Author: Dave Farquhar

Boom! Poof! Silence.

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

We had a power outage tonight. There was a boom, then a poof, then silence as everything in the house shut down. Maybe a nearby transformer couldn’t handle everyone running their air conditioners to escape the 95-plus degree heat. Maybe a squirrel got somewhere it shouldn’t have. I didn’t bug the service guys to find out.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some stuff. I’m too tired now to post anything else for the day. On the plus side, I got the excuse I needed to move my web server to the place where it belongs, rather than the “temporary” area where I staged it and it’s been sitting since, oh, September. It was already down, so taking an extra 10 minutes to move it didn’t hurt anything.

I’ve seen the Windows 8 screenshots, and I smell panic

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve seen the Windows 8 screenshots. What I see in them reeks of overreaction. Pundits are predicting a post-PC era, so Microsoft is trying their best to make a PC look and feel like a smartphone.

Why does a PC need to look and feel like a smartphone?
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Hybrid drive options roll in

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

OCZ introduced a hybrid hard drive, featuring 60 GB of solid state storage caching a 500 GB conventional hard drive, priced at around $350 and due in July. It’s on a plug-in PCI Express x4 card.

The idea has some merit.
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If you’ve been delaying upgrading your network, keep delaying

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , , , , ,

If you’ve been procrastinating about deploying 450-megabit (802.11n) wi-fi to your house, I have a reason for you to procrastinate a while longer: Gigabit wireless (802.11ac).

It’s only about twice as fast as its predecessor, which pales next to the 8x improvement 802.11n provided over 802.11g, but if you’re wanting to stream HD media through your house, you’ll notice the difference.
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Compress Commodore programs with Exomizer

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , ,

Exomizer is a compression program for Commodore and other 8-bit computers. The compressed program still runs, but it takes up less space on disk. Decompressing takes some time, but usually less time than reading more data off a 1541 disk. And unlike native packers which sometimes take all night to run, Exomizer runs on modern PCs, so it runs extremely quickly.

The space savings isn’t as much of a consideration now as it was in 1986, but being able to cram as many programs as possible on a single disk image makes access more convenient.

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How to have two hard drives when you only have a single 3.5″ bay

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Sometimes you need to put two internal hard drives in a system, but only have a single 3.5″ bay available. This is common in small computers, like HP Slimline and whatever Dell’s equivalent is.

There are two ways to do it. Both have tradeoffs.

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Apple’s first CEO speaks

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Apple’s first CEO speaks

Business Insider has an interview with Apple’s first CEO, Michael Scott. (Not the guy from the TV sitcom.) It’s interesting reading from a historical standpoint.
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How not to do business

Dave Farquhar General

I contracted out some work recently. It involved a large sum of money, at least to me. It amounted to about a three weeks’ worth of take-home pay. He wanted the money for the materials up front. I didn’t really want to do that, but other people had told me he was completely honest, so I did it.

He had trouble getting the necessary permits and other paperwork. I had trouble keeping his story straight. I gave him some time to sort it out. After about a month–which might have been too long–he concluded he wasn’t going to be able to do the work, and told me he’d give me a refund.

Then he quit answering his phone.

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RIP, Paul Splittorff

Dave Farquhar Baseball

Paul Splittorff, the winningest pitcher in Royals history–he won one more game in his career than Sandy Koufax–died yesterday at age 64.

The great Joe Posnanski wrote a tribute. I can’t top that.

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What’s wrong with my 6502 machine language article?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, Writing , , ,

It occurred to me this morning that writing about what was wrong with my 6502 machine language article from the early 1990s might be useful. Or maybe that was just whatever the dentist was injecting into the roof of my mouth talking, but I’m going with it.

Should I cut myself some slack on account of my age at the time? Sure. But teenage Dave would have welcomed the critique of mid-30s Dave, if either could find Dr. Emmit Brown’s DeLorean.

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