My web site has been moved to a new hosting provider, though you probably won't be able to see much difference. My old provider, Cirtex Hosting was never quite satisfactory, for various reasons. My new provider is A2 Hosting. They provide the software I need (Linux, Mysql, PHP, shell access) for about $8/month and had the most reasonable terms of service of the competing providers I examined. I took this opportunity to recreate the gallery since the database had become corrupted, as well as to upgrade my Drupal instance. There are a few tweaks I'd like to apply but customizing the site turns out to be more hastle than it's worth, so, other than adjusting colors, it's running a basic install with a few extra modules.

Yesterday I noticed my cpu usage at 30%, even though nothing was running. Turns out Vista explorer (the file manager/user interface) sometimes will eat up cpu. Excess cpu usage reduced performance for other tasks and reduces battery life on laptops. Causes are various. Explorer itself is a shell that loads many subprocesses and DLLs in and spawns threads. Searching the net turns up many posts, some useless, some useful. The basic protocol to solve the problem is:

- Limit or turn off indexing. This can be done from the start menu options, disk drive settings, or you can completely disable the windows search and indexing service. In my case this didn't help.

- Use process explorer to figure out which process is eating the cpu.

- Then use process explorer to see which thread in the process is using the cpu.

- Google the process or DLL name to see what's known about it. process library is one useful site to find out about processes and dlls.

After all those negative comments about vista, I thought it's time for some positive comments about my Tablet PC, an HP tx2500z laptop (though, sorry for Vista, no particular positive things to say about it yet).

The tablet interface is where it's at. For a while the industry was talking about how notebook pc sales would overtake desktop sales. This happened in 2008 (ref). It probably happened at different times in different sectors, e.g., home vs. business. Well, someday most notebooks will be tablet pcs. Why? Because it is a much better interface for certain things.

windows vista has a curious ability to stop you from using your own files. i think this is part of vista's "enhanced" security. getting around the guard dog requires some fancy footwork and several hours of wasted time. this reminds me of banks that won't let you get at your own money (e.g., "suspicious" activity, like, oh my god, leaving the usa) or visa's "verified by visa" feature which more aptly should be named "denied by visa" since i can never remember the password it makes me enter to use my own credit card.

somehow the permissions and ownership data on some of my files got out of whack. this meant that i could no longer open, move, delete, etc. etc. certain files, which were randomly distributed throughout my directories. part of this is due to trying to use cygwin's cp command. though i'm using a current version of cp, it seems to completely mess up file ownership and/or permission settings under vista. cp is a useful programbecause for some operations it is useful to have a command-line copy that is actually useful (unliked window's brain-damaged sibling to cp).

internet here in kuala lumpur has become terribly slow the last few days. we even completely lose connection several times during the day. when i say slow, i mean it can take hours to download a few megabytes and some sites, including my webmail, might never manage to load in the browser. at the moment it's running slightly better, but still very slow. this is probably due to the loss of several undersea cables between egypt and italy affecting south asia, including cables that carry traffic from india. strange that a cable outage to europe affects websites in the us, but i guess that just has to do with how traffic was routed or how it has been rerouted.

Another digression from travel. My install disks for adobe photoshop cs3 and lightroom 1.0 have gone awol. current versions are cs4 and lightroom 2. now, you might think, this being the age of the internet, that adobe would keep old versions of their software available for download, and we're only talking last-year's versions here. i tried their contact support page and it took a week for them to get back to me. before the week was up i called adobe and was told that cs3 and lightroom 1 are not available for download. the alternative is to order replacement media, which adobe charges usd$20 for the privilege. absurd, a disk costs pennies. i can understand a bit of cost in handling the request, say around $5 would be ok with me, but paying another $40 for software i already own is stupid. also, since i'm on the other side of the world, having the disks posted to me would cost another bundle--and let's not even get into singapore customs charging 7%. all adobe would have to do, like every enlightened software company, is provide a link for customers to download their legally-purchased software. that's all i ask. bah, damn adobe, wasting my money and my time.

vista just seems to be getting slower and slower. my system isn't old enough to be slowing down. i just don't understand it. boot up takes over 2 minutes, shutdown nearly 2 minutes. performance logs show boot up processes only going about 15 seconds over. according to a site, 95% of systems boot in less than 3 minutes and 80% in less than 1 or 2 (can't remember right now). but it's not just boot up. just clicking on a folder takes seconds. launching takes too long. it's annoying. to top it all off, media player can't play music with popping every 3 seconds. the only suggestion the docs have is to check the sound card drivers, which i did and they are up to date. ok, so guess what?

i purchased an hp tx2510us convertible laptop computer recently and have had a few days to play around with it. here are my impressions. the tx2510us is a preconfigured tx2500z setup for same-day shipping and retail outlet sales in the us.

choice

using the shift key when typing, often by pressing the shift key with the same hand that's still moving over the keys, exerts additional strain on the fingers. it also slows typing down. that's why i never capitalize my emails, but i usually capitalize blog posts--just not this one. the same is true for other combination keys, especially the control key. capitalization can easily be restored in a word processor, except for the odd acronym or name the program doesn't recognize, but these can be added to a custom dictionary if the software supports it. increased strain also applies to laptop trackpads, where you need to hold down an awkward button and simultaneously drag. there is a click-lock function in windows but it would be nice to have a dedicated button for that. at least the hp trackpad has a scroll bar.

Sorry folks, but this travel blog is being interrupted for a series of boring articles about Vista and Tablet PC related adventures. Our regular programming will resume when our computer does what we want it to do, or at least comes closer to achieving this ideal. Perhaps my website needs a "don't show these tags" filter so you can concentrate on the interesting stuff. You can also click on any of the Travel links to see all travel-related articles.

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Now, back to the main topic of this article.
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My war with Vista is at a standstill. Fighting from the trenches, we have taken to exchanging textual gifts. My troops claim they have successfully reduced Vista's armies from 1.5 MB to a mere 800 MB--a staggering feat. Vista's propaganda continues to point to its successful use of 800 MB to do no more than XP was able to do in 150 MB, Mac OS in 8 MB, and Xerox Star in 384 KB. We needn't go into the heroic deeds of even older, and greater, ancestors, or their younger offspring who continue to go forth in small vessels of great success. Below, you may see the terrible lies and slurs Vista hurls at us. My troops, brave and a tad foolish, as the young are wont to be, attempted to storm the dark realm of Vista Journal--a place of fame, or of infamy, where heroic deeds of great battles, past and future, are recorded.

Windows Vista declares victory in the Skirmish of Windows Journal.

According to the NYT article Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China by John Markoff (1/10/2008), reporting on the discovery by Nart Villeneuve and published on Information Warfare Monitor, China monitors Skype text chats and archives the text and personal information of users whose chats contain various trigger words, such as "Falun Gong" or "milk powder". In the past, the appropriate American response would be something like "Those terrible Chinese! They violate their citizens' rights to free speech and communication! What dastardly dictators!", with the subtext that in America, and perhaps other nations of the so-called "free world", we are better because our governments uphold more noble rights. While such statements about China remain fairly accurate, the subtext has collapsed. The NSA illegally spies on American communications. European countries have taken to archiving, for several months or years, all email communications and record end points of phone conversations.

The US government, via the copyright office, sets royalty rates for songs. That seems a bit dumb, why is the government determining rates between private parties, other than perhaps setting some fair maximum to avoid excessive restraints on trade (as in increasingly defunct usury laws)? The end result is that instead of artists (via their representatives) negotiating with broadcasters, we have artists petitioning the US government to set particular rates and broadcasters petitioning to have lower rates. Oops, did I say artists?

Ever since Google kowtowed to China and started censoring their results I've been looking for an alternative. Yahoo wasn't any better. So much for companies promising to do no evil. It didn't help Google's cause that they pester you with trillions of cookies (these can be shut off, apparently by setting other cookies, which really doesn't address the problem). From what I gather, which is not much, Cuil was started by some ex-Googlers. Since I made sure not to dig too deep, as far as I can tell Cuil hasn't gone and done anything evil yet, like blocking good stuff from folks with the misfortune of having a Chinese-looking IP address. There's also Goodsearch which will donate a bit to your charity of choice. By the way, Google should be well aware that the value of their product is in the switching cost, and since their search product has about zero switching cost, it's not very valuable. Lucky for them they have other products. Hello Cuil.

This post describes my workflow to handle digital images and how I publish them on my web site while on the road. My camera has shot about 35,000 images, nearly all of which have been taken on my trip which started in August of 2007 (it is now May 2008).

Equipment and software needed

Digital camera, flash memory, spare batteries
External USB disk, 2.5", and USB cable
Portable 2.5" disk drive that can copy cards directly
Good card reader with USB cable
USB flash stick with portable software (see below) and notes