Got the US maps for the TomTom GPS but they didn’t work on my Treo because my version of TomTom is version 5 and the maps would only work with version 6. I could have ‘upgraded’ with version 6 but who knows what wouldn’t have worked then.

With hindsight it might have been worth the risk of upgrading to version 6 as when in the US I ended up buying 3 or 4 maps, and these were just for Los Angeles. I couldn’t find a map with detail i.e. road names for Greater Los Angeles so you end end up with one for LA County, another for Orange County, another for Long Beach and yet another for the Santa Monica/Venice Beach/Malibu area.

If the A-Z company produced a map of LA with as much depth as their A-Z of London they’d make some money.

After yesterday finding out just how large my registry keys had got I ran a few registry checkers to see if they could get rid of any detritus. Ran at least 4 checkers and they all found a hundred or so issues which I let them fix. Odd how all of these registry checkers promise to remove unused keys etc yet all find different issues. The first checker finds 100 or so issues which I let it fix. Then I run a second checker, which also promises the same thing, and which I figure shouldn’t find any issues as the first checker has run and fixed every issue it could find, right? Wrong, the second checker finds another 100 or so issues which it fixes. Same for registry checkers 3 and 4.

There are some people who would actually try and convince you how the previous scenario is actually correct. They have a bit of a blind spot regarding software. If an application does something in a certain way then it must be correct and that it’s really a user misunderstanding problem.

I was having trouble with Nero on XP the other day so thought I’d try the DVD writing software on Vista. Loaded up the VOB file to write to the DVD and I got a run32.dll error message. Retried and got same message.

Run32.dll is a library file that allows a dll file to be run as an application, which I assume is loaded at Windows start.

I’ve started reading a book on the phenomenal growth of IT in China and India*. I’m a bit of a sucker for these kind of books so as soon as I saw it I had to buy it, if for no other reason than to scare the bejesus out of myself.

Seems that everybodies moving to these countries. One of the obvious reasons is that development costs are cheaper. Having said that even within these countries development costs vary so much so that one Western IT company actually upped sticks in one part of China and moved to another even cheaper area of China. Apparently competition in these countries is fierce and each city, town or IT development area wastes no time in criticising the next bunch down the road (Sounds like they have a reasonable understanding of capitalism then. Ed).

Some of the problems they do have in China are that there is a very serious water shortage problem, they have an aging demographic, obviously not helped by the one child policy and also the banking system is handicapped by bad loans. The bad loans, as at 2006, is estimated at about $800 billion. They are also a bit stuck in factory mode in that they are great at manufacturing soft and hardware but not so good, at the moment, at innovation. Interesting. More to follow.

When I picked up the hire car from Alamo I had to get an upgrade to a Cadillac and it’s great. Californian’s are a bit obsessed with smoking here or rather people not smoking. Suppose it keeps their minds off the smog thing (ouch).

It rained here this morning, for about an hour. They have so little rain that when it does rain the local roads flood because the drains are blocked. 

* IT And The East – How China and India are altering the future of technology and innovation, by James M. Popkin & Partha Iyengar

Quote of the day

‘Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up’ Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931)

I wonder if peoples reticence in migrating to Vista, or even just getting a new PC running XP, is because they have accumulated so much data on their old PC that they’re worried about how to get that onto a new PC.

They’ve probably got a choc-a-block PC full of all their Word docs, spreadsheets, emails, pictures, music files, movie files, Internet Explorer links and game settings and that stuff is important to them and they don’t want to lose any of it. They’ve also probably got a bit of a nagging feeling at the back of their mind on what’s going to happen if their old PC fatally crashes.

Backing up data under XP

I suppose the first issue here is that backing up data is such a pain. Many of us know that we don’t need to backup everything, only user generated data. Now that might make sense to you and me but to a lot of users it isn’t necessarily so. All they want to know is that if something goes wrong that they can get back to base camp OK.

Of course they can write all of these files to a CD or DVD, and make a backup of that too if they have any sense. But these files are splattered all over their hard drives and the regular user is not necessarily going to know where they are stored, and why should he care where they are stored anyway. Most of the software he uses is written by Microsoft, as is the operating system, so between them they should be able to backup all this stuff, and it should be very simple and intuitive,  yet it just isn’t that simple.

Of course Vista does have a backup utility, as does Live One Care. Running in default mode both of these utilities do seem to be looking for all of these relevant files, plus more than you might expect. As a test I have just started both of these utilities to see what they would find. And oh boy, they found a lot. As this PC, I’m using right now, has been updated to Vista from XP there is a folder of old XP Windows files which included a lot of movie and music files. Nothing wrong with that except that the backup process wants to backup those files too, and because there are so many of these files, the total backup size is going to be numerous gigabytes. This would therefore necessitate a backup over more than a single disc. Not a good start. 

You can see that this is starting to get a bit complicated and maybe the user will start to lose confidence in all of this. Of course he can find his local geek to help him, but do we still need to rely on these guys. Shouldn’t backing up be a bit more user friendly and intuitive?

The test to do here is to check that the files to be backed up using both the default Vista backup utility and the One Care version are exactly the same, but life’s too short for that kind of thing, and unless the backup engine is the same I bet there are differences.

And what happens when the PC crashes and you try and restore from either of these backups of just user data. Is it going to work perfectly? Another test from hell. So much for regular backups in XP or other Windows variants.

Data migration to Vista

I think what the user really needs is an absolute bullet-proof, rock hard migration function built into any new version of windows. I know that this can all get very complicated by having multiple users of a PC but any new function for the migration of data should be performed on a user by user basis.

This is almost more important than any other new functionality within a new version of Windows. A lot of people would buy a new PC, having allowed Microsoft’s Windows to have gently trashed their current PC during its lifetime, just to get a stable version of Windows, like when it was originally bought. Provided the new Windows version manages the data migration perfectly so that the user has his old stuff on the new PC and it works 100% correctly then they’ll be happy. Imagine, you get a new Vista PC, run a migration application on both old and new PC’s and all your data and settings are on the new PC, just what everyone wants. And if by any kind of miracle Microsoft have actually managed to produce some further functionality that actually works well, then that’s a bonus.

Weather here is a bit warmer so spent morning messing in Santa Monica and afternoon in/at/on Venice Beach.

Quote of the day

‘A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation’ Saki (1870-1916)