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Archiving Data

Twice in the past month people have asked me what the “best format” is for permanently archiving data that they want to keep forever, like family photos and tax records. Sadly, the short answer to that question is that there isn’t a “best format”. Technology keeps changing, and there’s absolutely no way to predict which current technologies (if any) will still be around in the next 50 or 100 years. Things can change an awful lot even in 20 years: somewhere in storage I have a box of 5.25″ floppy disks from my old Apple II+. If I suddenly had a desire to see what’s on those disks, I’d have my work cut out for me: while it’s certainly not impossible to find a 5.25″ floppy drive these days, it’s not a trivial matter, either. And 10 years from now, I reckon it’d be near impossible.

There are dozens of different ways to store data, and each one has their pluses and minuses. Magnetic media (like hard drives, tapes and proprietary disks like Zip disks) can often store huge amounts of data; however, magnetic media are also susceptible to damage from environmental issues (moisture, heat, shock, magnetic fields) and are also the most mechanically complex of the various backup types (and thus, prone to failure). The various types of “flash memory” like USB drives, Compact Flash (CF) and Secure Digital (SD) cards are renowned for being robust – indeed, the Internet abounds with stories of CF cards being run over by cars or washed in a jeans pocket and surviving. However, until only recently flash media had somewhat limited capacity, and flash still suffers from limited write-cycles and the unknown of future support.

So this leaves optical media like CD-R and DVD-R discs. Commercial CD and DVD discs (the ones you buy from Sony Music or Microsoft) are “pressed” much like vinyl records. A “master” is made containing the various “pits” on the disc (much like a record’s grooves) and thousands of copies are “stamped” from that master. CD-R and DVD-R technologies work by using a layer of dye which is heated by a laser to mimic those pits. It works well, but there are certainly some things you can do to make sure that your CD-R or DVD-R discs last as long as possible:

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FrontPage, Internet Explorer, IFRAME and Scroll Bars

During my website’s last redesign (well, not the last redesign, that was to convert it to WordPress), there was one thing I *really* wanted to fix: the “Latest News” section of the home page. Previously, that section was basic text typed into a cell in a table in FrontPage. The problem with doing it that way was that a couple of lengthy news posts would make that section huge, possibly longer that some visitors would read. I wanted to use an inline frame instead, so that way there would be scroll bars on the side. This way I could keep lengthy news posts on the home page for as long as I wanted, yet the fixed size of the frame meant that the rest of the home page – the Rant, the Useless Fact, etc. – would always appear in the same place.

The only problem with using an IFRAME is that Internet Explorer always puts a horizontal scroll bar across the bottom of the frame. This is not only ugly, but useless as well, as the text will wrap regardless of the size of the browser window (for what it’s worth, Firefox renders the page “correctly”). Now the only options available in FrontPage for the frame were to ALWAYS show the scroll bars, NEVER show the scroll bars and to only show them AS NEEDED. I had it set for AS NEEDED, but IE still put that $@^! scroll bar across the bottom, and FrontPage doesn’t offer the option of controlling the individual scroll bar behavior.

So I went online in search of answers. I found many, most of which were CSS or HTML hacks. Neither option was what I needed and most of the HTML tricks simply didn’t work. So I tried to find a solution on my own – and I did! If you use FrontPage and have the same problem, try this: put the contents of your frame’s HTML page into a table and make sure that table has a smaller maximum size than the target table\page. The table on my home page which contains my “Latest News” section is set to 100% of the browser window size. I set the new table be 98% of the size of the browser window – and that !$@(*# horizontal scroll bar no longer appears in IE *or* Firefox.

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Copying a Spreadsheet as an Image

Have you ever wanted or needed to copy a spreadsheet (or part of a spreadsheet) as an image? Maybe you used Excel to input a bunch of data and created some spiffy graph that you’d like to export as an image file to a Word document. Using one very easy – but almost universally unknown – trick, you can do this. Just open the spreadsheet in question and navigate to the worksheet you’d like to copy (NOTE: if you only want to copy a portion of the data, make sure the cells in question are highlighted). Then hold down the SHIFT key and click Edit > Copy Picture. A small box will then appear asking if you want the data copied either as it would appear on the screen or as it would appear when printed. Pick your poison. Then use image manipulation software like Photoshop or MS Paint (included free on every computer running Windows) to paste the new image. You can also paste the image directly into Word or whatever program you’d like.

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Cool Remote Desktop Shortcut

Remote Desktop is a fancy new word for “Terminal Services”. It’s a cool way for systems administrators (or sons and\or boyfriends) to troubleshoot any computer running Windows XP Professional from any other computer in the world. It’s also a cool way of using one keyboard and mouse to control several computers, or for the IT guy to do routine server administration from his desk two floors down from the server room. But there’s one annoying behavior of Remote Desktop that a lot of us geeks don’t like: once someone has logged on to a computer with Remote Desktop, that computer’s console session (the session displayed on the monitor) is locked until the someone physically walks up to that computer and unlocks it. This is more of a personal annoyance than a problem, but let me give you a scenario when this might actually hamper the usefulness of remote administration.

Let’s imagine that a company has several monitors embedded in the wall of the receptionist area of their office. These monitors are connected to several older PCs that continuously run Powerpoint presentations that show pictures of the company’s products and welcome messages for visiting clients. If the company wants to change or update the Powerpoint presentation, the IT guy normally has to walk to the closet wherever these PCs are located and manually copy the new PPT file to the PCs and restart Powerpoint. He or she could do this from their desk using Remote Desktop, but unfortunately since Remote Desktop locks the console session, the IT guy will still have to walk to the closet and manually press CTRL+ALT+DEL to unlock the computers… unless you follow this trick:

Right-click on any empty area of the desktop and select New > Shortcut. In the “location” box, enter (or paste) this text:

%windir%\System32\tscon.exe 0 /dest:console

Click “Next”, then give the new shortcut a name and click “Finish”. Once this has been done, you can copy the shortcut to any PC you’d like. To have XP end the Remote Desktop session and immediately return to the console session, simply click the new shortcut you made to end the remote session.

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Robocopy

Although “Robocopy” sounds like something robots do to make baby robots, it actually stands for “Robust File Copy” and is a popular (and free) tool from Microsoft. It’s included with Windows Vista and is available for Windows XP and Windows 200 as part of the Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit (despite the “Windows 2003? name, Robocopy works just fine in Windows 2000, XP and Vista).

What’s so cool about it is that it’s a command-line program for copying files from one place to another, yet it has some powerful features that you can’t get simply by dragging and dropping files using Windows Explorer. For instance, you can have Robocopy copy all the NTFS security information from certain files. You can set the number of retries on failed copies, exclude or include changed, newer or older files, copy subdirectories but not empty ones, copy subdirectories including empty ones and much, much more.

One of my favorite Robocopy options is /mir, which creates an exact copy of any directory on another drive or network share. This is an *excellent* tool for making backups. Here’s a sample of a batch file I use to copy my application and music files over to my server:

robocopy.exe \\mycomputer\applications \\server\applications /mir /eta /tee
robocopy.exe \\mycomputer\jukebox \\server\jukebox /mir /xd Recycled Recycler “System Volume Information” Temp /eta /tee

Both commands use the /mir switch to mirror the source directories and also use the /eta switch to show the estimated completion time and /tee to send output to console window. Since the “Jukebox” share is sharing the root of the drive I use the /xd switch to exclude various folders on the drive, such as the “Recycle Bin” and “Temp” folders. Neat huh? Of course, Robocopy with the /mir switch will (by default ) only copy newer or changed files, so it doesn’t waste time copying unchanged files. If I add four or five new albums to my music collection and then run the batch file, only those new albums will be copied to the server. This is *such* a time saver! Robocopy works far better than many shareware utilities that do the same thing.

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Outlook Calendar Shortcuts

One of the best undocumented features of Microsoft Outlook – well, undocumented as I can tell – is the “calendar shortcuts” feature. When you create a new appointment or task, you don’t need to know the exact date of the appointment or task – let Outlook figure that out for you!

For example, if your boss tells you that a particular report is due in 25 days, you don’t have to manually figure out when that is – just enter 25d in the “Start Time” for the appointment (make sure that today is selected in your calendar, otherwise the appointment will be added 25 days from the selected day).

Other available operators include W (weeks), MO (months) and Y (years) as well as TODAY, TOMORROW and NEXT TUESDAY (or whatever other day you need next week). Note that these calendar shortcuts also work with Tasks as well.

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Virtual Coolness!

Most large software releases – operating systems, office suites and anything else big enough to use an entire CD-ROM disc – are transferred legally (or illegally) in the form of disk images. These are single files (which usually have the extension .ISO, hence “ISO file) that contain the entire contents of the CD or DVD disc with extra “metadata” included – such as the discs’ name and boot information, if required. This allows the end-user to put a blank disc in their drive, open his or her software burning program and click “Burn Image” and end up with a CD full of stuff in just a few minutes. In a nutshell, I can create a CD-ROM named “Pictures” with a variety of digital images on it, create an .ISO file of the disc that I can distribute to anyone, who can then create a million discs just like mine – or send it on to someone else who can then make a million copies of their own.

This is not new. The Linux operating system has been distributed this way for ages. Microsoft rarely mails actual CDs of beta software to testers these days and instead opts to allow users to download ISOs of the beta program – like Windows Server 2008 for example. But what good are the image files aside from allowing users to make flawless copies of CD or DVD discs?

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How Fermi Changed The World

Enrico Fermi was one smart guy. The Italian physicist is most famous for building the world’s first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago in 1939, but he was also famous for his work in the development of quantum theory and for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity in 1938. However, one of his more enduring theories came about as a result of a seemingly flippant remark that Fermi made one day at lunch.

The year was 1950. Fermi and some colleagues were sitting down and enjoying a nice lunch. The topic of the day was extraterrestrial life; professors and grad students eagerly traded theories about where alien life could be found and what it might be like. As the excitement level of the crowd continued to rise, someone noticed that Fermi hadn’t said anything. In fact, he was just sitting there quietly, eating his lunch. During a brief lull in the conversation, that person asked Fermi what he thought about extraterrestrial life. Fermi looked up, thought for a minute, then asked “Where is everybody?”

Now, that three word phrase might seem silly. Condescending. Flippant, even. But it was actually a very deep thing to say. And it would become the basis of the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is awfully complex, but in a nutshell it goes something like this: modern human beings (that is, humans that have left a physical record of their existence, such as writing or buildings) have been around for around 6,000 years. The universe has been around for around 14 billion years. Obviously, 6,000 years is a teeny, tiny fraction of the universe’s 14 billion total years, so isn’t it logical to assume that some other intelligent life has been around for longer than ourselves? And if so, why can’t we see any trace of their existence? We haven’t seen any evidence of their space probes, their battles to colonize other planets or their messages left in radio waves. Not only can we not find the alien equivalent of a Starbucks on Mars, we can’t find any evidence of their existence whatsoever.

The interesting question is why. Does intelligent life eventually get smart enough to destroy itself… and then do just that, as is the fear with nuclear weapons? Does the very process of gaining the intelligence necessary to colonize space ruin home planets, as is the fear with global warming? Is space simply so very vast that Wars of the Worlds are going on at this very minute, but humans lack the ability to notice it? Or is our greatest fear true: that we really are alone?

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The Beautiful Forgery

Ever heard of the “Romantic Movement”? It didn’t have anything to do with bringing home roses and chocolates for the missus; indeed it didn’t have anything to do with what we think of as “romance” at all. Wikipedia says that it was “an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe”. It was partly “a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period”, but it was also (and more importantly) “a reaction against the rationalization of nature”.

There were two major scientific advances that led to the birth of the movement:

The first was medical science (and science in general), in that it seemed that scientists of the day were creeping ever closer to discovering the true “essence” of life. Whatever you want to call it – Life Force, Primal Essence, you name it – it seemed as if scientists of the day were mere inches from figuring out what that thing was and the Romantics feared that all manner of Bad Things would happen once Pandora’s Box was opened. One of the most famous pieces of Romantic literature – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – deals with this question directly: a “mad scientist” type figures out how to harness the power of life and uses his skills to create a monster. You probably know the rest of the story. In any case, Mary Shelley’s fear is hardly unknown to us. In fact, such fear may be even more prevalent today than it was two hundred years ago. It seems that medical science – with its DNA and stem cell research – might again be on the cusp of “harnessing life”. And it scares people now just as much as it did then.

The other scientific advance that kicked off the Romantic Movement was the Industrial Revolution. For centuries, people made things with their hands. But suddenly, factories were popping up all over Europe, factories that could do the work of thousands of people using machines that didn’t require wages or sleep. People had a real fear of technology – much like people in the 1960s and 1970s that feared that computers would take over their jobs. In fact, the fear of technology was so great that a political movement took root in England that went from factory to factory smashing up the machines. The movement made such an impression that to this day “Luddite” is a pejorative term for someone that has a (real or imagined) fear of technology.

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How a Comet Destroyed An Entire Industry

The British Empire was the largest, most powerful empire in the history of the world. At its height, the Empire controlled over 14 million square miles of territory and 458 million people – both of which constituted a quarter of the entire planet. The old saying “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was indeed true – so much land was held in so many places that the sun was, in fact, shining on some piece of land held by the British at all times.

It all came to an end after World War II, though. Exhausted and broke after battling Hitler for so long, Britain could no longer afford the luxury of an overseas empire, and most of the territories held by Britain were eventually given their independence.

Although the Empire began falling apart in the late 1940s, Britain still acted as an Imperial power in many industries until the mid 1960s. In shipbuilding, medical research and aeronautical design the Brits still ruled. In fact, it was the last category – aeronautical design – the Brits were in fact ahead of both the Americans and the Soviets. For on January 22, 1952, the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), the forerunner of British Airways, began the first commercial passenger jet service using the de Havilland Comet jet.

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