Sure, there have been bad times, and to be honest, of late, I’ve used my desktop much more than my laptop except for when I go out or when my big pregnant body is more comfortable typing while sitting on a birthing ball than on my desk chair. And it wasn’t the most convenient laptop of all time – I did need to drag my PCMCIA WiFi card with me all the time, and everything about it was bulky and inconvenient. And the bad times were bad… the time my evil husband accidentally got snow in my laptop (and my ensuing freakout afterwards when it didn’t work for a couple of days), and the first cascade of malfunctions (battery dying -> adapter frying -> motherboard snap-crackle-popping), and the endless trying to get WiFi card drivers working under Linux… this pretty much sucked. But for the most part, it’s been an excellent tool and I’ve used the heck out of it.

The first cascade of malfunctions, though, happened after about 2 years. Fortunately, it was still on warranty, and so once the motherboard was replaced (and I got a new adapter and battery), all was good again. Now it’s about two years later, and all of a sudden, the same things are happening again. The battery isn’t holding as much charge, and for some reason, when the adapter is plugged in, it will occasionally go to battery power for a split second, and there’s sort of a random chance the computer will shut down during that second, which, if I’m very unlucky, has a tendency to corrupt things I’d rather not have corrupted. The adapter itself isn’t in great shape, and, well, I’m not going to be really surprised if the motherboard goes next, although I’ve no real technical reason to believe it will other than the fact that I sort of suspect the last time it went it had something to do with the crappy adapter doing something naughty (I’m just guessing that based on the sound it made when it died…). The point is this – it’d cost me about half as much to get a new adapter and battery for this gigantic mammoth of a laptop as it will cost me to get another (newer) laptop, and I’ve given in.

Ever since my evil husband pointed out the really, really small and lightweight ASUS Eee 4G which came out this month (and costs about $400), I’ve been thinking of getting one. Sure, there are more powerful laptops out there for only slightly more than this one, but this little guy is small and has everything I really need. It runs Linux (though it apparently can run XP), which is all I really need in a laptop, and while it doesn’t have a whole lot of storage space, Linux doesn’t really need it – when I use my laptop, I need something with WiFi and ethernet, some USB ports for devices, some sort of removable storage (this guy takes SD cards, as does our new videocamera, so it’s all good!), and the ability to run the applications I need. I don’t need a gaming PC, I don’t need to run heavy office applications (and if I did, there’s always OpenOffice), and I’m not going to be doing a whole lot of heavy processing on it (most of the time, if I need to do big computations, I can do them on some other computer or over the network, so no big deal…). But I also don’t want a handheld phone-plus-some-web-apps device – that’s not enough computer for me, and I can’t change the OS on it or anything else. This little guy has what I want and lacks what I don’t, so really, this seemed like a good fit for me. No need to carry a bunch of peripherals (a USB stick and an SD card are *nothing*, and I don’t need a DVD-ROM drive on my laptop), and it’s easy to carry. Considering that I’m going to be carrying something much heavier for most of my days in the near future, a lightweight laptop is just the thing

And now, now that my poor laptop has decided to leave me… now my new little 2-pound laptop is on its way. It probably won’t come until after the baby does, but given the fact that going out to the coffee place to write is becoming increasingly uncomfortable anyway, I think I can do without a laptop for a while. I’m pretty sure that once the baby gets here, the laptop is not going to be on the top of my list of things to be thinking about anyway

So to my lovely, incredibly large laptop, I say goodbye, and thanks for the hard work.

From the post, we find that if you buy a Cisco switch, you may be fortunate enough to get gems like:

• “for glue the sex rubber mat (be applicable to 16/24 give cones change the machine)”, and
• “a fast ether lord fucking net ascending”

I think now would be a good time for my friend Rob, net geek and master of all personal technologies, to explain just exactly what alternate uses these Cisco products actually have…

I mean, I never thought buying a switch could be so, um, exciting…

But just for kicks… it’s been around 300 days since I wrote that post, and the average number of hits per day from around the beginning has been about 100. Even if you presume 30% of those hits were from people who absolutely love U3 or who were looking for something else (and I think the roughly 200 negative comments on the post indicate that’s probably being pretty generous), that’s still about 20,000 people who thought U3 sucked. You got that, SanDisk? Since this blog, right now, has just under 40,000 hits, that means that most folks who’ve bothered to come to my quiet little corner of the Blogosphere came here to find a way to get rid of your software…

What’s really funny is that the stats drop happened all at once. Like, Monday, it got 202 hits (pretty normal, lately). Tuesday: 56 hits. Wednesday: 28. All at once, I tell you …

Perhaps the U3 guys got annoyed and decided to try to do something about their search rankings Alternately, WordPress changed its stats counter again. (Or insert your own hilarious conspiracy theory here! )

Either way, I couldn’t care less – I do think it’s rather amusing that these guys got bitten for their bundled, involuntarily installed software that apparently messed up a lot of people’s systems.

But as a farewell to U3, I thought I’d give all you U3-haters a treat that my husband sent me a few weeks ago via Slashdot. Apparently there’s an Information Week article stating that Sandisk will abandon its U3 technology in favor of a partnership with Microsoft to “carry a complete image of their desktops around in their pockets.” From the article:

As part of the plan, SanDisk will phase out its U3 technology, which adds some smart features to USB devices. Independent software developers that have created U3-compatible applications will be offered help migrating their products to the new technology, which has yet to be named.

Now, I don’t know that the resultant Microsoft/SanDisk product will be any better – but it will probably be more clearly advertised, since these guys seem to want to make money specifically off of the technology rather than stealth-bundling (and yes, I do think that showing the “feature” in small print on an unbelievably cheap drive is stealth-bundling).

I’m not any more likely to buy one of these guys than I am to intentionally use U3, but I do have some advice for Microsoft and Sandisk this time: either let users install the new software themselves, or give them a very clear reference to how to get rid of it if they don’t want it. Preferably, if you preinstall your software on the drive, you should include the removal software with the disk and let users decline anything that might be installed on the desktop from the get-go, and give them the option to uninstall your software from the thumb-drive the first time they plug it in.

If you can’t do that, don’t advertise it as a thumb drive. People have certain expectations for what thumb-drives do, and screwing up multiple systems by installing software and messing up drive settings arbitrarily on every computer they touch isn’t one of them, unless they’re infected with a virus. Package it instead, in big letters, as a “Windows-only desktop replication device”. With a big warning that it will screw up your CD-ROM drive settings for no apparent reason. And possibly eat your dog when you’re not looking

It is amazing to me that even for someone who is, I think, fairly cognizant of the crap that’s gone on for the past 5 years, it is still easy to forget what really went on. What can still go on. What probably will continue to go on. And I seriously cannot fathom why more people – Democrats, Republicans, whoever (this is a citizens’ issue, not a partisan one) – are not screaming bloody murder about the conversion to unverifiable, basically unsecured, easily-hacked voting machines. Sure, having no paper trail (and no reason to look at one) keeps things less messy – nothing to recount if irregularities occur, so we just have to accept the result – but it’s a disaster for our democracy. My point about there being no reason to look at a paper trail is, I guess, a reflection of my feeling that if the politics are played just right, more often than not, people won’t even look at the paper trail if there is one. But it’s better than nothing, and a physical record that the voter can verify – and deposit himself somewhere – is vital.

Getting it right with electronic voting systems isn’t easy; designing such a system – and only a thumbnail sketch of one at that – was the PhD qual question for my information security final back in my CS days, and I remember that every time I was ready to add another component to the system, the nagging questions of accountability, verifiability, authentication, and integrity would pop up in some ugly way or another and I’d have to consider another path. I’m not a systems expert by any means, but it’s not easy, and as far as I can tell, all Diebold and company have gotten right is “easy to tamper with” and “easy to screw up.” Go Diebold! Hell, I can do that much, and I’m much cheaper.

By the way, if you think “all the kinks have been worked out” by now, and that folks like me are just getting all worked up over nothing, I urge you to have a look at Avi Rubin’s post about his day as an election judge in Maryland last month. For those who don’t know, Avi Rubin is not just some guy off the street – he’s a professor at JHU who does work in (among other things) electronic voting security, and he’s a smart guy. Particularly confidence-inspiring is the account of the well-trained and competent Diebold technician <insert sarcasm here> and how the machines malfunctioned pretty spectacularly.

Last month, folks. You can bet that not a whole lot will change by November.

You know the push for folks to vote absentee if their precinct allows them to cast a no-excuse absentee paper ballot? I’m thinking hard about it. In fact, the Denver Election Commission webpage actually encourages it:

Absentee Ballot Application

Please consider applying for an Absentee Ballot to vote by mail. This is the most convenient way for you to vote. The ballot comes to your home, you take your time reviewing the issues (but observe deadlines, see Elections Calendar), you send in the ballot, and your vote is cast. Simple and easy. Vote Centers indeed take voting in person to a new level of convenience, but the Absentee Ballot surpasses even that.

It won’t change the election if I do it, but if enough people do, who knows? On the other hand, absentee ballots by mail are certainly no panacea – it’s easy to just “lose” paper ballots that come in by mail; what you need, in some sense, is a chain of custody for the physical votes, and I’m not sure dropping something off at the post office does that. But it may be as close as most people can get for the moment. Denver does use machines that apparently produce a paper trail – I still don’t like the fact that even though you get to see the paper record, you do not get to physically deposit it somewhere yourself, however; I think it would be too easy for someone to go in and, in the guise of repairing the machine or switching the tape, replace it with another one, or for the machine to produce a second, different record. I don’t know anything about this machine in particular, but I honestly don’t understand why people were so hot to go to machine voting in the first place, except that the crooks in office saw an opportunity for more dirty tricks and knew the American public reveres technology without understanding it.

Guys, just because something is done using a computer, there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be better or correct. Trust me. Programmers are a tricky lot (we have two living in this two-person household, and we’re not to be trusted ), and in this case, it wouldn’t take much to falsify data.

In the meantime, if there are any more interesting “election surprises” this year in rampantly Democratic districts, I’ll be in the bathroom. Retching.

Do what you can to make your vote count this year, whoever you’re voting for. Do what you can do ensure everyone else’s does too, whether you agree with them or not. And whatever you do, vote.

Edit: I’m slow (and busy)… The Rocky Mountain News reported in mid-September that a lawsuit had been filed to ban the use of electronic voting machines in Colorado after Ed Felten’s group’s demonstation showing the easy compromise of such machines; according to a follow-up article, Denver District Judge Lawrence Manzanares said it was too late to ban them, but agreed with the plaintiffs that the Secretary of State’s office had not tested the machines adequately (including having a total non-expert – in fact as well as according to Colorado law – as the person charged by the Secretary of State with testing them, according to the Denver Post) and ordered chain-of-custody rules for the machines and other measures designed to prevent hacking or tampering.

The Colorado Democratic Party is calling on voters to cast absentee ballots by mail for the fall 2006 election. The last day to apply by mail for an absentee ballot is October 31, 2006; the last day to apply in person for an absentee ballot is November 3, 2006. Ballots must be received by 7 pm on November 7th (Election Day). More information (and a form to apply for an absentee ballot) can be found here – note that the address is for Denver voters, and that if you live elsewhere in CO, you’ll need to find the correct address for your area to submit the form to.

I saw this nice little 1GB USB flash drive when I was in Wisconsin last week for 30 bucks (after instant rebate) at a Best Buy. I was there for something else, but my dad had just misplaced his USB drive just before an extended consulting trip to North Carolina, and I figured I’d call and ask if he wanted me to pick one up for him. (My question was really whether I should buy one or two – 30 bucks is a very nice price for a decent amount of storage, and I figured Christian and I could certainly use it.)

So 60 bucks later, I left Best Buy with two little USB drives. They’re nice and small, have a retractable USB connector, and don’t have a cap to lose (which may or may not be a good thing). I thought it was a good buy in any event. When I got to the car, though, I noticed the fine print about U3 technology and some crappy software bundled on the drive (Skype with a free month of voicemail, some password storage software, and an anti-virus package, I think). Eh, I thought to myself. I’ll just wipe it when I get home. As I’ve implied before, I don’t really like companies deciding what’s installed on my hardware for me.

Well, I finally unpacked the thing today, and for some reason or other decided to look up this U3 stuff before I plugged the thing in. I like to know what devices and software are going to do before I let them run amok on my system. Sure enough, Amazon’s reviews of the drive had lots of complaints about the U3 Launchpad application running everytime the drive was plugged in, lots of undesirable stuff going on in the background, errors if the drive was not removed using the U3 tool instead of the Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” application, etc.

Ewww… I thought. This could suck… Bunches of people griping about it can’t mean anything good.

Of course, I’ve overestimated people before.

But after finding out how to fix it and forwarding the link to my father (who I hadn’t talked to since he got to North Carolina and started using the thing), I found out even he had had trouble with it. He’s a darned smart cookie, and he was pretty irritated:

It is REALLY annoying. It even told me that I had removed it improperly without using the f@3$%$*** eject button, even though I had disabled it from windows. … [I] will fix it after I transfer my files, but it’s nice to know that I don’t have to throw the damned thing away!

So I figured posting the fix might not be a bad thing, and might speed up some frustrated person’s search on how to get rid of the unwanted software. Fortunately, poking around at the SanDisk site reveals that it’s pretty easy to get U3 and all of the associated crap off of your drive.

Here’s how it goes, if you’re running Windoze (I don’t know if U3 even runs for other OSs, so if you’re running MacOS X or a *nix distro, the fix may be as simple as just formatting the drive):

1. If you’ve used the device before, make sure you’ve gotten everything off of the drive you need. You’ll be reformatting it. (The application may have an option that allows you to keep the data – I don’t remember – but better safe than sorry.)
2. Plug in the drive – the U3 launchpad will load. You can close the U3 tour program and whatever main window pops up if you like, but leave the U3 launchpad icon in the system tray enabled (i.e. don’t exit the launchpad application entirely).
3. Download SanDisk’s U3 Launchpad Removal Tool (opens in new window) – as the site says, make sure the USB device is plugged in and Launchpad is still running.
4. Run the tool, and choose the option which completely removes U3 and formats the drive.

Voilà, you now have a regular old USB drive which you can break in any way you want.

(Edit: If the SanDisk tool above doesn’t work for you, you might try the uninstall tool from u3.com – thanks to Olaf for the information. I had no trouble with the SanDisk tool, but I can only speak for myself!)

I admit that I am not a fan of bundling unwanted applications with devices or other software. Hell, I get annoyed with programs that install links to URLs for internet providers on my desktop, let alone executables that hide on my disk doing God-knows-what. (Well, ok, I have a pretty good idea as to what, but that’s only because I take the time to find out and eradicate them.) This is just one more example of how companies think it’s really OK to do whatever they want with your machine once you’ve bought something from them – purchase this OS, and you tacitly agree to relinquish control of your data. Purchase this DSL package, and you agree to have MSN as your ISP, even if you don’t need the service. Purchase this hardware, and you agree to let data be tracked that you would otherwise keep private or to run certain applications on your machine that you have no desire or need for.

Now, I understand that part of the reason that drive was so cheap was probably because there was some monetary incentive to SanDisk to push U3 out to consumers. And it was easy enough to get rid of once I looked for a solution. But let’s face it – Joe Blow who uses his CD drive for a cup holder and thinks he breaks the Internet every time his connection lags is not going to know how to find a solution. My feeling is that unless the software is clearly advertised on the packaging along with an explicit mention of how to get rid of the software, companies have no business installing or running anything on your machine that is not directly related to the product you intended to buy.

I loooooove corporate America. Yes, yes I do.

Standard disclaimer: If anything breaks as a result of following any instructions anywhere on this site, the responsibility lies with you, not me. I’m a poor academic – suing me would be pointless anyway…

(Added 1/10: Thanks to Jim C. for the updated Sandisk removal link.)