Vista on My MacBook Pro is Hot—Boiling Hot!

March 26th, 2008

I recently told the long story of how I installed Windows Vista on my MacBook Pro by means of Apple’s Boot Camp technology. To make that story short: it was difficult and took a long time because of a bug in the Mac OS 10.5.2 version of Boot Camp Assistant, but I did eventually succeed. See the earlier post for details.

Once I had Vista set up and running, the first thing I did was to test the science education programs I sell, since that was my main reason for wanting access to a Vista machine in the first place.

Both programs installed and launched without any problem. I had expected OnScreen Particle Physics, which used standard “old-fashioned” Windows routines for its drawing to the screen, would work smoothly, and users had reported success with it under Vista, but I had not tested it myself, so I was glad to see that everything I could think to try worked without a hitch.

OnScreen DNA was the one I had more concerns about. I had been advertising it as being for Windows XP, since I knew that its use of Open GL for three-dimensional graphics might be an issue for some configurations under Windows Vista. All the software that OnScreen Science sells has a sixty-day guarantee of customer satisfaction, so no one was in danger of losing any money by buying it to run on Vista, but I wanted to get a clearer answer about Vista compatibility, especially since new PCs all have Vista installed unless the buyer makes a special effort to get Windows XP instead, which some companies are actually doing.

When Vista was first released I did a very quick test of OnScreen DNA on a machine running Vista Home Premium. The software installed and launched without difficulty, but had a major problem showing animations (its whole basis, really) under Vista’s new Aero look. Once I switched into Vista’s “Windows Classic” theme (which has a pre-XP look to discourage its use, I suppose), all went well however.

I was almost certain that the animation problem with Aero was due to Microsoft’s having provided no default support for Open GL under Aero. Open GL, which I’d used to program the three-dimensional interactive graphics of OnScreen DNA, is a software interface to accelerated graphics hardware available for Macintosh and Linux as well as Windows. Its use had meant that the hardest part of the OnScreen DNA coding needed to be done only once, which had shortened development time by untold weeks. While it seems evident that Microsoft wants to discourage the use of Open GL, preferring instead to lock people into using DirectX, which is only for Windows, I knew that they had left the door open for graphics card manufacturers to provide their own custom drivers for Open GL. Since a substantial number of Windows games and screen savers etc. have been programmed using Open GL, I had assumed that providing Open GL drivers would become in time standard practice for graphics card makers, but this was a little bit of a gamble.

An online reviewer for PC World, who was taking a look at OnScreen DNA Lite, the free edition of the software which mainly deals with details of DNA’s double helical structure but lacks the simulations of how DNA works found in the advanced editions, encountered the Vista animation slowdown and queried me about it. I told him what I knew, and he proceeded to run the software either in Classic theme or under XP, then gave the software a favorable review but with a caveat about Vista Aero. I had in the meantime had some positive reports from users running OnScreen DNA under Vista and imagined that others must be running without problem on Vista as well, though I continued to advertise it as being for XP.

I was certainly curious to see what would happen running OnScreen DNA for Windows on my Intel Mac. It was gratifying to see that it was snappy and without any issues that I could uncover running with the full-blown Aero look. So the drivers that Apple was providing for running Vista on a Mac must support Open GL, which I took as more evidence that the driver support I’d been counting on was likely to be there on new machines.

So everything was OK, right? Well, pretty much everything except that my MacBook Pro sounded like a twin-engine model airplane trying to build up enough speed for takeoff against a strong headwind. I’d never heard such noise from the cooling fans. They seemed to be going full blast once they got started. I remembered that when the MacBook Pro first came out, a number of people had complained about excessive fan noise, but I had not encountered it. Apple laptops have a reputation for running hot—so much so that Apple will correct you if you call them laptops (they’re notebooks) to prevent you from complaining about a hot lap—but this seemed a good bit more than what I was used to.

I was especially concerned since the higher temperature and fan revving seemed to be associated with running the 3D animations of OnScreen DNA. I decided I should get quantitative about it and downloaded a free Windows program called speedfan, which promised to display computer temperatures, as well as letting you set the fan speed according to temperature in order to better control how hot it would be allowed to get.

I was shocked to see that the cpu temperature was going as high as 100°C. That’s 212°F, the boiling point of water! I hadn’t ever given the temperature of my laptop much thought, figuring that, although it might feel pretty hot to the touch, it was probably nothing to worry about. This high a temperature just didn’t seem reasonable though.

Some online research led me to an article in which the reviewer was concerned about the “excessive” 60°C temperature he was seeing on his MacBook Pro. This really made my temperature sound bad, but a little more research produced a less alarming assessment. The machine in the review just mentioned had a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo cpu, which supposedly is OK at temperatures up to 73°C, so the concern should not be great at 60°C. My MacBook Pro, however, is from the first generation Core Duo models. Those are supposed to be OK up to 100°C, so I am not really in the kind of danger zone that my first reading of the Core 2 Duo machine review had led me to fear. Nonetheless I am right at the margin on occasion.

A number of articles I found made it seem that Apple’s overuse of thermal paste was a well-documented cause of high temperatures in the early assembly runs of MacBook Pros. Some sites had instructions on how to crack your laptop, remove Apple’s paste, and put on a little bit of a better kind. I’ve installed RAM and a hard drive or two, but I don’t think that is something I want to attempt.

I had never monitored temperature under OS X, so I had no way to compare it to Vista, though I felt Vista must be running hotter. I downloaded the Temperature Monitor app from the Apple download site, and used it to monitor my Mac temperatures. The temperatures I mention in the rest of this piece are those from the cpu monitor. Unless it was in a quiescent state, the MacBook Pro was always hotter than 60°C. Running OnScreen DNA in an uninterrupted animation of DNA replication, I once saw the temperature climb to around 90°C. However, the same test at a different time saw the temperature peak at 80°C, with the fans bringing it down to around 75°C, where it would be maintained.

Similarly, running Vista, monitor readings on a day different from that when the 100°C had been measured found a peak temperature of 90°C. I speculated hopefully that some intervening Microsoft upgrades to Vista (they install some without giving you a choice) might have improved things. This brings me to my next Jerry Pournelle type adventure: installing Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Although Microsoft had earlier said Vista would not need service packs to fix bugs etc. in Vista, they had had to issue one if only to sell Vista to the holdouts that always wait for the first service pack before upgrading. I hoped that SP1 might lower the operating temperature further. Plus there was a vaguely worded promise of improvement in running games “not really designed for Vista” (not using DirectX, in other words, is my guess), which I hoped meant better Open GL performance.

Vista SP1 was made generally available March 18. Microsoft strongly recommended ordinary users upgrade through the standard Windows Upgrade program, which performs the same function as Software Update does for the Mac. But Windows Upgrade found nothing new for me. Microsoft online documentation had said that Windows Upgrade would just pretend you hadn’t asked if it detected a problem driver on your system—this without so much as giving you a hint that SP1 was available at all, never mind the specific reason you were not going to be allowed the upgrade. Thinking it might help to install a few optional upgrades I had skipped, I went ahead and did that. Windows Upgrade did then offer me something new, but it was a small upgrade. Installing it and restarting did not change things.

I wondered if an Apple driver might be causing me to get the cold shoulder from Windows Upgrade. A message I left on Apple’s Boot Camp forum brought replies from others that had successfully installed SP1 via the Windows Upgrade utility, so I knew it was possible on a Mac if not necessarily one with my exact configuration. But after numerous failed attempts to get the word from Windows Upgrade that SP1 was ready and waiting for installation on my Mac, I decided to go against Microsoft’s strong advice and download the 440 megabyte SP1 installer to do it myself. Once it was downloaded and launched, the SP1 installer informed me I needed 3 gigabytes of hard drive space in order to carry out the installation. I had been afraid my 1.75 gigabytes of free space on the Windows partition would be too meager, and it was.

Contrary to what I mistakenly said in my earlier post about Boot Camp, I had actually created a Windows partition of only 12 gigabytes. I was surprised to see after installing Vista that I only had about 300-400 megabytes free on the Windows partition. There really wasn’t much in the way of program files to get rid of. Most of the space was taken up by the Windows folder and a couple of humongous (2 gigabyte) files, one obviously for virtual memory paging and the other (hiberfil.sys) that turned out to be for “hibernating” or storing the contents of memory for quick return to your computer’s state without rebooting and relaunching programs. Since I had never known about hibernation, I figured I could live without it. I found instructions online for ditching the hibernation file through the Windows command line, since a drag to the recycling bin wouldn’t do the trick. That had bought me a little space, but not enough to install SP1. I could see no way to free sufficient space.

I already knew that it was impossible to just expand the Windows partition because of the different formats used by the two operating systems sharing the hard disk. I would have to start all over with Windows installation, as far as I could tell. But then a little more research made me aware of a very useful program that anyone using Boot Camp should know about: WinClone. It saved me a lot of trouble. It is donationware, and I was happy to make a donation after having used it successfully. Using WinClone, which runs under Mac OS X, but can read from and write to a Windows partition, I made an image file of everything that was on my Windows partition. Since I was going to have to get rid of the partition anyway, I wasn’t too worried about whether WinClone would work.

Next I used Boot Camp Assistant to eliminate the Windows Partition. I then rebooted using the iDefrag boot dvd I had made earlier, thinking I would need to defragment to make sure I could make a new and larger partition for Windows using Boot Camp Assistant. However, the visual evidence of a very defragmented drive shown by iDefrag (and of course the 12 gigabytes of the just wiped out Windows partition would be empty) convinced me I could stop the defragmenting and proceed directly to making a new Windows partition. Boot Camp Assistant successfully created a 17 gigabyte partition in a fairly short time without any problems. I then quit the program and relaunched WinClone, this time using it to “restore” the new larger Windows partition.

I then restarted Windows. It made some complaint about something having changed, so that it needed to check everything. I told it to go ahead and check. It was eventually satisfied and launched Vista. I logged in and started the SP1 installer again. This time it ran, warning me that it might take an hour and would restart several times in the process. It worked.

Now I had Vista with SP1 installed. Would it help keep the temperature lower? The answer was no. Even worse, I was now seeing the 100°C temperatures again. However, based on subsequent tests, which have measured the peak temperature under Vista once more at 90°C, and even brought below that by the fans, I have to conclude that there is some other factor that raises the floor of the temperature, and I think the ambient temperature can be ruled out.

In any case, Vista with Boot Camp consistently runs 10-12°C hotter than OS X on my machine. Running my graphics intensive program OnScreen DNA, the temperature peaks somewhere between 80-90°C, under Mac OS 10.5.2 and can usually be reduced a few degrees by the fans as they rotate faster. Running the same software under Vista on the same machine sees peak temperatures of 90-100°C, which can also usually be reduced a few degrees by the fans. I don’t have the data to back it up, not having monitored temperatures under Mac OS 10.4, but, based on my increased awareness of fan noise, I have the feeling that 10.5.2 may run hotter than 10.4.

Even if I could forget about the temperature, the fan noise is not something I’d want going in the background if I were trying to demonstrate the Vista version of my software, which militates against using the MacBook Pro for demos. Actually, I don’t think I could stand working with the fan noise for long anyway, as it is louder than my old Dell box. These high temperatures are occurring in March, where the ambient room temperature is 22-24°C. It will be considerably hotter in the office during the summer. This has not been a problem in the past, but that was before Leopard and Vista, so I can’t be sure what will happen.

All in all, my hopes of getting a topnotch Vista machine out of my first-generation MacBook Pro using 10.5.2 Boot Camp have so far been disappointed. I think I know Apple well enough not to expect any sympathy or direct help from them (though the Apple user forums are helpful). Not to be disloyal or anything, but Apple does not like to acknowledge it has been the cause of any problem you encounter with its products. If only my audience were a little bigger… Maybe I should try to get some conservative talkshow host to go on the air with my problem. Would that work? Too crazy!

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Computers | No Comments »

The Perfect Italian Woman

March 21st, 2008

For a couple of decades I lived under the illusion that, though I had spent all my life in the USA (Texas, Berkeley, and Cambridge), my true spiritual home was in Europe. I had convinced myself that there were many more people in Europe, especially France, with whom I would feel a close affinity than there were in my native land, whose faults I knew so well, but whose virtues I largely took for granted without even being conscious of them. There was also the alluring mystique of the beautiful, intellectual (yet thoroughly natural), sensual European women, different from American women in some indefinable way: in their Europeaness.

A brief visit to Europe when I was around thirty had only enhanced its romantic lure (that of Paris, especially) but I did not get across the Atlantic again until some ten years later when an opportunity arose to work for a year in Torino, Italy just at a time when my personal situation gave me a strong inclination to get the hell out of town anyway.

Torino would not have been my first choice as a place to begin my possible new life in Europe, but it would have to do for a start. As a rather provincial, industrial city, an extremely polluted one, it did not match my idea of the European paradise; wasn’t even close. I was working as a consultant for Aeritalia, the Italian national aerospace company, in the Space Division.

Torino was off the beaten track for tourism. I remember some Torino native asking me “Come maì Torino?” Meaning why had I picked Torino, of all places. The lack of foreigners in Torino meant that, outside of Aeritalia, where there were some other foreign consultants and where the Italian engineers liked to practice their English with me, I was forced to speak Italian. I had only started my self-study of Italian a little before I came to Italy, so I was far from fluent in it.

A major problem that I found in Torino was that almost the only women I saw in public were either married or too young. Meeting women outside of work was going to be a problem. This was disappointing, and a major deviation from my naively imagined life in Europe. I was later shocked to hear how matter-of-factly some of my Italian coworkers talked of utilizing the services of local prostitutes.

For the past several years, I’d been living in Cambridge, Mass. and spending a lot of time in Harvard Square, which my workplaces and abodes had been near to for most of that time. The Square’s numerous bookstores, street performers, cafés, restaurants, and bars attracted lots of graduate students, professors and other academic staff, and assorted artistic and hippie types; along with undergraduates, high school kids, yuppies, and general seekers of a good time. Harvard Square had been a place where it was possible to meet a woman; and, in addition to my wanting a comfortable milieu, that was a reason for hoping I’d find a similar place in Torino.

There was no such place, but I did find that the area around Via Po, which ran down to the Po river bridge, was the university neighborhood and probably as close as I was going to find. One Sunday afternoon after I’d been in Italy, feeling rather forlorn most of the time, for about six weeks, I was sitting in the Gelateria delle Alpi on Via Po, by myself as usual, drinking a beer and eating what the Italians called a “toast,” which was basically a grilled cheese sandwich.

A beautiful young woman at another table caught my attention. She was tall, vibrant, and dramatic in an oh-so-Italian way. Her attire—running shoes, pants, and sweater—made me think she might be a student, though she was no young kid. Advanced drama student I guessed. She was talking to her Italian girl friend with sweeping Italian gestures. Her big expressive eyes were especially beautiful. She wore no wedding ring.

I was spellbound. She kept looking at me, or looking to see if I was looking at her, in the mirror. In stature and flair she reminded me a bit of my second wife, whom coincidentally I had first seen in a café in Austin (speaking French, I now recall). This was not necessarily a good sign, though I didn’t think about it at the time. But this woman was gorgeous and vivacious in a way that shouted out her Italianess.

This made up for the weeks of feeling isolated in an unfriendly city that didn’t welcome foreigners. She was altogether the most appealing woman I’d seen since my arrival in Italy—the Italian dream woman really, not obviously married and not a teenybopper; and it seems she might even be interested in me, if those looks my way meant anything. Did I dare approach her, especially with my meager knowledge of Italian? I was getting nervous at the thought of it, which was not good.

Now she and her friend were getting up to pay and leave. I might never see this perfect Italian woman again! I dove in without further thought.

“Parli inglese?” (Familiar, rather than polite form. See if she speaks English.)

“Si.”

“I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed watching you and your friend talking. Avec des grands gestes italiens.”

I remember throwing in the stupid (and probably incorrect) French phrase, no doubt accompanied by some gestures of my own to add to the ridiculous effect, but I can’t account for it. I guess I wanted to be speaking to her in Italian, but French came out instead. I continued quickly.

“Sono americano and I really enjoy…”

She had to have completely misinterpreted the thrust of my words, for she interrupted me before I could complete the sentence in which I was going somehow to express my admiration for her as the quintessential Italian woman.

“So you could really tell I was an American,” she said. It was more a statement tinged with disappointment than a question; and in perfect American English.

Questa donna italiana! She—an American! While she seemed disappointed that I’d seen through her act and approached her as a fellow American, so she thought, I was briefly disoriented, for I had fallen for the act so completely that the truth had suddenly exploded both my imagined reality and the hope that sprang from it. I don’t remember the rest of our sputtering conversation very well, not that it amounted to much.

The sad truth was that both of us were trying to escape America and Americans. She said she particularly liked Torino because there were hardly any tourists. She was with a theater company, so my guess had been pretty close. She had to get back to her friend. Yeah, I was getting the brushoff, but it really didn’t matter anymore, and I was left to ponder what it meant that my perfect Italian woman had turned out to be American. As American as I was.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Italy, Remembrances | No Comments »

A Nightmare: My Father, Saddam

March 16th, 2008

I don’t remember dreams that often, and nightmares are in the minority of those I do remember, but last night I had a memorable nightmare.

Of course, I don’t remember exactly how I found myself in the predicament of my dream, but here it is: my father was none other than Saddam Hussein, and he was about to kill me by blowing my brains out with a pistol shot to the head.

As we all know, dreams don’t have to make sense while they are happening. They just are, and we have to accept the situations they place us in. I think I tried reasoning within the dream a little. Saddam, my father? That doesn’t make sense. But finally, there was no getting around it. This was real, and the gun was at my temple.

Although I had no reason to believe Saddam would spare me once he had determined I was to die (I’ve seen footage of him watching his comrades being escorted out of the Baath Party Congress to be shot on his orders, as they pleaded that there was a mistake, that they were loyal.), whether or not I was his son—which I didn’t feel myself to be—I said something like “How can you kill me? I haven’t done anything wrong, have I? I’m your son.” Actually, I don’t remember what I said to him, only that it was a desperate last-second plea. The important thing (for understanding the dream) was his surprising reply: “That’s not my business.”

What? This powerful dictator with a gun at my head, supposedly my father, was telling me that the why of my death through his imminent action was not really his business! This answer implied that he was only doing what he had to do, that he himself was only carrying out orders in some way.

The trigger was never pulled, or if it was I awoke before the bullet penetrated my skull. Relieved to realize I was safe in my own familiar bed, with no gun at my head, I lay awake to ponder the meaning of the dream. Which I think I have found.

Dreams are metaphorical dramas. Saddam was an implacable killer, against whom I was powerless. But, contrary to what I would have thought, he had no motive, however crazy, for wishing me dead. He was just doing his job in some sense. He was not the all-powerful man I imagined him to be.

There was nothing personal about it. The Saddam in my dream was a heartless killer, but neither sadistic, angry, nor calculating. And he was supposedly my father. What else could this Saddam be but Nature? Nature has given us life, as a father does, and it will eventually, when the time comes, subtract us from this world as cooly as Saddam Hussein might have, but without willing it.

“That’s not my business,” Saddam said in my dream. Whose business is it? That is the mystery we all either try to find the answer to or try to ignore.

Tags: ,
Posted in Life, Reflections | No Comments »

Boot Camp? I Was Ready to Punt.

March 14th, 2008

This is going to be my Jerry Pournelle column. Not that it’s about Jerry, but it falls into the genre he created, or at least became the master of. For those of you not familiar with Jerry, he used to have a column in Byte magazine, which ceased publication several years ago. Jerry’s column had pretty much the same basic outline each month. Under the guise of reviewing new hardware and software, it chronicled his latest misadventures with computer technology, problems he had encountered just in his daily work as a writer and in setting up and connecting components.

I was a Mac user, and he mainly dealt with PCs, so there wasn’t much overlap of my experience with his, though for a time it was amusing to follow his monthly tours (long, meandering tours usually) through troubleshooting land: first I did this, but then that caused this other problem, so I had try this other procedure, and so on. I had the feeling that life couldn’t be that hard for all PC users, so that maybe Jerry was deliberately trying things that would stress the systems just to see if he could encounter the problem that would become next month’s column.

I recently discovered that Jerry is still at it, writing about computer experiences at chaosmanorreviews.com, only now he is mainly using Macs. I read an episode a few weeks ago, and sure enough Jerry had gotten into a bind doing something unusual: copying all 55,000 Windows PC files from an external hard drive connected to his Mac to the Mac’s trash folder in order to clean off the drive, instead of just reformatting it, which he was going to need to do anyway. He ran into problems trying to empty the trash (which took many paragraphs to relate) until someone told him to disconnect the drive. See what I mean? Jerry could definitely make a little extra income as a software and hardware tester. It’s fool proof, but is it Jerry proof? Just joking, Jerry. I’ve had problems too, as I shall now relate.

I have been needing a Windows Vista machine to test my software (OnScreen DNA and OnScreen Particle Physics) on. The Dell box I developed the Windows versions on runs XP fine, but is not up to running Vista. Ever since Apple announced Boot Camp as a way to install Windows on an Intel Mac, I’ve been planning to use it to make my MacBook Pro function as a Vista test machine, just as soon as Boot Camp was out of beta.

That happened when the latest version of Mac OS X, Leopard (aka 10.5), was released a few months ago with Boot Camp as a component. But still, I was a little leery of version 10.5.0, and indeed a number of problems were encountered by some early adopters. I didn’t actually install Leopard until the second update 10.5.2 appeared, which by some accounts was the first truly non-beta version.

As an aside, let me say that the last upgrade to 10.4, the oddly numbered 10.4.11, had caused me more trouble than any other Mac OS upgrade I’d ever installed. Safari wouldn’t run at all, at least until I upgraded QuickTime as well, which shouldn’t have been necessary. Meanwhile I learned that Firefox is not that bad, and I now use both. I was glad to have obtained the experience with Firefox, having recently discovered that it’s impossible to edit a page for a blog in WordPress using the latest version of Safari. Don’t try it; it will make you want to pull your hair out when all your paragraphing disappears! Firefox works fine with WordPress.

I purchased an OEM version of Vista Home Premium for a little over $100, thus saving quite a bit of money though restricting myself to never installing from that disk to another computer, which seemed a reasonable sacrifice. I had done a good bit of online research from which I had concluded that it was all right to install the OEM version on your own computer, so long as you realized you would not be able to get any tech support from Microsoft. I was after all making a custom computer assembly of a sort, just not one I planned to sell.

After installing 10.5.2 and waiting for things to equilibrate for a few days, I decided to take the Boot Camp Vista plunge. The first step in Boot Camp installation is to partition your Mac hard drive into separate Mac and Windows partitions. You are supposed to be able to do this “in place” without erasing your hard drive. A program called Boot Camp Assistant is provided by Apple to move files around to clear space for the Windows partition and then to do the partitioning.

I launched Boot Camp Assistant, instructed it to make a 15-gigabyte partition for Windows, and then took a break, assuming this would not be a rapid procedure. When I came back to the computer, I was not happy to see the ominous white text on a black background that signifies “Kernel Panic,” even without the words. Nothing to do be done but to restart and try again, hoping it was some freak glitch.

I was relieved to see that the MacBook Pro appeared to boot normally if a bit slowly, indicating (I thought) that the interrupted partitioning had not harmed the disk or its directory etc. Then I noticed that the total gigabytes for the disk had been reduced by the fifteen I had tried to give to the Windows partition. Disk Utility didn’t see the Windows partition, so it was as though the space had just disappeared from the hard drive.

I have AppleCare (Apple’s extended warranty plan), so I gave them a call and got through in a reasonably short time. The fellow I talked to had not encountered the problem, and the few things he suggested didn’t do any good. He put me on hold for a long time and then came back to suggest wiping the drive clean and reinstalling everything.

That was not something I wanted to do, as it seemed both time-consuming and risky. I thought I’d check the Apple support forums to see if anyone else had run into the problem. Indeed I found several people had had experiences essentially identical to mine that very same day, and all had been running the brand-new version 10.5.2. A couple had already reported that rebooting from the system installation disk and then using Disk Utility to repair the shrunken drive would restore it to apparent health, gigabytes recovered. This was encouraging at least; and I was able to obtain the same result. But I still didn’t have Windows Vista installed on my MacBook Pro.

I was not tempted to try the partitioning procedure again, since I felt lucky to have escaped with my data intact. There were a few hard-headed optimists in the forum that had gone through the whole procedure, Sisyphus-like, several times. I kept checking back in the Apple Boot Camp forum, for news of a solution. Finally a couple of distasteful workarounds appeared. One guy had just done what Apple Care had suggested I do, and he could verify that after restoring the contents of his hard drive from a backup drive, he had been able to partition it with Boot Camp Assistant and then install Windows. Another had achieved success after defragmenting his hard drive. This was more appealing to me. I paid for a program called iDefrag online ($35) and downloaded it. First I had to use the software’s special program for creating a bootable DVD with iDefrag on it, since it can’t defragment the startup disk.

Defragmenting is a slow procedure, but the software’s colorful visual representation of moving files and fragments around and filling in holes in the disk was rather fascinating, in the way watching clothes wash through the window of a front-loading washer can be, so I watched it for a while. It was slow though, and I eventually took a break. When I returned I found that a disk-reading error had occurred, and the software had quit, though it had been kind enough to tell me the name of the file it had encountered the problem with. The same file had failed to copy during my earlier backup to an external disk, so I wasn’t surprised to see its obscure name appearing again.

I deleted the file from the hard drive and started the defragmentation again. I was sorry to see that the program didn’t go back to where it had left off but was starting all over again. Even though the first part of the disk it was working on (as seen in its graphical display of the process) was almost solidly colored in with defragmented files, there were a few bubbles now present due to my having deleted that one file. It took a long time just to scoot blocks over to fill those bubbles. I left it to do its work again, and when I returned saw the same dismaying message about a problem file. Delete file and start over.

The same thing happened two more times. I was now worried that my hard drive might have some physical damage or that the original partitioning attempt had left a lot of files in a messed up state. Since the last couple of problem files had been in the same folder, I decided to try replacing the whole folder from the backup I had earlier made. Having done that, I crossed my fingers and started iDefrag again.

This time it worked, and the Boot Camp partitioning went through without another hitch. Now I was ready for the actual Vista installation. Then I read on the Vista box insert that the OEM version of Vista might require, according to Microsoft, installation by something called the OEM Preinstallation Kit or OPK. Going to the OPK web page, I saw that there was a license Microsoft wanted you to obtain (online application form, of course) in order to get the OPK. This was looking like a lot more trouble than I had anticipated. Some online searching about installing Windows with Boot Camp led me to assurances that the OPK was not really necessary.

I have to admit that, while I can interpret Microsoft’s fine print on use of the OEM version in a way that justifies my use of it (as a “system builder” that just doesn’t intend to redistribute this particular system, thus not needing to use the OPK), my main justification is my belief that, given the widespread availability of the OEM versions of Vista (I got mine from Amazon, and I’ve seen it listed at Walmart), Microsoft does not really care about individuals installing on their own machines, so long as they don’t expect any technical support.

I proceeded with my Vista installation, following Apple’s directions. As far as I could tell, my OEM version disk was just the same as a regular one, and it installed Vista without ever demanding I use the OPK instead. Sure enough I had Vista installed and running on my Mac! But something that should have taken around an hour had stretched over two days and required lots of online research and the purchase of a third-party program.

Whew! I don’t know how Jerry Pournelle does it. Writing this has been like pulling teeth after a sleepless night. That’s more than enough for a single post. Having gotten this far, I’ll relate my so far none-too-happy experience with Vista on the MacBook Pro in a later entry.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Computers | No Comments »

“How Are You This Evening, Professor?” Asked the Roulette Croupier

March 10th, 2008

When I was a graduate student doing research in experimental particle physics at the University of California in Berkeley in the 1968-74 period, I shared an office with another graduate student up on “the Hill” in Building 50B of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Jerry, a sociable young researcher whose office was across the hall, was frequently at the center of conversations right outside my door. Jerry had a pretty loud voice, so I heard a lot about what he and his friends were up to. The talk might be about rock concerts or other recreational activities as well as physics shop talk. Sometimes people would go skiing, sometimes people would take a trip to the casinos in Reno, which wasn’t that far away.

At some point, Jerry and a few other junior physicists and grad students decided to apply their physics knowhow to the problem of beating the roulette tables at Reno. From my memory of Jerry’s hallway accounts, augmented a little by answers to questions I asked someone (Jerry, probably) at the time, I can sketch the outlines of how the project went.

As far as I know, they came up with their scheme independently from any previous attempts. Their idea was a sort of Gordian-knot-cutting approach that didn’t require a detailed analysis of the roulette ball’s motion. No equations of motion required!

YouTube has a collection of roulette wheel videos (mostly advertising ways to make money playing roulette!) for those of you as unfamiliar with how a roulette wheel works as I was until a few days ago or who would like to refresh your memory. The basics are the following. The croupier launches the roulette ball so that it races around a circular track that encompasses the rest of the roulette apparatus. The track is banked, and the ball is traveling along a section of the inside of a cone, but due to the ball’s high initial velocity, it hugs the wall and doesn’t start to roll downhill toward the center of the apparatus until it has slowed down substantially.

Frictional forces slow the ball down; at some point gravity has its way, and the ball rolls downhill, eventually coming to rest in one of the numbered compartments of the inner wheel. To make things more interesting the inner wheel rotates in the direction opposite to the way the ball travels around the outer circle.

I never knew the full details of their scheme, but I know that the basic premise of their method was that an essential parameter of the roulette ball’s motion followed an exponential decay law. The method depended crucially on the fact that roulette bets can still be placed for some time after the ball has been launched, which gave them a short time in which to make measurements and calculations and then place their bets based on the results.

Exponential decay of a certain variable occurs when the rate at which the variable decreases in time (decays) is proportional to the current value of the variable. The constant of proportionality is called the decay constant. For any fixed time interval (say half a second), no matter when the timer starts, the value of the decaying parameter will always be found at the end of the interval to have decreased by the very same percentage from what it was when the interval began.

The speed of the ball around the outer perimeter in the first part of the spin must have been the parameter they were focussed on, since it’s the only variable you could realistically hope to obtain in real time. What’s more, ball speed would be the crucial variable to know. If you know the value of an exponentially decaying variable (ball speed in this case) at any time, then the decay constant tells you what its value will be at any later time.

Exponential decay of the speed would imply that the the frictional force slowing the ball down was proportional to the speed. This wouldn’t have to be strictly true, just a sufficiently good approximation. Any detailed analysis of the ball’s motion would clearly be impossible in real time. Exponential decay would just be a hypothesis to test, and evidently, in the experience of Jerry and his friends, it was good enough to make money on.

They had no device for measuring speed directly. The requirement would be to time the position of the ball at three points and with sufficient accuracy to determine the decay constant. I assume a hidden programmable calculator would be used for all the calculations, since they would have had to use the measurements to solve for both the speed at some particular time and the decay constant. How they would have input this data into the calculator, I don’t know. I wish I had actually seen them in action, as it must have been fascinating. They would only have needed to determine the decay constant once for a given roulette wheel and ball combination. Then only two measurements would have been required during a spin to determine the speed at a known time.

I’m guessing that they would have used their speed formula to determine the point on the wheel at which the ball would lose contact with the outer rim and begin its descent, which would occur when the component of the gravitational force parallel to the cone’s surface became greater than the component of centrifugal force acting in the opposite direction. Yes, I know centrifugal force is not a “real” force; but, mathematically, it’s a convenient fiction for calculating when the gravitational force starts to make the path of the ball deviate more from the straight line it would follow (in the absence of wall or gravity) than it would deviate if the centripetal force exerted by the wall on the ball were acting alone.

To calculate this point would require knowledge of the angle that defines the interior conical surface on which the ball is moving, but that would either be standard or something they could calibrate from observing a few roulette spins, always assuming the method was reasonably sound. Once the descent has started, the motion is probably similar from one roulette spin to the next, even allowing for the possibility of hitting a deflector on the way down. Those occasional deflections aren’t going to make or break the method as a potential money-maker.

The roulette-beating team would have had to take into account the motion of the inner wheel as well, but that would be simply a matter of keeping track of a constant rotation. With all that knowledge they should have had an excellent chance at correctly identifying the sector (though not the exact number) the ball should end up in. They would have bet on some contiguous range of numbers, for I can’t imagine the method could have done better than that. Individual bets would not pay at long odds, but they could consistently win if they could predict the sector the ball would end up in.

After the team had advanced their technique sufficiently, they rented a roulette wheel for testing their method under realistic conditions. The method perfected, they set off for a dry run in Reno. The results of that expedition convinced them they could be making money at it even under the pressure of a casino environment. Perhaps they won a little money playing for low stakes.

I assume that on their next trip to Reno they were ready to make some real money, perhaps even to win an enormous jackpot, but I don’t know that for a fact. Inside the casino, it was soon apparent that things were not going to go well. Jerry was greeted with “How are you this evening, Professor?” Now even though this was not 100% correct about Jerry’s job title, it was enough to indicate some serious intelligence work on the subject of who he was, and it conveyed very adequately the desired message of “We know who you are and what you’re up to.”

Whether Jerry and his friends decided to leave on their own then or were escorted out, I can’t say. I do know that they were joined in the parking lot by some professional intimidators, who made it clear they had better not come back. So ended the story of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab roulette scheme, or at least the last I heard of it.

Jerry, if you should by some amazing accident stumble upon this article, I ask you to write up your experience, as I’m sure it would be very entertaining. Send it to me by email, and I will post it (without revealing your full name if you prefer) if you can’t think of a better outlet. Of course, Jerry may be the one with the magnificent Tuscan villa I imagined for Bob in my previous post, in which case he will not want to give away any trade secrets.

Also, if anyone makes a fortune from the secrets revealed in this post, please don’t forget to come back and make a donation. Just remember I don’t condone breaking any laws, and I believe there are now laws about using any sort of computer in a gambling casino, at least in the most up-to-date jurisdictions.

Finally, let me propose that the Department of Homeland Security could benefit from hiring a few people that work in casino security. They know how to identify suspicious characters and follow their moves to see what they are up to. And they don’t waste time with random searches.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Berkeley, Remembrances | No Comments »

Why Gamble? Hire a Physicist.

March 5th, 2008

I landed my first and only free-lance physics job right around the time I turned in my PhD thesis with all the required signatures to the UC Berkeley graduate office in 1974. It was at a time when I was without an income or a place to live. No, I wasn’t on the street. I had plenty of people I could crash with, and my mother was sending me a little money, but it wasn’t an ideal situation, to say the least. As part of a cost-cutting move, I and at least one other grad student, who like me must have seemed destined to maintain his Research Assistant status at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab indefinitely, had been given a cutoff date for support by the particle physics research group we belonged to. Fortunately, I had been able to use the Lab’s computer facilities and my office there to finish writing my thesis during the summer, albeit without being paid. I’m afraid the other student I spoke of never did finish. I hope things turned out all right for him.

Anyway, I needed to make some money while I figured out what my next step would be. I had personal reasons for staying in the Bay Area, and having given my physics research a much lower priority than political activity (remember, this was Berkeley) for so long, I don’t think it even occurred to me to ask my thesis advisor Ron Ross to help me get a postdoc somewhere, which would have been the normal course for a new PhD to follow. Ron and I weren’t on bad terms exactly, but he hadn’t understood my participation in student strikes and so on, and we hadn’t interacted all that much for quite a while. To be honest, I hadn’t really expected to finish my degree. I was definitely not on the normal career path. I should add that when a physics professor called Ron about hiring me several months later, he gave me a strong recommendation, for which I am grateful.

Now the University maintained a bulletin board in some campus office where jobs available to Cal students were posted. I found out about this and went to check it out. One unusual posting intrigued me and seemed to have my name on it. Someone was looking for a physics grad student that had completed the graduate classical mechanics course. I believe the posting was even more specific about needing to be able to derive equations of motion using the Lagrangian formulation of mechanics. Though it had been years since I’d taken the course, this sounded right up my alley: a textbook problem, though I assumed it must be a pretty hard one.

The office put me in touch with my prospective employer, who turned out to be a former UC Berkeley math teacher, one currently engaged in a court battle with the University over some unfair practice, so he claimed, related to his being no longer a teacher there. I don’t remember the details, but it sounded pretty hopeless. The guy, whom I’ll call Bob, wanted to make sure I could handle the problem first, and then that I would agree to work on it without knowing its purpose, which was to remain secret. He said the work was related to some device he and others were planning to make. He also assured me that it was not weapons-related.

After he had determined I might be capable of succeeding at the task, he brought in one of his partners (there turned out to be several) in the secret venture to help negotiate my pay rate. This was not easy for me since I had been making a low Research Assistant salary for several years and had no idea what hourly rate I should get as a new Physics PhD (or near-PhD, whichever it was). We agreed on something, which was definitely an improvement over nothing, but which was unfortunately, as it turned out, an hourly rate instead of a flat price for the whole job. Afterwards the partner, call him Ben, felt obliged to tell me he thought I had sold them my services at too low a price.

The problem to be solved was that of a sphere rolling down the inside of a cone. It must be a funny kind of a device they wanted to build. Some kind of guidance system? Bob explained that all they needed were the equations of motion because they had other team members who were computer programming experts that would be able to solve the problem numerically.

Bob had tried to find the equations of motion in numerous physics books, without success. Something he had seen in a paper or a textbook by some Russian physics professor had led him to believe that, if he could only reach that particular Russian, his quest would be over. Bob had been trying to track the professor down, making long-distance calls to the Soviet Union for several days. I believe there was a language problem. In the meantime he was turning to me to get the project past this crucial step.

It wasn’t a very hard problem, and I found the equations all too quickly from the standpoint of income. Bob, however, was a very generous fellow, and I benefitted from his generosity beyond the money I earned for solving his problem. For example, when Bob heard I didn’t have a regular place to stay he told me I could come by his house any time. The window by the front door was always unlocked, so I could just climb in if no one was home. I slept on his living room floor two or three nights, though it was not a very restful place. Bob actually found the equations in a text book not long after I had obtained them, so it was just as well he hadn’t spent too much on it.

It was not the best time in Bob’s life. In addition to losing his job, he had split up with his wife (though his teenage son was living with him), and the bank was foreclosing on his house. Eviction was imminent. He was approaching that problem from a legal angle as well, working on a presentation to US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to halt the eviction, arguing that the bank had not sent the final notice to his actual address. Not only that, they had knowingly sent it to the wrong address, and this was a widespread practice by California banks, thus making the issue one that the Supreme Court should take up.

Bob had obtained all the proper legal forms for petitioning the Supreme Court, but still had to type his argument and the requisite names in them. I helped him with that. This was in the days of the typewriter, before computer word processing. I believe he needed a lot of whiteout. Whether Bob’s drinking was a cause of or a result of his current troubles, he was definitely drinking too much at this time, and I had a very hard time waking him up so he could get the Supreme Court package sent out in time. But the package was sent and received, and a court clerk affirmed by telephone that Justice Douglas had taken it home with him to read overnight. Even I felt some satisfaction in knowing that, though I had no hope for a Supreme Court intervention. There was something admirable about Bob’s never-say-die spirit.

The rest of Bob’s team also seemed to have seen better days. At least one other, a large, morose programmer, had a drinking problem. The group also included two rather attractive women of the same name, but of different stature, one being referred to as “tall Gwen” and the other as “small Gwen.” I think small Gwen may have once been married to Ben.

Bob once took me, his son, Ben, and one of the Gwens out to eat in a nice restaurant but got his credit card rejected, which I mention just to show what dire straits he was in. He managed to come up with some alternative payment method, which I don’t recall now. Much worse than the credit card refusal, which could happen to anyone really, was the night an angry artist came with a burly friend to retrieve his paintings from off Bob’s wall. I was asleep on the living room floor when the two of them burst in, one of them saying “Rip off an artist, will you?” as he knocked Bob down. It was over pretty fast. I lay low. Later Ben asked why Bob hadn’t waked him up, for he would have come downstairs with his 38. I relate these details just to give you a picture of the kind of life these guys were leading. It would take Dickens to really do them justice.

Anyway, everyone in on the project’s secret seemed to be counting heavily on it to turn their fortunes around. They had a code name for the project: The Number. They spoke of The Number a lot, sometimes in ways that indicated they viewed time as before The Number and after The Number. What could this mysterious project be?

The name provided a clue, and you probably have guessed it by now. Although I have to say I never had it verified by one of them, and I never even mentioned that I thought I might know the secret, what else could it have been but a project to beat the roulette wheel at a casino?

I’m afraid they hadn’t thought it through sufficiently, for I can’t see how they would have made practical use of any kind of solution they came up with, never mind that a sphere rolling in a cone hardly seems an adequate model. I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news, and they never asked me what I thought. My job was done, and I moved on.

I imagine they eventually gave up, but for all I really know Bob may now be living in a magnificent Tuscan palazzo, sending out a new money-gathering party to Monte Carlo whenever the wine cellar needs replenishing. Or maybe I was just wrong about what The Number was. What do you think?

I actually know of some physicists that found a way to beat the roulette wheel, but they ran into other problems. I’ll tell that story in my next post.

Tags: ,
Posted in Berkeley, Remembrances | No Comments »

Dangerous Experiments

March 3rd, 2008

Years ago, I had an idea for a movie, the premise of which was that a physics graduate student had discovered that an imminent particle physics experiment was going to destroy the universe. The student had written a computer program to predict what sort of new particle physics events would occur when the next super duper particle accelerator, now nearing completion after years of construction, came on line. The shocking result, checked and rechecked, which his program gave was that with the anticipated beam densities and energies and with the particles involved, a reaction would occur which would trigger the equivalent of a new Big Bang, annihilating the existing universe. Never mind how that singular result would have been presented by a program whose author had no reason to anticipate such an outcome; this is movie science.

Of course, no one would believe a mere graduate student (maybe a little bit of a hippie), especially not the scientists whose careers and future Nobel prizes were at stake, nor the politicians who would have to admit they had squandered a few billion dollars. You get the picture. The hero and his girlfriend try everything to stop the experiment from taking place, finally turning to a personal last-ditch attempt at outright sabotage. Nevertheless, after numerous exciting escapes from security guards etc., they are ultimately foiled. And of course this happens in a way that allows them to watch helplessly as the dreaded experiment finally commences.

The particle accelerator revs up (with impressive sounds and indicator lights), the beam energy gauge rises, the maximum beam energy is reached, a switch is turned to bring about the catastrophic collisions in the particle event detector, and… Nothing spectacular happens. Hero and girlfriend, unable to believe their good fortune, laugh and hug, on realizing they and the universe have survived. There must have been a bug in the program after all. Or maybe the theory was wrong.

That’s not a very satisfying ending I’ll admit, and I hereby give permission to anyone that wants it to take the idea, modify it as desired, and sell it to Hollywood.

Oddly enough, the world now finds itself in a situation that in some ways resembles my movie scenario, though with important differences. Instead of a lone graduate student, we now have the overwhelming majority of climate researchers telling us that their computer program predicts the end of the world as we know it. The “crackpots” in this case are the ones that cast doubt on the prediction.

Both the supposed catastrophe-inducing experiment (continued release of green house gases into the atmosphere at the current or an increasing rate) and the catastrophe itself (runaway global warming and all the bad things that happen when polar ice caps melt etc.) are gradual and cumulative over years, instead of sudden, as in my movie. The movie at least had a quick way to find out who was right.

Since the number of people deeply interested in the results of particle physics experiments is sadly but truly quite low, all it would have taken to stop the experiment in my movie was to get the governments involved to agree to dismantle the accelerator and bury it, much as happened to the ill-fated Texas Supercollider. Substantially curbing green house emissions, however, will require major modifications to the way the world currently works, and will likely call for real sacrifices by billions of people, at least in the short run.

I’m not willing to say the attempt should not be made; but my guess is that it’s not going to happen, at least not as quickly as the most alarmist predictions would require. So, like it or not, we will probably be in the position of the main characters in my movie, after all else has failed, fatalistically waiting to experience the results of the experiment, only in slow motion, and perhaps passing the anxiety on to our descendants.

As regards the ending of the movie compared to the real-world script: based on my experience with complex computer models, people’s tendency to place too much confidence in their results, and my guess at the current level of scientific understanding of world climate, I don’t think it is crazy to hope—note that I said “crazy” and “hope”—that the ending of the world’s current drama, foolhardy though it may be, will be as happy for future generations as my movie’s was for its main characters.

However that turns out, unless climate modification becomes a branch of practical engineering (and how do you test whether something works in advance?), there is good reason to believe that the future will see major natural climate changes, most likely of the ice age type. That is, unless we have lucked out on those with our unnatural warming.

Tags:
Posted in Observations | No Comments »

Life, Death, and the Second Law

February 28th, 2008

I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I don’t mean about what the law says, though the concept of entropy is harder to grasp than that of energy, which at least seems to be less abstract until you get to know it better. No, I mean the idea that it’s really unfortunate that everything tends to even out to sameness over time and a downright shame that we and our devices are forced to work so hard just to keep our bodies and our society running against the inexorable dissolution ordained by the law of entropy increase.

Indeed, some may see the second law as a defect in the universe. Is it an argument agaist the existence of God for Creation to be running down? Or should we view it in Manichean terms—the Good God of energy conservation struggling valiantly in a lost cause against the Evil One of entropy increase?

There is in fact something strange and subtle about the connection between life and the second law, something that goes beyond the idea that living organisms are able to maintain their highly ordered selves against the tide of universal disorder by squeezing out order at the expense of the rest of the universe. The subtlety of the connection has to do with the way in which living systems accomplish that feat.

Chemists, including biochemists, have an infallible way of determining how chemical reactions proceed within a complex mixture of chemicals not yet in equilibrium: the reactions will take place in such a way as to decrease a physical quantity, which can be calculated, called the free energy. This is under the assumption, which is pretty good in a cell, that the reactions are taking place at constant temperature and pressure. This free energy is the energy in the chemical system theoretically available for useful work, say for causing a heart to beat in an organism. In order for a certain reaction to take place that increases the free energy of the participants in the reaction, it must occur along with a second reaction in which the free energy decrease more than offsets the increase of the first one. That the free energy must always decrease, sounds a lot like the second law of thermodynamics, and in fact the decrease of the free energy in a process at constant temperature and pressure is equivalent to a net increase in the entropy of the universe.

Living organisms have the ability to utilize chemicals from their environment to both sustain their own existing chemical structures and components and to extract useful energy to do the work of living. How does the blind science that rules the organism determine whether it needs to combine molecules A and B into a new one AB or needs instead to start splitting AB molecules apart? Whether the organism is breaking large molecules into smaller ones, combining smaller into larger, moving from molecules with free energy the organism can’t utilize to others with a lesser amount of free energy it can use, or using energy stored in chemical bonds for mechanical work, or dong all in one cell at the same time, the tally sheet of free energy for all the reactions taking place has to show a net decrease.

This means that the incredibly complex and dynamic chemistry of living cells—that involved in nerve signal transmission, DNA replication, digestion, photosynthesis, and the whole network of biochemical processes—all that chemistry is regulated by the second law of thermodynamics. The “self-regulation” of living systems comes through their submission to the second law of thermodynamics. The iron law that says all things decay and that we must all one day die also allows us our brief time of life and consciousness! Nature is deep, very deep, and it is wonderful to think that the very processes that enable our thoughts and understanding of it depend upon the same law that leads inevitably to their end.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Reflections, Science | No Comments »

A Humble Beginning

February 27th, 2008

onscxreen presidentI know, I know. That picture makes me look as batty as the Archbishop of Canterbury. I mean as batty as he looks, not that he really is batty, so far as I know, any more than I am. At a certain age, you just start to look that way if you sort of bug your eyes out, which I happened to be doing when Photo Booth snapped me. The picture must be a little scary too. When I had it at the top of the OnScreen Science home page, for about two days, nearly every visitor left the site immediately upon landing there. But the other snapshots in the series made me look like Steve Wozniak. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except I don’t look like him. I am a physicist, a developer and marketer of science education software, and a Little League coach, or have been all of those recently. I’m also a husband, grandad, and son; and the parent of two teenagers, as well as a grown daughter. I’m shooting for one entry a week. We’ll see how it goes.

Posted in Miscellany | No Comments »

Newer Entries »