Disk defragmentation in Windows 2000, XP, and, uh, NT4

The disk defragmenter that Microsoft includes with Windows 2000 and XP really stinks up the place.

I’ve been playing with an alternative.It’s free. It’s called DIRMS, an acronym for Do It Right Microsoft.

It’s text mode. That means XP and NT owners can schedule defragments without paying for Diskeeper, which is good, because Diskeeper is barely better than MS’s defrag because they were written by the same company.

DIRMS uses the same built-in API so it ought to be safe but it uses a different algorithm. Whereas Executive’s programs won’t even try to defrag a file if it can’t do it completely, DIRMS just does the best it can. And unlike Diskeeper/Defrag, it moves files to the front of the disk, just like Win98’s Defrag, which increases performance further.

I’m not ready to put it on any system I care about yet, but I think it has a lot of potential. Rather than running Defrag four times to clean up a disk, I can run DIRMS followed by Defrag to mop up the operation and get a disk that’s almost 100% defragmented.

In fact the two programs seem to do better in tandem than either could ever do on their own. At any rate, it’s free, and worth checking out.

Graphics software for Windows revisited

My girlfriend was asking me about graphics software today. She’d been trying to use Paint Shop Pro as an inexpensive alternative to Adobe Illustrator and, predictably, was disappointed.

The GPL alternatives to Illustrator still lack at least one crucial feature (bitmap pattern fills) but I remembered reading about Serif DrawPlus.Serif is a manufacturer of cheap desktop publishing/graphics software. By cheap, I mean they aim for the $99 price point for their flagship product, then they give away older versions, and, at least sometimes, when you download the older version they offer you a somewhat less-old version for $10 or $20.

So I downloaded DrawPlus 5 and played around with it. It’s a bit basic, but it has all of the fundamentals. After about five minutes of playing around I was able to do some nice effects with text–for example, I was able to add a border to the edge of the letters, add fills, and even add a transparency effect. Cool.

Standard polygon and circle tools are there too, and you can combine multiple shapes into more complex shapes. If you can picture something as boxes and other simple shapes, you can draw a scaleable image of it with this program.

Why yes, I do think I’ll be using this to draw buildings and such for my Lionel layout. How’d you ever guess?

It’s not as powerful as Illustrator, but for a lot of people it’ll do what they need. Someone unfamiliar with vector graphics might be more comfortable with a simpler program like this, then switching to the higher-end software after running up against the simpler program’s limitations. (For years journalism schools taught desktop publishing by teaching students Pagemaker first, then QuarkXPress, since the latter is much less intimidating once one is familiar with the basic concepts.)

Check it out at freeserifsoftware.com. Serif also offers a raster image editor (a la Photoshop) and a desktop publisher under the same plan.

I like Firefox 1.0

Big surprise, huh? Seeing as I’ve been running it since the very first version, back when it was called Firebird, and the version number was probably 0.1.

And I really liked 1.0PR, so it was a given that I’d like 1.0. So there’s no big difference, right?

I’m not so sure about that.Maybe it’s just me, but I think 1.0 renders pages faster. Quite a bit faster. And there are some bug fixes, some minor and some less minor, but nothing we haven’t gotten used to from living with IE for all these years. If you were using 1.0PR, there’s no reason not to upgrade to the gold release code.

I see from my logs that 25% of my site’s visitors use some flavor of Mozilla. That’s good. If you’re not in that group, you owe it to yourself to try it.

Believe it or not, you can get excited about a web browser again.

Firefox 1.0 is out, and mozilla.org is down

So I wait. Now I know what it was like to stand in line waiting to buy Windows 95.

Wait. No I don’t. I’m actually standing in line waiting to get something good.

Cheap hardware won’t stop software piracy

Who’s to blame for rampant software piracy? According to Steve Ballmer, AMD and Intel. Oh, and Dell. Charge less for the computer, and there’ll be more money to pay for Windows and Office.

Steve Ballmer doesn’t know his history.

Read more

The almost-was Bill Gates

The almost-was Bill Gates

Finally, a little bit more detail on the haziest (to me) story in my controversial Why I Dislike Microsoft has appeared: Gary Kildall’s side of the CP/M-QDOS-PC DOS 1.0 story.

The story corroborates what I said, but I wish the story answered more questions.

Read more

What pop singer is your OS?

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
–Unix pioneer (and Plan 9 co-creator) Rob Pike on Slashdot

Ah, the questions that inspires…If Unix is David Cassidy, then what’s Windows?

I nominate Britney Spears. She and her management can’t decide what her name is, she’s tempermental, unstable, lacks talent… You can have a heyday with that analogy.

Is Mac OS the Grateful Dead? Hmm…. There’s not only that “Flower Power” Imac, there’s also that cult following…

Amiga OS must be the Velvet Underground. Ahead of its time, obscure but not so obscure that nobody has heard of it, influenced virtually everything that came after it, and 20 years later, lots of things still haven’t completely caught up…

SCO obviously wants us to think Linux is Milli Vanilli.

So which OS has to be New Kids on the Block? Vanilla Ice? MC Hammer? David Hasselhof?

Darl\’s getting a blog…

For those of you who don’t know, SCO is tired of Groklaw and setting up its own blog, prosco.net (not yet active; it goes live Nov. 1) to provide a counterpoint.

SCO, for the uninitiated, is a software company turned litigation company whose lawsuits against the likes of IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Daimler Chrysler and Autozone aren’t doing well.SCO says they’re going to answer questions from the public. I have a few questions they can answer.

Their stock was trading at or around $50 a share during the past year, but the share price is currently near $3. What are they going to do about their dwindling stock price?

Is SCO in danger of being delisted?

What sources of revenue does SCO have?

Is Darl McBride buying or selling SCO stock right now?

When SCO goes out of business next year, what company will Darl McBride and his friends go to? I still owe about $10,000 on my Honda and I’m realizing now that if I had shorted $5,000 worth of SCO stock a year ago, I would have nearly doubled my money by now. Investment opportunities like that don’t come along every day, so I’d like to find the next one.

Can I see a line of the code that IBM stole? One line would suffice. I would prefer it not include the strings “#include” and “stdio.h”.

Why November 1? Why tease us? Why not just start writing and then publicize it? That’s what I did, and I get lots of traffic. Surely not as much as SCO does though. I’m sure the traffic they receive from disgruntled sysadmins redirecting Nimda and similar requests to www.sco.com dwarfs mine. And Yahoo’s.

Ghost won\’t let me use my monster hard drive!

Here’s a familiar problem, I’m sure.

You need to back up your laptop, so you buy a monster (200+ GB) USB or Firewire hard drive. And then you can’t use it in Symantec/Norton Ghost, for one of two reasons:

1. You can’t format a FAT32 partition bigger than 32 gigabytes.
2. Ghost chokes when it tries to make a file larger than 4 gigabytes.These are limits of the operating system, not Ghost. But there are workarounds.

To format a FAT32 drive bigger than 32 gigs, you need a DOS boot disk. If you don’t have a Windows 95OSR2 or Windows 98 DOS boot disk handy, you might try bootdisk.com, or download the latest version of FreeDOS, which now supports FAT32.

You’ll have to use good old FDISK and FORMAT, which is clunkier than Windows XP’s computer management, but at least it’s possible.

Ghost can choke when the image file exceeds 4 gigabytes in size because FAT32 won’t let you make a file larger than that. It’s a limit of the FAT32 file system. The workaround there is to split up the image. Pass Ghost the -SPAN -SPLIT=4095 parameters when you launch it to get around that problem.

How to get your RSS/RDF feed working with Mozilla Firefox\’s Live Bookmarks

As soon as I upgraded to Mozilla Firefox 1.0, I started noticing that when I visited certain sites that had RSS/RDF feeds, a big orange “RSS” icon showed up in the lower right hand portion of the window.

That’s cool. Click on that, and you can instantly see that site’s current headlines, and know if the site has changed, just by looking in your bookmarks.

Except my site has an RSS feed and that icon didn’t show up. Here’s how I fixed it.At first I figured Firefox was looking for the standard “XML” icon everyone uses. So I added that. No go.

So I investigated. A Google search didn’t tell me anything useful. So I went to Slashdot’s page and viewed the source. Four lines down, I found my answer.

In your section, you need to add a line. In my case, since I run GeekLog, it was this:

LINK REL=”alternate” TITLE=”Silicon Underground RSS” HREF=”//dfarq.homeip.net/backend/siliconunderground.rdf” TYPE=”application/rss+xml”

Just substitute the URL for your RSS feed for mine. The two slashes at the beginning are necessary. The whole line has to be enclosed in , of course. (I can’t show them here because my blogging software is trying to protect me from myself.)

But since Geeklog doesn’t have an index.html file, and its index.php file is mostly programming logic, where do you add your code?

In your themes directory, in the file header.thtml, that’s where. I put mine right after the line that indicates the stylesheet.

The location for other blogging systems will vary, of course. But I notice some seem to do it automatically.

Now your readers can keep track of you without constantly refreshing your page (which they probably won’t do) and without having to run a separate RSS aggregator. Pretty cool, huh?