This is a PSA for those who have way too much junk on their hard drives.

Background

For several months, McAfee has been taking ever longer to run virus scans on my hard drive, getting to the point that it sometimes took a couple of days. When I investigated, it reported that it was scanning almost 1.1 million files — far more than I realized that I had. In fact, I couldn’t even figure out where that many files had come from. For example, I knew that I have several large collections of sample data from programming efforts over the years, but these totaled at most maybe 100,000 files, not hundreds of thousands.  So, at first, I was just left wondering which program had secretly cluttered up my drive with random junk, but without any good options for resolving the problem.

WinDirStat to the Rescue

I found the problem areas by downloading and installing WinDirStat, an open source application for scanning a hard drive and determining which files and folders take up the most space, as well as which file types do so.

A screenshot of WinDirStat (from the official site)

WinDirStat took about 20 minutes to analyze my hard drive on the first run, but the results were tremendously helpful. I was able to see at a glance that I had two enormous folders buried on my system about which I had totally forgotten. One contained a complete backup of Sarah’s hard drive from, I think, 2007 — it had even been migrated in at least one laptop replacement, if not two. The other folder contained hundreds of thousands of files from an old backup of my own files, which I didn’t even know was on my system. Many of those were related to software development, meaning they got extra processing time from the virus scanner. The upshot: two folders alone accounted for more than 450,000 files and more than 100 GB. Unsurprisingly, getting rid of this junk sped up those virus scans tremendously, at least four-fold based on the first post-cleanup scan.

Summary and Non-Windows Options

If you are looking for a good way to clean up your hard drive, WinDirStat is a handy tool to have. Check it out at the official site or the project blog.

The official WinDirStat logo (variant 06 shown here) is pretty nifty, right?

WinDirStat is Windows-only, but there are good options for other systems. Although I don’t have personal experience with them, similar alternatives for other operating systems include:

• For Mac OS X:
  • DaisyDisk and
  • Disk Inventory X.
• For Linux:
  • KDirStat, the inspiration for WinDirStat; and
  • FileLight, a KDirStat offshoot.

P.S. Sarah glanced over at my computer from a good distance while I was writing this post and thought that I was writing that I had 1,000,000 flies in my hard drive. Fortunately, no. If that happens to be a problem that you do have, I am afraid I can’t help you.

P.P.S. This post had the unintentional effect of illuminating serious shortcomings in my WordPress theme; the way images with captions are displayed is terrible.  I think it’s a question of new versions of WordPress coming out more often than I post, on average, so the theme has languished for quite a while and quite a few versions.  Time to give it another face lift, I suppose.

Posted in Tech | 4 Comments »

Always, always double-check that anyone who has worked on your car gave you back the key for your wheel locks. Apparently, the last folks to work on Sarah’s car did not give us the key for her wheel locks, which we discovered today when I tried to get a screw removed from one tire and get the tire patched. Better now than out on some highway, but still a pain.

The stupid part is that I’ve had this happen to me once before. Fortunately, in this case, I was able just to put some air in it, drive it to the nearest dealership, and buy a replacement key on the spot. The last time that happened was a much bigger pain.

Posted in Miscellanea | No Comments »

I just realized that my most recent post (GTD: Your 6 Most Important Things) was my six hundredth post on here.

This site has come a long way since I started working on it in vi and Netscape on a Unix workstation. It has been edited in — and arguably abused by — vi, Netscape Communicator, multiple versions of FrontPage, multiple versions of Dreamweaver, and countless other tools. I am pretty happy with the way it runs now (almost entirely driven by WordPress, with some portions hand-coded in Notepad++).

Mostly, I’m happy it’s still ticking along, despite a few long slowdowns, and still has some readers. Thank you for reading!

Posted in Miscellanea, Tech | 2 Comments »

I recently read a blog post by Natalie Peace, entitled Your 6 Most Important Things. For those of you not familiar with her, Natalie is a serial entrepreneur, hailing from Canada. As is usually the case with her writing, this blog post was straightforward, to the point, and reminds the reader of something he or she probably knows, but has forgotten. At least, that was true for me with respect to this particular post.

The point of the post is to make a list every day of the six things that you will get done that day. Things that you will accomplish if humanly possible, but which are not automatic, like brushing your teeth. I make myself lists like this all the time at work—I always have a lengthy to-do list going, which I update as my workload evolves or priorities change. That list usually has far more than 6 entries—sometimes, it has dozens and includes sub-bullets!

But for some reason, I was not applying the same method to the ever-growing list of things I want to accomplish outside of my job. After reading Natalie’s post, I started making a list each morning, following her suggestion and using 6 items. It immediately made a difference in my ability to focus. Rather than wasting “just another couple of minutes” on various blogs or whatever was distracting me, I found it easy to get back into productive mode.

An obvious tip, perhaps, but a useful one, so I thought I would share it with y’all.

P.S. If you find this information useful, I highly recommend following Natalie’s blog or following her on Twitter at @Natalie_Peace.

Posted in Miscellanea | 1 Comment »

Those of you who live in Houston know that we have had five months of mandatory water restrictions. After this Monday’s torrential rains, the restrictions have been lifted. For some of you, that means you can water your lawns again. For others, it means you can keep doing what you were doing, but legally…

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On the heels of my post on upward mobility comes an insightful post by Cato’s Michael Tanner. Two key quotations:

In the end, however, one has to ask a more basic question. Why do we care about inequality at all?

Poverty, of course, is a bad thing. But is inequality? After all, if we doubled everyone’s income tomorrow, we would eliminate an enormous amount of economic hardship. Yet, inequality would actually increase. As Margaret Thatcher said about those who obsess over inequality, “So long as the [income] gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer.”

Another Nobel Prize winner, F. A. Hayek, concluded, “The rapid economic advance that we have come to expect seems to be in large measure a result of this inequality and to be impossible without it. Progress at such a fast rate cannot take place on a uniform front but must take place in an echelon fashion, with some far in front of the rest.”

We should all seek a prosperous, growing economy, with less poverty, and where everyone can rise as far as their talent and drive will take them. Equality? Who needs it?

Well put.

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I just read about Duolingo on CNN. The concept is fascinating: teach people foreign languages for free, by feeding them text to learn and/or translate, some of which comes from real websites. In the end, you end up translating the entire web—the real goal. Some of the gotchas are obvious: getting enough participation to succeed on such a large scale, for example. Others are less obvious: e.g., how to get enough help translating text in truly obscure languages (those with a few million speakers or less). Still others are very obscure: how to translate text that, in many countries, either is illegal to view at all or at least raises potential difficulties for the viewer (for example, translating Wikileaks material or “how to” manuals dealing with explosives may draw attention). In other words, some parts of the web may stay “dark,” at least in some languages. And in any event, non-native translators will be doing the vast majority of the translation.

At the end of the day, I have no idea how well Duolingo will work, but it’s a very interesting concept.

Posted in Tech | 1 Comment »

Say what you want about Ron Paul—and there is a lot to say—this is perhaps the best one-sentence commentary on his candidacy to date:

It is quite remarkable that a man who renounced his membership in the Republican Party because he so despised the Ronald Reagan administration could now be running for the GOP nomination for president.

Read the whole post at Power Line.

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I read an interesting article on economic mobility in National Review Online, which got me thinking. The article is good in that it points out some of the statistical challenges in measuring upward mobility. For example, who counts as poor? Who counts as middle class? Are we measuring intergenerational or intragenerational mobility? In acknowledging these questions, the article does well. Where the article falls short is in two key areas.

First, it assumes that upward mobility in the United States is lower than in many other countries. This may or may not be true, depending on how it is measured. For example, how much credit should be given to official statistics as reported by various countries? Certainly, focusing on the official “poverty” level will give bad results, as discussed here.  But even using income percentiles poses challenges. For example, should welfare and other “benefits” in socialist European countries be counted as income? When I lived abroad, I routinely encountered people making more money than I did, for doing absolutely nothing. The individuals in question were not independently wealthy or trust-fund babies; they were merely beneficiaries of a very generous welfare state, which rewarded them for being unemployed and sitting around various public areas all day, which making no effort to find work. The artificial support given to such individuals may mask the natural cause-and-effect relationships between work and prosperity on the one hand and sloth and poverty on the other.  The NRO article, like most discussions of economic inequality, also totally ignores wealth, focusing only on income. There are good reasons for this, chiefly the availability of data on income and lack thereof on wealth, but the distinction is still an important one and is totally ignored in the article in question.

The second and more significant failing is in the article’s assumption that increasing upward mobility is always a good thing.  That’s not necessarily true.  Certainly, increasing opportunities are always good, but one can easily imagine a very high-mobility society with an extremely dysfunctional economy.  For example, imagine a tax system in which anyone whose parents were in the top 40% of the income distribution at the time of his or her birth pays a tax surcharge of 40% of his or her gross income, which funds are then distributed to those whose parents were in the lowest 40% of the income distribution.  This would, at least temporarily, result in incredibly high mobility, but it would be manifestly unfair and strongly disincentivize anything resembling ambition or hard work.  The point is that mobility is not the goal; opportunity is. Past a certain level, increased mobility can only be achieved at the cost of stability and fairness.  For every person who moves up the income distribution, somebody else moves down, because rankings are a zero-sum game.  Foster too much movement from the lower end of the distribution into the higher end, and you are by extension fostering an environment in which many of the highest earners suffer precipitous plunges in their incomes.

These are just some quick musings on the article; I would be curious to hear what others thought.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

Follow me at @EdInHouston. Not everything on here will necessarily be on there, and vice versa.

Posted in Miscellanea | No Comments »