Wesley Howe

I posted another short cartoon video clip from some stuff I am working on. Not much, a crab dancing in a threatening sort of manner.

I bought a laptop sufficient to run Maya on. It is not perhaps the fastest possible, but it does the job (Maya is powerful, and requires a lot of power to make use of the capabilities). But that isn’t the subject of this entry, it is the mouse I bought to use with it.
I generally dislike cordless mice, because they eat batteries. However this mouse (the Logitech Performance MX) has a rechargeable battery that can be charged from a cable that plugs into a USB port or one of those black box plug in the wall jobs. I generally run the computer plugged in, but with more than one cord, I manage to get everything tangled up if I want to get up and come back to work. On this mouse, there is a small receiver that plugs into a USB port, but it is much, much shorter than a memory stick, and that seems to be OK, it doesn’t stick out far enough to obstruct anything or appear to be liable to catch on something and break. The laptop allows me to disable the touch-pad when a mouse is plugged in, which is important because if you bump the pad otherwise, your mouse pointer jumps unexpectedly. This feature works with this mouse (the system recognizes it as a USB mouse).
The mouse hardware itself works pretty good, although it has one of those combined scroll-wheel/middle mouse buttons on it, and making the middle-mouse action work without scrolling takes some effort. But I think I will learn this trick, despite being a bit of an old dog. The middle-mouse is very important to using Maya well.
However, the Setpoint software that came on the CD with the mouse is not very awesome, and I had to uninstall it. Without that software all the extra buttons on the mouse do nothing, although the big selling point for me was the cordless+rechargeable features anyway.
With the Setpoint software installed, I got erratic mouse movements, sometimes with a flashing screen. I think that there was some internal conflict going on between their software and the Windows 7 system software, but I have no way to tell if that is what was the issue. However, uninstalling their software (and another reboot) put everything back to right.
I have used other Logitech mice before, and remember that I had issues with the Logitech Setpoint software before. They seem to have learned nothing over the years, because it is still unusable. I thought about sending the whole thing back (this setup costs as much as several ordinary mice would), but uninstalling their software fixed my big issues with it, so I will probably keep it, it is a nice looking and smooth operating piece of hardware, except for learning a different touch for the middle-mouse button.

I got interested in making videos from 3D mesh characters a while back. I have been working hard at learning how do do it (now, I just need to learn how to do it better). I finished a short animation of a cartoon dog, named Little Ludwig, and presented it to a meeting of the Autodesk Animation User Group of Austin last night. It was pretty well-received, and got some spontaneous laughter, which was what I had hoped for.

While there are technical flaws in the production, I learned a lot making it, including how much more I need to learn. I created the whole cartoon, right down to the sound effects and music. I put it up on YouTube, in case anyone wants to see it.

I think I have found the cause of my freezeups on Windows 7. I searched around and found a lot of different posts about Windows 7 freezing problems, many possibly related to graphics driver issues. My freezeup happened only when wakening the computer after an extended idle period. I changed all the power settings to prohibit sleep, but it still happened. Stuff like this aggravates me to no end… when I buy things, I expect them to perform properly.

After examining the event viewer I began to suspect indexing. I changed the option for my drives to uncheck the box labeled “Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties”. So far, I have not had any freezing on wakeup. Of course, this is just a workaround… Windows 7 should not freeze if indexing is happening. Doing more than one thing at a time is called multitasking, and Windows is purportedly a multitasking operating system.

Microsoft, get a clue.

People hated Vista, and there seems to be a warm feeling, in the press at least, for Windows 7. I have had a week with Windows 7, and I am about ready to go back to Windows Vista, at least until Microsoft fixes the issues. Vista was mature, and stable, far more so than XP. The biggest complaint I heard about Vista, being a memory hog, was really a feature. Vista loaded everything into RAM, and kept everything that had been used loaded until there was no more space. Were it not for a major hardware failure, I would still be running Vista, but an untimely death forced me to get a new machine.

While Windows 7 does not perform particularly poorly when running programs, it is full of niggling little issues that irritate particular people like myself. The issue that has me about ready to close the book on it for a while (and let other people beta test for Microsoft) is the freezeup issue. I have turned every power management setting off, but when I have left the machine idle for a while, when I go back to use it, the screen comes back right away, and the mouse will move a few times, but if you click on anything the whole system freezes solid.

However, this freezeup is only temporary. The disk activity light indicates that something is being read from the disk, and while that is underway, all other activity ceases. A properly designed multi-tasking system should never lock up like that, especially for several minutes. Initially I thought the only escape from the freezeup was a shut-down, but the problem seems to go away on its own accord when it is good and ready, when whatever it was working on finishes.

I have no idea whether there are some options I am using that are causing this, but I have ruled out antivirus software because none of the two packages I have tried, or bareback, has made any difference. Something is being done during long idle times that does not readily cease. However, a freezeup is inexcusable, and indicative of the typical shallowness of testing that is put into Microsoft’s premier product.

One of the things I like about established products is the opportunity to get anything wrong corrected. Part of the social contract is that I pay my money, and I get something that works correctly. Generally, this is an implied warrant of merchantability. You should get what you pay for.

Today, we are going to single out one company, McAfee, for being tone deaf to customer needs. I wanted to just fill out a form and report a bug. The bug is that every time I restart, McAfee Total Protection insists on creating a desktop icon. I have a perfectly useful icon in the system tray, so I don’t need another one on the desktop. If you delete it, don’t worry, it will come back at the next restart.

So I went to their website, there the only email service option is “customer service”. However, it is mislabelled, as you don’t get any service there. I just got instructions on how to get a live chat with a technician. The message is clear. “Can’t you read, you must not bother me”, although the words are polite.

So I took the time to use the technical chat. This process starts with downloading and running their virtual technician program. That did not go so well, it was unable to scan my computer. I would wonder if my anti-virus program interfered, but either way they look like fools, because they wrote my anti-virus program. The lack of technical ability so far is quite evident, and could hardly inspire one to an increase in confidence.

So I had to type my report into the system, and open a “GoTo Assist” window, which was another download and installation. That worked, and a proud technician named “Divya” proceeded to say hello and ask me what I needed. Obviously, what I typed at the start of the session is either not passed along or was ignored. So I explain again (now, this is the third explanation). After a short bit he proceeded to tell me that it was a known issue they were addressing.

I asked to open a ticket, he would not do that, just repeated that the engineers would fix it and it would be in an update. So here is my summary of the process:

• You,  the customer, are a useless entity except when you are paying additional sums of money.
• You, the computer user, cannot be relied on to make an observation, you must use our virtual technician that does not even work.
• Customer Service does not mean you are entitled to any real service; if you want to report a problem, don’t talk to us, chat with a technician.

Does no one care about what the customers think? Or are they just a time wasting entity that have nothing better to do than call in and complain about problems. I guess they expect that eventually they will get the customers trained so that they expect the little they are going to get.

I tried this. It works very well, at least for now. Time will tell if they keep up with the demand.

I have a wireless internet service that worked pretty well, although it was a lot of grief getting to that point. But by pointing my DNS at Google, instead of the DNS servers provided by my ISP (the “automatic” ones) things have improved markedly.

Besides a generally “snappier” response to clicks, which may or may not be a quantifiable improvement, there are two places where the improvement is quite solid. The first is problems accessing sites on the first click. I would guess that the ISP DNS server is holding recently accessed addresses in a cache, because the first time each day that I tried to access some of my favorite (but smaller) forum sites I would get a site not found error. Repeating the access attempts a second time usually brings it right up. This happened on enough different sites enough times that I can only assume it is designed with some sort of cache, and is too slow on some network accesses to get the address before a timeout occurs. I suppose a longer timeout value would also fix the errors, too, but who wants the World Wide Wait back?

The other very noticeable improvement I see is playing videos, at least those that are streamed, such as the ones at YouTube. I used to just avoid a lot of them because they would stutter and stop waiting for some more data. It really detracts from the enjoyment of a story when you have to wait for them to finish a sentence a half-dozen times in a 3 minute video. With the DNS changed to Google, the data stream is pretty consistent… an occasional short glitch happens, but videos play well.

I am, for now, pleased. I know some people have some worries about Google maintaining data on them, but all the ISP providers do this, so the question really is about who, not if. I don’t have much private or pirate stuff I am involved with, so I never worry about this (except online commerce, I make sure the site I am using uses HTTPS instead of plain HTTP).

After ragging on some of the deficiencies and bad policies of certain software companies, I would like to tell a story that came out right. I suspect a virus infection had slipped past my McAfee virus protection. Reinstallation failed, error messages popped out, and I was concerned.

I signed up for their paid virus removal assistance, and after a moderate wait a technician appeared in a chat client, and soon asked me to approve his looking at my screen and controlling my keyboard and mouse. After a little while of windows popping open and closed, all happening from the remote center, the McAfee technician concluded the issue was actually in the “McAfee Server”… I suppose a case of software gone bad.

Dig this part… because it was their problem, they refunded the service fee. Now, I know and you know that is the right thing to do, what is surprising is that they did it, and without me demanding it.

As promised, they got the issue resolved and my protection status back to operational within a few hours. These guys have had some aw-shits in the past, but they scored this time my doing the right thing for the customer.

I just hope it is the start of a trend.

Bernard Madoff has made his name as an infamous swindler, running the largest Ponzi scheme ever, some $50 Billion Dollars. Oh, wait, I guess that is the largest Ponzi scheme that collapsed to date. There is an ongoing one that dwarfs Mr. Madoff’s results.

Unlike the Madoff scheme, few of the participants in this scheme are wealthy investors. And few people get any choice about investing in this scheme. The size of the scam is enormous, and while precise numbers are hard to find that do not have some level of estimation in them, they range up to over 200 times the size of Madoff’s haul. That would make the previous record just 0.5% (half of one percent) of this scheme. Even if the deficit comes in at one-tenth of this, it is still huge beyond belief.

Oh, some of you may have guessed the name of this scheme. It is commonly called Social Security, although it has a more legal name as the Federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance Act. The scheme is a simple one, like a Ponzi scheme, where the contributions of current participants are used to pay benefits to prior participants. Like any Ponzi scheme, as long as the pool of investors keeps growing, the scheme remains viable and does not collapse.

Because of the number of years of participation and minimum age requirements to collect benefits, the funds collected from all of the promised future beneficiaries are greater than what is required to pay benefits. But all this extra money just gets skimmed off and spent on other things, replaced with paper promises of repayment later from general revenues. The impending risk of collapse of the scheme is because at a point not too many years from now, the pool of investors will start shrinking when the rate of participants becoming eligible as new beneficiaries is greater than the rate of new participants that come into the system.

Not only will revenues start to decline with the shrinking labor pool, causing the excess funding currently used for other government services be consumed, but the government will have to dip into general revenues to start paying back all of those paper promises in place of the excess revenue collected. So the issue is that this may not be sustainable, as fewer workers are required to pay more in taxes to support the system. The danger is one of real or political revolution because of conflicts between those taxed and those benefitting from the tax, combined with the very real possibility that benefits from other governmental programs may be cut. And if the government just prints more money, rampant inflation will result (you don’t need to study ancient history to learn this, just study the last few decades of events in Argentina).

While everyone can see the problem, no one knows if the breaking point will be hit one of these days. But history tells us that people revolt on their stomachs, and either those who will be excessively burdened from increased taxes or those whose promised benefits get cancelled, or some combination of the two, will have less to eat as a result of the higher taxes, reduced benefits or strong inflation. None of the choices look good, which is probably why nothing ever seems to get done about the problem.

I finally updated the Wordpress software underlying this blog from 2.3 to the newest, 2.7. It seemed to go pretty well, although in the database conversion there appear to have been some random garbage characters introduced to the entries… I tried my best to find them all, but there may be some lurking here or there. There may also be some undiscovered issues, not everything possible has been tested.

Because of some security enhancements in the newer version, I am opening up comments on the most recent posts. You still have to create a user name, and the first entry you make will have to be moderated (approved by me). The main purpose of the moderation is not censorship of legitimate discussion (including dissent from my impeccable ideas), but to stop the use of the board as a forum for advertising links to the tawdry side of the internet.