Learn how to take Cube Roots in your Head!

M ost people can't do mental arithmetic any more. What a pity indeed :-(

Almost everyone relies on calculators these days. So today I'm going to tell you how to do an apparently difficult feat of mental arithmetic. Today you will learn how to take integer Cube Roots in your head! It's really dead easy, believe me!

Picture the following scenario down at the local pub. We borrow the bartender's calculator and I get you to choose a secret two-digit number. Any two digit number. Call it X. Using the calculator, you then calculate X³ ; if the calculator can't do that, just calculate X*X*X. You read out the answer, say nine hundred and fortyone thousand one hundred and ninety two. Without missing a beat or taking a second's pause, I tell you that the cube root is ninetyeight. You try it again. 438,976? The cube root is 76! Now 79,507? The cube root is 43! As fast as you can read out the cubes, I can tell you the cube root. No PC needed, no pocket calculator needed either. Not even pen and paper. I do it all in my head! In my effin' head! You can learn to do this too.

Firstly, learn the cubes of the numbers 1 though 9 off by heart. They are :-

1 1
2 8
3 27
4 64
5 125
6 216
7 343
8 512
9 729

Then, when the cube is read out to you, regard it as two numbers, to the left and right of the thousands-comma respectively. Thus 571,787 becomes 571 and 787. From the little rote table given above, see which is the largest cube still smaller than the left number (here 571). Here it is 512 which is 8 cubed. So the tens digit of the cube root will be 8. Now look at the right number, here 787. If its final digit is 0,1,4,5,6 or 9, then the units digit of the cube root will be the same (0,1,4,5,6 or 9). If its final digit is 2,3,7,or 8 , then the units digit of the cube root will be ten minus that digit (thus 8,7,3, or 2). And so IMMEDIATELY you can say "The cube root is 83" :-)

The first few times you may be slower. So just talk slowly and perhaps plug in some extra words, eg "Ooh, that's hard! Lemme see now : ah, got it, the cube root is 83."

You have just become a mental giant in your friends' eyes! So, now I've told you the secret, I think you owe me a Guinness or two ;-) BTW, it only works for 2 digit roots.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 29th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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In Memoriam : Ernst Hiller (1928-2008)

With sadness I relay the news of the death of Ernst Hiller, aged 79. He was six times a German champion motorcycle racer and active until quite recently, as shown in the photo on the left. The photo on the right shows him racing his BMW fifty years ago at the Ulster GP in 1958. He lived locally, but will be missed by many across Europe. There is a good illustrated article on his career over at Classic-Motorrad.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 28th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Powering up? But at what price?

As I mentioned in monday's diatribe, Germany is hoping to replace its nuclear and coal power plant facilities with alternative, regenerative, energy sources. In 2007 these summed to 86.7 Terawatt-hours or some 14.3% of the electricity consumed last year. So we would need to multiply this at least sevenfold. The %-age contributions of the individual types of power sources are shown below :-

One particular type which is expanding at 30% p.a is solar power or photovoltaics (= silicon rooftops). This is because it is being subsidised to the tune of 46 Eurocents per KWh since 2004 for the next 20 years. Over this 20 year period the net cost will have summed to some 23 Mrd Euros :-( Put another way, that is 153,000 Euros per job in the solar power branch (FWIW the coal industry subsidy was 78,000 Euro per job). OK, you may say, the subsidies are there to get the investments into place. But currently we end user households pay about 17c/KWh; since the subsidy alone for solar power is 46c/KWh, the cost of electricity will triple over the coming 20 years :-(

Because Germany is relatively cloudy - implies shadows - and the sun only shines in the daytime, solar power plants effectively only average(MWh) 9% of their peak (MWp) rating. Windpower works at night too, but provides no power in the doldrums or even when the wind is too strong, so it does not average much better. In both cases the electricity generating companies need to keep conventional plant available - even online - to cover for the outages due to the vagaries of the weather. How inefficient it all is!

Addendum : Alaskan blogreader Klaus gives us a heads-up about a cascading power outage in Texas allegedly caused by a lack of wind. Miami (FL,USA) blogreader John tells us about yesterday's major power outage in Florida, caused by a single defective switch. Saarland (FRG) blogreader Hermann tells us that the mining shutdown there (after the earthquake) is to be permanent and so the local coal-fired power stations will have to shut down after a few weeks. They are not built to fire imported coal, for that they would need new scrubbers (sic!) which would take almost 8 months to retrofit.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 27th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Powering Down?

S eems to me that the electrical infrastructure here in Germany is getting more fragile too. We are used to hearing about electricity problems in third world areas (like California ;-), but now I'm thinking ours needs some mid-term investment too. At the end of january, the town of Karlsruhe was cast into darkness for 2½ hours leaving 100,000 people without power. Seems a large transformer in the Rheinhafen power station caught fire and there was no alternative way of routing power to the people. This got me researching the power infrastructure situation.

When the Green party was in power(sic!) here, they managed to push through an idealistically motivated bad decision to roll back the use of nuclear power in Germany, not investing in any new plant and aiming to let the existing ones shut down at the end of their planned lifetimes [2006-2035(?)]. This because they were frightened of the unsolved long-time storage problem for nuclear waste. But nuclear power is CO₂ clean! Italians, Swiss, Sweden, France and even the Brits are in favour of (CO₂ clean) nuclear energy. Certainly there is enough uranium for the next 60 years, they say. FWIW: for comparison, there is also sufficient coal for 300 years under the North Sea.

When politicians here understood the global warming issue, the knee-jerk reaction was to roll back on the existing coal-powered power stations too, instead of investing in better gas/smoke cleaning filter technologies. Instead they are pushing for solar power, bio-gas (cows' farts) and wind turbines. Recent ideas are to fill Germany's (short) coasts with (offshore?) wind turbines because the wind is statistically stronger there than inland. It has also been proposed to build any new coal power stations not where the coal is mined but on the coast (so that said wind can disperse their exhaust fumes over the sea? Not with our prevailing winds!). This implies the need to transport the power generated there over long distances across regions where the networks are not capable of doing so. Missing power and missing infrastructure, like I said. Like to the tune of 30,000 Megawatts by 2020! That's 25 or more large power stations! The Green party in e.g. Kiel opposes building these 25 plant, at least in their back yard :-(
Pollution-free electric cars are the future, they say, forcing them upon us. But the power for the puny electric cars has to be generated somewhere and transported too. And those centralised generators pollute the air too, just like regular cars would.

The city of Marburg now requires that newly-built houses have solar-panel roofs. It would have been better if they had merely insisted on a specified energy efficiency. Then house owners could decide how to achieve this. Market forces instead of state planning! Even with government subventions, solar companies all took losses this past year, Conergy shares have lost 80% since 1st Oct. 2007 already! Not so sunny.

We have government-subsidised wind turbines all over the windy bits of our remaining countryside. But during the sunny weather of the last week of december they were becalmed all week. The electricity generating companies thus have to keep spare capacity available to cover such doldrums. If they run their existing plant at low power during windy periods it is less efficient and generates proportionally more pollution.

Now as for the vagaries of the weather, let's just look at this weekend's events. An earthquake (4.0) in the (small) state of Saarland has led to ALL mining there being stopped until further notice 'til they establish the extent of the damage. Let's see how long the coal plant stockpiles last before they run out of coal-generated power there. Simultaneously a hurricane-force storm swept across northern Germany. Most wind turbines feathered their props, going into failsafe mode, so NO power was generated. The storm also took down many trees, some of which fell onto power lines, taking out the already sparse infrastructure. Gradually, after 2 days, people there are getting some power back. The sparse net was not robust enough for alternate routings.

The money spent on subsidising wind-turbines, silicon panel roofing and cow-fart powered gas turbines would have been better spent on improving the efficiency of existing coal plant by just 1% !!! None of these alternative power sources are viable economic alternatives yet. Statistically, wind plant runs only at about 10 % of its maximum rating. And how often the solar roofs see cloudy skies can be seen from the daily weather reports. Even the methane-laden cow-farts are more 'regular' than the wind and sun. But FWIW methane is 18 times as bad a greenhouse gas as CO₂. None of the propaganda for socalled CO₂-free solar- and wind plant takes into account the carbon dioxide and energy resources consumed in the powerplants' manufacture. Nor into the infrastructure costs of its transport, nor the cost of standby plant :-(

What we really need is table-top cold fusion, every house generating its own power, without the need for more infrastructure. Even large capacity centralised fusion plant would be a good solution. But are the (quasi-monopolistic) gas and power companies pumping sufficient resources into research on fusion? No :-( Nor is the government. It is betting its our tax money on cow-farts instead! And the farmers cry "Me thane!" :-(

Comments(2)
Quoth Doug Alder :
"I don't know about the geothermal potential for Europe (outside of Iceland) but I can tell you that it is going to be very big here in North America. At some point in the not too distant future I'll be replacing my furnace her with a geothermal heating/cooling system (estimated drill depth about 300 feet here in Trail - cost about $5000 CDN) and there are numerous areas on the continent that have such active geothermal regions they could (and are being investigated for such) generate most of the power needed in Canada and the US.

You mentioned table top cold fusion - was that a joke or do you think it's likely?"

Reply by Stu :
No geothermal energy here, Doug, the heat is all too deep. Cold fusion is an outside bet, but one in which we should be investing much more research resources, IMHO.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 25th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Phoah!

Two of you commented irately on the morals of the "lady" discussed in tuesday's poem. Fiona thinks "she is just a groupie hawking her body to a variety of old rich men", for which, she says, "there is another (more common) word!". Brian liked the photo of her but says his fantasies revolve around getting (Kate) Moss up against a wall. So it is for Brian that I post my photo of moss up against a wall ;-)

The local wall in question being around a former nunnery (in Dalheim, NRW). Pete Doherty wept ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 23rd February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Bikers Apostrophe's :-(

Wee knead 2 torque abaht moddun edookayshun!

On sunday we had nice weather (albeit 6°C below zero) so my biker mates and I rode to the first motorcycle trade show of the forthcoming 2008 season.

There was the usual contingent of HOG (Harley Owners' Group) members wearing their inevitable couleurs. My editor's eye was struck by the bikers' adoption of the greengrocers' apostrophe (quid vide). Specifically, the Hells Angels (no apostrophe?), and their antithesis, the Free Rider's (superfluous apostrophe). There were also several bikers(plural) apparently from the Freeway Rider's MC (singular?). At first, I thought the individuals had made their own spelling mistakes; however Google confirms that these MC clubs all do use the dreaded greengrocers' apostrophe. They can't all be dyslexic! So why is it so hard to get right?

Oh BTW, that logo shown above today is not a domino, it is an apostrophe in Braille, displayed here for the benefit of those Brothers who name their motorcycle clubs ;-)

Recommended reading : Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss, ISBN 1846680352.

BTW: The founders of Google really had wanted to call it Googol (i.e. 10¹⁰⁰ data items), but the person they sent to the name-registry office didn't know what a Googol was, and so chose the wrong spelling. Duh!! :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 21st February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Footnote . Yes, I do know it's doggerel. Can't remember how to do iambic pentameter properly :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 19th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Dried Prune

Trying to lose some weight (again). So I'll be trying a dried prune diet today. Makes for a ripe old age they say, dried prune.

Which reminds me - Yoko Ono is 75 today. Hippy Barfday ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 18th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Close encounter of the turd kind?

Back on thursday 7th I blogged an article on code-breaking for kids. Now - only ten days later - someone (or some 'bot) from a certain address in Maryland came knocking at my exterior firewall, wanting to get into my computer. Kinda spooky! Sorry to have to disappoint y'all. I can only assume it was the fast-response team, having spent the intervening time fighting the effects of drinking honey wine (Fought Mead, geddit ;-)

Move along lads, nothing to see here.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 17th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Will you be my Valentine (again) :-) ?

Copyright ^© Stu & Cornelia Savory on 14th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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NOT as intended :-(

What a pity. As regular readers may have noticed I changed the blog header yesterday to include a clickable banner. (The banner shows a 120 degree panorama of our village). When using Opera, a click on the banner brings you a new window with the panorama in its full glory of 3860 by 450 pixels, horizontally scrollable, so detailed you can see individual roof tiles. Sadly, if your browsing experience is limited by the crippled IE 6.0 , the panorama is limited to the width of your screen, so you miss the intended AHA effect :-( Thus IE6 users would need to save the piccy as a jpg and then view it full size with a photo-viewing SW. Also, IE6 frames the banner too, whereas Opera doesn't; my HTML says noborder.

Would you users of Firefox and/or Safari and/or IE7 please tell me what YOU see when you click in the banner? Do those browsers frame the banner too?

Can anyone tell me how to make IE6 display it full size (3860 by 450 pixels) on the blogreaders' PCs? Yes, I already declared width and height parameters in my HTML.

Finally, how do you folks like the new pastel-green head- & sidebar colour? Is it OK?

Oh BTW, the new motto just above the banner is an in-joke for theoretical physicists, NOT a spelling mistake.

Comments(5)

Quoth Doug Alder :
"First off why on earth would anyone still be using IE 6 which is so full of holes it's simply a danger to them, so don't encourage them by writing for it :)

In FF (2.0.0.12) it opens in a new page compressed to width of screen, but FF gives you a magnifying glass - you just click on the picture again in the new screen and it goes full size."

>>> Reply by Stu :

Quoth Peter Pfersich :
"Great panorama - with IE7 a new window opens and you can scroll the panorama from side to side, in very good quality (I counted 1.345.688 tiles (roughly), plus 11 broken ones ;-). The picture is framed by a red line."

Quoth George Bell :
"It works fine on Firefox 2.0. I know IE tends to like to resize images, so matter what it is told. There is an option to disable this, I always used to have this checked (when I used to use IE). I have some panoramas on my web site that I used to have the same problem with, see http://www.geocities.com/gibell.geo/flatirons/index.html for a time sequence on the panorama from our house."

>>> Reply by Stu :
"Option now disabled here, but I can't do it for my blogreaders. Thanks anyway :-)"

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 13th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Safer Internet Bonking

Well I'm pretty sure that should have been an A in that header and not an O, but that's what the newspaper headline actually said :-) Mind you, with all these interactive chess games now online, no wonder people are complaining about Internet Pawn ;-) Whatever. A German court has now ruled on online security :-

The Cologne county court (Landgericht Köln) has ruled (in ruling Az: 9 S 195/07) that the owner of an online bank account is responsible for any losses due to Phishing unless he has demonstrably taken the following precautions :-

• Use of a firewall
• Use of any current virus killer which must however be kept up-to-date
• Have regularly downloaded all Operating System updates and Patches
• Have regularly downloaded all Updates and Patches to the banking application
• Not put PINs or TANs in an eMail or revealed them in telephone calls
• Recognise warning signs of a Phishing attack, specifically :-
  • Typographical errors and/or bad grammar on the alleged "bank's" website
  • Non-https web addresses
  • Non-appearance of a padlock symbol in the address line (=non-secure link)

The court did however rule that the following additional precautions are not required :-

• No need to modify the standard security settings of the OS
• No need to use a special high-security virus killer
• No requirement only to go online without administrator rights
• No need to verify the banking services' website certificate
• No need to check for subtle deviations from the correct https address

So now you know. You have been warned, any Germans doing online bonking!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 12th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Listen Up! Spinvox's Speech2Text service :-)

Let me point you to an interesting online service. Are you fed up listening to your answering machine or voicemails? Then how about having them converted automatically into text and then sent on as SMS (texting) or even eMails? And that with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. Even dictate to your blog from your mobile! It can cope with English, French, Spanish, German, and yes, even American ;-)

Christina Domenq and Daniel Doulton have set up a UK company called Spinvox to do all that. They currently have 140,000 UK customers and are just starting in test mode over here (Germany). There is a limited contingent of test accounts available via the URL www.spinvox.com :-) Talk for up to 3 minutes - pretty well without grammatical or semantic restrictions - because if Spinvox can't understand more than 3 words it sends you an SMS to that effect. One or two unclarities will be marked with a question mark. Experience shows that it can even cope with phone calls from out of a loud moving car. It gives up on excessively technical texts though - it's meant for the general caller not doctors or engineers dictating reports. Traffic volume? an average 30 second call turns into 2 or 3 SMS messages after about 3 minutes processing time.

And if you send the messages to your Blackberry, there's a client SW available which will look up the caller's number in your Blackberry and tell you the caller's name :-)

The test page ( not only for Germans ) at URL http://ifrademo.livejournal.com .
You just call the number provided there, say your (English or German) message, wait 5 mins, then refresh their blog to read what it understood. Be patient though!

In my test I started talking in German. It converted that well with just two grammatical errors (one per sentence). Then I switched into (British) English in the middle of the third sentence. It coped well, just dropping the first english word, otherwise no errors. I then spoke three sentences in French which it ignored completely. Then I switched back into German in the middle of a french sentence and it converted the German correctly. Finally I switched into Latin just to see if it would convert individual words which are also valid English. It ignored the Latin completely. No Russian. No Spanish either. But for everyday use in German and/or English I can recommend Spinvox! Well done you 380 folks there! This is a good phone service :-)

Finally I tried a test to see where the borders of its capabilites are. Puns, homonyms and malapropisms are probably the most difficult aspects of any language for non-native speakers. So I dictated the eight malapropisms from last tuesday's blog. Here are the results, of course the Spinvox software can't cope with puns, homonyms or malapropisms. In cases 2,5 and 6 though, it even removed the malapropism :-)

"This is a test, with 8 Mallpopsimis(?) 
No 1. Mallet Palebels(?) new deal. 
No 2. More on President Bush on Fox TV after the byte. 
No 3. All those chaps scum, wishing they were effluent. 
No 4. My cold feels glassy pasaleted(?) TD tubercular pills. 
No 5. The fight against internet porn, takes a new a direction. 
No 6. We can expect some climatic change. 
No 7. 2007 was probably the be call year. 
No 8. Hefty UK cops gave up chasing me, I think I had left the plod."

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 10th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Teaching Kids Codebreaking

M y good friend Lothar is the headmaster of a local grammar school (˜ High School) which teaches children from 11 to 19. We decided to try an easy little experiment last week, teaching 11-year-olds elementary codebreaking. So I went to his school and taught a 90 minute session twice, to about 70 kids in total. I think we had a good time - I know I did - and the kids had a break from the routine :-)

AtBash : About 600 BC the Hebrews used a keyless substitution called the AtBash (after the first two & last two letters of their alphabet). They folded their alphabet in the middle and then substituted letters opposite one another. So an AtBash of our modern English alphabet would look like this :-

A B C D E F G H I J K L M
Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N

And so GOOD MORNING CHILDREN encodes to TLLW NLIMRMT XSROWIVM and vice versa. So I had them write the folded alphabet on squared paper sheets and then wrote TLLW NLIMRMT XSROWIVM on the blackboard. Furious scribbling ensued until all the children had decoded the message. Just for practice (to reinforce what they had just learnt) I then had them encode a message of their own, swap sheets with their desk-neighbors, who then had to decode their messages. Excitement and laughter, disputes too about whether any errors were encoding or decoding errors :-)

The photo above shows me explaining the biblical use of Atbash (see Jeremeiah 51,41) writing Scheschach instead of Babel (while also illustrating there are no vowels in Hebrew), thus giving the kids some historical context too.

Railfence cipher : The next one we tried was a railfence cipher, as used by the rumrunners during the Prohibition years in the USA. I had them copy my three-rail fence with its diagonal struts from the blackboard, then wrote my message following the diagonals down then up, writing a letter at each rail intersection thus:-

Then we read off the coded message along the rails, getting MMSAY YAES TSVR NIUO. How to decode that? We drew an empty railfence again and wrote the letters along the horizontal rails. Then we read them off along the diagonal struts getting MY NAME IS STU SAVORY again. One very bright child asked how I knew how many letters to put on each line. So we stepped through the arithmetic. Along the diagonals from top to (but not including) the next top is 4 letters. The message length is 17 letters. 17/4= 4 remainder 1. So there wil be 4+1 letters on the top rail, 2*4 on the middle rail and 1*4 on the bottom rail. Industrious scribbling of these calculations followed. Again, I had them encode a message of their own, swap sheets with their desk-neighbors, who then had to decode their messages. Slightly higher error rate this time, but OK.

Transposition (Skytale) : The next one we did was a simple transposition. So I told them about the Greek Skytale - which means Baton - and explained how this was like our transposition box. As our clear message we chose WIR SIEGTEN IN MARATHON (We won at Marathon) . This was a class of German children, and they had just been taught about the runner bringing the victory message from Marathon, 42 kms away.

I had chosen a 5 by 4 box because the message happened to have 5*4=20 characters ; We wrote the letters into the square horizontally, the children using squared paper (which Lothar had provided with forethought). Then we read out the code column by column getting WEIA IGNT RTMH SEAO INRN. To decode again, we drew a 4 by 5 box and wrote into it line by line WEIA IGNT RTMH SEAO INRN. Then we read this out vertically getting WIR SIEGTEN IN MARATHON again. I explained that the size of the box was to be secretly agreed beween the partners (e.g 3*7 instead of 5*4) and that they would have to fill in any empty squares (e.g. with an E). Then they did their own practice exercises as before. More precision this time :-)

Caesar Chiffre : Finally we did a simple keyed substitution cipher. The kids knew about Julius Caesar - most of them having read the Asterix and Obelix comics. We agreed that he spoke Latin not German, so his message was to be in Latin. I had chosen OMNIA GALLIA IN PARTES TRES DIVISA SUND which is the first sentence from Caesar's war diary De Bello Gallico, thus teaching the kids some Latin on the sly and giving them some context to the codebreaking exercise. So, after explaining that HIS alphabet only had 22 letters, I wrote OUR alphabet on the blackboard with the one displaced (by C for Caesar) just below it :-

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 
CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZAB

The children then encoded OMNIA GALLIA IN PARTES TRES DIVISA SUND by using the letters below the cleartext letters. To check their result they then decoded by using the letters above the ciphertext letters. Again they did an exercise with their own messages (one lad even wrote his in Spanish :-). And then, sadly, the time was up. But this is about as far as you can go with 11-year-olds anyway, nothing too hard.

All in all, a minor success, 70 kids now busy coding and codebreaking, girls swapping encoded SMS with their friends etc ;-) I even suggested to Lothar that I come in for a ½ day and give the Advanced Maths class of 18 year olds an intensive half-day course, picking up where this lesson left off ;-) I may tell you about that later, IF it happens.

Let me say Thankyou, Lothar, for giving me this enjoyable teaching opportunity :-)

UPDATE (saturday evening) : Wow ! This is proving to be a popular subject. Instead of ˜1400 hits per 24 hours, I'm now getting over 7000 ! And instead of 6 to 20 real Emails/day (and 70 spams) there are literally hundreds of you mailing me encrypted messages. There's no way I'm going to decode and reply to them all. Ten, yes. Fifty, maybe. But nigh on a thousand in the first 48 hours after posting this? No way!
I generated an automatic mail to this effect at the weekend to everyone who mailed me (which has caused disappointment in some quarters and even a temper tantrum). Sorry folks, do your own decoding. I'm not the NSA, nor do I play them on the net.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 7th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Mad Malapropism Monday ;-)

E ver have one of those days where you seem to parse every single sentence you hear wrongly? Or at least differently from everyone else? Yesterday was such a day. Here are ½ a dozen things I thought I'd heard. Now you work out what I should have heard ;-)

• "Morayed for Labour's Nude Eel" ( Context : UK politics)
• "Moron President Bush on Fox TV after the break."
• "All those chav scum wishing they were effluent" ;-) They probably are ;-)
• Mike Oldfield's glassy pest-cellar seedy Tubercular Pills.
• The fight against internet porn takes a nude erection ;-).
• "We can expect some climactic change" (Hillary Clinton, Miss Herd).
• 2007 was probably the pee coil, yeah!
• If the UK's cops gave up chasing me, I'd think I'd lost the plod ;-)

Which is your favourite malapropism?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 5th February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Counterfeit USB sticks :-(

Y et another rant. This time about deliberate Chinese fraud. Recently I bought a no-name 4 GB USB2.0 memory stick at a local PC store. Being the distrustful paranoid old fogey that I am, I first ran a virus checker on it (as I do with all removable media, new or not, every time I plug them in). Sure enough - fresh out of the manufacturer's shrink-wrap package - there was not only one but TWO trojans on board ex-factory which contained key-loggers which would have tried to phish me and send my keywords (and bank account info?) back to an IP address in China :-(

So I deleted both trojans and then called the PC shop and informed the owner. His subsequent tests showed the whole batch to be infected ex-factory :-(

The trojans had been hidden in the so-called memory-manager SW aboard the stick. Once bitten twice shy, I became even more distrustful and decided to check the actual capacity of the stick. To do this I used a special test-program which runs under Windows, available from ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/ctsi/h2testw_1.3.zip. This SW is bilingual and can be run in German or English. I ran it in German (sorry, wasn't thinking I was going to blog about it here). Here are the results I got :-

Der Datenträger ist wahrscheinlich defekt.
1,9 GByte OK (4148013 Sektoren)
2,0 GByte DATEN VERLOREN (4220115 Sektoren)
Details:
2,0 GByte überschrieben (4220115 Sektoren)
0 KByte leicht verfälscht (< 8 Bit/Sektor, 0 Sektoren)
0 KByte mit Datenmüll (0 Sektoren)
2 KByte mehrfach genutzt (4 Sektoren)
Erster Fehler bei Offset: 0x000000007e965a00
Soll: 0x000000007e965a00
Ist: 0x000000007e965800
H2testw Version 1.3

To cut a long story short, you can write up to 4 GB on the stick (as it claimed on the packaging and the stick's label). However inside the stick is only a 2GB chip, so the 3rd and 4th GB written merely overwrite the 1st and 2nd GB. If you saved 4GB of real data to that stick you would lose the first two 2 GB of your data :-(

This is a deliberate fraud by the Chinese manufacturer! So I retuned the USB stick to the PC shop and exchanged it for a name-product (a RunDisk 2.0) with which I am happy and which tests OK. I also gave the unwitting PC dealer a copy of the freeware test program (FTP URL as above), so that he can check new batches of sticks.

Just FYI the capacity-check program runs at about 8 GB per hour and verifies all bits.

Tip for my readership : Download the freeware and check your USB sticks' capacities BEFORE you lose any data! AND check the sticks for nasty phishing trojans too !

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 3rd February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Oh Dear! Dear Me :-(

Y amaguchi-San has written complaining about the iniquitous prices of some of my books at his local book dealer. Now these are old textbooks which I wrote some 20 years ago, so they shouldn't be that expensive, being somewhat out of date (and print) by now. According to my contracts files (and royalty cheques), I never sold the right for translation into Japanese, just German and English versions. So I presumed he was talking about an English version. Following up on his mail I found the following ridiculous prices online (screenshots, I refuse to link to them):-

Horrified by what they were charging (over 80 UK pounds), I found elsewhere :-

Over a hundred and fifty Canadian dollars? WTF is going on? And even in France:-

And for another one of mine a US dealer wants over two hundred and thirty US $ :-(

Let me make two points clear, Yamaguchi-San :-

These prices are inflated. You can pick up a used copy for 30 Euros or less from other internet dealers so that even with shipping costs they would still be cheaper. By a lot!

I am not responsible for this pricing, the book retailers are. As you know, an author gets paid peanuts (a percentage of the wholesale - not retail - price). This book sold under thirty thousand copies two decades ago, so I'm not getting rich from it :-(

Of course, overpriced-book dealers may have one of the rare unsigned copies ;-) ;-) ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 1st February 2008 permalink Comments Email

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