Click to enlarge

It all really comes down to The Taskbar. This mighty bar of information has been a part of Windows since the 95 days, and it is the key visual difference between Windows and OSX to the regular user. I have equally not made a secret of the fact that I detest the OSX dock. This is the OSX dock (photo is taken from flickr; even though I have a macbook pro now, I only run Windows 7 on it and I don’t want to restart it into OSX mode just to take an original screenshot). I purposely chose a flickr photo with the dock turned to left-side, for reasons you’ll see a few paragraphs down.

Click to go to original flickr page with large sizes

What makes the dock so distasteful? It doesn’t tell me anything about a program except that it’s open. Let’s say that you’ve selected System Preferences in OSX (in that screenshot, system preferences is the 4th icon from the bottom). The icon there in the dock doesn’t change when the shortcut is clicked. It just sits there, with a bland glowing dot to its left (you can see that with the Finder window, the first icon on top), and if you start working on something else and came back to System Preferences later, you’ll need to manually click that stupid icon again and check the contents of the particular window to see what it is you had opened up. So, you have to move the mouse back to that icon, click the icon, and then wait for the screen to redraw the window. Arguably no more than 2-3 seconds – but it adds up. Mac users have to do this dozens or hundreds of times a day. That comes to minutes per day, hours per month of just time spent fighting your computer for information. The Windows taskbar, however, does not fight you. It passively and constantly displays exactly what you have open and tells you the name of the window is for that program.

Now that I have an Apple computer, when I first got it I made a conscious effort to try to stay in OSX and use it. I made a serious attempt to be an OSX user. The paragraph above describes the sole reason why I no longer bother. I even tried writing in on a few Mac-users forums to see if there was a way to add an informational taskbar to OSX. I asked very politely, but the replies were “why would you want that; that’s like Windows” and even “just get used to the OSX way of doing things.” I never went back. OSX is simply a waste of my time.

See there in that first screenshot of the Windows 7 taskbar? In a fraction of a second glance, I can see that I have Ars Technica open in a Firefox window, Pandora open in Chrome, and three system management windows open – Services, Device Manager, and Disk Management. If I know I don’t want one open, I can then choose to move my mouse, right click on it and click close. I don’t even need to look at that window again; it doesn’t redraw itself if I only right click on it. Information management, accomplished, with minimal mouse/keyboard movement.

However, Microsoft is moving backwards. What you saw above is a customized Windows 7 taskbar (as those of you who already use Windows 7 probably guessed). Microsoft no longer shows you this sort of wonderful taskbar by default. No, the Windows 7 taskbar by default looks like this.

Click to enlarge

Yes…looks kind of familiar, doesn’t it? A big, bulky taskbar that takes up more of your screen real estate vs the classic, thin variety. Large, gaudy icons that have no text on them. I took these two screenshots mere seconds apart; those are the exact same programs and windows open here as in the first picture above. But where is the information? Why, Microsoft, am I forced to look at an OSX dock when I first install Windows 7? I can see I have Chrome, Firefox, and three other weird nameless windows open (and without text, I certainly have no idea what they could be; they’re generic system management windows with no brand recognition like Chrome and Firefox).

As an I.T. admin, I work with middle-aged professors that probably started with DOS and Unix when they first began doing statistical calculations, then moved to XP, and then moved to Windows 7 when we told them their new computer was capable of it. Without fail, I always tell every single user – as they stare blankly at the oversized, pictograph taskbar on their new Windows 7 desktop – “don’t worry; if you’d like, I can change it back to the way that Windows XP arranged the taskbar.” With two exceptions out of dozens, every person has been grateful to me for showing them how to do this, and several have asked me to write it down so that they can do it to their own personal Windows 7 computers.

Right click the taskbar, click properties. Change to these settings. Fixed!

The new Windows 7 default taskbar has the exact same problem as OSX’s dock. It causes you to do more work, more mouse movement, more thinking, to merely see what’s open or running on your computer. Over the past few years, there has apparently been an outcry for “simplified” computing. Graphical User Interface (GUI) designers have responded in a lazy fashion – merely subtract information from the screen, and voila, your experience is simplified. But is it? Users of desktop and laptop computers still compute the same way. Most regular users have at least 3-4 programs open at once, and power users like myself might have 15 to 20 open. You can’t “simplify” away the fact that we need to be able to quickly navigate and filter that information, and pictures/icons simply cannot communicate details as effectively as text.

“A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words” is true if you want to pass on the information of a painting, a movie, or a vista (pun intended). But when you’re an office worker with 4 open Word documents, 3 open emails-in-progress, a web browser, and possibly a chat program (for business or pleasure) open, seeing 4 identical Word icons, 3 identical email icons, and then two other icons for your browser and chat, is not useful simplification. Microsoft, you’ve forced that user to move the mouse over and click each icon individually to see which document is which. At least Microsoft’s implementation is better than the OSX dock, because moving your mouse over each icon in Windows will then show a popup (with text, fortunately!) of open windows/tabs/sub folders for that program, and right-clicking even gives you access to special commands and functions (called Jumplists). Here’s an example of Internet Explorer 9, with six tabs open, spread between two windows, while using the informationless-taskbar. Although better than OSX, this still requires moving your mouse over from whatever you were doing before and hovering it over the IE button to see what windows/tabs are open.

None of this is new information, though. OSX has been out for a decade and Windows 7 for about two years. I’d long since come to terms with what I thought was a mere fad of hiding information from users by the two mainstream operating systems.

What pushed me to write this blog entry was the fact that now, even the stalwart, information-packed consumer Linux is losing control of its information management capabilities. The newest version of Ubuntu now comes with its taskbars turned off and a new, Ubuntu-made custom GUI called “Unity” turned on. Here’s a screenshot taken from Ars Technica’s review of Ubuntu 11.04. Not to sound like a broken record, but does that look familiar to you?

Ubuntu's Unity: Click to enlarge

Of course it does. It’s the Mac user interface all over again, and a bottom taskbar that has been an everpresent part of Ubuntu and other Linux GUIs like GNOME and KDE is now gone. The top taskbar that you can see in that screenshot that merely says “Firefox Web Browser” can no longer be edited with Unity to add customizable widgets and information panels like with GNOME 2.0. The worst thing is that this massive user interface change is now the default.

Speaking of GNOME – a separate team of Linux programmers and developers who have been developing the default interface for Ubuntu and other Linux version for years – last month, GNOME version 3.0 was just released. Ars Technica’s article on it is filled with commentary on how closely it resembles a certain other operating system. Once again – here’s a screenshot of it! Does this look familiar to you!?!?

GNOME version 3.0: Click to enlarge (and weep)

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are witnessing the death of the taskbar and the rise of the i-Interface. The rise of OSX’s marketshare has caused not only Microsoft to reel back with fright (expected) and duplicate the useless dock, but in a completely unexpected twist, even Linux – two separate developer groups, for that matter! – have released new versions of GUIs that look identical to OSX with the left-mounted dock turned on. GUIs based on textual information are dying out. The success of OSX has apparently whipped GUI programmers into a fear that users no longer want information, they want pretty pictures; and actual convenience be damned. I place the blame squarely on the OSX dock for Microsoft’s parody (yet with thankful improvements, as mentioned) in the Win7 taskbar and even worse, for the utter maiming of the most popular consumer version of Linux, and separately, the most popular standalone GUI for numerous versions of Linux.

I forsee the rise of three varieties of computer users. First, there is and at least for a few decades more will be the command line users. It goes without saying that there are still computer users who are more comfortable getting their work done on a black screen with a single glowing cursor and an encyclopedic knowledge of text commands. More power to them! Until now, there has only been a second category – people who use a GUI of any kind. This is now splitting into people who want “i-Interfaces” like the iPhone/Android “tap for program” pictograph GUI’s I’ve just shown you, and people like myself who will continue to use classic, useful, information-heavy interfaces.

My greatest fear for the future of computing? That Microsoft will continue down this troublesome path and make it harder and harder to get to a text-based, information-centric taskbar that puts control of my computer not just at my fingertips – anyone has that already – but in my line of sight. Who knows what Windows 8 and 9 might bear as options and default settings, but after this unfortunate Linux debacle, I’m inclined to think that it’s already too late for power users. Just look at how the Internet Explorer taskbar has morphed from text-based in IE6 to a bare sliver in IE9. That’s all well and good for a browser…but I don’t want an OS like that.

It was a pain to find computers still running IE6 and IE8 to make this screenshot! Click to enlarge.

I was really blessed to find a new job relatively quickly after I returned to America from the Middle East last September. Only three months of job searching, combined with supportive parents and friends (and their couches and extra beds) seems downright easy compared to the overall job market around America. I feel lucky that Madison, Wisconsin has such a relatively stable job market, and I like working with smart people in the academic circles of the public sector. It’s really a perfect match for me.

I made a short how-to video and posted it on youtube a few days ago. My department does consulting and computer management for 5-6 other departments in our building, and we had a lot of a particular type of system, the Dell Optiplex GX620 small form factor, left over from a bulk purchase order several years ago. Unfortunately, Dell didn’t design the system so well, so that the hard drive enclosure inside the system blocks the only exhaust vents in the entire case and heat generated by the CPU just sits inside the case and slowly fries all the components.

After noticing these fifty computers stacked up forlornly in a corner of an office, I asked to be given the assignment of figuring out something to do with them. I politely requested more motherboards from Dell’s support people (these systems had already gone through 2 or 3 each from previous fry-ups, but of course a replacement motherboard doesn’t resolve the underlying heat issue and they’d just burn up again after a few months), and after I casually reminded Dell about “how similar this seemed, in my mind” to the Optiplex capacitor debacle from several years ago, they were more than happy to send me 50 free motherboards. I didn’t even have to send the old ones back!

As my colleagues and I were determining what we could do now that we had these motherboards, we had a few brainstorming sessions. Could we drill through the case and add an extra fan and vent? Could we move the hard drive outside the case with a long data cable running back inside? That’s not even getting into my original, pre-contacting-Dell plan of actually physically removing the blown out capacitors (you’ll see those in the video below) and soldering new ones into place. We actually got as far as ordering 10 new capacitors for the systems, but discarded that idea after we discovered how insanely difficult it was to melt through Dell’s soldering connections. I practically burned a hole straight through one board before we decided to just try calling Dell. No one expected me to be able to convince them to send us a 4th set of motherboards but there was much jubilation when I was successful.

Anyway, my coworkers finally hit on the idea of just getting rid of the 3.5″ hard drive that was the cause of all this blockage and just tear out the 3.5″ floppy disk drive, hollow it out, and slide a little 2.5″ laptop hard drive into the shell. Our users haven’t used floppy drives in years (we hope) so this sweet fix would not only maintain the physical integrity and ‘look’ of the system, but also allow for good heat exhaust.

As I got started with the fixing process, I figured it might be nice to make a video documenting what I was doing, and how. Who knows; there’s a very good chance that our department wasn’t the only ones frustrated with a constantly-failing batch of a few dozen GX620′s, and they might be doing internet searches for possible fixes. I hope this video gives them some hope!

As for us, we’re going to be using these newly refurbished and upgraded systems as terminals for Citrix. They’ll be locked down so that users don’t try to put video editing software on them or something else which is going to heat them up. I have confidence that our trick will work so these computers won’t kill themselves again in three months, but I’d rather not test that. As terminal workstations, CPU usage shouldn’t go above 40-60% of maximum, therefore keeping heat way down. Just as a further test, though, I put Prime95 as a stress-tester on the first system I completed, and then ran the CPU at full 100% load for 3 straight weeks. No problems at all!

Heh, I meant for this article to be about 200 words or so as an intro to the video, but as usual, I got ahead of myself. I was going to put the video right below this blob of text, but I think I’ll put it on top instead. Thanks for reading, in any case! Sorry I don’t have any more adventures in the Arab world to write about…yet.

For anyone who’s read my blog for awhile, my Iraqi translator in Jordan, Wamidh, will be a familiar name. He was successfully relocated to America with his wife Hanan in early 2011 and my parents and I were looking forward to taking a trip to meet them – and to enjoy the warmer “southern” weather after surviving yet another Wisconsin winter. In my case, after so many months spent in the always-balmy Jordan, this winter seemed particularly unfriendly – although I’m sure it was just me.

Between visits, I took my first steps onto a tiny segment of the famous Appalachian Trail - sometime I'll do the whole thing!

I can only hope that everyone in the world can someday get a chance to experience real Arab hospitality. Although neither of my parents and certainly myself are strangers to it, it was humbling to once again be treated with such absolute kindness and friendliness that you can only get from Eastern cultures. We had brought some Amish Friendship Bread along too, and after we explained what “Amish” meant to the two Iraqis, they were overjoyed to be able to add it to their piles of sweets that they already had been planning to serve us.

Eating can become an all-day affair when confronted with an Arab banquet meal like the ones Hanan had prepared for us. A trip from our hotel to their apartment on our first night, which had been intended just for some coffee, turned into a 4 hour gathering with a beaming Hanan bringing us four or five platters of sweets and drinks out of the kitchen for us. My parents and I were happy to see that they were settling in well in their new country, and Hanan’s English was coming along quite well. In fact, I had to mentally stop myself from speaking in Arabic to the two of them several times throughout our visits, reminding myself that I was no longer a stranger on their side of the world, but it was the other way around and I needed to be helping them gain more and more experience and immersion in the peculiar American way of speaking.

Wamidh had to chuckle as he told us of his experiences understanding the “southern” accent. Throughout his work with EGT and his hundreds of hours working with me as my translator, he’d become used to a midwestern dialect, or an east coast accent like what some of our other coworkers had. The drawl or twang of Virginians was like starting over again, and he admitted having to ask several people to repeat themselves when he first arrived.

I was interested to notice that Hanan no longer wore her hijab hair covering anymore, something which I had been telling my parents before we arrived I was sure wasn’t going to change. When I commented on it, and being able to see her hair, she told me with quiet determination that she wanted Americans to feel comfortable around her and want to talk with her, and learn more about her. Someday I might wear the hijab again, she told me. But first, I want others to learn about the “real Hanan.” She felt – probably with good reason – that other women in the neighborhood might be shy or unlikely to engage her in conversation if she was dressed in more stereotypical Muslim women garb, and she was willing and determined to not let that happen by being proactive with a large personal and religious choice like this.

For our final dinner with our friends, Hanan pulled out all the stops and made a meal so large that it took us almost 7 straight ours of eating and chatting to work our way through all the courses she had made. She sat across the table from my mother and jokingly wagged her finger at all of us if we ever paused for longer than a minute in our quest to reach the bottom of our bowls. “Eat…you need to be eating more!” she would cluck at us. We asked Wamidh how on earth he ever managed to ever leave the table while married to such a dynamic chef. “I don’t give her a chance to refill my plate when I’m finished!” he exclaimed with a serene smile. “I just grab my plate and run to put it in the sink before she can!” By the time we left, filled with food and delicious Turkish coffee, my mother commented that we could probably be rolled up the interstate back to Wisconsin like little barrels. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so full in my life.

Goal: to eat our way to the bottom of all those bowls and pans!

Besides our visits, we had time for a few other things while in Roanoke. The city had a thriving little farmer’s market on Saturday morning, similar in style to Madison’s, and we bought some local pottery, baked goods, and heard some local lore. I can’t speak for my parents, but like Wamidh, I found myself wishing that I had a small box that would generate small subtitles to help me understand what the old Virginian farmers were saying.

We drove up to Roanoke’s Mill Mountain to see the local treasure, a huge metal frame star that was built several decades ago to commemorate the city’s nickname, the “Star City of the South.” The views of the surrounding mountains north of the city were impressive on the clear Sunday morning, and we could see little plumes of stone being thrown high into the air many miles away, in what must have been some West Virginian coal mines. There’s a website that utilizes a small camera that they mounted on the star; it takes a little low-res snapshot every 15 seconds of the observation deck below.

In order to prove that we were indeed there! (I'm looking at the starcam website on my phone, as my parents watch me)

I think our favorite non-Arab part of our trip was visiting the Mill Mountain Zoo, another attraction only a few hundred meters away from the star. The little zoo was affordably priced and had a good selection of animals to view, and a well-trained staff of young keepers that all looked around college age and had a friendly relationship with their four-legged charges, many of whom would literally do a happy dance of joy at the sight of the staff’s green polo shirts. Although it would have been easy to see the entire park from end to end in less than hour, we stayed closer to 3, chatting with the keepers and watching the animals get fed.

A mere couple weeks later, I joined the Wisconsin 4-H Extension office as a chaperone on my first visit to NASA’s Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I have dozens of fond memories from my own childhood in 4-H. I’ve done everything from small county-level trips to Chicago and around northern Wisconsin, to state-authorized trips to Washington D.C. and New York. As far as I know, the Space Camp trip must have been added sometime after I had already graduated from the organization, otherwise I surely would have gone.

Although my only other chaperoning experience was several years ago for the 4-H show choir in Milwaukee, I enjoyed it and thought a shorter, but much more distant trip might be a lot of fun. Interestingly enough, several other chaperones had even been chaperones on my own childhood trips, which they enjoyed pointing out to my young charges.

My group, “Casper” – so named after the Apollo 14 command module – was led by a big friendly guy from Florida named Mark, or “Ox” as he was known by the Space Camp group. We had a fun three days wandering around the museums and exhibits of the Space Camp grounds, building our own model rockets – something which might be completely new and exciting to other groups of kids, but I was proud when in response to Ox’s question of ‘has anyone built a model rocket before?’ all but one hand went up into the air. 4-Her’s are smart kids!

One of the first things we did was get divided into our “mission roles” – probably one of the most famous parts of Space Camp, made so by the 1986 movie of the same name. Although we didn’t get blasted up into space by an insane anthropomorphic robot, we were divided into three teams – one for Mission Control, one for the space station, and one for the shuttle control team. Although my team of mission control kids didn’t get the cool orange (and poorly-fitting) jumpsuits like the other two groups did, we did get to stare at computer screens a lot! Almost like real life for one person on their team…

There weren't enough kids for a full team, so Ox had me playing both the Mission Scientist and the Propulsion Officer at the same time: having two scripts to have to pay close attention to was tough!

Besides the full size exhibits of historical rockets and engines, there were the rides, which of course I think the kids might have enjoyed even more. Everyone had heard of the moon jump, which simulates the 1/6th gravity conditions of the moon, and the space shot, and the G-Force, but then there was also the Multi Axis Spinner, which was created solely to screw with astronauts as kind of an engineer’s prank at NASA.

Okay, fine, its original purpose was to help train Apollo astronauts what to do in case their command modules started to uncontrollably spin about during the re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Since those old-style command modules only had their incredibly heat resistive layers on one side, and required precise angular placement, astronauts in one of these uncontrolled spins would have had only minutes to figure out how to right themselves again. We were dealing with a “modified” one, obviously – an actual trainer would have also had a control stick in front of me, and I would have been placed into it with the purpose of seeing how long it took me to stop the rotations. We were told that Apollo astronauts were put into this thing for hours at a time to make sure they were completely immune to sickness caused by the violent movements. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

I was very pleased with how well behaved both the small group of kids in my Casper group were, and the boys in our large, barracks-style sleeping room both were. Although I never worried about not enjoying the trip and my time as a chaperone, I came in expecting to have to be shushing kids all the time, especially when it was supposed to be sleeping time (the Space Camp administrators and Ox enforced strict rules for all attendees; kids were sent to bed at 9:30 and roused at 6:30 or so, without exception) but I was pleased to be wrong. Either the kids were just really well behaved, or exhausted each night, or they were secretly using electronic games under their sleeping bags – a problem that didn’t exist back when when I went to 4-H camp in the Wisconsin Dells area! (Game Boys existed, but they certainly didn’t have any sort of backlight on them).

Team Casper, posing in front of the Apollo 14 "Casper" command module

I had a lot of fun on both trips, and I can’t wait to see both Wamidh and Hanan and Space Camp again sometime soon, I hope!

One of the introductions to Windows 7 was “libraries” for types of media. The main ones are “Pictures,” “Videos,” and “Documents.” I would have to say that although perhaps there must be someone out there who needs this, I have yet to find one. Look at Documents for example. Microsoft and Apple both have trained us over a decade that Documents should either go in “My Documents” if you care about organization, or “The Desktop, lol” if you prefer to make the desktop a dumping ground for every type of file. Same with pictures and videos, to a lesser extent…they’ve always had their places. Now Microsoft wants to make these virtual consolidation folders that basically create a single way to view a bunch of folders from all over the computer. Not useful, Microsoft. The reason is that when you go to the “Documents” library, you still just see 1, 2, or however many folders you’ve specified, and you have to drill down in order to get what you’re looking for.

If you wanted to be useful, you’d have given the option for the Documents library to spontaneously push together all of the files in all of the folders. With one click, a user could go from having to drill down through a top-level documents container to 500 Word docs/another with 200 Excel Docs/Word Docs/ etc to having all of your documents visible in one big folder with no subfolders, where you could sort them by name, file size, type, etc. It would have been infeasible to do, pre-Vista, but now that Windows Search is so fast and we have RAM out the wazoo, a single “folder” with thousands of lumped-together files from all over your system is such an obvious idea for the “Documents library” that I’m embarrassed that it wasn’t put into use.

Even if Documents doesn’t have that ability, the Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery does a brilliant job of this. I love it and use it all of the time. It beats iPhoto shamelessly, and although Picasa is great, it still doesn’t use XMP built-in metadata nor allow so many methods of sorting. I will give Picasa credit for having a smarter facial recognition algorithm though. Anyway! You can shove as many folders as you want into the Photo Gallery (using the “Pictures” library) and then just click “All Pictures” at the top of the program, and boom, you have all of your pictures from all over the computer sorted in any way you want, regardless of where they are.

My Beef with Libraries: There is no separation between something you want to share, and something you don’t want to share. The “Libraries” are systemwide, and unfortunately are now being used for network sharing with other Windows 7 computers and, even worse, the Xbox 360. Here’s my situation:

I have a folder on the root of my C drive that contains all of my movie backups and recorded TV shows. I would love to be able to automatically share this to an Xbox or to other users through the network using Windows 7′s “media streaming”, which means it would be a primary candidate for inclusion in the “Videos” library, right? But, Windows Photo Gallery uses that same “Videos” library to get my personal home movies out of, too, which is exactly what I want to be seeing in the Photo Gallery. I use the Gallery for personal things like home movies and personal photos, but I don’t want those shared so loosely to just anyone on the network. At the same time, if I include that recorded TV show folder in the “Videos” library, I’m going to be seeing random copies of the Colbert Report floating around next to my personal memories. I love you, Mr. Colbert, but you don’t belong next to pictures of my mother’s birthday just because I happened to record your show the same night.

Microsoft: You need to fix this. There are multiple ways: for example, you could make it so that Windows Media Center and all other Media Extenders (like the xbox 360) could just use regular network shares as well as libraries, which I already made my movies/TV show folder years ago. That used to work just fine. Just add the ability back! But now, my xbox can’t see them anymore. “Just use the libraries!” your tech support gleefully tells me. Okay, but I’m already using the libraries for my private files. So, in that case, give us the ability to define a library as public or private. Or, disconnect Photo Gallery’s defined root folders from the Windows 7 “Libraries.” Think about it – libraries basically mean collections, which is right-on. But you can have a private library in your house that you don’t share with anyone off the street, but then there are public libraries that contain media that anyone can access. I want to have both, and I want them to be definable.

That way, anyone using Windows 7′s awesome “Media Streaming” features will be able to easily get my “public” files of Music/Movies/TV shows/Funny Cat JPGs, but I can keep my Home Movies and personal pictures to myself. Libraries are (on the way to being) a great idea to consolidate your files, but until we can separate what we want shared and what we don’t, they’ll never reach their full potential.

After I recovered from my initial shock, I realized that with almost 500MB of data in that IMAP folder, I would have had some serious hard drive action if it had actually deleted the messages. So I went to c:\users\zth\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles\account.default\ImapMail and sure enough, there was my Gmail folder, still there with no apparent damage done to it.

But I simply could not figure out how to get Thunderbird to realize that the folder was still there and parse the data out of it. There was no “import” button in the program and desperate Google searches were turning up nothing.

I sorted the account.default folder window by date modified so I could try to pinpoint what files might have been edited in the past 10 minutes. Cookies, plugins, the Thunderbird 3 index database (at a whopping 168MB), and something called “foldertree” which was a lot less helpful than I hoped it would be.

The key was in a small file called prefs.js. I had ignored it first, figuring it was a Javascript file but “preferences” was too intriguing to pass by twice. I opened it up in Notepad and examined it. Sure enough, it contained all of the different account records and folder links back out to Windows Explorer. Exactly what I was looking for. All of my other accounts were referenced in there in their specific ImapMail subfolders, but my main Gmail account was conspicuously absent.

It would have been difficult but not impossible for me to look at my secondary Gmail account and be able to piece things back together for how the account properties were coded into this prefs file. But backups came to the rescue! That and the automatic Windows Vista/Windows 7 ”previous version’ function, which completely saved me. I merely right clicked on the prefs.js file, selected the “Previous Versions” tab, and selected the most recent automatic backup of the file from last week. I clicked “Restore”, crossed my fingers, and opened up Thunderbird again.

Done. The prefs.js file had instantaneously restored all of my accounts back to their former selves and everything was being parsed properly. It was then that I realized I had been holding my breath for 20 minutes straight.

I was pretty proud of myself; it was one of the few times I’ve ever actually lived up to my so-called “technician” reputation and actually figured out something for myself as opposed to turning to the Internet for guidance. Of course, that’s exactly why I wrote this blog entry, in the hopes that perhaps it will help someone else out.

We're holding onto his legs as he does this, I promise

Andrew and I shared one of the three hotel rooms that our team utilized, and after the awards ceremony I asked him if he would mind me taking copies of the video. He told me to go ahead, but warned me of the difficulty of doing so. He told me that I needed to have a special program to play the videos back, and that they took a long time to transfer off the camcorder.

I got out my Windows 7 laptop, took his USB cable, and had the files downloaded and playing on my computer in Windows Media Player 12 (WMP) in less than a minute. He stared at the laptop in amazement. “How did you do that?” I explained that Windows 7 really focused on interoperability and being able to work with as many devices as possible. They probably got tired of Apple people warbling about how it “just works” and devoted some of their billions into tangible R&D…these days, sure enough, everything “just works” with Windows 7, too. Score one for the Redmond team!

.MTS files are the default file format that most high-def camcorders use, and I don’t know how many other free programs can play them besides WMP. Of course, the king of Open Source Media Players, VLC, plays them without issue, although they need to be de-interlaced and the playback is slower on older computers.

I’ve put one of the MTS files up on HeiseHeise.com, and you can download it here to check it out. Keep in mind that it’s about 26 megabytes in size, and half a minute in length, at 1440 by 1080 pixels of resolution. Personally, I was quite impressed at the level of quality Panasonic was able to fit into such a comparably small size! Try playing it back with Windows Media Player, but if it gives you an error message, download and install VLC and you can be assured that this file, and anything else you throw at it, will work with it!

After I assisted Andrew with getting the .MTS files off his camcorder, he took them and made a nice little 4 minute video of highlights from the ride, set to music. Just imagine you’re out there with us on the highways!

The rant of the night is the lack of a standardized power plug in Jordan. This country has a ridiculous lack of standardization, and it seems to be the worse when it comes to just choosing a power plug to use. Check out this map:

Poor little Jordan has at least 5 listed

It’s one thing to have this entire country filled with so many plug standards I have to carry a sack of clinking adapters in my backpack to make sure I’ll be able to plug in my laptop where I need to work. That’s bad enough. It’s even worse when we have four different plug standards at the training center in Ayn al Basha!

When I first came to Ayn al Basha, the only building that had electricity (or even existed for that matter) was the lime-green administration building. All the plugs in there are using the Italian “L” standard; three prongs in a straight line. Then when we built the first classrooms in September and October of 2008, the electricians put in the German “Schuko” style plug. Now, after I returned from America on my vacation, I discovered that some numbskull had wired my new classroom with British “MK” plugs – my most-despised type of plug that’s used here. Then, just a couple days ago while I was with the TOT class in the assembly room, I saw that the plugs there were using some weird hybrid of the USA “A” standard, combined with widened holes to fit the “Europlug.” Supposedly, it’s some sort of Chinese sub-standard. You know what really gets me? Aaron told me that the electrician that did up my new computer lab was the same one who installed the “Schuko” plugs in all the other classrooms last year, so he should have known better than to just stick another random outlet standard into the walls. It’s just a coincidence that because of their complexity, MK outlets cost twice and cables cost thrice more as any other type, right? Hmmm.

The British MK outlet and plug are indeed the absolute worse, relics of the 1930′s with a plug that requires its own built-in fuse and an outlet box that usually has an utterly pointless power switch next to it. The pins on the MK are huge, ungainly, and if you are unlucky enough to step on one in the middle of the night you will beg for death. “They’re impossible to break, though,” some of my English friends here will say with a grin, and one even proudly showed me a thick ugly scar on his right foot where he drove an MK a centimeter through his sole while running across a room to answer a phone. The MK needs to die. Or at least, Jordan needs to stop using it – but it’s unlikely, seeing that it’s probably second after the Europlug in the number of buildings it’s used in.

The Europlug – a bland, non-grounded little weak thing. Most lower-amperage devices in Jordan use this style of plug, and mercifully it seems to fit into most of the outlets found here. However, because of its lack of ground, it’s useless for computers. Also, they also feel like they’re going to fall apart in my hand. Pass.

The “Schuko” plug would definitely be my favorite if the American “B” standard didn’t exist. Strong and sturdy with an ingenious way to add a ground wire to the system. Philip thought ahead when he had his house built and had each wall outlet contain two sockets – one using the Italian “L” plug and the other using the “Schuko.” The only problem with them is that they’re still too large for my taste. When I need to buy power strips (which is quite a bit), you can only fit four “Schuko” plugs on there, like the MK. If you tried to sell a power strip in America with only four outlets on it, you’d be tarred and feathered. By me, at least, if no one else would.

The USA “NEMA 5″ plug is by far the best of them all, and after having to work with this bizarre hodgepodge for the past year, I don’t think I’ll find much resistance to that claim. Our plugs and outlets are like our citizens: a well-grounded combination of strength, size, and electrical amperage. It’s no shock that we invented electricity, really, and it feels good to be able to say for once that America is indisputably the best at something besides starting wars. Without further ado…

USA! USA! USA! USA!

Glad I got that out of my system.

Wajih has invited me to be the teacher of another technology class down at Ayn al Basha. This is with a new NGO contract, not with IRD this time but with some organization called UNIDO. Today is the big day, in fact – their representatives are going to be coming onsite in only a couple hours for a ribbon-cutting or some sort of equivalent. Classes are supposed to start next week on Sunday. As opposed to my previous training course with the IRD contract, this time I’ll only have 4 students instead of 18. Apparently UNIDO hand-picked them for this class and they’re supposed to have fundamental knowledge of computers already, which is why I’ve been told to step it up a notch and discuss Windows Server vs. Linux Server, installing patch panels, and the differences between Cat6 and Cat5e network cable (the former I’ve been installing for the past 4 days; it’s so tough and thick that my hands have practically been bleeding).

It’s amazing how much this site has grown in the past year. I still remember my first trip down here with Philip, way back in late 2008, when it was nothing more than a dusty old tile factory site. Now, between the IRD contract and the new UNIDO group, we’ll be teaching 20 different classes in 15 different classrooms. We have a sewing class and two computer labs, a welding facility, and a huge garden – the courtesy of Nicholas’ legacy before he left 4 months ago.

I look forward to seeing how far along it can get before I inevitably move onto the next stage in my life.

Before I get out of Aaron’s office and get back to work on the last few touches on my new classroom, I suppose I should do some quick research on different available Internet Service Providers, just in case there’s a better deal out there than my old now-expired Orange contract. Frankly, I’m leaning towards Umnia’s “UMax” service, because who can resist an advertisement like this?

I use it a lot more now that I live in Jordan, however. The main reason for this is because for whatever reason, I can pretty much be guaranteed accurate, up-to-date imagery of Jordan and other Arab countries. Although Google didn’t have street names in Amman for my first five months in Jordan, they’ve added those since then – although their use is debatable since no person, be he taxi driver or King of Jordan, has any idea what 99% of the street names are in Amman. No one uses them, using major buildings or traffic circles as directional landmarks instead.

When I came back to Madison a couple weeks ago, I wanted to see if they’d updated the Google Earth map to reflect the fact that my venerable Ogg residence Hall was demolished a year ago and since then two entirely new dorms have been built in its place. Google Maps (as in the website) is less effective here because it only provides a copyright date, which is always just the current year. Google Earth, however, informed me right away that downtown Madison, at an elevation of around 7 kilometers, hasn’t been updated since late August 2004.

Madison, WI, USA: Last updated late August 2004

You can easily see the imagery date in every recent version of Google Earth, there in the lower left part of the screenshot I took. Compare that five and half year update span to this screenshot from Amman which I captured on the same evening.

Amman, Jordan: Last updated early July 2009

This picture is from mid July of 2009. Since I was already in the Middle East, I flew around to other large capitol cities from other Middle Eastern countries.

Beirut, Lebanon: Last updated late August 2009

Riyadth, Saudia: Last updated late May 2009

Tehran, Iran: Last updated late June 2009

Even more interesting, when I hovered over Baghdad, the former center of America’s “War on Terror” not even a date was displayed for the current photography. Using Google’s “previous imagery” function, I deduced that the last satellite photos that were given an official timestamp were from back in 2005. Out of the dozen searches I conducted, Baghdad was the only city that did not prominently display the date of its images in the lower left.

Baghdad, Iraq: Last updated...???

So, it’s obvious that there’s merely more satellites posed over the relatively small area of the Middle East compared with the vastly larger North American continent, right? And it should therefore stand to reason that they just happen to be taking more pictures of everyone under their cameras. Not necessarily. These Arab capitols I’ve just shown you weren’t the only ones I photographed. Below are the two major cities of Jordan’s next door neighbor, Israel.

Tel Aviv, Israel: Last updated early February 2006

Jerusalem, Palestine/Israel: last updated late November 2007

So, in the span of a few hundred kilometers, we have five capitols of Arab nations, that have all had their satellite imagery updated within the past year. However, easily within that same range, we have a country that is considered Jewish that has pictures that are many times older. Why are there no satellite images of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in the same time scale as the other cities? From the looks of the Arab pictures from May, June, July, and then August (and who knows for Baghdad) there was a definite system to these photography. Shouldn’t Israel be in there in, for example, April or September?

Taking these screenshots reminded me of my trip into Jerusalem a few months ago. Our Palestinian driver from the border pointed out a zeppelin that flew high above the center of town. He told us that it was a security blimp, positioned up there to be able to focus down at the Muslim mosques below with high resolution cameras. Supposedly, they carefully keep logs and records by name on every Muslim who enters the mosques, keeping special care to note how devout they are to their prayers and how frequently they attend. How very generous of Israel to take up that responsibility!

I’m not the first person to raise an eyebrow about Google’s satellite image-server policy. This article from the Arab News Blog questions the differences in resolution (clarity) of the images that are used over Iraq, Egypt, and Israel. In my own completely non-scientific article, I don’t speculate on resolutions and how easy it is to see various things in each city, but instead just how frequently things are updated. You can check all of this out yourself in Google Earth if you like; and if you don’t have it it’s free to download and useful for many more things than mere casual observations such as these!

So, my friends and colleagues in the Arab and Persian worlds, feel free to shoot a jaunty wave up to the beautiful blue skies above you (or grayish, if you’re in Cairo) because you can rest assured that you’re being watched and photographed – perhaps even a bit more than your neighbors. For your safety and convenience, of course.

When I taught my class, I would always teach my students about one virus in particular, the one named after a particularly nasty nuclear reactor explosion, the W32/Chernobyl virus which could actually eat into your computer’s BIOS and then tell it to overwrite itself into blankness. Unless you happened to have a BIOS flash programmer and the wherewithal to undo the solder joints holding the BIOS chip in place…this usually meant a completely fried motherboard, resulting in a new purchase. How many other viruses have you heard of that can actually physically damage computers? Not too many.

The one that has now merrily written itself all over my laptop’s hard drive is called the W32/Sality, variant AQ or AN, depending on which vendor you ask (in fact, it may even be something entirely new, which I’ll get to later). The Sality is one of the infamous types known as “Patching Viruses,” and their methods of spreading and eluding deletion are diabolical. Basically, a patching virus does exactly what it sounds like. When you hear of someone “patching” their own computer, it usually means with updates, like Windows Update, which overwrites or updates program and system files with newer, better versions. Sality does the same, except replace “better” with “evil.” It is able to actually insert its own viral code into a program’s .EXE file, which is how 99% of standard Windows applications start themselves up. Does this sound familiar? Once the program, any program’s .EXE file is affected, like Firefox.exe or Mspaint.exe, the sality writes itself into the last section of the .EXE file’s code and runs itself whenever that .EXE is run. Since almost every application, including antivirus systems, on a Windows computer is made of EXE files, this can be a problem.

To put it bluntly, there is 100% no way to remove this virus from within Windows. It’s impossible. Every time you try to scan it, it will merely eat your scanner and turn it into an infected virus-loader. The only possible chance to fight it is to use a program which can “disinfect” these viruses, but it has to be outside of the normal Windows operating system, preferably in a Linux boot CD that is immune to .EXE harvesting. I’ve always generically titled these systems “Alternative Boot Environments” or A.B.E. – or just ABE, for short (patent pending). Dr Web’s cleaner boot CD is particularly good ABE for evading .EXE patching. You have to be careful not to use a ham-fisted antivirus program that merely deletes everything it finds as a virus, because that would now mean deleting every program on your computer and somewhere a virus-writer would cackle with glee.

So how did this happen to a guy like me, with a decade of experience in the field? Well, I’ll be completely honest and tell you that I haven’t used antivirus programs in years on my personal computers, desktops or laptops. Don’t get me wrong; in my years at DoIT in Madison and working as a consultant, I have always been extremely diligent in making sure that computers are protected. But I always figured that antivirus programs are for people who make bad decisions and let their computers get infected.

And guess what? I’m still right…that’s exactly who they’re for. But this virus, Sality, outsmarted me for a split-second and that was all it took. I was down in Ayn al Basha doing some work on some photos for the Entity Green Training website with Lillie. I had made a shared folder on my laptop for her, named “Lillie” and we were passing around photos that needed to be re-sized for web use. I noticed a strange folder on my computer I didn’t remember making there, and figured that since she had write access to my computer’s shared folders, she had just made it. I didn’t notice until a second after I double-clicked it that the folder “icon” was a pixelated application icon, shaped like a Windows folder, and even more foolishly, that it was named Lillie.exe…not “Lillie” like a folder should be. I’m lucky that I had the “show file extensions” enabled on my computer – I still think that Microsoft disabling those by default is the dumbest thing in their history as software writers – otherwise, there would have been almost no way to visibly recognize this as a virus. It would have merely said “Lillie” and looked like a folder.

Seconds after I double-clicked that fateful file, my computer immediately betrayed signs that it was going into action. The hard drive spun up over my knee, the CPU usage shot up, and everything briefly slowed. Before I even drew my next breath I knew what I’d done and probably filled the air with a few expletives. It was too late by now, of course. The Sality had taken my computer, and now it was going to be a fight to the death, between the virus and my operating system. As many as 5/6 Sality infections result in the user or technician giving up and reformatting the computer. Literally, this was going to be a fight to the death – either I’d remove the virus, or the operating system would be erased to take it out.

Let’s go over the symptoms that have made me respect this fearful beast below:

1. Deletion of Safe Mode: As any technician knows, safe mode is the first tool against a virus; a safe(r) haven against auto-loading .exe files and lesser programs. The first thing Sality did was delete the following registry entries:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot. These two keys control the computer’s ability to use safe mode, and with those deleted, my computer promptly blue screened with the generic 0x0000007B error whenever I tried to restart and get into safe mode.
   Resolution: utilizing the system.bak registry backups in an ABE to find the safeboot keys specific to Windows XP service pack 3 in the Dr. Web external operating system, and then exporting/reloading them into the main registry files again.
2. IP filterdriver Monitoring and Filtering: Of course, one of the first thing any user would do after infecting themselves is search the internet for how to fix everything. Sality’s got you covered there; it injects itself into the “ipfilterdriver” service and then actively scans IP traffic from all network connections, searching for any keywords of itself or antivirus tools. If you search any search engine or try to load any page that contains these keywords, Sality knows. It doesn’t block them outright, merely causing “page loading” messages to last forever.
   NOTE: This is much different then the old-fashioned virus trick from the early 21st century; filling your HOSTS file with antivirus websites linked to loopback address 127.0.0.1 – that’s child’s play to fix compared with this.
   Resolution: as before, getting the backup copy of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\IPFilterDriver\Parameters registry key and then reloading it into the primary registry. Needless to say, we all might be a lot more screwed if later revisions of Sality are able to corrupt the .bak files that contain the backup registry hives.
3. Masking by “Admin” takeover: Like many modern viruses, the second thing that Sality did was try to (poorly) disguise that it had infected me. It does this by exploiting the registry yet again in the form of normal Administrator authority blocking keys, deactivating the all-important Task Manager, Registry, Folder Options, and the ability to view hidden/secret files (the latter being very related to the autorun files, which I’m mentioning next).
   Resolution: This one is easy to take care of if you have an ABE to work with. All the ways to remove those simple registry-key blocks are well-documented. Sometimes you can use the DOS-based “reg.exe” instead of regedit and batch files to fix this, but when you’re dealing with a Patcher, the inescapable fact that it’s reg dot EXE obviously isn’t going to help you too much in the long run.
4. Disk Replication: This one isn’t so special, but of course worth nothing. Like most modern viruses, Sality takes advantage of the fact that everyone uses USB flash drives these days to transfer files…often between multiple computers. Sality also knows that any executable program on a CD-ROM or flash drive that is linked to by a file called “autorun.ini” on the root of the drive will automatically be run by your computer, therefore silently and quickly installing itself onto any computer that USB flash drive is plugged into. Sounds like a really stupid security breach, doesn’t it? Guess what, Microsoft packaged it as a feature and this is still not disabled in XP’s third service pack. For God’s sake people, disable Autorun on your computers. At Whitman, I’ve seen minor virus infections decrease by 87% since I initiated a mass Autorun deactivation last spring. Update: If the United States Government says to disable, you must not resist.
   Resolution: In Linux or in ABEs, nothing is hidden, no matter what fake Windows Administors have put into my registry. I had an Ubuntu disk with me, and was able to verify that sure enough, Sality had helpfully added a few hidden and automatically-running virus files to my flash drive I was using at the time. My own computer has had Autorun disabled for years, so I couldn’t get reinfected from that, but unfortunately, Autorun disabling is still not the norm.
5. Network Replication: this is almost certainly how I got infected with the original Lillie.exe file. When it takes over, the third thing Sality does is search for every folder that your computer has listed as a public, network-accessible “shared” folder. Then it reads the name of each folder, and puts a copy of itself in each folder with that same name and an icon in the shape of a Windows XP folder. On an infected computer, Sality then waits for computers with publicly-writable shared folders to connect to the same network, and then does the same thing. I’m positive that’s how I got Sality in the first place; on any of the numerous networks I work on or coffee shops I’m at, any previously-infected laptop could have spawned Sality onto my computer, where it then lay dormant in my shared folders, waiting for my single moment of distraction to strike and cause all this havoc.
   Resolution: Easiest one of the bunch; after Sality was finally removed, went through my network shares and removed all the bad .EXE files.

Remember how I said earlier that this is possibly an entirely new version of Sality? I say that because besides carrying out the documented attacks written above, something new and very troubling happened. When I came to work at Whitman this morning, the secretary told me that her AVG auto-block was throwing a warning whenever she visited the school’s website, whitmanacademy.org. I checked her logs; it was an HTML/iFrame takeover. AVG did its job, though, and successfully shut down the infected website’s attempt to secretly launch her to the hidden websites. I didn’t verify exactly what would happen if she had gone there for obvious reasons, but upon downloading the wordpress index.php file for Whitman’s website, I determined that sure enough, it had been infected with two auto-loading iFrames.

Here’s the scary part. Then I visited Entity Green’s website, and then this one, HeiseHeise.com. AVG in the school’s computer lab blocked both of them, with the exact same errors and iFrames to the exact same bad websites. I checked the logs from 1and1, the web host for all three websites. At approximately 10:30 the night before, all three index.php files were overwritten at the same time to the infected version.

I’ve never heard of this happening before, but here’s my theory. My FTP program, FileZilla, is very widely used, and it’s probably attracted several virus writers out there. Of course, like everything else, it’s an .EXE – Filezilla.exe. I would not be surprised if the virus had been programmed to automatically load itself into Filezilla, automatically connected to all stored FTP websites, and patch these iFrame codes into the end of each site’s index.php file.

Needless to say, I have no idea if those FTP passwords are now in the hands of the virus writers, but of course they’ve since been changed. What’s more worrisome is that a virus could even do that. Unlike everything else written above which I’ve lifted from elsewhere on the ‘net, I’ve found no known link between current variants of Sality and iFrame hijacking.

So what have I learned?

Don’t use Windows XP anymore. As I mentioned in section 5, I picked up this hitchhiker through unguarded shared folders. Windows XP only has one switch for folders: sharing is either on or off. In Vista, Microsoft introduced “network types” that are either Work, Home, or Public. Anyone who has used Vista knows the (somewhat annoying) trait of the operating system to bug you within seconds of connecting to a new wireless location – “Do you want to make this a Work, Home, or Public network location?” Guess what – that’s an important setting, because if you choose “Public” (or cancel the dialog box) then it automatically locks down every shared folder on your computer as “no write-to permitted.” On a more annoying note, non-Microsoft verified .EXE files (like Lillie.exe obviously was) are double-confirmed by Vista before they are executed, which would have given me that precious “second glance” that would have saved me. If I had been using Vista or the drool-worthy new Windows 7, this never would have occurred. So…even though I’ve fixed the problem and my computer is no longer infected, it’s still time to wave a second farewell to Windows XP (I’ve said that before) and move to the latest and greatest.

Will I run an antivirus program? With some teeth-gritting…yes. I’ll have to start doing comparisons between the different options out there, but the whole reason I stopped (my arrogance aside) is because AV programs are system crushers. Norton in particular has been long-infamous for stretching its tendrils into every part of your computer and although it does a great job of keeping your computer safe, I wouldn’t use it, or most other AV products out there just because of the speed hit your computer takes. There has always been the choice between speed and security, no matter what – and I had just picked speed until now. Perhaps I’ll give the Comodo Suite a look, provided its free, lightweight, and speedy. A final note: Mac users, you made your own unconscious choice by picking an operating system that, while secure, doesn’t support standard programming APIs like DirectX and therefore is useless for speed-gaming purposes. You’re secure, sure – but useless for my needs and wishes. So don’t bother giving me that argument.

So there you go. My observations on battle with the W32/Sality virus, variant…well, possibly new/unknown. Maybe this will help someone out there; I can only hope so. This Youtube video, while long, was definitely helpful to get me started with the always-updated Dr. Web program, which really is an excellent virus-fighting ABE.

Good luck out there, soldier.