How Can Anyone Take These Newspapers Seriously?

I opened up the local Minneapolis paper to the Business Section today and found an article titled "Winners And Losers From A Stronger Yuan." It only took two paragraphs to discover that the Associated Press' Christopher S. Rugaberl had a point of view:

China's decision to let its currency rise in value adds buying power to its exploding middle class — a win for American electronics makers, which can sell more computers and iPods to a hungry market.

At the same time, it puts a squeeze on U.S. retailers like Walmart because Chinese-made imports suddenly cost more.

(emphasis added)

Got that? It was good for the Chinese people but not bad for American people - just bad for those nasty American retailers! Whatever happened to symmetry? Well I suppose that was taught in Geometry Class. And they told the Journalism majors there would be no math!

Why no recognition that this might affect American consumers? Maybe because this guy and his administration had been calling for it. And the AP wouldn't say anything negative about him.

Top Load vs. Front Load Washers

Wintering in Cairo led us to be in the market for a washing machine.  The machines are pretty much limited to front loaders so we went with the flow and bought a popular model, the Zanussi Ideal.  We had a little familiarity with front-loaders from a recent visit to a friend who has one back in the states.

Check around the internet and you might find a chart like this one at About.com 

Now we already knew that there was at least one item missing from this chart based on conversations with our friend. Just try putting "front load washers stink" (don't include the quote marks) into Google and you will see what I mean.  There is a problem with mold building up on the gasket unless properly cared for.  Now we know about two more issues.  Check this vibration thread at houseblogs.net "Think Sikorsky helicopter hovering in the laundry room!" And, by the way, there is no opening the door and redistributing the load with a front loader either.  You just have to tough it through.

And the biggest think we noticed is expressed in this discussion thread.  Front load washer cycle time - is 115 minutes normal?

So, lets just revise that chart a bit:

The Expense of Health Care

Much of the concern with our present healthcare / healthinsurance system seems to center around cost.  "Bend the curve" of cost increases says the president - without much evidence that the bill before congress will do any such thing.

But why are the cost rising?  Carpe Diem, one of my favorite econ-blogs notes the increased use of "other people's money" as a cause.  And it probably is part of the problem.  But there are two fundamental issues that are easily overlooked.

First, there are a lot more older Americans than there used to be.  Frankly, it's us "old farts" that use the expensive parts of health care.  Treating my heart attack is more expensive than setting my son's broken leg.  And let's not forget the mom-in-law's hip replacement.

Remember that image of the babyboomers dominating the market for consumer goods twenty years ago?  Guess where they are now?

 

And the second reason for increased costs?  Well, we now can do something for the old folks.  Remember grandpa's treatment for a bad hip?  He got a cane.  Mom-in-law got a hip replacement. 

When president Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955, the standard treatment was six months of bed rest.  I believe that Mamie was instructed to cuddle up and "keep him warm!"  Today, we would have seen a stent inserted at a minimum but more likely a triple or quadruple bypass.

The reason we spend more money on healthcare is because:

• It's possible
• It's effective
• We have the money

The only real question is should I pay for my own stent or should I charge it to your children and grandchildren?  That's what the debate is really about.  And that's where professor Perry's "Other Peopl's Money" chart comes in.

(Note cross-posted at my numbers blog)

Recovery.gov Reports mm Jobs Created or Saved in Congressional District xx

There have been a lot of blog posts and newspaper articles written about Recovery.gov reporting results for the 57th district of Minnesota or "the fightin' 59th" of Illinois. But few focus on the real problem.

Since the site reports information from ordinary folks who receive "stimulus money," you can hardly expect them to know their congressman.


I once stood on the busiest corner of downtown Minneapolis during lunch hour while KTCA reporter Eric Eskola showed a picture of congressman Marty Sabo to passersby saying "Do you know who this man is?" I watched about 15 minutes of "uh, uh, no!" before anyone even came close.

But part of the job of programmers creating a website is to make sure that things like invalid congressional districts don't get past basic input edits! Try changing one digit in your credit card number the next time you input it on Amazon.com and see what happens!

A Congressional District input should be a wonderful learning tool. "Back in the day," we would have assigned a rookie programmer to handle this part of the coding on a project. "These two columns on the card contain the Congressional District," would have been stated to the rookie. "Make sure its valid."

With any luck at all, the rookie in question was a newly hired MBA from finance who had been sent down to the department to spend a few months "learning about computers". He'd been to programming school. Now the fun would start. Would he find a good source for his information? Would he only check to see if the input was numeric and less than some maximum? Would he allow "00"? Would he find the programming standard for tables? Would he document the table in understandable fashion? And the big one!"

So what are you going to do when the districts change after next year's census? ...Well, who do you think is going to make that change?

Eventually, everything would be fine and our MBA would go back to his "real" job upstairs. But years later when there was a major issue to work out in a possible acquisition or major restructuring and our MBA was now the CFO, he's the one who would say:

Let's get somebody from IT involved. Those guys have way of thinking through all the details and ramifications of stuff. We could really use that on this task force.

And that's the way it was.

And spending 18 million dollars to rework a website? We'll leave that for another post. But a lot of old MIS types are turning over in their graves.

Lumberjack or Logger?

I was browsing Amazon.com for books on lumbering and railroads around the 1900 era. Yes, I know, "strange tastes" and all that.

I meandered into the reviews for this book, "Glory Days of Logging/Action in the Big Woods, British Columbia to California" after Amazon caught me browsing through "Minnesota Logging Railroads." (Isn't it wonderful how Amazon does this? I recall disparaging them in the late 1990s when the stock market had given this profitless company a valuation exceeding General Motors - proof that the market does really know stuff about the future!) The author of the review has some pretty strong opinions about lumberjack versus logger:

(Please don't call them lumber-jacks. I never heard a man who works in the woods called a lumber-jack all my years going up in Oregon. Yet a recent TV show about the worlds most dangerous jobs constantly referred to them a lumber-jacks.)

I grew up in Oregon hearing both terms used. Of course, half of my family was from Minnesota. So, I thought, perhaps it is a regionalism. After all, shortly after I had moved from Oregon to Minnesota, I was having dinner at my future wife's house and my future mother-in-law said, "could you pass the hot dish, Tom?" I was at a loss for what to do - hell, most of the dishes on the table were hot! How was I to know that "hot dish" is Minnesotan for casserole?

So perhaps lumberjack is Minnesotan for logger? Wikipedia suggests that it is more a function of time than place. But our true Minnesota Lumberjacks are timeless:


And don't miss the Lumberjack World Championships in the Lumberjack Bowl when you visit Hayward, Wisconsin.

1980 Ford Fairmont - Abuse of Convention

This was our 1980 Ford Fairmont.

Purchased in the depths of an "Energy Crisis" - oil would soon be non-existent and we would all be walking or biking - here was my contribution to solving the world's problem!

This baby came with a 2.3L 4-cylinder engine and a four-speed manual transmission achieving an EPA rating of 23mpg. (The estimated MPG numbers for other similar sized cars ranges from 07 to 24 MPG.)

I remember this car as fondly as I do the 55 MPH National Speed Limit of the time. But we were in the Second Oil Crisis and still wanted to make trips to our lake cabin. And we needed enough room to haul that Afghan Hound too! What's a guy to do?



My least favorite feature on the Fairmont was its horn. Ford violated the common sense practice of putting a horn button where everyone else had been putting it for about 60 years - on the steering wheel. Someone had a better idea. The horn was activated from the turn-signal stalk. No I am not making this up!

Oh, what kind of actual mileage did I get? Mostly 27-28 with an occasional 30-31 for all highway driving.

How Many Processes Should be Running in a Clean Version of Windows XP?

Now there's a question that should be easy to answer. Just Google that phrase and see what you get!

If that weren’t bad enough, there are plenty of libraries of processes around the Internet.  But the one that I’ve run into seem a little shaky – especially when they allow readers opinions that then vary from “Part of the Operating System – Don’t delete!” to “Was a virus that killed my system”

I asked myself the “How Many” question a couple of years ago when I brought up the Task Manager on a friend's machine and saw 112 processes running. I knew that was bad. But what was good? I tried my own machine and found about 70. I vowed to answer the question for myself the next time I had to do an XP Install.

So, here we are. I put a brand new 500 GB hard drive in my Dell Vostro 1500 and re-installed Windows. This is the story of what happened, process by process. I will show you the processes as they are displayed in Task Manager. I operate under user TOM.

First I did the basic install and took a look before adding any drivers or utilities.

 

#	Image Name	User Name	Belongs to
1	svchost.exe	LOCAL SERVICE	Windows XP
2	alg.exe	LOCAL SERVICE	Windows XP
3	svchost.exe	NETWORK SERVICE	Windows XP
4	svchost.exe	NETWORK SERVICE	Windows XP
5	System Idle Process	SYSTEM	(Not really a process!)
6	System	SYSTEM	Windows XP
7	smss.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
8	csrss.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
9	winlogon.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
10	services.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
11	lsass.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
12	svchost.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
13	svchost.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
14	spoolsv.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
15	wmiprvse.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
16	msiexec.exe	SYSTEM	Windows XP
17	explorer.exe	TOM	Windows XP
18	taskmgr.exe	TOM	Windows XP
19	wscntfy.exe	TOM	Windows XP

 

That's pretty much basic Windows XP. Seventeen processes if you don't count taskmgr.exe which is required to display the processes and "System Idle" which is simply the processor not running anything.

Needless to say, things are not going to stay at seventeen very long!

My first surprise, though was this:
After sitting idle a bit, msiexec (the Windows Installer) and wmiprvse (Windows Management Instrumentaion) fell off leaving 15 real processes - seventeen displayed on the Task Manager list.

If you start Windows up in Safe Mode, by the way, you will find these same fifteen processes running except for:
alg.exe – part of Internet connectivity
spoolsv.exe – the print spooler
wscntfy.exe – the Windows security center
and one of the svchost.exe processes
so perhaps eleven processes is “minimum windows” or maybe as much as fifteen.  You make the call.  Either way, there’s not much happening at this point.  And what is happening is pretty slow going, especially on the screen.  Program windows and icons don’t move around very fast because the video acceleration capability of your video adapter is not being utilized.  So let’s add some drivers!

After adding drivers for Intel and Roxio chipsets, Nvidia Video card and both wired and wireless networking cards, we picked up 8 new processes, for a total of 23 real processes (again omitting Task Manager and System Idle) . From now on, with processes coming and going, I will just keep track of the numbers of new ones showing up.

18	wuauclt.exe	SYSTEM	Windows auto update
19	WLTRYSVC.EXE	SYSTEM	Dell Wireless
20	BCMWLTRY.EXE	SYSTEM	Broadcom Wireless
21	nvsvc32.exe	SYSTEM	NVIDIA graphics card
22	rundll32.exe	TOM
23	rundll32.exe	TOM
24	WLTRAY.EXE	TOM	Dell Wireless Tray
25	msmsgs.exe	TOM	Windows Messenger

again, after sitting idle a bit, one process, wuauclt.exe went away.

After adding some more drivers, the Firefox web browser, the TrendMicro antivirus system and the Dell Utilities to "make it a Vostro" we are up to 33 processes. Also we have used 4.91 GB on the hard drive and still don't have an honest application installed! Hey, does anyone remember the IBM PC XT with a 10MB hard drive? Here we have used 491 times as much disk space as there was on the XT and can't do a spreadsheet yet. Ah, progress.

New processes are:

26	firefox.exe	TOM	Firefox
27	quickset.exe	TOM	Dell Vostro Buttons
28	SfCtlCom.exe	SYSTEM	Trend Micro
29	stsystra.exe	TOM	Audio Driver
30	TMBMSRV.exe	SYSTEM	Trend Micro
31	TmPfw.exe	SYSTEM	Trend Micro
32	TmProxy.exe	SYSTEM	Trend Micro
33	UfSeAgnt.exe	TOM	Trend Micro

I use TrendMicro for my antivirus since it hasn't "broken" anything on any of my computers yet. This is much unlike Norton and McCaferty (yeah, I know the real name) whose annual upgrade processes have made some of my computers sicker than any virus and me madder than hell!

After adding Microsoft Office, a lot of data files, firing up Excel, running several tabs in Firefox and starting up Outlook Express for e-mail, I found myself at 36 processes.

New processes are:
 

34	ctfmon.exe	TOM	MS Office 2007
35	EXCEL.EXE	TOM	Excel 2007
36	msimn.exe	TOM	Outlook Express

Also another copy of svchost was added but msiexec.exe went away.
 

36

svchost.exe

SYSTEM

Not bad!. 36 processes running, very snappy performance! And in the process of adding a good amount of data, I increased disk usage to 17 GB.

Then I installed a copy of Zune software for my wife's Zune player that I gave her last Christmas. (Why a Zune? The FM Radio.)
This got me two Zune Processes
 

37	ZuneBusEnum.exe	SYSTEM	Zune
38	ZuneLauncher.exe	TOM	Zune

and as a surprise bonus, I also found
 

39

mscorsvw.exe

SYSTEM

running on the system!

I had to install an operating system upgrade to get the Zune program to load so this might have been the real culprit here.

It is hard to find a good description of what this process does, but it appears to be compiling some code on my system and some descriptions indicate that it may go away after awhile. We'll see.

This got us to a total of about 39 running processes. (37 without Task Manager and Idle)

Now actually connecting the Zune and synching it got me two more processes:

40	ZUNE.exe	TOM	Zune
41	WUDFHost.exe	TOM	Zune

for a total of 41 processes.

Overnight, Windows shut down after downloading a "critical" update. With the Zune disconnected, ZUNE.EXE went away but not WUDFHost.exe

And, O yes, mscorsvw.exe did go away.

Next I added in Photoshop Elements 3.0 plus did a reboot or two.
This gave me a total of 8 copies of svchost.exe running
Plus three new processes for the Photoshop Organizer contained in Elements.
 

42	PhotoshopElementsDeviceConnect.exe	SYSTEM	P.S. Elements 3.0
42	PhotoshopElementsFileAgent.exe	SYSTEM	P.S. Elements 3.0
44	PhotoshopElementsOrganizer.exe	TOM	P.S. Elements 3.0

After transferring 35,000 photos into the organizer, disk usage was up to 55 GB. The first computer I ever worked on held about 2mb on each reel of magnetic tape. So this is about 27,500 reels of tape.  Quite a tape library I have.

And with the comings and goings of a couple of the processes such as wscntfy.exe and wuauclt.exe we are at 44 processes - 42 without Task Manager and Idle.

For me, this should pretty much be my base system:
E-mail
Multi-tabbed Web Browser
Photoshop Organizer with my photos
Either Word or Excel
Zune awaiting connection

Anything over 44 processes is probably unnecessary or suspicious for me.

And, of course, as always happens, I missed one driver that comes with a running process:

45

SynTPEnh.exe

TOM

Synaptics Touchpad

that one is for the Synaptics TouchPad on the Vostro.
So make the new total 45.

I also noticed that TrendMicro received a quick update and that added two processes very briefly. I didn't get the names.

Well, of course your mileage will vary, mostly depending on your applications.  But I have now vowed to run task manager when I first fire up a new computer and store away what is running in the "initial state." By the way, if you do that and find much over 40 processes running, it is because your new computer is loaded with "crapware" and "nagware." In this case you must "de-crapify" the computer or do what I just did and reload the Operating System from scratch.

Or, I suppose you could just buy a Mac. But then, where's the fun?

And so now, as a public service to everyone who has read this far, lets conduct a poll:

How Many Processes Are Running on Your Copy of XP at the Moment?