) lists the right specs for my GeForce 7800 GT, but dxdiag believes there are "n/a" megabytes of memory on it.
This doesn't cripple Windows in general, but it means I'm not going to be playing any 3D games to speak of (OpenGL games still work fine, but most Windows 3D is Direct3D), or watching much video. Small-dimensioned video files play OK as long as they don't have to be scaled to a higher resolution; scale 'em up and the frame rate dives as the CPU begs for mercy.
I've had this problem once before. Then, I just had to run dxdiag, turn off whichever DirectX Features were still available in the Display tab, then close dxdiag and run it again, and turn all of the now-available-again features back on. Totally opaque for the everyday user, but a doddle when you know how.
Now, though, DirectDraw Acceleration, Direct3D Acceleration and AGP Texture Acceleration are all Not Available, and the enable/disable buttons for them are greyed out, no matter what I do.
(Needless to say, the DirectX Files tab in dxdiag says "No problems found"!)
And this is the way it is apparently going to bloody well stay, because I've been banging my head against it for more than six hours now, making no progress whatsoever.
I can get work done while the computer has this problem. If anything, it makes it easier to work, because I sure as hell can't play. But I have a hard time doing anything, including sleeping, if there's an unresolved problem like this dancing around in the back of my brain.
There's quite a lot of info on the Web about this problem, including some pretty freaky suggestions, most of which are mentioned on the Microsoft page.
Herewith, the list of Things I've Tried:
I've reinstalled the graphics and motherboard drivers, and the latest version of DirectX 9, multiple times. Yea, multitudinous have been the reboots.
I've cleaned out the old Nvidia drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro (previously mentioned here) before reinstalling them.
(Oh, and yes, "Hardware acceleration" in Display Properties is set to "Full". I've tried setting it to None and then back to Full, too.)
I've tried the weird-sounding suggestion to enable, then disable, Remote Desktop Sharing in Microsoft NetMeeting, because the sharing feature apparently blocks Direct3D, and cycling through it can perhaps cancel some other application's similar block.
I've disabled the Terminal Services service, which I don't need anyway.
I've uninstalled my monitor in Device Manager and rebooted, even though this particular piece of voodoo is only at all likely to work if you're removing phantom monitors from an extra graphics adapter, like an integrated motherboard adapter that you're not using.
I've reinstalled Windows over the top of itself.
(Actually, the first time I did that I accidentally told Windows the wrong drive, picking the other one in the system that's the same size as the actual boot drive. So I created a shiny fresh copy of Windows that I didn't want. That was thirty minutes I'll never get back - though I didn't bother installing graphics drivers in the new Windows. I suspect that DirectX would then have worked, but who knows?)
I've restarted the computer with a "clean boot procedure", by using the System Configuration Utility, msconfig, to skip all startup items and non-Microsoft services.
(This, entertainingly, showed me that msconfig does not consider Windows Defender to be a "Microsoft service".)
I've turned off "Enable Write Combining" in Display Properties and rebooted. And then turned it back on again. And rebooted.
And, the last option on the Microsoft page: I created a new user account.
The Microsoft page doesn't tell the hapless troubleshooter what to do with the new account, mind you. It just tells you to make it, and... wait for its healing energy to permeate your computer's chakras?
I presumed that I was actually meant to restart and log in as the new user, so I did that. But it of course did not help.
Next, the Microsoft support page points you to another Microsoft support page, "How to troubleshoot display issues in Microsoft games". But that contains nothing helpful, either.
(I love how Microsoft's pages always mention "Microsoft games" in particular. That's not really a good PR message - it suggests that other DirectX games might work fine, but ones from companies owned by Microsoft wouldn't.)
I've even visited the More Help tab in dxdiag and then clicked the DirectX Troubleshooter button, with the mad hope that this might be the first instance in human history of a Microsoft Troubleshooter actually shooting some trouble.
So much for that.
All of this screwing around has messed my Windows installation up a little more than it was before. There was one incredibly bizarre problem, now resolved, that I'll leave for another post, and all of my icons are of course bunched up on one side of the screen because layout.dll has forgotten where they were.
Oh, and ACDSee now has a great error:
But the problem remains.
If Web pages about this are anything to go by, this problem can be a bit like lower back pain; it makes you suffer for a while, then just goes away as mysteriously as it came, when you reboot for some other reason. I've made a frickin' hobby of rebooting today, though, and the problem ain't gone away yet.
The only option left, as far as I can see, is a proper nuke-from-orbit Windows reinstall from scratch. (I suppose I should have kept the accidental install on the other drive, instead of deleting that Windows directory when I got back to booting from the proper drive. Oh well.)
That'll mean losing most of the system setup stuff I've done over the last year and a half of largely trouble-free computing, which is not that big a deal, of course.
But it's ludicrous to have to do that just because Windows has arbitrarily decided not to let the graphics card accelerate anything any more. It's like having to reinstall Windows because it's decided to not let you use anything above 640 by 480, or because the audio "mute" box is permanently checked. It feels like buying a new car because the horn doesn't work in your old one.
(And yes, I have been tempted to use this as an excuse to get a whole new computer. Mmmm, quad core...)
I've swapped e-mail with a fellow who works at Nvidia; I'll drop him a line and see if he's got any ideas. I also invite you all to contribute your own hare-brained schemes in the comments.
I will, of course, also update this post when the problem's fixed, whether by diplomacy or the nuclear option.
[UPDATE: Yeah, I reinstalled Windows. Latecomers haven't missed all of the fun and games, though; check out the comments!]
Signs you may be the right man for the job
6 August 2007 — dan
Spam-lessons update
2 August 2007 — danAnother of those thesaurusised porno spams arrived, with the puzzling subject line "lascivious yez Cyprians rmpp Masturbates!"
So now I know that "Cyprian" is not just an archaic word for a resident of Cyprus, but is also an old term for "a lewd or licentious person, esp. a prostitute".
It's not, I grant you, as useful a word as "catamite" for everyday abuse of the deserving, but it's diverting nonetheless.
(Modern definitions of "catamite" are a bit colourless, if you ask me. I much prefer the succinct old Oxford definition, "a sodomite's minion". The 1913 Webster's opted for "a boy kept for unnatural purposes", which left the details of the poor fellow's everyday life alarmingly hazy.)
The author of a different spam was pleased to inform me that after using certain suggestively-named pills for seven months, "now my shaft is extremely weightier than civil".
I think there's something in that for all of us, don't you?