Early Misdeeds Evident

A January 20 Scientific American piece titled Endangered Species: Humans Might Have Faced Extinction 1 Million Years Ago says that the early human species -- including Homo erectus, H. ergaster and archaic H. sapiens -- were down to about 18,500 breeding individuals.

According to genetic evidence the early human population faced a major setback about one million years ago. It is thought that the diminished genetic diversity one million years ago suggests human ancestors experienced a catastrophic event at that time as devastating as a purported supervolcano thought to have nearly annihilated humans 70,000 years ago.

According to Pat Robertson this was another act of god:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti Africa, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French Homo erectus. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French Homo erectus. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

Windows 7 and Canon Utilities

After my modest success with installing Windows 7 on my home computer, I spent my Monday morning at work installing Windows 7 there. Because I sometimes use my Canon camera at work, I brought in the software CD for EOS utilities.
When I tried installing the software, however, I encountered a dialog that said "Installation program of EOS utility requires administrator privileges." The problem was that I am the admin on this machine! I don't know what that difference is between my home and work environments that would cause this to happen. I tried the "run as administrator" command, and I tried compatibility modes.
When I googled the error message, I got one hit: http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?p=9162655. The solution, which worked, by the way, is a doozy. Get a load of this:

1. When you receive the error , DON'T click the "OK" button.
2. Navigate to the following path: "C:\Users\admin-user\AppData\Local\Temp\".
3. Inside this directory, you should see a directory named something like "CanonUPW_000". Copy this whole directory to another location.
4. Then click "OK" on the installation program error on the screen (which removes the directory you just copied).
5. Open the directory that you copied in the last step and navigate to the following location: ".\CanonUPW_000\INST\INSTALL\COMMON". You should find an "Install.exe" file in this directory.
6. Open the properties of this "Install.exe" file, then select the "Compatibility" tab.
7. Select the "Change settings for all users" button and select the "Run this program in compatibility mode for "Windows XP (Service Pack 3).
8. Under the "Privilege Level" section, select the "Run this program as an administrator", then click OK twice.
9. Execute the "Install.exe" file. The installation should start and finish successfully.

Great googly moogly!

Trying to Live with Windows 7

With time off for the holidays, I decided that it was time to nuke my now-seedy Windows Vista PC at home and replace the operating system with Windows 7 Ultimate.

Of course, one of the main reasons that Vista had gone to seed was my trying to "upgrade" to Windows 7. That went through a lot of motions, but it ended up freezing up my PC and leaving me to back off to Vista. Every day after that was a pointed reminder of why it's usually better to just reformat and install fresh.

I took the chicken's way out for the fresh format, pulling my "working" Vista multi-boot system disk and putting in a new Western Digital (1 TB) Caviar. The old system disk was a small (70 GB) and very fast (10k rpm) WD Raptor, which has been in continuous use since early 2004. Best not push my luck with that old Raptor.

Windows 7 installation was uneventful and fairly fast. The fun began when I tried to piece Humpty Dumpty back together again. Here's a short list of issues that I had:

1. Try as I might, I could not acquire a networked HP LaserJet printer that was connected to another machine.
2. My old NTI Backup Now! version 4.5 software was incompatible with Windows 7.
3. Although my multi-boot system drive was swapped out, the Ubuntu Linux operating system resided safely on another drive. I just had blown away the GRUB master boot record, which I needed to rebuild.
4. I was afraid that I'd have issues with my old Hauppauge WinTV card and software.

The HP LaserJet 2600N
After configuring and sharing my new OS on my local network neighborhood, other PCs could see me and connect to me; however, I could see the other PCs but not connect to them. Expedient solution was to make my PC the host for network printing. That, too, started out poorly, as test prints just sat in my print queue without printing. Long story short: other users had reported that I should turn off "Enable bidirectional support" in my printer port settings. That and updated drivers solved problem #1.

NTI Backup Now!
Before I upgraded, Windows 7 warned me that my version 4.5 of NTI Backup Now! would be incompatible. An upgrade to the 5.x version was fairly inexpensive, but I forgot one thing: when I went to a new disk drive, I left behind my old NTI Backup program. The 5.x license was an upgrade version, which required that the previous version be installed. I could NOT install the 4.x version under Windows 7. Oops. Fortunately, I found that I had an electronic version for the NTI suite on another drive. For whatever reason, that version was able to at least install an attenuated version of the old NTI Backup long enough for me to then install the upgrade version.

Multi-boot Manager
I was using the built-in Windows boot manager, via BCDEdit, to boot into my Ubuntu Linux partition. After upgrading, I needed to re-create the master boot record entry that would launch Ubuntu. I got in a little over my head when I found that I did not know how to use the Ubuntu Live disk to write a new GRUB entry on my C drive. Most fortunately, I had the foresight to backup the original NST_grub.mbr file. When I put that file back onto the right spot of the new C drive, I was able to convince BCDEdit to configure it back into the multi-boot environment. Hurrah!

Hauppauge WinTV
The Hauppauge started giving me grief back when I first started with Vista, so I wasn't hopeful about Windows 7. After loading up my old drivers, however, I was able to get the WinTV tuner working. Color balance was loopy, though. Every time I fired up the TV, Windows would warn me that the color scheme as changed back to Windows Basic. This means that I always have to go in to Hauppauge preferences and tweak the color balance. Ok. For whatever reason, I could not get the remote control to work, but that was hit or miss (mostly miss) under Vista. I thought that finding and putting in new drivers would help, but that just screwed things so bad that I had to uninstall all of the new drivers and fall back to the old ones.

Lessons Learned

When you run into installation problems with old software, always check the net for new drivers. That solved most of the minor problems. When you have old hardware/software combos like my vintage Hauppauge card, don't expect miracles. Learn to live with it, or plan to upgrade it. I'd love to figure out what's wrong with my Windows Network Neighborhood setup, but at least everyone can print.

It's nice having a fast, clean OS running again.

I can has a Cheeseburger?!

Hand it to Big Blue.... They now have a supercomputer that simulates a cat's cerebral cortex, albeit one hundred times slower than a real life hairball. Suprisingly -- to this cat owner at least -- the IBM machine has 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of memory. Seems an awful lot for a SIM Pussy.

Previous attempts by IBM have simulated 40 percent of a mouse's brain in 2006. They managed a rat's full brain in 2007. Unlike Renfield, they've apparently skipped past the flies and spiders.

So, what's it like having a computer that simulates one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses?

1. It's hard to wake up after it goes into hibernation mode.
2. Wireless mice keep disappearing
3. You have a computer that can lick its own I/O ports.
4. You have to program it in LOLSpeak.
5. It REALLY hogs your bed.
   

Genetic link to lousy drivers

Astounding scientific discovery from the University of California at Irvine: bad driving may have a genetic basis.

According to a recent study by Dr. Steven Cramer, an associate professor of neurology, and the leader of the study, people with a certain gene variant perform more than 20% worse on a driving test than people without that gene.

People with the variant have a smaller portion of their brain stimulated when performing a complex task like driving.

I'd like to see some research explaining why these same people are drawn to driving in Subarus.

I plink, therefore I am

A news item released today, Music makes you smarter, says that regular music practice can improve cognitive skills.

There is growing evidence that musicians have structurally and functionally different brains compared with non-musicians. In particular, the areas of the brain used to process music are larger or more active in musicians. Even just starting to learn a musical instrument can changes the neurophysiology of the brain.

“My brain? That´s my second favorite organ.”

-- Woody Allen

Ihagee in a box of junk

Over the course of too many years, a little black case, which once belonged to the father-in-law I never met, has followed us about. Inside it were the remaining dreck of his photography hobby: unexposed rolls of Kodak film from 1957, a movie camera lens, and an assorted collection of Ihagee filters and unidentified components.
I've since had a photographer buddy explain to me that the Ihagee brand has a long history and a devoted following. The company was founded in Dresden, Germany, between the World Wars.
One of the boxed components contains what I think is a film holder for a large format camera. Unique among the other assorted boxes, however, the reflex finder box sported an interesting company logo.
Rather than photographing it, however, I decided to try to reproduce it in Adobe Illustrator. This hardly does it justice, as some jpeg artifacts are marring the outside edge of the circle. I also think that I could have done a better job of centering the artwork.
It will be curious to see if there's a market for this kind of stuff on eBay. Hope springs eternal.