The real US immigration problem

New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, in a speech delivered at the Immigration and American Competitiveness Conference sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Partnership for a New American Economy, seems to be the first politician (that I know of) who makes sense out of serious immigration problems in the US. No, it's not about the repeated ad nauseam "11 million undocumented immigrants" and how to grant them "the path to citizenship" (as ill-informed and lazy journalists keep repeating) it is about four major issues, as outlined by Bloomberg.
ONE "Every year, we admit more than one million new permanent residents. But 85 percent of the visas we hand out are for those seeking family re-unification or refuge from harm, while only 15 percent of visas are given for economic reasons."
TWO " Foreign students who are earning advanced degrees in technical fields from our universities should be eligible to work here permanently."
THREE "We [the US] should stop turning away so many entrepreneurs who want to come here and start businesses. "
FOUR "Business leaders and mayors agree that we should expand and streamline our existing tools for attracting talent to our country."
Read the whole story here.

Now it's Windows 8 turn

"The rearticulation of the mouse cursor with the finger" (or fingers), all of them, that's succinctly the new Windows 8 multitouch interface, named Metro UI (based in the Windows Phone 7). In other words, you can use simultaneously more than one finger each one engaged on a different complementary operation on the same screen (and I don't mean just enlarging or reducing the size of a picture!) That's but one of the many features present in this new iteration of Microsoft Windows introduced officially this week, in Anaheim, California, at the BUILD conference, the first place to dive deep into the future of Windows. I missed being there, with thousands of developers, to get a free Samsung Windows 8 tablet powered by ARM mobile computing architecture (in other words, beyond the traditional Intel, and that's a big departure). I found this well documented site with a a list of 300+ Windows 8 features that Microsoft didn’t show.

Don't set files and folders permissions manually!

...unless you have to do it and as your last resort. My late father used to say, in a sort of philosophical way, something to the effect of "messing up is how you learn." And that's exactly what happened this weekend. I wasted many hours in the process trying to fix the access to my personal folders and files located in a separate partition, some 8 GB! But I learned a great deal. By default, any folder or file you create in your computer will have an owner (the person logged in to Windows) and "everyone" will have full access to them. Don't ask me how I decided to change these settings manually, really not knowing what I was doing, I admit. Next thing, access denied (!) to most of those files and the ones still visible had the dreaded little padlock icon. Then after much manual fixing, a Windows 7 (Vista and NT as well) utility came to the rescue: icacls. This command line utility is capable of displaying and modifying Access Control List (ACL) on folders and files explicit permissions. Warning: use it at you own risk; only advanced users should try it. This tool comes in handy when you have to make permissions changes to hundreds and even thousands of files at once. You can start by opening a DOS console with admin rights and then type icacls /? to see all the possibilities, but, let's face it, this is more complicated that it seems. Yet on the other hand, let me give you the skinny with actual examples (you replace parameters accordingly).

1. Before assigning permissions you need to take ownership of the files and folders, assuming the owner is not the current logged user (as it should be). Use this syntax:
   takeown /F YourPath /A /R
   Notice how we are using still another application (takeown.exe) where /F is for the filename or directory, /A gives ownership to the administrators group instead to the current user (a necessary step, before you can assign it manually to the current user, by rather using the GUI tool —right-click on the file or folder / Properties / Security tab, etc.), /R applies changes to directories and subdirectories. You may have to repeat this operation a number of times for other folders since not always the changes trickle down to all files and folders. To learn more, type takeown /?
2. Now, this is the command line for assigning or reassigning the actual permissions:
   icacls YourPath /inheritance:r /grant:r Everyone:(OI)(CI)F /T
   /inheritance:r removes all inherited ACEs (note that each assignment of permissions to a user or group is represented in the system as an access control entry or ACE); /grant:r assigns the specified user access rights but with the :r switch the explicit permissions previouly granted are replaced; (OI): object (file) inherit, (CI): container (folder) inherit, F: full access, /T: operation performed on all files/directories below the directory specified in YourPath. Once this command line has run, you may still have to do some manual adjustments using the GUI tool.  

Please NOTE: these command lines have worked for me, but this may not be your situation. Use them at your own risk, and, again, this resource is to be used only when you are in trouble. Do not use this for normal assignment of permissions. Leave the OS and/or an experienced administrator take care of that. No wonder, information and documentation for these 2 utilities (takeown.exe and icacls) is not readily available, in a sort of "handbook" form, but I'm sure I overlooked a lot of information out there. Here, for example you can watch at your leisure this bunch of videos on the subject. Finally, given the complexity of this subject, I have to say that I did not even start to scratch the surface of it.

What's with the Calendar gadget?!

One of the emblematic Windows 7 gadgets, the calendar, has its way o misbehaving (see snapshot, right). It basically does not show anything except a solid orange box. Trying to fix it by restarting it did not work. Upon a search on the Internet I could not find anything of value to help solve the issue, not even in the Microsoft websites (!) and I gave up and, worse! I uninstalled it and I have no way to know how to reinstall it. Go figure! Until a new version is relesead (beyond 1.0), I will stop using this gadget. I'm not going to bother with this issue. However, when I'm in a better mood for gadgets I will try and review the Windows Gadget Platform (in Vista it used to be called the sidebar and the gadgets were all together in one block). A nice Windows shortcut to bring to the front all the gadgets, buried under open applications, is Windows Key + G.

The healing power of Words

In this day of remembrance for New York and the world, memories from ten years ago—when I was already an adopted New Yorker—come rushing through my mind, but I try and keep only the most vital. For instance, back in the summer of 2001 when I visited a wonderful and moving photo exhibit in the Vanderbilt Hall of Grand Central station, called M.I.L.K. (Moments, Intimacy, Love, Kinship) I came across a line of the American writer Thornton Wilder that profoundly touched me, as the whole exhibit did:
"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
Powerful words to keep us going, that came to the rescue in the darkest hour, as it is always the case with poetry.

Robocopy: A practical way to backup your files on the go

One really great tool in Windows 7 (also available for Windows Vista) is the robocopy command, which is the "robust file copy for windows" that allows you to copy an entire folder, and subfolders, from one destination into another, in a much better fashion than using xcopy. It's perfect for quick backups into flash memory drives, hopefully encrypted with Bitlocker to Go, first, though not necessary. The syntax, in a DOS or a PowerShell console is

robocopy [source] [destination] /MIR 

the latter, an option switch which stands for "MIRror a directory tree." In other words, you get an exact copy on the destination drive, adding or deleting folders and files, accordingly, with a complete summary at the end of the operation. Let me give you an example with a complete batch file I programmed. It will ask you first for the drive letter of the destination directory. Why this? Sometimes the drive letters of removable drives may change when other devices are added or removed. In addition, should the destination folder not exist, robocopy will create it.  Here's the batch file, in which you only have to modify the fourth line accordingly. For example's sake, your source folder is D:\CollegePapers and the destination folder is in drive M. Once you run this batch file, you should type the corresponding drive letter, here M, and then press Enter. Sorry, there's no error trapping included. Very useful and practical. Please, give it a try. REMINDER: if you delete directories and/or files in your source and then run this batch file, those same directories and/or files will be deleted in the destination drive. Remember: the /MIR switch is used to create a mirror, identical, copy. Use with caution!

@echo off
set /P drLetter=Please enter drive letter: 
set "thisDrive=%drLetter%:"
robocopy D:\CollegePapers %thisDrive%\CollegePapers /MIR

More wonderful Windows 7 themes

It's a very nice surprise to find more and more Windows 7 themes in the Microsoft website. The last time I visited for this purpose, to be honest, it was a few months ago. But now, lo and behold! a great assortment of subjects is right there ready to download. No need to install, just "Open" and voilà! Change the mood of your computer and perhaps yours too. All sorts of animals, art, automobiles, games, holidays, seasons, movies, landscapes and places are waiting for you. Wishing you a great weekend, with of without hurricane Irene...