SoftWareProgs.com

I recently wrote about bad reviews, with software in mind. This refers not to reviews with negative evaluations, but those which have no value, due to reviewer prostitution, reviewer laziness, reviewer stupidity.

Shortly after posting that blog, I ran across one about inflated or meaningless “awards”, such as on software download sites. It is both amusing and educational. See “The software awards scam” by software developer Andy Brice.

I also was impressed by Andy’s “Selling your software in retail stores (all that glitters is not gold)“. This clarifies some reasons that a web purchase of software can provide better value than store bought, for both the buyer and the seller.

Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.

Introduction
Webmail can be great for travelers and multi-office workers, but I prefer an email client on my computer, monitoring in background. Gmail is a webmail with option to automatically forward to local email client, and does not insert ads, as do many other free-mails.

Comcast.net recently changed its default email port from 25 to 587 as part of effort to fight spam, BUT did not tell customers. (Can you spell “class action law suit”, Virginia?) This blocked my mail sends not only on Comcast, but on all my domains recently moved to HostGator.com. Fortunately, Gmail from Google had already instructed me to use port 465.

As part of my effort to isolate the problem, I tried several alternatives to my usual email client, which made me review the features that matter most to me. The candidates I describe below are easily found on Google Search, including email review articles.

Note that an individual can want multiple user accounts for various reasons, such as to separate activities, simulate different business departments (”sales”, “support”, “feedback”, “customer service”), or similar.

Also note that I have yet to find spam filters built in to email clients which are as effective and easy to use as dedicated filter programs. Filter programs that “learn” from what the user rejects can take for ever to build up immunities, and then aren’t very reliable. Bayesian and other statistical technologies just don’t work. The better filters subscribe to black lists and allow manual updates plus keyword blocking. I prefer quarantine to automatic deletion, for safety.

Another consideration is that I like to have the Windows operating system in the base “C:” partition, and divide the rest of that disk drive into “D:”, where I keep most programs and data. Thus, when I must back level Windows yet again, I don’t wipe out recent data.
(See http://softwareprogs.com/wordpress/17/disk-partitions-disk-images-and-backups for explanation.)

Outlook Express (”OX”)
This program comes with MS Windows, so was easy to try. As I recall, it is similar to the more elaborate MS Outlook which is part of Microsoft Office, which I removed a few years ago.

I suspect that many email clients evolved from one-account systems, hence the trend to have a dominant user and/or merge IN and OUT boxes. Those which differ probably were designed from the beginning to separately handle various servers, users, and passwords, which I believe is better.

I have a good memory for concepts, but a bad one for names, so I try to make my setup parameters meaningful to me. Even though the emails on my web domains all use the server set by the host, I choose to name my accounts after the user address, not the server name. OX overrides setup with the server name, appending numbers in parentheses to distinguish them if more than one, so I had to go back in and re-edit the account names. Also note, OX is helping no one by filling in the name of a new account with the “default account” name.

Please, Mother, let me do it myself.

Now for the feechur that I find least attractive. The Folders Directory for OX starts with “Local Folders” containing “Inbox”, “Outbox”, “Sent Items”, “Deleted Items”, “Drafts”. This means that send and receive ignore the advantage of dividing email activity into user accounts. If I want to organize logically, I can add “New Folder” to “Local Folders”, but not elsewhere, then I must manually move messages. Very unfortunately, numerous email programs copy this structure.

I have not bothered to study how I might move OX email from C:\Documents and Settings\admin\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}\Microsoft\Outlook Express to D:. I just don’t care.

Thus, Outlook Express works for me as an alternative email client, but I will not use it routinely for mail. I sometimes use it for newsgroups.

Others
Google search quickly finds survey articles on email clients, so I tried a few.

Incredimail starts by asking user’s gender, age, country… in other words, a marketing spy. MYOB. If backgrounds, icons, emoticons, animations are needed to “express your message perfectly!”, the probability exceeds 99.9998 percent that you have nothing to say. Quite the opposite style from Caesar’s “veni vidi vici”. This seems to be a bandwidth polluter. Uninstalled. Then I found it had installed games menu along with a kindergarten setup, which remained after “uninstall”. RIP BY HAND.

DreamMail claims to be a “professional email client” with a nice list of features. Setup accepts 4 users initially, asks where to save mail, then refuses either paste-in or type-in of folder, forcing use of Windows’ klutzy “browse”. After letting the wizard set up first account and test it, I found that the other three I had entered did not exist. When I manually added user IDs, I found that DreamMail placed them UNDER the first, instead of beside. End of evaluation.

Mulberry is free and Open Source. It makes too big a deal about a calendar feature I do not want. Mulberry helped me set up first account, then seemed to disallow add-ons. Uninstall.

Free Pegasus Mail is another to merge In and Out mailboxes. PC World says “An email program with all the convenience and versatility that you wish you could get in Outlook and Outlook Express.” I used the wizard to set up two accounts. I do not want to select an identity before seeing its contents, but to see all accounts and folders in one directory tree, with contents clearly divided by user. Uninstall Pegasus.

I had previously used Eudora and some others, dating back to DOS days. Presently, Eudora can install in restricted free/sponsored mode and paid mode. The paid mode includes spam watch and fast indexing. I don’t particularly like the “Persona Manager” with its insistence on making an account “dominant”. Some good options, but turn OFF automatic spell check, autocomplete, MoodWatch, most warnings. Could not enter password until I sent first message, which is dumb. I do not want In & Out boxes to be combined, but separated by accounts. Uninstall Eudora.

Mozilla’s FireFox is a great browser. The new “SeaMonkey” project wants browser, email, newsgroup reader to be all in one package, but FireFox allows less vertical waste plus choice of Google Tool Bar. Email, as expressed in Mozilla’s Thunderbird, is WAY to cumbersome for advanced settings, such as: separate POP and SMTP servers for accounts, separate passwords per account, access to passwords, location of profiles and saved files, other data off C-drive. Also, Thunderbird can’t save attachments with email, insisting on either a default folder or asking each time. Really should let user globally set defaults, so every account-add does not have to go through same wrong defaults. At least for email, marvelous programming skills behind some very unfortunate design choices. Every time I have tried using Thunderbird, over several releases, I am left very frustrated by their rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory.

Responsive user forum for browser and email, but answers don’t always get good results. For relocating profile, see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder. For setting up multiple SMTP servers, see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Multiple_SMTP_servers_-_Thunderbird. Thunderbird has one setup advantage, an awareness of gmail properties.

Present Choice
For email, I have been using The Bat professional edition since March 1996, now version 3.99.3. A version 4.x is available. Compared to all others I have tried, my complaints are mere nits. Creating a new user account sets up a new folder containing sub folders “Inbox”, “Outbox”, “Sent Mail”, “Trash”, with choice of where to locate data folder on PC. I chose the layout with folder tree on left, folder list on top right, item contents on bottom right. There are both fixed and customizable tool bars. The search function is fast, and can focus on all or individual folders. Filters can be created manually, or from an inbound message, such as to move message to a sub folder and mark it read. At one time, I made heavy use of the quick templates. The same macros can tweak the layout of “new message”, “reply”, “forward”, “reading confirmation”, and “save message”. For example, one can insert the macro to request read confirmations in the new message template, and each user account has its own settings. Attachments can be saved with mail (my choice) or separate folders. The major weak point in The Bat is the junk filter, with any chosen plug-in; just not reliable.

After a lot of waste motion, I discovered spam filters which poll the mail servers before the email client does, so that well known crap can be discarded before downloads. These are similar to filters available on most web mails and host accounts, but allow continuous monitoring and tweaking from the personal computer.

One such filter example is “SpamWeed for POP3 … an advanced Bayesian spam filter acts as a personal POP3 proxy”. I suggested clarification in the setup directions, as I had to request help. If your email settings had mail server = mail.comcast.net for user = name, those become server = 127.0.0.1, user = name@mail.comcast.net. With that explained, adding accounts was fast. The product would be improved tremendously if the Block List subscribed to automatic updates from spam authorities. As I noted above, Bayesian spam filters just do not impress me.

The filter I now use (since last July) does subscribe to block lists, SpamEater Pro 4.x. SEP subscribes to various black lists, as well as letting user enter keywords for subject, body, sender. Unfortunately, I often have spam get through SEP’s filters for all of those parameters combined, and I have not received adequate explanations from Support. Support responds quickly, but not all recommendations work. Nonetheless, this is still the best spam filter I have yet tried. I prefer this outright purchase to remote host based filter subscription services, which can only slow down receiving.

My emails which use my domain hosting can prefilter with BoxTrapper (”protects your inbox from spam by forcing all people not on your white list to reply to a verification email before they can send mail to you”) or SpamAssassin (”is an automated email filtering system that attempts to identify spam messages based on the content of the email’s headers and body.”). I frankly am irritated by outbound mails which are tediously interrupted by recipients’ use of “BoxTrapper”, and “SpamAssassin” is less featured than “SpamEater Pro”.

If readers have better choices, please describe in detail.

Summary
I return to The Bat for email and SpamEater Pro for filtering.

Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.

Summary
In my search for faster web site performance, I have encountered web hosting companies which range from incompetent and/or fraudulent to quite excellent.

Remcom.Net, up through October 2007
I had been several years with Remly Communications, http://www.remcom.net/, who took over my prior account by purchasing http://ecphosting.net. I had a “reseller” package but used it only for my several domains. Reliable and fast FTP uploads became a repeating issue, so I sought elsewhere. They might have upgraded systems since October 2007.

Note that numerous other hosting companies allow more than one domain on the base plan, whether or not they offer reseller packages. That certainly is easier to manage, as well as cheaper, than the one domain per account I had used before. Free market competition helps achieve marvelous things.

Hostmonster.Com 9/29/07 - 10/12/07
I tried http://hostmonster.com, due to favorable reviews, before I realized that some of those glowing recommendations were written or sponsored by them. During 5 days of work in Sep.-Oct. 2007, I transferred my domains to their servers, and had them dropped three times while installing them. “Support” never responded, nor did Billing when I demanded a refund, so I had VISA roll back my payment. AVOID HOSTMONSTER.

Westhost.Com 10/2/07 5/8/08
I successfully transferred my domains to http://www.westhost.com. Their support system assigns ticket numbers, but does not let customer view ticket histories. Phone support is an option. Speed has been an issue, especially for CubeCart store with about 3000 antique print reproductions. Therefore, I tried another host for a new domain.
     One thing I have not seen elsewhere is that creating email users results in same user connecting to every domain on host account. Then one must wrestle a bit with a Virtual-User-Table file to delete those not wanted and to make the rest into form “user.domain” instead of the more usual “user@domain” or “user+domain” expected my email clients.

Dreamhost.Com 2/29/08 - 5/8/08
My new host account was opened Feb 29 with http://dreamhost.com/. Their support tickets are viewable, and they usually answer fast, but the solutions are sometimes very slow. I have effectively lost most of two work months, because they had major network and server disasters when trying to upgrade cluster. I suspect they bought economy servers. Now that they have fixed that server cluster, I still have administrative problems, such as changing my own logon password, and slow response with such things as store script and Wordpress blog. Support says my logon password has changed, but I still must logon with the prior one. Funny thing is that my FTP password changed with no problems.
     Refund issued.

Resume Search
What blogs should be like for FAST posting, editing, and browsing can be seen at zimbio.com; just open a free account. Zimbio appeared to be about ten times as fast as my blog at Dreamhost.

On May 2, 2008, I resumed my search for an affordable host which is fast, easy to use, and has high percentage of uptime.

Phpwebhosting.Com No answer
Before finding 2mhost.com (next), I saw that http://www.phpwebhosting.com expresses a friendly philosophy, very relaxed limits on diskspace and bandwidth, but they had not answered my pre-sales questions in more than the time that 2mhost.com both answered and signed me up. Interesting feature: “Your own cgi-bin directory and ability to run your own scripts from any directory (not just inside of cgi-bin).” I never understood why my scripts had to be all in one location. [More than 6 days later, I have only received an initial autoresponse from them that said my query was received.]

2mhost.Com May 2-3, 2008
The next candidate, http://2mhost.com/, has a new criterion for selection, namely that hosts which rent hardware, instead of owning, can make frequent upgrades if their fees give enough income. “Recently, we upgraded our entire fleet of servers to quad processors with quad cores (a whopping 16 physical processors in each server).” “We host no more than 200 websites on Dual processor Quad core intel servers, this is less than 25% of what most hosts load in such servers.” Their “mission-critical-web-hosting” package says “100% web hosting uptime guaranteed.” That plan starts at $7.50 per month, with incremental fees for added services. For example, rather than shop for plans that allow the number of domains I want, they simply add domains at $0.80 per month, no setup fees. Their base limits of diskspace and bandwidth are generous and upgradeable. It should be noted that the payment options are for 6, 12, 24 months and not these monthly amounts.
     Now the fly in the ointment. My order was acknowledged by 2mhost.com in about a minute, but payment not approved by their processing company (plimus.com) for over five hours, then the logon data were generated more than 14 hours after order, in the wee hours of the next day. This wasted a half work day for me. I CANCELED account.

Whreviews.Com
Excellent article can be found at http://whreviews.com/the-uptime-guarantee.htm, what appears to be an honest review of hosting companies, i.e., not fakes sponsored by hosting companies. Good recommendations as well as “My worst experience“.

Hostgator.Com 5/3/8 to present
Decided to try recommended http://www.hostgator.com. Coupons are available on the web for discounts of 20 to 99 percent of first month. UNLIMITED domains, subdomains, emails, et cetera, on “baby gator” plan, list $9.95 per month but cheaper with 2 and 3 year contracts. Code “404PAGE” might still be valid for 1 cent first month signup.
     After I had filled out the order page, I got confirmation within 1 minute, and logon info in 5 minutes more. This is more like one should expect with electronic purchases.
     Because I wanted to test my migrated setups before changing DNS name servers, I could view my site as http://assignedIP/~accountID, and similar for their FileManager, but did not have FTP access for bulk uploading. Found some document files at http://support.hostgator.com/ which told me browser FTP is ftp://username:password@serverIPaddress/, so I tried those data in FileZilla and observed fast uploads as well as fast initial connection.
     By the way, HG offers reseller accounts starting at about 3 times the individual mid-range account price. Also, they offer Windows servers as well as the Linux I prefer.
There was a problem with HG, however. The morning after I opened my account, I found that HostGator had suspended it, for payment verification. Then it took support, sales, and admin over 3 hours to get that cleared up. Their excuse was that I was randomly selected for verification. Needless to say, I told them there are much better ways to handle such, including contacting Visa for its password enabled verification from my email account. Sales said they are in a massive upgrade of practices.
     I did get to run some speed tests with this blog. On Hostgator, it paged about 5 times as fast as on Dreamhost at the same time. A migrated large store, http://oldcolorprint.com, clearly is faster than on Westhost. Two other stores, http://softwareprogs.com/store/ and http://easyhealthdiet.com needed for me to set MySQL correctly with a bit more effort on the changed user and db names, resulting from differences in cPanel structure.
     Tests so far show HG to be the fastest host I have yet used. Support has been good, except for that “verification” boo-boo.

Legal Observation
Criticism is not “libel” when it is (a) factual, and (b) documented, such as with screen captures, et cetera.

Conclusion
For anyone running a website, or thinking about it, I recommend a visit to http://whreviews.com/, then to http://www.hostgator.com.

Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.

There are several kinds of data recovery tools for personal computers. For Windows users, the first is “Recycle Bin” or “RECYCLER”, a holding folder for deleted files. The second kind is “undelete”, which goes back to DOS days. The third is media level, below the operating system.

Automatic System Tools
Popular computer operating systems usually contain some automatic check and recovery tools that run at startup, on schedule, or on user start. CHKDSK (short for Checkdisk) is a tool for DOS and WINDOWS systems to check disk health. Some disk controllers include continuous monitoring to warn of degrading sections of the drive, might have ability to move data to good sectors and lock out weak sectors.

By the way, Tweak UI from Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP shows me that “Optimize hard disk when idle” is turned on, which I believe to be disk defragmentation.

Recycle Bin / Recycler “oops folder” can be nice. However, power users who work with large files can find this to be a luxury with a high price in disk space*. The file “move” is probably just a minor edit in the directory list, but occupied bytes can slow disk browsing and searching. Document files are usually not a problem, but many megabyte image or data files can choke the system. I gave up this option in favor of frequent backups outside the work folder.

*If a power user wants the Recycle Bin, don’t locate it on the same drive as the pagefile.sys or hiberfil.sys swap files. Locating on an external USB2/SATA drive can handle the space needs, but probably at a speed loss compared to internal drives.

Undelete can work if used soon after the “oops” is discovered. Both for DOS and Windows, files are written to where ever there is open space. “Erase” modifies the file header information (I recall it was just a one character change), but does not actually remove anything. However, subsequent file saves can overwrite the data fragments belonging to an erased file. Therefore, undelete programs are often made to be interactive, to help decide if fragments belong. I suspect this approach is less used in this era of huge files and disk capacities than when PCs had only 360 Kb floppy drives and 1 Mb hard drives to work with. Also, binaries are much harder to judge than text fragments.

Some programs edit and directly repair files. Others are “read only”, and make repairs on copies, for safety. Most recovery programs for Windows handle both FAT and NTFS file structures. I tend to ignore recovery tools which limit themselves to a particular application, such as MS Outlook Express email, or mp3, or digital photos, or to a particular drive type. Specialists in a particular activity might take the opposite view.

Here is an undeleter which has a version for the Windows file manager and a stand-alone *.exe for work with less overhead, “WinUndelete™“. I have used this in both modes.

However, many undelete programs for Windows now go beyond un erase, and can recover from re-format, re-partition, damage from trojans, viruses, power failure, program crash, and so forth. Such tools are more likely to have “recover” in the name than “undelete”. Read descriptions and/or use the trial versions, such as for these examples.

Also note that disk manager tools for partitioning can have non destructive recover options from format and partition.

Media Level Tools are not something often found in home use. These are run by disaster recovery companies when the drive controller or boot sector have become non operational, perhaps due to lightning strike, fire, flood, dropped drive, or whatever. Of course, each situation is unique, so success is hard to predict. Tools can also work on scratched CD discs, stretched or broken tape, et cetera. A web search will find numerous companies for this service, but some initial education can help in the selection, such as provided by Wikipedia: Data recovery.

Some of these companies say they perform “forensic data recovery”, as in criminal investigation. The science is the same under a different label.

Summary
Good backup strategy, and letting applications save prior version as incremental backup, can deal with most cases of data loss. However, working under pressure, or making the wrong finger action, can make users want tools to undelete files and folders. Current generation of undelete tools can also recover against re-format, re-partition, various infections, and other glitches. Failures at the hardware level, including mechanical and electrical damage, can be offset by some specialty recovery firms, but they won’t be free.

Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.

Information Technology news of the past two years has been hot on “data deduplication” or “single instance storage.” I mentioned this in “Remote Backup for Data Protection“, and some of the offsite backup services that use it. Main frame systems replace all but one instance of an actual file with pointers to that one copy. To be meaningful, dupes must be defined by actual content, not merely by file name and time stamp. Some backup companies say that 80 percent savings of storage space are typical with dedupe, which helps on both costs and retrieval times.

[I do wonder what provisions are made for a disk defect in that single instance copy. I would have two or three versions of the overall backup.]

Personal computer users are now offered tools to help manage similar results. Not all offer grand catalogs with pointers, but do help users identify true duplicates before deletions. The best will use true byte by byte comparisons. Less reliable systems will use calculated file signatures for comparison, such as Cyclic redundancy check (CRC).

My first experience with such programs was with the no longer offered Dup Detector by www.prismaticsoftware.com. This examined several common formats of image files in a directory, and could be set to the degree of allowed tolerance, to find similar views of the same subject. Persons doing a lot of photo editing, or image downloading, could find this tool to be valuable, as did I. Setting of 90 percent identical found related edit versions.

Here are some currently available tools for use under MS Windows, all with trial versions. None can do the 90 percent indentical search.

Dupehunter Professional claims a lot of use in commercial and government environments, so is oriented more for command line execution than for fancy GUI interfaces. I can’t accept their exclusion, “One example is ZIP compression, which is not compatible with Dupehunter’s high standards.”, nor should you. Frankly, that reads as what we technical folks call “BS”, and I don’t mean Boy Scouts.

Duplicate Finder v3.4 (DF) lets one choose between CRC32 and byte to byte comparisons, or the faster file names mode, which I consider to be obsolete. CRC32 is probably faster than byte mode, and could be used before byte mode. Unless time is really an issue, I would probably always use byte to byte comparisons. The user interface is easy, and the choices seem to cover all possibilities. For example, one can select drives, folders to scan or ignore, chose how to handle hidden items and Windows folders, select with wildcards and extensions. DF deliberately does NOT auto delete anything, insisting that the user make the final decision. For a system that does not retain pointers to all original file locations, this seems excellent policy.

NoClone 4.x (NC) also offers both filename and exact byte comparisons; allows defining master folders to compare against and paths to exclude. Users can choose file types to be “all, image, movie, music” and wildcards, such as “*.jpg”. NC says it is “Accurate, no false duplicates.” NC distinguishes between files below or above 1 Mb size in the setup, but DF does not bother. Defining master folders can be useful.

I have worked with both DF and NC, and think both are worth serious consideration. They don’t work the same as those main frame solutions, but they also don’t cost the same. Both are under $35 for home editions. I have not tried to benchmark relative speeds. After all, it can take days to compare a million files.

Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.

I often preach about data backups and suggest tools, strategies. Usually, I do not touch on the wisdom of having off-site copies for home offices, due to speed and cost. My own solution has been to have “fire safe” file drawers, and duplicates of my external drives. You might have handy friends/relatives willing to stash such copies for you in their homes, or a bank safe deposit box that can hold the present generation of compact disk drives and memory cards. You could even box a drive and hide it in the trunk or under a seat of your car. I can now recommend another approach, which used to be reserved for businesses… and it is much more convenient.

A few years ago, I saw PC remote backup services available over phone modems, and I just laughed. Cable and DSL improve the situation considerably. Fiber networks would help several orders of magnitude more.

During my years at IBM R&D, I saw use of Ironmountain, Inc. for archived paper and tape records. Take a used up mine, provide good drainage and air conditioning, add vault doors and massive shelving networks, purchase a few battery operated fork lift trucks, and advertise for business. Fortune 500 companies were probably the first to afford it. Individuals could not.

A web search shows that remote data storage is now offered to both businesses and individuals. However, some of the vendors do not post their prices, which means they must still be high for small and non business use. Examples: http://www.ironmountain.com, http://www.symantec.com/, http://www.3x.com/, http://www.evault.com (owned by Seagate, the maker of disk drives).

http://www.intronis.com/pricing.html offers home plans of $9.95 per month for 1 GB and $19.95 per month for 4 GB, still pricey. My backup drives are 500 Gb, and I have several pairs.

Two companies appear to be much more user friendly: http://www.datadepositbox.com/ simply states “$2 per GB per month”. http://carbonite.com/ says “Carbonite is only $49.95/year per computer no matter how much you need to back up. No hidden fees. No limits on backup storage capacity.” [Which implies home users. I doubt such a deal for large businesses.]

All these services seem to offer some flavor of continuous backup over cable. To deal with the heavy load of transmitting large files, they can be run on automated schedules, or be made to transmit only during computer idle times. The last two services clearly integrate with current versions of 32 bit MS Windows. Security is assured by encryption.

A feature that can matter to some, datadepositbox.com mentions that users can share passwords with friends in order to share files. That probably requires a license for each computer.

For business backups, “de-duplication” software can be extremely valuable. IronMountain has patented programs for compression and de-duplication, said to reduce storage needs by up to 85%. Other companies offer similar enhancements; IBM recently bought out Diligent for their enterprise virtual tape library (VTL) data deduplication technology.

Home users can select which PC folders to backup. I have previously recommended the free compression utility 7-Zip.org, which can certainly help for remote backups. I recently compressed 370 HTML page files of 3.48Mb into a *.7z file of 358Kb, about 90 percent reduction.

Conclusion
Remote backups can now be both technically and economically practical for small or home (SOHO) offices located in North America. The lowest prices I have so far found are by http://www.datadepositbox.com/ and http://carbonite.com/. The latter says $49.95/year per computer no matter how much you need to back up.

Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.

Adobe Photoshop (PS) is probably the most well known of photo/image editing programs, even though it is probably also the most expensive. Paint Shop Pro (PSP) is possibly the nearest competitor, at a much lower price, but lost me as a user when I discoverd it’s text size scale (points or pixels) had nothing to do with image scale. PS calibration is dependable.

PS uses vector images for text, on layers separate from the graphics image. This means that users can concentrate on the image and know that any text will resize gracefully with the graphics layers.

I do dislike the fact that Adobe products employ user-awkward Bezier splines for drawing, “pen”, “path selector”, instead of the CAD choice of cubic splines. Beziers define shapes via points mostly external to the curves, whereas cubic splines can be made to pass through user defined points, similar to work with pencil and paper.
[See Carl de Boor, "A Practical Guide to Splines" (1978 and re-issues), adapted by Donald A. Miller in "Power BASIC for Business and Technology" (2003), both available at amazon.com.]

To enlarge, shrink, smooth, sharpen, other actions, Photoshop uses bicubic splines (an example of polynomial fit) to represent and process image layers. If one enlarges too much, the image becomes pixelated, i.e., grainy pixel boundaries very obvious to the eye. Various non Adobe plugins and stand-alones exist to do a better job of zooming in, enlarging. A bit more than a year ago, I evaluated several before choosing one.

SizeFixer XL, then at $275.00, claimed “SizeFixer XL can enlarge digital photos up to any size without loss of sharpness.” I was not impressed. I did not retain complete notes, but I believe this product used splines.

photoZoom Pro™ 2 is based on patented S-Spline alogorithms, was then a more friendly $149.00. I liked the product and its output, but found it could choke to death on large zooms.

The only product I found which did a good job without splines was Genuine Fractals; furthermore, GF can handle much larger zooms without choking. I bought version 4.1 as a transiton to version 5 almost ready for release, both in same price of $159.95. Version 5 is not only faster than v4, but separates text layers from image layers, so that it is no longer necessary to flatten layers before resizing, or to remove and restore text. This means that text never loses resolution upon resize, like the underlying Photoshop. My only prior experience with fractals was those cute graphics programs which can be zoomed without limit. The GF5 price is still $159.95. (Few people will need the costlier PRO version.)

As the company explains, “Genuine Fractals 5 patented algorithms work differently. It starts by analyzing ever-decreasing sizes of pixel blocks in your image looking for repeating natural patterns at different sizes. These are known as fractals. Fractals are common, naturally repeating patterns found everywhere. For example, a river system viewed from space has the same shape as the veins in a leaf. These are both fractal patterns at very different scales. The great thing about fractal patterns is once you find them they can be scaled to any size without loss in detail. This allows Genuine Fractals 5 to resize your image over 1000% without losing sharpness and edge detail.” I noted that their proprietary image format STN does not support layers, so I prefer Adobe’s PSD for archives, JPG or PNG for use. (JP2 is a lossless JPG, but not widely accepted, and seems to take more processing time than PNG.)

By the way, some folks who sell old images on CD advertise that their BMP format is lossless and, therefore, superior to JPG. As I told one of them (based in UK), I would far rather have a lossy JPG at 300 or more pixels per inch than their crummy 150 ppi lossless BMP. Rose/Crap by any other name is still rose/crap.

I used Photoshop with Genuine Fractals to repair, color-correct for aging, and resize on about 3000 antique print reproductions, which can be viewed at OldColorPrint.com. Perhaps you will like the results as much as I do.

Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.

I now share some of my experience with fonts, font editors, font managers on IBM Compatible Personal Computers. This is not meant to imply that other brands did not exist, only that my experience of computers started with FORTRAN main-frames (CDC and IBM), then some IBM time-shared systems (e.g., APL, PROFS, SAS), some IBM mid-frames under FORTRAN, then IBM and clone Personal Computers. I am just not expert with the families by Amiga, Apple, Atari, and numerous others. I am aware that some of those other brands did marvelous things before the IBM PC was even born. Nonetheless, marketing forces and historical accidents resulted in the IBM compatibles setting the standards for the majority of personal computer users. It is thanks to the choice of open architecture on the PC that so many non IBM forces helped lead to the marvelous range of hardware and software we now have.

I will not dwell on the fact that mathematically defined “outline” (vector) fonts, which are resolution independent and scalable, existed before the PC. Thankfully, they are now the standard for most PC and Web applications, today. I will now spend time and words on bitmap (raster) fonts.

ASIDE: I have long since discarded numerous manuals and diskettes pertaining to various generations of Personal Computers and Operating Systems. However, legacy files contained in Windows (up through XP/SP2) allow peeking into the past. In the FONTS folder, files ending with extension FON represent bit map fonts for monitors. I viewed dosapp.fon, cga40woa.fon, cga80woa.fon, ega40woa.fon, ega80woa.fon in an appropriate font editor (namely Sib Font Editor), selected sample characters !”#$ABCDabcd, used a screen capture utility (such as Amor Screen Capture, then edited saved images with Adobe Photoshop into composite images dosapp.jpg, cga40.jpg, cga80.jpg, ega40.jpg, ega80.jpg (cited below).

Bitmap or pixel fonts are the simplest technology, taking the least overhead. At the most basic, only one color is used, on or off. Unlike fonts on a typewriter, they can produce numerous characters with a single interface, be it light spots on a cathode ray tube monitor or a head of electromechanically driven pins on a dot matrix printer. Bitmap fonts are also the simplest to visualize.

As described by wikipedia, the Monochrome Display/Printer Adapter could display 80 columns by 25 lines of “high resolution” text characters. The nominal screen resolution of the MDA was 720×350 pixels. Wiki says the characters were 9 pixels wide by 14 pixels high, but this includes spacing. Image dosapp.jpg shows the bitmap was 4 px wide by 8 px high. Close examination of these representative characters shows a better technical description for the resolution is “pathetic”. The viewer actually had to fill in missing detail, which explains complaints of eye fatigue.

In my opinion, a PC which cannot display at least simple X-Y graphs is a calculator, not a computer. The problem was not in the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) but the adapter, as proven by the Hercules Graphics Card, which was installed on more than half of the IBM PC family used outside IBM, even after release of IBM’s CGA (next). Just as the cobbler’s children were the last to get shoes, I could not have the HGC at work.

IBM soon offered the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Color Graphics Monitor. At work, I got the CGA and attached it to a CRT black and white monitor for manufacturing equipment controllers. I never understood why anyone would want the mode for 40 characters wide (see cga40.jpg) and went immediately to the 80 wide I had used on the MDA (see cga80.jpg). The bit map for cga80 is 8 by 8 pixels, and for cga40 was 16 px wide, which merely made a fatter character to fill the screen at half max horizontal resolution, still at 25 lines.

A similar situation was for the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) and Enhanced Graphics Monitor (EGM), which I was able to get for my office soon after their release. Now my eyes quit complaining of strain. Image ega80.jpg shows the characters were 8 by 12 pixels at full resolution, but 16 by 12 (see ega40.jpg) at half horizontal resolution — a mode I refused to use.

The EGA/EGM pair came along about the time a development version of APL interactive programming language was created for the Personal Computer. APL uses a very compact notation for mathematical operations, so needed its own bit map generator. For a time, the most popular program from the IBM Internal PCTools disk was “EGA Maestro”, somewhat similar to Sib Font Editor, but including the ability to load its fonts into the monitor adapter. With it, I was able to create acceptable APL characters. For development work, APL is one of the best languages available, an opinion shared by most people who have mastered it. My Personal Computer with only 640Kb of RAM gave me a larger usable APL Workspace than I was able to access on a remote computer center connected with a 300 baud (Yes, only 300) telephone modem, and I could download various software libraries from that center. Later, my office was put on a cable network, so I was able to run both local and remote sessions of APL. APL geek heaven!

Of course, vector fonts have mostly replaced raster fonts on PCs. Adobe had developed PostScript fonts for publishing, but these could not be seen on a PC monitor, as I recall. Apple Computer defined (patented) the TrueType Format (TTF) to unify the screen and printer displays, as used on Macintosh and Windows. Because TTF is an open format, anyone could create and distribute fonts, which initially gave TTF a reputation for bad quality. Among the many millions of such fonts, some really great font families are now available on the internet, from both pay and free sites.

Editing of vector fonts requires more sophisticated software than for raster fonts. One of the most popular is FontCreator 5 in Home and Professional Editions.

The next part of this series discusses font management on PCs.

Copyright 2008 by Donald A. Miller, PhD / SoftWareProgs.com,
See “S/W Store” and “Specials, Limited” for good deals on software.