News and Views From my kids accomplishments, to my heretical perspective of the world

Last week Mom sent me an email. She has started doing the daily “Sudoku” puzzles in the local Tribune newspaper , but she asked me if I could create a computer program to make it easier for her to play them. She complained that she was erasing holes in the paper!

So I threw something together, and here it is, complete with help file and 5 games to practice on.

As I developed the program I had to play the games to make sure it worked, and became intrigued by them. They are more interesting than I thought at first glance; some careful logic can usually solve them pretty quickly, though for the more difficult ones I’m sometimes reduced to trial and error in places.

Anyway, give it a try and you might find that you enjoy them too.

If you installed the new 1.5 version of Firefox, you may have noticed a bug. If you print a selection, or a selected set of pages, images don’t print correctly. They come out all black, or black and grey stripes.
The developers are aware of the problem and there’s a Release Candidate version available that fixes the problem. I installed this version and that problem has gone away, but as an RC it might not be completely stable, and there are risks of other bugs

However, if this printing problem bugs you as much as it bugged me, you can download the RC 1.5.0.1 version here.

The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of their Thunderbird Email client, Version 1.5.

The release notes are sparse and vague. Looks like mostly security and stability improvements, with a few new features. One improvement is that it will recognize headers set by Spam Assassin on your mail server, and automatically classify the message as junk.

I downloaded it and ran the install, and it found and replaced my version 1.07 with no problems.

I just saw that you can set a filter to automatically delete messages from the POP server based on criteria you set. I set up a filter that will delete messages that have “****SPAM****” in the subject, so I guess I don’t even need the “recognize SpamAssassin” improvement mentioned in the paragraph above. Don’t do this unless you are comfortable with the way your filters are set on SpamAssassin, or you will lose valid email!

I have a nice insulated coffee cup that has a screw-on cap with a rubber O-ring seal. Putting the cap on has been very frustrating for me over the two years I have owned it. Sometimes I gently screw the cap on, and the seal is good, no coffee leaks. Other times no matter how hard I twist it on, the lid leaks. I can remove and replace it several times, and it still leaks. I thought the problem had gone away around last April, but it came back again a couple of months ago.

I have been putting up with this all this time, and then the other day I happened to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and a simple demonstration that Richard Feymann did to show what had caused it. He placed a piece of the shuttle O-ring into a glass of ice water and when he pulled it out, the O-ring was brittle and hard. The cold morning of the Challenger flight had made the O-rings inflexible, thus allowing gases to leak and ignite, causing the explosion.

The same thing was happening to my coffee cup. If the lid (and O-ring) was warm, which usually was the case in the summer, the seal was good. But on these cold winter mornings the O-ring is inflexible and doesn’t seal well. I’ve gone to running hot water over the lid, especially over the O-ring, and now I get a good seal every time.

Physics at work in every day life!

Gisele got a new computer for Christmas, with a “Dual Processor” CPU. The technical details: It’s an Intel 820, which runs at 2.8 GHz. She has 1Gig of Dual DDR2 RAM, and a fast SATA hard drive.

I did some playing around with it to see if I could tell any difference between her computer and mine, which is a 2.6 GHz (single CPU) with similar RAM and hard drive. Both computers are running Windows 2000. Of course, hers has a newly installed OS, while mine has accumulated stuff for two or three years, so it’s not a completely fair test, but anyway…

The dual CPUs are supposed to divide the work between the processors, with (as I understand it) one focussing on whatever you have in the foreground, while the other handles the background tasks. If the foreground program is written to take advantage of the dual processors, then that program can also see performance improvements, but not many programs are so written.

I did a couple of qualitative tests:

1) Just running single applications, I didn’t notice much difference. Opening and running Firefox or Open Office seemed to take about as long on either computer.

2) You know how during startup, while the system is putting icons on the tray, loading the virus scanner, etc, you can click on the start button or an application and it pretends to acknowledge you, but it takes a long time for anything to come up. With Gisele’s computer it seemed to respond much more quickly, while the booting continued in the background.

3) I started the virus scanner doing a full system scan in the background, then ran various programs in the foreground (Firefox, Open Office). I couldn’t even tell the virus scan was running. Everything was fast and responsive. On my computer the foreground slows down perceptibly while scanning for viruses.

Next year Intel is coming out with new versions of the dual processor CPUs, which are supposed to share memory better and therefore perform even better. Quad processors are due out soon after that, but Windows 2000 can’t handle a quad (or more) processor and I’m loathe to install an activation-required OS from Microsoft. However, along with these multi-processor CPUs, there will be new software for running multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer, so that might be the time to start phasing in Linux. I’ve tried VMWare on my current computer, but the background OS just takes up too much of the CPU and slows down the foreground OS too much. But with dual processors, that shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll see!