One Up, One Down

I recently had some spare time and worked on an old desktop. It constantly rebooted and I didn't know if it was a hardware or a software problem. Trying to get Windows repaired didn't work, and other hard disks just caused it to not recognise any attached hardware. But I eventually managed to get it to offer me a repair option when I was using the original Windows disk after much gnashing of teeth working with other programs and fixes found on the Internet. This eventually led to a Windows repair which was basically a reinstall, with me entering the key and then online activation. The computer then booted up and within a few minutes I was looking at the contents of a hard drive that hadn’t been used since 2007. It is a pretty good spec computer too, even though it’s three or four years old.

I was quite pleased with myself.

Of course, the gods wouldn’t let it lie.

Today on my laptop my U3 disk wouldn’t load. Here we go I think, it's finally snuffed it. I had recently bought a four gigabyte one as a replacement because the one I have been using the past few years was giving some errors here and there and felt very fragile. The program wouldn’t load but the drive was still accessible. So I play around with that. I copy all the files to the c disk of the laptop and fiddle around with the U3 drive. No luck. It would not load any portable programs and the files downloaded from Sandisk wouldn't recognise the USB disk as a U3 drive.

I even tried programs from the temporary folder on the laptop hard disk but they wouldn’t work either. I reformat the drive and try to reinstall. No dice.

It’s about this time I realise it isn’t the fault of the U3 drive but the laptop. It is not recognising CD/DVD drives: not the internal one, not the external one and not the USB one. A quick check of the system shows me that it can’t find or load the drivers. Vista couldn’t find any drivers online or any solutions to the problem.

Ghost I think, it's saved my bacon before. And, without thought, I load the Ghost CD and restore the laptop to last week. It's halfway through when I realise that I hadn’t copied back the files for the U3 from the laptop c drive.

Norton Ghost does a ninety nine percent job of restoring the drive. I get a blue screen and then some Vista program called System Repair or something appears, spends ten minutes doing nothing and then loads the computer up. It's back to the way it was last Sunday, but seeing as I don’t keep any files on the laptop that's ok.

They’re all on the USB. Which has been re-formatted.

The recovery programs I tried were rubbish, listing only files with numbers. And there’s no way I’m going through four thousand files and renaming them. So I turn back to the backup disk and unzip the back up of the USB. I back that up manually using my copy of SecureZip. As it’s a manual backup by me it’s not as regular as the machine backup by Ghost. The latest I have is from late last month so I’ve lost about two weeks worth of information but it’s better than losing everything.

But I’ve got my old computer back again, and I might use that for a few things. Antics now has a workaround via the forum and I might stick Antics on the old computer - I did purchase the parts and build it to high specs so I could run Antics on it. And as I said earlier even though its three years old it’s still good specs: 2 gig of RAM, 2.4 gig processor, 250 gig hard drive, graphics card. That’s an OK spec even for now. It runs Windows XP which I still prefer over Vista and – as I made a point of never installing unnecessary software on that computer – it still loads and runs blindingly fast.

Another plus is that computer is where I have the program Sophocles. I bought it and then a few years later the company disappeared altogether. The software was Internet activated; you got a code from the guy and all the features were then enabled. And he was quite cool in that you could go back to him any number of times for another number. I only had two numbers; the one for the computer and another for the new (at that time) beta edition of the software.

When the software disappeared the Internet came to the rescue with a way to ‘activate’ on other computers, which involved saving out the registry entries. This allowed me to ensure that I can still use the software but only the beta version as I couldn’t access the original version on the old desktop computer. Now I can and I will save out the registry information so that if the computer goes down again at least I can continue to use that piece of software.

Bluddy L

What happened to August? One minute it was there, all fresh and new, the next it’s almost gone. It has been a really quick month. What makes it even more ironic is that I have done very little of note during the month. I haven't been online too much - but still managed to clock up half the allocated bandwidth for a month, although that was mostly upgrades of software - and have had little time to do anything else.

Finances are a little to the fore at the moment. I'm trying to cut back on spending everywhere but I did splash out on an upgrade to LifeForms. I visited their website and noticed it had been redesigned since the last time I was there. So, I checked the software. Huzzah, new version out.

I went from version 4 to version 5. I first got a version of this software free from a magazine yonks ago. Last year I purchased the full version and, although it is a great piece of software, version 4 was old and worked best in Windows 98:  it gave some errors in Vista.

The new version has been updated to work well in the newer operating systems but the interface is the same old friendly one I'm familiar with. And the upgrade was very cheap too.

I'm going to look into the blogs I follow and see if I can prune them back a little. It seems some of them I hardly read at the moment. And since I moved to using Google Reader for following blogs I hardly ever comment on blogs now. I pruned the blog list a few months back and although I haven't added any recently it's time to look at them again.

Sneaky Waterstone's

I was all set to walk past Waterstone's today. I've spent a lot on books recently and some are still to be read. In fact my to read pile is pretty high now, and in danger of toppling over. Plus I've got a paperback to arrive, and I've subscribed to CrimeWave with an additional novella still to come.  So, I had already decided that I wouldn't be tempted by Waterstone’s and not even go into the shop for a browse. However, the buggers are sly.

Passing the shop I noticed through the window that all paperbacks are 3 for 2, even all science fiction paperbacks. So I went in and had a look. They have changed a lot of their stock too. I looked at PK Dick books but there was only Do Androids ... which I already have. I remember seeing Rendezvous at Rama by Arthur Clarke some weeks ago and nearly bought it but there was no sign of it this week. None of the Classic SF interested me either. As usual a lot of the SF was actually Fantasy and I’ve never been much into that.

I had a look around the crime and mainstream sections too but there wasn't much of interest, so I went back to the SF section and bought three Neal Asher books. I've enjoyed what I've read from him so far. So for my three for two I bought Line War, Brass Man and Shadow of the Scorpion. At the moment I'm halfway through an old pulp, The Spider - I got a reprint of two novels from eBay for under a fiver including postage - but I think I'll let myself sink into one of Asher's novels afterword.

The Peace Machine, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-03582-X

A little lacking in posts this month. The following has been ninety percent finished but has been sitting on my USB portable drive for close to a month. The good news is that I can get two posts out of it.

This is one of my favourite Bob Shaw novels, whether it is called Ground Zero Man or The Peace Machine. I first read it in paperback as Ground Zero Man and it fairly rolls along. It’s a cracking read and in my opinion is Shaw at his peak as a writer. The update, issued in hardback by Gollancz as The Peace Machine in 1985, is more or less Ground Zero Man with some updates on a topical references such as television shows – although they are now ancient history references to televisions shows.

Shaw mentioned this novel in his HOW TO WRITE SCIENCE FICTION Book, making a comment that some people thought he should move into thrillers on the basis of this book. And I agree that Shaw would have made a good thriller writer. At his best Shaw is not only a master at plotting but also a master at building suspense and piling the pressure on his characters.

It starts off intriguingly, with the main character telling us ‘My finger rests lightly on the black button’ and who wouldn’t be intrigued by that?

The rest of the novel is in the third person and brings us answers to questions posed in the prologue. Lucas Hutchman is staring at a piece of paper and finds himself in a cold sweat. He is in his office and despite interruptions from other people the thought dancing through his head and filling him with excitement and some fear is ‘I can make neutrons dance to a new tune’. Hutchman takes the afternoon off and as he drives home we get an inkling into his marriage and the personality of his wife, and while he is pursuing his hobby of archery we learn that his ability to control neutrons meant he could build a nuclear machine; one that Hutchman insisted would be an anti war machine.

Then comes the news that Damascus is in flames because a nuclear bomb exploded over the city. This affects Hutchman deeply and deepens his resolution to create the machine that will stop all governments from keeping nuclear weapons. As his relationship with his wife goes back and forth Hutchman commences the project of building a machine that he hopes will bring peace to the world. Hutchman too goes back and forth about the Peace Machine; if he can be brave enough to use it or if he knew deep in his heart that he would never cross that line.

The decision is taken from his hands and Hutchman by the actions of his wife and Hutchman is put on a path that eventually brings him to the attention of the authorities. Intrigue, kidnaps and deaths follow as Hutchman tries to stay ahead of the authorities and use his invention to save the world from itself.

I found it a very enjoyable novel when I first read it in paperback and equally enjoyable when I read the updated and revised edition in Gollancz hardback when it was reissued in 1985. As I’ve said I feel this is Bob Shaw at his finest. The writing is crisp and elegant, the book is well plotted and the characters feel real, even minor characters. The situation isn’t as relevant or as oppressing as it was in the seventies when it was first issued and in the eighties when it was re issued. Nineteen eighty five was a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall and the USSR. After the fall of the USSR nuclear weapons and the nuclear standoff that is pivotal in this novel more or less disappeared. Nowadays the enemy is a lot more difficult to identify and no one knows where to point their nuclear weapons.

The epilogue to the book, like the prologue, is in the first person, and the book ends a little pessimistically but this doesn’t detract from any aspect of the book and is, in a way, quite fitting.

Portable Probs.

My U3 portable drive has been acting up a little lately, and it feels loose and ready to fall apart. I’ll use it for as long as I can but I’ve invested in a new drive for under a tenner as a replacement.

I bought another Sandisk Cruzer drive but the U3 installer insists that it isn’t and turned its nose up at it, refusing to acknowledge its existence let alone install the program on it. So I installed the free portableapps menu on it and copied over files and documents. It meant downloading some programmes again in portable app format instead of U3 format and that ran away with a fair amount of bandwidth, but it does come with its own backup program. On the U3 drive the program that I use to backup comes in two flavours, low volume free and unlimited paid for.

One of the good things about using the portable apps instead of U3 is that it lead me to a site where there was a program that allowed you to use Windows Live Writer on a portable drive – I’m using it to write this post – along with a few other programs I looked at before but never tried. Unlike U3 – the U3 website has totally gone now and I don’t think it will be back – all the portable apps programs are free. U3 had a lot of free programs but also a lot were paid for. The prices for the programs ranged from dirt cheap to bloody extortionate.

I haven’t read a novel in weeks. The last one was Ghosts of Manhattan, a pretty decent story of a hero in an alternate world at the early part of last century, even if it was about a third too long. (It was while reading that book that I noticed –some- books nowadays have at least 1 1/2 line spacing and not single line spacing: when did that start and how come I didn’t notice it before?) Since then it’s been short stories all the way; the Captain Midnight hardback edition  (paperback edition) ordered a few months ago has arrived, The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions signed by six contributors also arrived this week and I’ve dipped into that, and the latest issue of Interzone dropped through my letterbox this week too.

Virus! Arrgh!

Well, more a serious malware program to be accurate. I came across something like it before at work. It stops anti-virus and malware programs from running so they can’t remove it from your system.  The one I experienced before didn’t stop web browsers so I could go online with information about it and find a way to remove it. The one that recently infected my machine was worse: I couldn’t reboot the machine successfully, or even load Windows in Safe Mode.

Norton Ghost came to the rescue. I slapped in the disk and loaded it up, less than an hour later my computer was in the state it was five days previous. It does automatic backups every Sunday and am I glad of those? Yes I am.

I checked the programs I have on the computer – some of them are dependent on activation – and they all ran fine. A little weird in that the Windows update history is completely gone. My computer says it is up to date but there is no list of all the updates that have been installed over the years.

And as I store all documents on my U3 disk I don’t have to worry about losing any recent files.

I never found out what the malware/virus was. I have malwarebytes on the system which I run every now and then. I’ll get a couple more as a precaution, maybe try and find one that works in real time. I’ll also see about getting a different firewall and not relying on the one that comes from Microsoft. Although it’s good it’s sort of anonymous and so a little unnerving as I’m unsure of what it’s blocking and what it’s letting through.

Book Binge

I didn’t mean to but I went on a sort of book binge today. I happened to be in a WHS today and browsing through it noticed they had a clearance on some books. I picked up an Ursula K Le Guin collection of short stories for two pounds; The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. Hopefully it will be more interesting than the previous collection of hers I picked up where I couldn’t get into any of the stories. I also picked up a novel set in ancient Rome for a pound and two Ben Elton novels for a pound each – they were sold together. Four books for a fiver. Not bad.

Then, minutes later, in Waterstone’s, I pick up another three for two. Right in front of me as I walk into the store was a signed edition of Transition by Iain Banks. No M in the name but it deals with parallel worlds and the time between the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. I remember it had some mixed reviews when it came out last year but it sounded interesting enough for me to pick it up and give it a try.

Although, as it’s a signed copy, perhaps I should keep it pristine (?). More than likely it was a batch lot signed by Iain Banks for Waterstone’s, or for the publishers to distribute to booksellers. But, seeing as he lives a stone’s throw from Kirkcaldy (or, as he has been quoted as saying – with Kirkcaldy being in the constituency of Smiler Brown – a ‘mortar lob away’:) ) there is a also every chance the shop got copies signed by him direct.

The three for two was rounded off with another collection of short stories (supposed to be as rare as hen’s teeth nowadays as short stories ‘don’t sell’ but I’ve picked up a few main stream collections recently) and the 5oth anniversary edition of To Kill A Mockingbird, which was the one I got ‘free’.

Also I have a copy of The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer to be winging its way across the Atlantic any day now. This is a collection mostly about Philip Jose Farmer and is a limited edition. I’ve been told my copy is number 128 and it’s being signed by the authors attending FarmerCon V.

It seems like I spent most of my time online updating laptops, which for some reason seems to take at least half an hour per update. There is the downloading of the updates then the installing of the updates and then the obligatory reboot; nine times out of ten after install of updates I was informed there were further updates available. And round it went.

Blogger re design

I tried to change the design of this blog a couple of times with Artisteer. The program works great with Wordpress but not so good with Blogger. It uploads all the files ok and the site appears for a second and then the whole site disappears from view while it goes searching for something. And it continues to search for a very long time. So I just chose another design within Blogger. The designing in Blogger has changed since the last time I used it.

It's not as straight forward as Worpress, the export to Blogger in Artisteer was a little more complicated and involved copy and paste of code - the second time; no such option was given  on the first attempt to change the Blogger theme. I'll stick to the inbuilt options for Blogger and use Artisteer for Wordpress only.

Warren Peace, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-04918-9

Warren Peace was published by Gollancz in hardback in 1993 but renamed as ‘Dimensions’ when it came out as a paperback – also published by Gollancz in the UK. It is the sequel to Who Goes Here?

I had this short review all ready until I realised something: it is also the last novel that Bob Shaw published. It has been said that Shaw went through a period of writer’s block: indeed during the eighties and nineties Shaw released revised and updated versions of his works. For books like Ground Zero Man and The Shadow of Heaven this may have been justified as they had limited releases in the UK on their first outing. For a while Shaw issued a book a year: indeed during the seventies there were sometimes two per year, with the latter part of the seventies perhaps his most productive time.

Although saying Warren Peace is a sequel may not be entirely accurate as the book takes the story, characters and situation to a different level.

Peace is now one of the Oscars, the elite Golden Supermen who have no need for food, drink or sex. But Warren is not happy with his situation. In fact he is bored rigid. We meet him on the eighth day of the Oscar Galactic Jamboree and he is not having any fun at all. Luckily for Warren he comes across a group of criminals who are getting ready to attack the Oscars.

Warren thinks the plan is to strand the Oscars on the planet but the big glowing purple rock that is dropped on them and kicked away into space by Warren has more implications.

The rock turns out to have been Pryktonite, which for Oscars is a fate worse than death – it turns them back into human beings.

The Oscars quickly deduce that this is the work of the Galaxies greatest villain, Jeeves. Jeeves has evaded the Oscars by reverting to his nice side any time he is captured. However, his evil side will want revenge on the person who foiled his plan to eliminate the Oscars: Warren Peace.

The Oscars want to protect Warren but Warren doesn’t want to be bored to death by their lifestyle. He is still kept within the Oscars but sent to worlds where the Oscars can’t do much. His first job is at the sea planet Golborne where he has to work out what exactly is the alien porn that keeps turning on the workers called squelchers.

It is on this planet that Peace is caught in an elaborate trap laid out by Jeeves, who, in classic villain style, explains the trap to Peace. It seems that Jeeves’ assistant, Wimpole, didn’t get the black holes needed for the plan but instead got Puce Holes, which have an entirely different effect.

Peace thinks he has only been displaced in space due to the actions of Jeeves. His ship is lost in waters as he lands. The situation becomes confusing as Warren tries to figure out where and when he is without making the locals suspicious – it doesn’t work as the local Landlord gets angry at Warren a couple of times; the threat of violence which he manages to extricate himself from.

Warren quickly concludes that he is in another universe, where time and circumstances were different and society grew in a different direction. His next step was to go to Manchester, where they built spaceships. Warren gets a job as a draughtsman and his next plan is to work out how to get back to his universe and tackle Jeeves.

To be honest the book is a bit of a mish-mash, and I think Shaw padded it out with a couple of short stories from elsewhere as the first part of the book is a little episodic, something similar to Ship of Strangers which was a novel created from previously published short stories.

This doesn’t stop it being tremendously enjoyable – although not quite as funny as the predecessor Who Goes Here – particularly when Warren finds himself in an alternate world with a close to Victorian society. Personally I found too many situation changes for my liking. Generally there is only one real twist in most novels, which should occur halfway through. With Warren Peace there are a couple which, although it doesn’t spoil enjoyment of the book, didn’t ring right either.

This may have worked a little better if it wasn’t linked to Who Goes Here? An entirely separate hero going through the latter half of the novel may have been more entertaining and rewarding. Certainly the predicament Warren finds himself in halfway through the novel is very far removed from the central premise and the central threat of Jeeves.

The Jeeves/Oscar storyline could have been issued on its own and the time/alternate universe story could easily have stood on its own.

But we have this novel from Bob Shaw, his last. Not by any means his best but a good solid novel revisiting familiar characters and exploring high concept ideas. The alternate universe was well drawn and well thought out and would have been fun to explore further.

Upgrades

I upgraded the laptop today with more memory. It arrived quite quickly and was no problem installing. Switched the laptop on and the new memory worked like a dream.  Although there is a notable difference with most of the programs one is giving an error since the memory was installed. I'm not too bothered as it is a program that I hardly use, and I got it free from a computer magazine about four or five years ago.

Still getting problems with Firefox V2 so I downloaded and installed the portable version of Google Chrome. When I first tried it Chrome it wouldn't open several sites, including ansible.co.uk, u3.com, and a few others but since then I have been able to access some of them. U3 dot com hasn’t been available for the last few times I’ve tried to access it and maybe it’s gone for good. This is a shame as it’s about the only place where I can get official U3 software which, in my opinion, is far superior to Portable App software.

I’ve tried Chrome and it’s ok; not as fast as people say it is and it doesn’t have any menus. It imported the Firefox bookmarks no problem but I’ve still to get the saved passwords into it. Even though it’s portable the default setting for importing is to look at the browser on the hard drive.

I use Windows Live Writer for blogging (write once blog many times) and I’ve also upgraded that by adding other Windows Live components. The main one being Windows Live Mail. Again it’s quite good. I added a few email addresses and it went and got the emails with no problems – Yahoo involved only entering the email address and password, no POP3 settings or outgoing mail server requests that you get from other email programs.