Anablog

The formidable Susan Sillitoe sent along a press release informing us that Prism Sound, an audio testing company, will be giving a webinar on June 24 on how to measure sound levels of various headphone types in order to insure your product is not causing hearing damage. They will broadcast the webinar twice, once at 9AM EDT and once again at 1PM EDT. You will have to register to view the material. Worse yet, they will expect you to install software on your machine so you can participate. Perhaps the good folks at Prism don’t understand that IT departments, at least most that I know, don’t give administrator privileges to us peons so I can’t install anything on my work laptop. I certainly am not going to install anything on my personal workstation intended to open it up to the whole world.

On July 8^th they will have a different webinar on test strategies for AES3 digital audio in HD Radio. The program for the June 24^th headphone sound level webinar includes:

·        The present standards environment regarding human safety

·        Fixtures for testing circumaural, supra-aural, and supra-concha headphones, ear buds (intra-concha) and insert earphones (intra-canal).

·        Test techniques for headphones, ear buds and portable players

Details

·        Who? Dan Foley, Prism Sound Telephony Solution Strategist.

·        What? 20-minute online seminar, with 10 minutes for questions.

·        Where? Online. Registered attendees will receive an email with details.

·        When? Wednesday 24th June 2009, 9AM EDT (13:00 UTC/GMT, 14:00 BST)

·        How? Details will be included in the email sent upon registration. See also webinar FAQs

This does look like a great presentation and guess I should take the bullet for you all and install the software in my machine so I can report about it, but I finally have a nice stable WinXP service pack 3 install and I’ll be darned if I am going to risk the kind of misery that can come with installing sharing software. Five years ago I did that at a work machine at National— it was one of the popular packages—I forget which one. It went in and changed so many things I can guarantee you that when you uninstall it there will be things wrong with your OS. The anti-virus software started complaining since they opened up so many ports and redefined so many things. Worse yet, having software on your machine that is just made to open it up to the whole world is a pretty scary proposition.

I know, the diligent engineer should find a work-around. I can thing of a few. I could create a Windows profile of my present install, install the software, watch the webinar, then go back to my old profile. Better yet, I could image my OS disk, install the software, watch the webinar, and then over-write my OS with the disk image. I have to take an image anyway, if only to save the 10,000 little settings Windows scatters all over the place. I am really happy with this install of XP and want to keep it forever, at least 5 years. Another tack might be to use my spare OS. See, I install Windows XP on two partitions, so when one gets corrupt I can just boot into the other and instantly have email and web access and all the programs I need to do my job. I guess I could consider one XP install to be the “whorehouse” where I install all these insidious little programs, and then just use that partition when I have to use these programs. Heck, my Orcad 9.3 is one of those, I always cringed when the install procedure said it had to change file associations on existing file types. That is why I have not installed it, even though I would like to play around with PSPICE and draw article figures in Capture.

I don’t think non-technical types understand the reticence we engineers have to installing anything on our computers. I have an entire backup computer that has the exact same hardware and also has a double install of XP, and yes, I got tired of being a crook so I bought a whole second legal copy of XP for that machine even though it is only a backup. Kudos to Microsoft, since they seem to understand when I install two XPs on one machine. The install never gives me grief, and both installs verify over the internet.

Now the sharing software for this webinar comes from the UK, and I do have a better feeling about European software writers being a little more polite about hacking up my machine. Still, before I install any sharing software on my machine, or any silly little program, I would want to see a twenty-page dissertation about every single thing that gets changed or overwritten, as well as a binding legal contract that specifies that the uninstall will leave my machine EXACTLY the way it was. My buddy John once had some Colorado tape backup software that overwrote a Windows dll but did not change the file date. Of course they did not restore the old dll on an uninstall. Fortunately the dll was a few bytes longer so he figured out what they did. And yeah, the new dll made some other program not work right.

No, anything to do with software resembles walking over the Grand Canyon on a tightrope. One little change, one misstep and I have to spend 5 to 10 hours re-installing Windows XP and losing all the settings I have not figured out a way of backing up. I hate the way Microsoft has put registry files in user directors, so you can’t just make a copy …/Paul Rako/ of it anymore, at least not while the system is running. That is one benefit of having two installs on one machine. You can do copies of partition that you are not booting from. This is OK, but I still need to learn how to take an image of both boot partitions so I can recover from the inevitable hard drive crash even though I have both my OS drive(s) and data drive(s) redundant in RAID arrays.

So yeah, I have redundant RAID drives with redundant OS installs and a complete redundant machine. And if I install some software on one of them, good configuration management and that Intel “Copy Exact” philosophy dictates that I should install the software in all four partitions. No thanks. If it corrupts my OS, a 5 to 10 hour reinstall of the OS and all my programs is multiplied by four, so it takes the better part of a week.

So how might a webinar be run without special software? I could see streaming the video and then just taking emails and posting them to a comment or question section of a web page. Heck, I really don't see why we need real-time participation anyway. Just post a video to a blog the way Brian Dipert does and let the comments fly. I know EDN will be doing audio seminars later this year so lets see how we structure that. Audio is much easier to produce than video but the real-time aspect is a pain. When I was with National Semi we did a web show once in real time and then gave up. Sorry for the long rant on computer installations and software, but do let us know how you feel about installing viewing or sharing software on your box, as well as if you like live seminars or prefer time-decoupled ones.