IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.

Rosetta Stone,
originally uploaded by jj_mac.

Nearly a decade after Y2K recalled the antique programming language to mind, there are still crises caused by lack of COBOL knowledge:

Perhaps no state is as troubled as California, which has not met timeliness standards for nine years. As in most other states, its 30-year-old computer runs on Cobol, a language so obsolete the state must summon retirees to make changes.

Apparently there is no cadre of computer scientists interested in becoming adept in learning dead languages the same way there are philologists who devote their lives to classical and even more obscure tongues and their glyphs, and this knowledge is in danger of dying out.
I think there should be a project to take an existing COBOL program and translate it into another high-level language which can then be maintained when our retirees can no longer be counted upon to contribute. The original program would be preserved as comments to guide those who maintain the new code. Once the programs have been converted and passed through QA, the whole set of software can be migrated over, to serve as the new production system until that language, too, falls into disuse. Then the whole cycle can begin again.
Perhaps it is possible to define a Turing-complete language which is so easy to understand that its demise would be reckoned in centuries or millennia rather than decades. Ideally it would not rely on cues from any existing human language, as these undergo change and obsolescence, nor from any computer architecture beyond the most fundamental, in case there is a dark age and there is a loss of that technology. Also, it should reside on a durable medium, not on optical or magnetic storage only as those have not demonstrated the kind of longevity our descendants would be counting on. The best thing would be if it could designed to be self-generating, so that you could run it in a way to produce its own compiler from an executable image and a set of execution rules.
That way the survivors of the coming global catastrophe would only need to wait a week or two after emerging from their shelters before basic computing services could be restored, and after that the entire information processing ecosystem could be rebuilt from a source code repository somewhere.

A small request

Midtown Shadow,
originally uploaded by Automatt.

This weekend's release of Cloverfield reminds me of a little peeve I've had for the past couple of years, echoed by this article: haven't we had enough destruction of New York City up on the screen by now? So, we're still broken up by the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, sure, but there were other places devastated that day, not to mention all the other worthy places which have been visited with catastrophe and at least as photogenic as New York. I'm just asking for a bit of a moratorium, during which time I ask that the screenwriters of Hollywood incorporate a little more variety in their plots, a change of venue, or perhaps a plot where the metropolis is menaced but escapes disaster. (Right after the Writers Guild settles, that is.)

At least Steven Spielberg's H. G. Welles's remake only busted up Bayonne, over on this side of the river.

Oh, and while you're at it, could you maybe leave Ms. Liberty alone? Please?

True, the city in question has some things to answer for (such as the mayor, the former mayor, the crazy team owner, and the mogul), but that doesn't mean you have to keep dropping rocks and other unpleasant objects on the place so regularly.

I don't even get into NYC that often myself, but it's always out there on my horizon, and I know my wife has twinges of worry now and again about making her way back and forth every day. It would make it easier to conduct negotiations on what movies we'd like to go see, that's certain.

I was wondering how does one say...

pyromania in Greek?

greecefires_satellite,
originally uploaded by Darriuss Royce.

The whirlwind

Remember how relieved you felt when the hurricane season ended this year with zero hurricanes hitting the US mainland? Wasn't it a pleasant surprise not to see pictures and headlines about people who have lost everything, and the ones even less lucky to have lost their lives to the storm? Well I felt that way too, and I know it was a good thing.

Still, I would like remind people that the Pacific typhoon season has not been so kind (broken link) with super-cyclone Durian making landfall in the Philippines on southern Luzon and killing perhaps 700 people. Perhaps if you had a little money earmarked for charitable giving in case of natural disaster in this country, and ended up not needing to dip into it, you might consider a donation for disaster relief for the 100000 people affected by this typhoon? I don't have much to spare, myself, but sent in what we could afford.

They'd be perfect if we didn't need to run programs on them

The finish line is in sight for the two-week long odyssey of the computer rebuild hell which has made my outlook on life even gloomier than usual these days. Just today I read a column in the local paper about the importance of file backups, but I'm here to tell you that admirable as this endeavor is, it is simply not enough if you value your precious binary data.

The problem is that simply copying the data over to a new machine is not enough, even if you don't happen to need to go between different versions of the operating system. Even though I had the contact management and the bookkeeping data files from just before the old laptop died, they were basically useless without the programs themselves in running order, and it didn't take much difference between the layouts of the old and new machines to insure that the program files and configuration would not play nicely with my new setup. No, it was a matter of going back to original distribution CDs and reinstalling everything from the bottom up.

The trouble was that over time I seem to have acquired a hundred or more of the installation CDs, packed away in boxes and folders and sleeves, and I spent a long, long time looking for what I needed. Luckily I did find a Windows XP Pro installation disk I'd bought years ago when I thought I was going to upgrade my wife's Presario, a failed effort at the time, so with some effort I was able to set up a dual-boot arrangement on the laptop, making it a little less likely that I'd destroy everything I had. But the CRM and ancillary software installation disks were nowhere to be found, and I began to suspect that at the time I started up my business, the laptop was delivered to me without the installation media. If I were an independent operator I would have had a hard time getting these, but as a franchise member in good standing with my Home Office I was able to contact the IS people there who set up the machine and get some disks of the appropriate vintage sent out to me by overnight mail.

This is the basis of my current idea: I would like there to be a service which would take my installation disks and store them for me in some organized fashion. Including the vital license/serial number information and the documentation for installation. Maybe they'd just provide mailers so I could dump in the whole box the software came in, and periodically email me a list of the software they have on hand. I guess for software which I received electronically (as a download), I could imagine an upload server to send the package to. Then when the hardware fails, I could contact them with a list of what I needed and they would send back just what I needed (maybe from a common stock of media from their warehouse, along with an electronic record of the license key). Maybe it would be on a subscription basis, so that as long as I had a current membership they would not need to charge me at crunch time, or maybe they could have some kind of partnership program with software vendors where they could provide programs (and upgrades?) to their members at a discount. Or they could have an arrangement whereby one could obtain software which had not been previously vaulted, assuming I knew the name of the program and the version, with a new key.

If you are like most people and the data you want to keep is in the form of text files, pictures, and music files (DRM-free, that is), this won't be quite so critical to you, since pretty much any computer you buy off the shelf will be able to give you access to these. But you might well have some accounting software or video editing applications which might not come standard on a basic computer which you still might need to maintain the ability to install when the PC dies.

It's times like these that remind me why I do not ever want to go back into the business of supporting computers myself. I actually contacted a company here to do the hard work, but it turned out that they were already working at capacity and declined taking my troubles on at $125/hour.

Plain old paper

Sunday evening is usually when I do lots of my office work for the upcoming week - printing calendars, drawing maps to appointment sites, setting up directories for pictures I take on site.

This evening, just as I was getting started to do this, the laptop that has my business software started acting up, with the screen flashing on me, then freezing up, unresponsive to the keyboard. I powered it down and back up but it would not boot back into Windows. Further investigation showed that one of the pins on the hard drive had been bent and shorted against its neighbor, so I straightened that back out with a kitchen knife and reinserted it. This time, it got as far as spinning up the drive, but still I was getting a blank screen, even when I plugged a standalone monitor into the external video socket. So, I am guessing that something got fried on the video part of the motherboard, or the board itself has gotten fritzed out. Tomorrow I'm going to the computer store to see whether it can be saved somehow.

One good thing is that I was able to verify that the data on the disk was still okay, by putting it into a USB enclosure and attaching it to my wife's desktop computer. Although I could see all the folders and files, because my contact management software uses SQL Server, I could not read any of it on this other machine unless I were to take my program disks and install everything, then copy over the data files, and even then I might run into some problems with making sure my keys and licenses were all working. So it seemed that I was going to be starting out the week without a clue as to what I had to be doing day by day.

Fortunately, I was able to salvage some of the situation by means of good old paper records. I did have my printout of last week's calendar which had the names and the times of the customer appointments written out for this week. I am pretty careful to keep this up to date and in sync with what is on the computer, because it is my lifeline out in the field. Some of the customers were repeat visits, and for them I had previous maps to their addresses with telephone numbers and that kind of thing as well. Then there were new appointments for people I hadn't seen yet, and in those cases I turned to my pile of scrap paper - lists of calls to make, incoming faxes of messages left for me, and other old paperwork. Sifting through this junk, I was able to come up with an address and phone number for everyone I was scheduled to see this week. I plugged those into Mapquest and come up with the vital maps I needed.

So, here's a case where hoarding redundant and almost useless paper scraps helped saved me when technology broke down. It would be impossible to run my little business completely from paper records, I'm pretty sure, but it has proved to be the bridge I needed as a backstop when my two sets of redundant backups (the last one was updated just this morning!) were not enough to make sure that I could get the data I needed.

In the non-business realm, my main blog has been running for over three years now continuously and I would hate to lose that content if for some reason those backups were not enough. Maybe I should print out those hundreds of pages onto paper too. Also, it's probably high time to update my paper copy of my password file with all the new accounts I have had to set up lately. This one goes into a safe, naturally.

Update: I forgot to mention that also yesterday I managed to corrupt the Memos database in my Treo 650 the way I did once more, apparently by editing an item in a way that it didn't like. It is even giving me problems HotSyncing the records over to the desktop. It does seem as if this version of PalmOS is much more fragile than the one I had on my Visor Platinum.

Second update: It's been a long, slow process recovering from the madness. I convinced myself that there was not going to be any way to resurrect the original laptop, so I bought a new one on clearance at Staples. I had my hopes, but simply sticking the old hard drive into the new computer got me nowhere, so I found the next few days filled with such things as repartitioning the new drive, restoring the data from Ghost, overlaying the old (broken) Windows XP installation with a new one from CD, and now trying to reinstall all my critical applications. My current contact management software is a single spreadsheet, backed by lots of loose paper. And if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to the battle.