Month: October 2000

Busy day, accomplishing nothing

Dave Farquhar Music

Busy day, accomplishing nothing. I spent a good deal of time fighting an iMac DV. A Umax Astra 3450 scanner we have works fine on PCs, but hook it up to the iMac and it acts like it has mechanical problems. So it goes. Download the newest drivers and all the Apple updates, still nothing. Time to call Umax on Monday I guess.
And I’m outta here. I just found a copy of a rare CD from a band called Seven Red Seven. They were essentially a Depeche Mode wannabe band from Chicago in the early 90s, but they recorded a song called “Thinking of You” that used to be a staple of a local Sunday night radio program around 1991, and it’s probably my favorite song from that year. My only copy of the song was an incomplete radio taping dating back to then, so the quality was awful. It’s good to finally have it on CD. The rest of the album is only so-so, but I paid little enough for it that it was worth it for the one song.

10/21/2000

Dave Farquhar General

Last Updated on April 18, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

Not that I’m complaining in the least. It’s nice to have two days for the price of one while laying things out initially. So, let’s put some real content here, rather than “Hi, I’m Dave and I’m putting together a Web site” ramblings.

A Mac maintenance tip. Alwin Hawkins sent a tip to Dan Bowman, who passed it along to me:

My own personal choice is to burn a CD with a System Folder, DiskWarrior, TechToolPro, and the Apple rescue utilities. When a Mac can’t find a hard drive to boot off of, it will try to boot off the CD drive. Terribly convenient…

Another choice is picking up a cheap refurb external drive (SCSI for old macs, Firewire for new), load it with the tools you need, then stick it in a place where the kids can’t muck about with it.

When your Mac dies, you clip the drive to the external bus and Bob’s your uncle.

Lacking a burner-equipped Mac, that second tip is exactly what I did at work. We bought the biggest SCSI drive available at the time (I think it was a 20-gig), which I installed in an old external enclosure and partitioned. I installed the OS and utilities to one of the partitions; the rest of the space I use for quick-and-dirty backups. Before I make a major change to a system, I drag its drive icon to one of the partitions so I get a full backup, including hidden files, then go to work. If I mess up, bringing everything back is just a matter of dragging the partition’s icon back, then un-nesting the folders from the first two levels (the drag operation creates a folder with the disk’s name in it–just drag the folders to the root of the drive to undo that).

Design anarchy. Designers are used to specifying everything about their work’s appearance. So are computer users. This has been a point of contention since the Web’s infancy. (Designers don’t like to budge after years of classes and experience. Computer users don’t like to budge after years of classes and experience. Being both, imagine the conflicts that go on inside my head! No wonder I’m neurotic…) Centuries of experience have proven that a line width between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 alphabets (49 to 65 characters) provide maximum readability. Tables provide a neat way to hard-code such things.

But readers used to configuring everything about their machines (and chances are there are plenty of those in my audience) don’t like when I do that.

This time, I opted to code my site to scale to screen resolution, then I opened my browser full-screen (I usually keep it at about 680×768 or 800×768). I didn’t like it much. But then I hit the Ctrl-] combination to increase font size (I was using Netscape at the time). Then I hit it again. And again. And I liked it. Then I dropped my screen size to 640×480 and my browser to standard font sizes. Still readable without too much obnoxious scrolling.

So I’ve given up some control. But hopefully that’ll result in better readability on a wider variety of machines.

Mac data recovery

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , ,

Interesting day yesterday. I talked with my agent about where I’ll be writing next. There’s a UK magazine editor who is expressing interest in my work. We’ll see where that goes. My college degree is in journalism, and my field of emphasis was in magazine editing and publishing, so writing for computer magazines doesn’t seem foreign to me at all. I actually have been published before in computer magazines, but the last time was in 1997, and the time before that was in 1991. And I think the UK attitude towards technology is a bit more sensible than the US attitude–the UK seems more interested in making the most of what they have, as opposed to the US philosophy of replacing right away. (My English, Scottish and Irish ancestry must be showing through right about now.) So I like the idea of writing for magazines in the UK.
Due to my weak wrists, magazine writing is probably better suited for me at this point anyway.

Just don’t expect me to move to Manchester, England right away. (Of course I’d choose Manchester. That’s where the good music comes from. Joy Division, New Order, Joy Division, The Smiths, Joy Division, Crispy Ambulance, Joy Division…)

More emergency Mac procedures. It should be noted that what I stated about dual G4s not booting off the current utilities CDs also applies to other new models, such as the iMac DV and the G4 Cube (assuming you’re one of the 12 people who bought one).

Unfortunately, my tip for yesterday won’t help you if the machine is already in service and you can’t take it down for a reformat and reinstall. What to do then? Go ahead and copy (once again, DO NOT INSTALL) the contents of your utilities CDs to the hard drive. When you need to run them, boot off your MacOS 9 installation CD. Assuming your drive isn’t damaged to the point of being unreadable by the OS, you can then launch and run the full battery of utilities programs to get the machine back up and running.

If your filesystem is damaged to the point of being unreadable, your best resort is to take out the hard drive, put it in a Mac that is working, and run DiskWarrior, then if that doesn’t bring it back from the dead, run Tech Tool Pro’s volume recover. (Unfortunately, I’ve had to do this before–good thing for me that I’m not uncomfortable ripping into the innards of a computer and transplanting pieces into another.) Of course, this trick works better for G4 towers than it does for iMacs.

If it happens to a PowerBook, your best bet is to put the machine into SCSI dock mode (where the machine just emulates an external SCSI hard drive), connect it to a SCSI-equipped Mac, and run repair tools from there. This is also a great way to transport large numbers of files in a pinch. This is much nicer than taking out a PowerBook hard drive.

Ahem. I see Dan Bowman has introduced me as the Daynotes’ “Resident Expert on Macs.” I suppose I qualify as that. But I’m not a Mac zealot. There are things about every computer architecture that drive me up the wall. I’ve had fully multithreaded, pre-emptive multitasking systems since I bought an Amiga in 1991, and frankly ever since then I’ve found it very difficult to live without that. I’m always doing more than one thing at a time, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to expect my computer to juggle a few things. (For a few blissful days in 1992 I had two Amigas, which let me really juggle a lot of things. These days I normally work with at least two networked PCs going, and sometimes as many as six.)

So while I’m no friend of Microsoft, I’ve probably said more critical things of Apple in these pages than I have of Microsoft.

The only computer that I was ever religious about was the Amiga, and to a certain degree I probably still am. That got me absolutely nowhere. Microsoft zealots drive me up the wall. Linux zealots drive me nuts. Anti-Linux zealots drive me even battier. I sympathize with OS/2 zealots, when I run across them, but I won’t join them. They’re machines. Tools. Do you expect me to sing the praises of Craftsman screwdrivers while I’m at it? They’re nice screwdrivers, but hey, I can get work done with a Stanley too…

So… Thanks for the kind introduction, Dan. I guess I just finished it. So if you’re here courtesy of Dan, welcome aboard. I hope you’re not too offended. (Don’t feel bad. I offend everyone at one point or another.)

Praying about depression, and a common Mac no-no

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , ,

Sorry, not thinking much about computers tonight. Short version of the story: I was at church Wednesday night, and I sat near the front. I never do that–that’s the last remnant of “Good Lutheran” in me. (I’m a very, very bad Lutheran, partly because I believe a guitar’s proper place is near the altar.) I was staring off into space before the service when I happened to turn around, and there was a lady my age sitting behind me. I’d seen her at Wednesday services a couple of times before but we’d never been introduced.
I’m usually one of two twentysomething males present. The other plays keys for the praise team and isn’t very accessible because he’s always busy. She seemed to want to talk to a twentysomething male. More on that in a second.

We ended up in the same prayer team. We break into groups of about seven to talk about what’s going on in our lives and pray as a group for those individual needs, for pastor, and for the church. Her big concern: Her brother. He’s depressed. OK, what twentysomething male isn’t sometimes? He’s not very receptive to God. Again, what twentysomething male isn’t? So after we prayed, I asked her a little more about her brother. From what she told me and others, I got a bit of a picture. Twenty-one, depressed, doesn’t have a girlfriend and thinks that means there’s something horribly wrong with him.

I know a certain someone who was in that very same boat, right down to the age. He was deathly afraid to tell anyone about it. So he wrote a column about it and published it in the student newspaper at the University of Missouri-Columbia where potentially 20,000 people could read all about it. He’s a good friend of mine. His name’s Dave.

I didn’t get to talk to her a whole lot more about it because I had to go put together a slideshow after the service, but that’s just as well because I think it’s good that I’ve thought about it some. I need to think the situation over a little bit more.

Some things are more important than computers, after all.

Yes, some things are more important. Let’s fast-forward to when I was 23. Maybe as you read this, you think, “Dave just found himself a target.” Well, you know, when I was 23 and not very different from how I was at 21, some people saw me as a target, and they did just that. They messed me up even more. But there were a couple of guys who were different: an ex-Marine named Cannon, and a guitar player named Mark, and an artist/guitarist/anthropologist named Charlie. They saw a guy who needed a friend. Cool guys. All Christian, but they weren’t fake. Their approach worked pretty well.

So of course I have to change it. What I needed most at that time was to know that someone had been there before. All the rest could come later. In Mark and Cannon, I saw two guys, one of them a couple of years older than me, who’d kinda sorta been there before.

So. This could be my chance to give something back.

———-

From: Dan Bowman

Subject: FWIW (Macintosh maintenance)

Mac Buyer’s Tip: On our new dual-processor G4, the cruddy DHTML animation at Happy Cog runs as smoothly as a Flash movie. And our crisp, new, widescreen Cinema display reveals the terrible imperfections of the artwork we’ve foisted on the public for years. One freelance gig can pay for this system. We recommend it highly. But don’t buy the latest versions of Norton Utilities and Tech Tool Pro yet. They won’t boot the dual-processor G4. And Norton has actually caused hard drive problems we were only able to repair with Apple’s built-in Disk First Aid app. Installing these two power-user must-have programs was the cause of most of our installation woes.

via Zeldman: http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html October 17 post.

dan

———-

Amen, brother!

Rule #1: Never, ever, ever, EVER install Norton Utilities and Tech Tool Pro. Not even if Steve Jobs holds a gun to your head. Boot off them in emergencies in order to fix or defrag your hard drive. You have to boot off the CD to do that anyway (the OS won’t let you fix or defrag the drive you booted from), and those tools cause more problems than they solve when they’re installed. Installing serves no useful purpose. Buy them and store them away except for that one day a month when you do disk maintenance.

Rule #2: Don’t rely only on NU and TTP. Also get DiskWarrior, from Alsoft. When something goes wrong, run DiskWarrior. Then run TTP. Then run NU. Then run Apple’s Disk First Aid. Why? All of them fix a lot of disk problems. None of them fix all of them. DW and TTP catch things NU won’t. NU catches minor things they don’t. And Disk First Aid fixes what NU breaks.

To get around the dual G4 boot problem, partition the drive and install just a minimal Mac OS 9 to it. When maintenance calls, boot off that partition, then run your disk tools off their respective CDs (or copy the CDs’ contents to that partition if you have the space).

This problem occurs every time Apple changes their architecture.

Fun with electricity

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Fun with electricity. I’m trying to figure out if I’m overreacting or not. What really scares me is that this journalist seems to know a whole lot more about electrical safety than some other people working in an IS/IT department.
The scenario: I had a PC that wouldn’t boot or power off. It sat there in a catatonic state, HD LED solid, power LED solid, fans running, but no other signs of life. The only way to power it off was to pull the plug. Plug it back in, and it reverted instantly to the catatonic state. I popped the hood and didn’t see anything obvious. I did notice a weird smell, which isn’t unusual for an electrical problem, but it was somehow different. Organic… I unplugged the ATX power connector and went and plundered an ATX power supply from an old P166. I came back, plugged the plunder into the board’s power connector, connected the cord, and hit the switch. It fired up and the system POSTed. OK, it’s a short in the power supply. I’ll just e-mail Micron with the details and the serial number, and they’ll overnight me another one. In the meantime, this one’s not doing anything anyway.

So I unbolt the bad one, pull it out, flip it over, and get a nice splash of black liquid. What the? 10W40!? In a computer!? Wait… Suddenly the smell made sense. Old coffee. With cream and sugar, judging from how sticky my hands were getting. So I went to the facilities to wash my hands and get some paper towels to clean up the coffee spill that had now migrated to the IDE cables and elsewhere inside the case.

I cleaned up, assembled the system, and e-mailed my boss and my boss’ boss to ask what, if anything, needed to be said or done. My boss is incredibly busy, but my boss’ boss asked if we could loan them another Pentium II until theirs was fixed. I told him he was missing the point: I already got their computer working. My problem with the situation was we had an electrical device with liquid in it and no one told me before I started trying to fix it. The $35 power supply is meaningless. It’s a lot more expensive to repair or replace techs if they electrocute themselves.

He asked me what part of policy isn’t working if it’s not safe to work on equipment.

Am I the only one who remembers from grade school not to put a hair dryer in the bathtub? It’s the same principle, just with more current and less liquid. And I also remember from science class that pure water isn’t a conductor. It’s the stuff dissolved in the water that conducts. St. Louis has hard water. Add coffee. Add cream and sugar. Now you’ve got enough conductivity to short out the power supply. Having some idea what kind of juice accumulates in the power supply (I shook hands with a power supply a few years ago, which is why I don’t open power supplies anymore), this situation strikes me as dangerous.

I was at least owed the courtesy of being told they spilled coffee in there so I knew not to reach in with both hands and complete the circuit. The embarrasment is better than finding a dead Dave laying in their cube next to a dead Micron, isn’t it?

I guess I didn’t explain it well enough.

Mailbag

Dave Farquhar Writing

Just mail today. I’m off to a meeting. But if you wanted to dual-boot Win95 and 98, or if you want insight into the writing process, read on.
———-

From: David Brimlow

Subject: Thanks

I know you’re sick of it, but Opt. Win. etc. is saving my sanity! I am ordering copies for all of my interns (we’re working on a B to B application) and for certain friends who deserve to be enlightened (in windows). Great work. Now how about a novel?

Dave

———-

Thanks! Sick of it? Hardly. You never get sick of hearing people tell you they like your stuff (unless it’s the same people over and over and over, which makes you start wondering what they want from you).

Thanks for the additional sales, to be sure.

I have been working on a novel off and on since I was 19. Crime fiction, semiautobiographical. Someday I’ll finish it, but I find fiction a much slower process. (Hmm, Optimizing Windows took me 8 months, versus 7 years so far for the novel…) You have to do just as much research, plus you have to be more creative and interesting. Technical books can get away with only being right. It doesn’t matter so much that chapter 9 of Optimizing Windows was boring since the other chapters, for the most part, weren’t. They’ll skip it and come back to it if/when they need the info. But if chapter 9 of a novel is boring, people put the book down and don’t pick it back up again.

A tough question, and an answer

Dave Farquhar Christianity ,

Late post Sunday. If you checked early and it wasn’t there, there’s mail. The post I originally intended is no more, unfortunately. So it goes when you depend on something other than a real operating system. Say what you will about Linux’s ease of use, but its stability certainly is a productivity gain. I’ll take having to learn new tricks over having to tolerate crashes any day of the week. Now if Southwestern Bell will just get their infrastructure working right again so something other than Win98 can connect…
A tough question, and an answer. It’s been well over a year since anyone asked me why I believe in God, and specifically, one benevolent God. Maybe people are afraid to ask, I don’t know. But on Sunday I heard a story that reinforces exactly why.

One of our elders had a pregnant wife. She was a little under two weeks from her due date when, tragically, she was in a car wreck last Thursday or Friday (I don’t remember all the specific details). She was shaken, but there didn’t appear to be any harm. Still, the obvious question was, why? Why would a loving God allow such a risk? Especially to this family, which has been through so much and yet remained so faithful? Where was your God then, I can hear some asking–especially as you said “had a pregnant wife,” as opposed to “has…”

Well, the story’s not over. The doctor insisted on keeping her overnight for observation, when he noticed the baby’s heart rate going down, down, down, until it reached dangerous levels. So, the doctor decided, it was time to get him out of there and he induced labor. Their son was born healthy. But here was the rub–the umbilical cord was wrapped all around him. Most notably, around his neck. Had he gone full-term, the doctor said he probably would have been stillborn.

Suddenly that car crash makes a whole lot more sense. How many people can literally say a car crash saved his life?

See enough things like that, and the doubts start to fade a little.

Hardware mailbag for Sunday

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

I wrote up some stuff, forgot to upload it, and lost it. I hate when that happens. So I’ll hit the mailbag for this late Sunday post.
From: Robert Bruce Thompson

Good post on AMD/Intel. At this point, the only thing saving Intel is the fact that AMD doesn’t have enough fab to keep up with demand.

—-

Thanks.

I know AMD and IBM have an agreement dating back to their K6 woes, and I really don’t know why AMD doesn’t have IBM manufacture Athlons and/or Durons to supplement their own capacity. There are issues with someone else making your chips like higher ramp-up time and possibly lower yields, and of course lower profits but I have to think the greater market share they’d gain until they can get another fab built would have to make it worthwhile.

I really wonder if the thing standing in the way of that isn’t technical, but rather Jerry Sanders’ “real men have fabs” attitude.

From: Robert Bruce Thompson

Well, perhaps. But his attitude is correct. Consider CPUs. Intel (bunch of fabs) = dominant; AMD (a couple fabs) = far second; everyone else (no fabs) = non-players. Same thing in chipsets. Intel (bunch of fabs) = dominant; VIA (a fab) = far second; SiS, ALi, etc. (no fabs) = non-players. But I agree that AMD should sub out CPUs to IBM, who can make chips with the best of ’em.

—-

But I wonder if that attitude towards fabs is what’s keeping Sanders and AMD from subcontracting; it seems almost as if using someone else would appear as an admission of weakness and he’s not willing to do it. That’s an Intel-like mistake. When opportunity comes, you have to seize it regardless of how it looks short-term.

From: J.H. Ricketson

Subject: More bargains

Dave –

Another link for surplus/overstock bargains:

www.computersurplusoutlet.com

O have placed one order with them. Completely satisfied, start to finish. Outpost couldn’t have done better. Also, they are in Nevada, which saves me, a Californican, the 8.5% local shopping penalty. They have a good selection of stuff at very good prices.

Regards,

JHR
—
J. H. RICKETSON
[JHR@WarlockLltd.com]

—-

Thanks.

AMD’s turnaround

Dave Farquhar Hardware
AMD’s turnaround

Last Updated on March 2, 2026 by Dave Farquhar

In October 2000, AMD turned their fourth consecutive profitable quarter, and they say they expect to sell out of Athlons this year. This exposes AMD’s prime weakness: Even though this year Intel has repeatedly failed to execute while AMD has had smooth sailing, Intel has the tremendous advantage of capacity. AMD has two fabs. I don’t remember how many Intel has. Eight?

Read more

Mac “superiority” and cheap PC hardware sources

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , ,

Dave flying solo. Sorry about not getting the post up there yesterday. So here’s two days’ worth, divvied up however I want.
Inherent Mac superiority… or something. When Steve Jobs unveiled the new dual G4s, he loaded up Photoshop 5.5 on a 1 GHz P3, a 500 MHz G4, and a dual G4 and applied a filter. The 500 MHz G4 finished faster than the P3, and the dual G4 finished in less than half the time. The dual G4 is faster than a 2 GHz P3, not that you can buy one, Jobs boasted.

OK Steve, let’s try a real-world test here. What’s more common, Photoshop or MS Office? The rest of us use Office more frequently. So let’s rumble. The objective: A 700-record mail merge, using Excel and Word. The contenders: A 350 MHz G3 with 192 MB RAM, a 266 MHz G3 with 256 MB RAM, and a 333 MHz P2 with 64 MB RAM.

On record #596, both Macs abort with out of memory errors, even if I crank up the amount of memory both apps can have beyond 32 MB. (Macs don’t have dynamic memory allocation.) Time elapsed: 5 minutes on the 350, 6 minutes on the 266. (I tried it on the second Mac in case there was something wrong with the first one.)

The PC zips through the job in 30 seconds without errors. (Oh yeah, and I had two Internet Exploiter windows in the background, and an extra Excel spreadsheet loaded, mostly because I was too lazy to close everything extraneous down on the PC in order to make the test fair.)

So I guess by Jobs’ logic, my 333 MHz P2, which isn’t even made anymore, is faster than a dual 2 GHz G4, not that you can buy one…

Not that I’m a Microsoft zealot by any stretch of the imagination, but I just found this amusing. It turned out the fastest and most reliable way for one of my Mac users at work to do a mail merge on her Mac is to save the Excel “database” to an NT share, then go log onto a neighbor’s NT box to do the job.

A place for potential bargains. I found a source for surplus computer gear that pretty consistently has good deals advertised at www.softwareandstuff.com. Caveat emptor: I haven’t ordered anything from them myself yet, and they have a 5.1 rating on resellerratings.com but only four evaluations. Given that, I’d say they’re somewhat promising but I’m not going to explicitly recommend either for or against them based on just that.

A sampler: They have an Athlon 550 (Slot A, non-Thunderbird) on a Soyo KT133 mobo for $150. Soyo’s not my motherboard maker of choice but that’s not a bad deal for an inexpensive system with some kick. IDE CD-ROM drives are in the $25 range. WinChip 200 CPUs (outstanding for upgrading Socket 5 systems cheaply–the 1.5X multiplier becomes a 4X multiplier with the WinChip, so a Winnie-200 is a drop-in instant replacement for a P75, and you can get it running at 200 MHz on a 66 MHz system bus if your board supports a 3x multiplier) are $30. Plextor 12X/20X CD-ROM drives are $60. If you want a cheap speed boost for your Win9x box, Fix-It Utilities 99 is $10. Norton Utilities 2000 is $20. Nuts & Bolts Platinum is $15.

Certainly an intriguing vendor. That Athlon bundle has me thinking, and that Winnie would be nice in my P120.

From: Robert Bruce Thompson

Yep. I understand that even a lot of younger hams have never built anything. That’s sad. And probably not good news.

—–

Agreed. But I don’t know what anyone can really do about it.