Pourquoi la capitale française passionne-t-elle tellement?

«Paris est un livre d'images fait de calques superposés, surpeuplé de morts et hantés par des vivants»
-- Graham Robb

Playing with Pano app at Niche Cafe on Queen West #Toronto with a nice lavender-black tea.

Link to iPhone app: Pano app

Post-secondary education around the world

G7 countries compared in terms of the percentage of the population between the ages of 25-64 with post-secondary degrees. Highest: Canada, Lowest: Italy.

Mozy 2.0 client is a fiasco

Just a heads up to current and potential new clients of the Mozy online backup service: The Mozy 2.0 client is a big flop. Do not install it, in its current form, barring any major updates, under any circumstances. Not only is it a nightmare from the customer perspective, but potentially in the wider public relations sense -- though, obviously not quite to BP proportions!

I have been a happy MozyHome (exactly like MozyPro, but for non-commercial use) user for over 3 years now (yes, that makes me an early adopter) and have often cheer-leaded for them to family and friends. It has given me peace of mind for my 150 GB worth of data as I bounced from one side of the Atlantic to the other with my laptop.

Then came last week. As I had never experienced any issues with their service, when I received the latest client newsletter (that looked a bit like the following post on the Mozy blog) exalting the benefits of the newly released version 2.0 client, I didn't hesitate to download the upgrade. Big mistake. I'll spare you the gory details, but, in summary: it failed to install properly in Vista 64-bit, forcing me to reinstall the old client, version 1.16 (but only after a forced brute-force uninstall of all traces of Mozy, which caused the loss of all my customized settings) and somehow made it not work anymore (despite anything the tech support tried to suggest), finally making me resign to trying 2.0 again, which now oddly installed, but now failed to upload a complete backup set (this seems to be a common issue mentioned on message boards) all the while growing in CPU resources over time (rendering the computer useless). And that's just the beginning of the oddities.

Luckily (though, truly, it's a bastardization to call all this useless time and effort anything remotely related to a fortuitous situation), the evil Mozy 2.0 client accepted to be deinstalled cleanly this time and I was able to once again install the 1.16 client (1.16.4.0 to be precise, still available here). My good luck did not end there, 1.16 now worked perfectly again, just as it did 10 days ago...

Given all the unhappy, sometimes ireful, posts in the Mozy Community message boards, this is brewing to be a serious problem that Mozy's farmed-out tech support is having difficulty handling. Of course, this is not a tech support issue, but a software development issue; more specifically a gross failure in proper stability and regression testing.

It's just one big flop in a company with a good track record, but hopefully they can fix this soon. We're currently all seeing how a single mistake can quickly grow to a debacle and threaten a previously-strong company's very survival. (Yes, I'm talking to you BP!)

Reducing DPC latency on your laptop

If you plan on producing or streaming high-quality live audio (or video) from your laptop computer, or you just happen to be a bit of a tuning nerd, then you definitely should care about DPC latency. (Otherwise, you might want to skip this post, as this is not about making your system run faster per se.)

The Deferred Procedure Call (DPC) latency is a Windows concept. Suffice it to say that audio/video to/from an external device is handled by a queue of such low-level priority function calls. The time delay between a DPC call and execution is the latency (typically measured in microseconds, μs) and varies over time, depending on such variables as system load and running system services (of course), but also hardware and, most importantly, device drivers. To see live measurements of your system’s average DPC latency over time, this free tool is invaluable: Thesycon’s DPC Latency Checker.

A low DPC latency is what we are aiming for, but it’s not just a low mean value, but a constantly low number without any spikes. It’s the spikes in latency that will cause audio or video to stutter, skip, crackle, or pop (only a good thing if you developing a new Rice Krispies commercial). A good system would have no latency spikes above 250 μs; a setup like this or better is a requirement if you plan on being a laptop-DJ performing live, non-pre-recorded sets (next, you’ll need some software like Ableton Live, Native Instruments Traktor, Atomix Virtual DJ, etc., not to mention a good external audio interface, but I digress…).

If you find that your system has a horrible DPC latency profile, you’ll have to do some digging. The sad news is that you’ll mostly be blind in this hunt for low DPC latencies. A general rule of thumb is to make sure that you have the latest drivers for your graphics card (as the display is a big performance hog, even when a system is idle). Next, try stopping any unessential services or background running programs -- one by one -- and seeing if the situation improves (by running the linked-above DPC Latency Checker utility). Generally, background applications like Dropbox, a weather widget, Mozy, etc., don’t affect the DPC queue, but you never know! On my computer, the ESET NOD32 Antivirus real-time protection was the cause of some “minor” periodic 500 μs peaks. Another serious culprit on my machine was CPUgenie, a CPU power management application I installed that reduces CPU voltages to decrease CPU temperatures and increase battery life. I can only infer that other undervolting tools such as RMClock should also be considered potential targets in this war on DPC latency.

If all else fails, try a web search for your notebook computer’s “MODEL NAME” and “DPC LATENCY”. (Come to think of it, you should probably do this first!) In my case, I found out that some hard-core gamers were complaining about the Nvidia graphics card on their Sony Vaio Z’s. This gave me the idea to switch to using the integrated Intel graphics system on my system’s motherboard (conveniently, Sony provides a useful external switch to do this on the machine: “STAMINA” switches to the built-in Intel graphics processing, whereas “SPEED” means the Nvidia graphics card will be used). Although I lose 3D graphics performance by using the integrated graphics unit, my average DPC latency was more than halved (now down to the 50-70 μs range) and, more crucially, eliminated the last of the remaining spikes.

Time for me to enjoy my laptop’s newly lowered DPC postponement statistics… but first, my human priority calls for a short period of dormancy.