Author: Dave Farquhar

Well, that solves one mystery of the universe

Dave Farquhar net.culture

I’m not sure when I first heard of Craigslist. I think it was sometime this year. It’s probably the biggest up-and-coming website there is, and while it’s a way of life for some (people have used it to sell everything they own, including their house, then move to a new city, find a new place to live, a new job, and new stuff to fill it) a large number of people have never seen or heard of it.

What I’ve always wondered is how what amounts to a free classified ad board makes money.It turns out it makes its money from the job postings. Prospective employers have to pay for their ads. The rest of us get to freeload. And I do; I’ve sold stuff there, and I’ve bought stuff there. I’ve placed wanted ads, and I’ve bought stuff there that I knew I could resell for a profit elsewhere.

A lot of people don’t like the site because it’s basically all text with virtually no graphic design. Other people like it for just that reason. Personally, its minimalist design doesn’t bother me at all. It’s a free ad service, it’s easy enough for me to find stuff on it, and enough people use it to make it worthwhile to look there and post there. What more could you want?

Supposedly, the up-and-coming Google Base is going to take aim at Craigslist. Others think it’s an Ebay killer. We’ll see. Based on the few vague descriptions that are out there, it’s not clear to me exactly what it’s intended to do yet.

Personally, I’d rather see Ebay get some real competition. Amazon and Yahoo have launched auction sites, but no one comes. People list at those venues basically as an afterthought. I’ve picked up some bargains both places, but it’s rare enough that anything I’m interested in turns up there that it’s been months since I’ve looked either place.

Ebay is big and successful and you can find almost anything there, but it’s almost too big and too successful. Its fees are high, and if you use Paypal, you essentially pay the fees twice. What we’re seeing is the classic monopoly problem: The company is so dominant, the only way for it to gain revenue is by raising its fees, so it raises its fees every year. The people who make their living on the service protest, but there isn’t much they can do about it; packing up and going elsewhere won’t work because there’s nowhere else to go. So they work harder.

Competition would be good for everyone. It would force Ebay to lower its fees and find other ways to improve its experience, and maybe the competing product will be better too. Imagine what the auto industry would be like if GM didn’t have Ford and Toyota around to keep it honest.

What about Craigslist? Well, if it goes by the wayside, it was fun while it lasted. But I suspect it, too, will adapt.

H1B abuse

Dave Farquhar Society

Hmm. Companies hire H1Bs to pay them less.

And in other news, George W. Bush listens to country music.H1Bs are the worst thing that has happened to the computer industry, aside from all of the massive outsourcing. When you can’t outsource, you drag an indentured servant over here from someplace else and pay him 60% of what you paid his predecessor.

H1B sysadmins make for $17K a year less than U.S.-born sysadmins (such as me). This could explain the dearth of sysadmin-type jobs out there. I had a recruiter contact me this week about a job for an experienced Unix sysadmin. At best I’m a marginal candidate for the job. When he told me the pay, I couldn’t believe it. It was easily $13K a year less than I would have expected, given the qualifications. It’s a step up for me–a small one–but I doubted that someone who was really a good fit for the job would actually take that little.

We’ll see if that job ends up going to an H1B. I suspect it will.

I’ve been contacted for a number of jobs this past week that pay $30,000 a year. No benefits. I told the last guy–obviously an H1B himself–that you can’t live in St. Louis on what he was offering. Well, if you can find an apartment next door to a crackhouse and you drive a 1991 Honda Civic I suppose you can… But I did the math. Adjusted for inflation, that’s less than I made at my first job coming out of college at age 22.

So CEOs slash salary costs and pocket huge bonuses while they take a wrecking ball to the local economy. But they also destroy productivity. I have to deal with a lot of people in my day-to-day job whose first language obviously isn’t English, and it can be hard sometimes. There are an awful lot of problems that come across my desk that literally take 30 seconds to fix. I know this, my boss knows this, and my two coworkers know this. But there are times when I have to read the description of the problem about 12 times before I finally figure out what the problem is and what the writer wanted me to do about it. And I might have to bug one of the other guys to read it to confirm my interpretation. So that 30-second problem can easily balloon into a monster that consumed half a man-hour.

Of course, some genius will take that out of context and use it to argue that U.S.-born workers are lazy, unproductive, and overpaid.

Normally, politicians have no control over the economy. But I think this next crash, when it comes, will be made in Washington.

What economic crash? Let’s think about it. We’ve encouraged a negative savings rate to artificially fuel a sputtering economy, so people are strung out to the point that when gas prices jump 50 cents it’s an economic hardship. Add a 15% cut in salary (whether it happens through a true salary cut or if it happens over the course of several years of raises not keeping pace with inflation) and let’s see what happens. People can’t afford their lifestyles now. Make ’em absorb a 15% cut in salary and see what happens. Oh, and make the bankruptcy laws more difficult while you’re at it.

Yeah, they got smart fellas in Washington. Yee haw.

I still leave my PCs powered on

Dave Farquhar Hardware

There’s advice flying around the ‘net today about how much energy we save by shutting PCs off when they’re not in use.

Having widely dispensed the advice to leave PCs on all the time (but I’ve been saying for 15 years to turn monitors off), let me be the contrarian and talk about the counterpoint.The issue is the amount of energy an idle PC wastes doing nothing. And that’s the main reason I’ve always recommended turning monitors off–monitors use a lot of energy and give off a lot of heat, and there’s no particular advantage to leaving them on either. Picture tubes degrade rapidly if they’re left on all the time–this is why every monitor in a used computer store requires you to turn the brightness and contrast all the way up for the display to be readable. Turning the monitor off and on repeatedly isn’t good for it either, but it saves the picture tube.

Now, on to the PC. My PC on its own consumes less electricity than the light bulbs in the room it sits in. Energy costs are going up, but that’s still only a few dollars a year it’s burning. In the 15 years I’ve been leaving computers on all the time, I’ve had a very small number of hardware failures–I’ve lost maybe four hard drives, and one or two power supplies. And I own a lot more computers than the average person. That averages out to one repair every two years on a house full of computers. If I were having to replace a hard drive every year, I’d be spending more money.

Aside from the money, how much energy am I saving by not having to replace lots of parts every year? Isn’t the increased lifespan of my computers worth something?

That’s not the only issue, of course. A computer generates some heat, and in the summer you have to get rid of that heat. But rather than turning PCs off all the time, I prefer to minimize their power consumption. If I don’t need the hottest new 3D video card (which I don’t), then I don’t use it. And the majority of my CPUs are in the gigahertz neighborhood. They do everything I need. So I save energy that way. I get energy savings elsewhere (by using compact flourescent bulbs, for example), so to me, leaving the PCs on makes sense.

In the winter, of course, the heat given off by PCs is a nice benefit. The more heat my computer gives off, the less work my furnace has to do.

I think some common sense is in order. I turn my monitors off when they’re not in use (though LCDs use little power, I recommend shutting them off too in order to conserve the backlight). The PCs I use every day stay powered on. PCs that I only use occasionally–say, once or twice a week–get powered down when I am finished with them for the day. Admittedly I’m more likely to leave a little-used PC powered on in the winter or summer.

Firefox simplifies Tinyurl

Dave Farquhar Software

This is cool. Steve DeLassus finds stuff and I blog it. If you like Tinyurl, there’s a Firefox extension that’s going to make you like it a lot more. If you don’t know what Tinyurl is, read on and you’ll be using it almost every day.First, why Tinyurl is useful: Ever try to give someone a web address, and you end up with something that’s three lines long? Items on Ebay are probably the worst. You try to e-mail it to someone, or post it on a discussion board, and the long length messes up the formatting, or the address gets chopped up and people have to copy and paste the thing back together again–if they think to try it.

Tinyurl is a web page you can visit, punch in any obnoxious address of any length, and it spits out an address that’s a few characters long, which can be easily passed along and won’t mess anything up.

Nice, eh? But what if you don’t want to visit tinyurl.com over and over again?

Install the TinyURL extension for Firefox, that’s what. Then you can just push a button to turn whatever page you’re viewing into a tinyurl and it goes straight to the clipboard. Push a button, then paste, and you’ve got it. What could be easier?

Firefox popups got you down?

Dave Farquhar Software

In case you haven’t read it elsewhere, Flash and other plugins allow popups in Firefox, even if you have popups disabled. Here’s how to disable popups from plugins.

I made the change (it takes 30 seconds) and the sites that had been getting popups through to me aren’t anymore.

Robin, thank you and goodbye

Dave Farquhar Toy trains

I hang out at several train-related sites online. The Gauge is one of my favorites, partly because I learn so much there.

One of its great teachers, who was known both by his handle, Matthyro, and his first name, Robin, died today. In some ways he was the heart and soul of The Gauge–not many have their own entire section named after them.

You owe it to yourself to take a look at what Robin could build. What you’ll see isn’t the work of a hobbyist. It’s the work of a true artist.Unfortunately not many build like Robin anymore. Robin’s main material was, of all things, cardboard from cereal boxes. Sometimes he’d add corrugated cardboard, and wood was almost a last resort.

In an era when most people buy their structures for their layouts already assembled, and people can wow a crowd by dripping thinned gray paint into the lines that are supposed to represent mortar and drybrush a little grime on it, Robin stood out.

And he wasn’t the least bit shy about sharing his methods. He patiently took pictures of each step of most of his projects, posting them online and explaining just about everything he did–the master teaching his captivated students.

I learned a ton from reading his posts on the forum the last 18 months or so. I know I’m not the only one who will miss him.

I count myself fortunate to have been able to follow some of the last of his projects while they were still in progress.

Need a cheap NAS? Grab this floppy and an old Pentium and you’ve got it

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

I wanted to build a small-as-possible Linux for the purpose of creating a lightweight NAS a few years back. I even downloaded the uclibc development tools and started compiling for the purpose of doing it. Then I got distracted.

I guess it doesn’t matter. I think NASLite had beaten me to the punch anyway.Here’s how it works. You download the appropriate floppy for the network type (SMB for Windows networks, NFS for Unix) and network card you have. You find an old PC. As long as it has PCI slots, it’ll work. Drop in the NIC if there isn’t one there already, and then drop in as many as four IDE hard drives. (The disk will reformat the drives if there’s anything there, so make sure they’re new or scratch drives beforehand.) If the BIOS doesn’t support the drives because they’re too big, disable them in the BIOS. Don’t worry, Linux controls the drives directly so you don’t need the BIOS. Boot off the floppy, and it joins the network and you’ve got a bunch of disk space for the cost of the drives and possibly the NIC.

Nice, huh?

This isn’t suitable for use in most corporate environments since it creates wide-open storage (it might work well as a big file dump, so long as people realize there’s no security there, but I’ve learned the hard way that users tend not to listen, or at least not remember, when they’re told such things). For home networks it’s fine, unless you’ve got wireless, in which case anyone who can get into your wireless network would also be able to get to your NAS.

Even then, it’s useful if what you want is a central repository for programs like Irfanview and Mozilla Firefox that you install on all your PCs and want to keep handy.

At any rate, if you’re creative and careful and have a Linux box and know how to use the dd command (or have a fairly up-to-date copy of WinImage) to copy a 1.72-meg disk image to a floppy, this is a useful tool for you.

Have you noticed your inbox is lighter lately?

Dave Farquhar Spam ,

The FBI nailed Alan Ralsky.

Ralsky’s reaction? “I’m not a spammer. I’m a commercial e-mailer.”

In other news, Marion Berry doesn’t go to strip bars. He goes to erotic clubs.Ralsky, if you’re not familiar with him, is one of the more prolific spammers in the world. And while some people sympathize with him since sending spam seems to be the only way he can make a living, the fact is that spam hurts everyone. It wastes your time–the lost productivity dealing with spam has been valued at anywhere from $9 to $22 billion–and it hurts your ISP too.

I know someone who administers mail servers for one of the largest cable companies in the United States. The upgrades to its mail servers cost six figures when they have to do it. This past week he described the situation with spam and worms as “SETI@Home in a DDoS attack against mail.ispname.net.”

If you want to know why broadband Internet access doesn’t cost $5 a month, you can blame people like Ralsky.

Defenders say Ralsky didn’t break any laws. But according to various anti-spam laws, you disguising the origins of your mail is illegal, and Ralsky has been guilty of this. To me, this rings of jailing Al Capone for tax evasion. Another question to ask is whether Ralsky has hawked pornography to underage children and whether he has ever hawked prescription drugs. If he had set up a table on a streetcorner and done either of those things, he would have landed himself in jail. If it’s illegal on the streetcorner, it ought to be illegal online. Especially because if he were doing it on the streetcorner, he’s only using a small parcel of public land. When he does it online, he’s utilizing thousands of computers that don’t belong to him.

I was glad when thousands of people signed Ralsky up for every junk-mail list they could find. It told a lot about his character when he remained defiant afterward. Filling his mailbox with junk was wrong, yet he saw nothing wrong with filling out e-mail boxes and he continued to do so.

Someone else will rise to take his place, but it will take time to learn his tactics, and in the meantime, anti-spam tools will get better.

The reason spam works is because somebody buys stuff from it. It might be one out of a thousand, or one out of a million, depending on who you believe. But it doesn’t take much more effort to blast out 3 million messages than it takes to blast out 3 thousand. It’s an attractive business because someone who’s unable or unwilling to do other work can get started with little or no expense, using equipment he or she probably already owns. It’s safer than, say, trying to sell stuff on Ebay. If I list a big pile of stuff on Ebay and it doesn’t sell, I owe listing fees–probably around 30 cents–on each item that doesn’t sell. Plus I’m stuck with that item and out whatever I paid to get it. But if I blast out a bunch of spam and nobody bites, I haven’t really lost anything, except maybe my ISP suspending or discontinuing my service.

The courts need to make an example of Alan Ralsky. Meanwhile, the FBI needs to go find a few of the other big fish in this pond and do the same.

Windows 2000 in 32 megs of RAM

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, Windows ,

I can’t remember if I linked this before or not, so here’s Windows 2000 on 32 MB of RAM.

Of course I find this interesting. And his advice is pretty good. My first choice for an OS in 32 megs of RAM would be Windows 95, and probably Windows 95a at that (and gee, some idiot wrote a book about that), but if you need better reliability and stability, Windows 2000 is a good second choice.

One piece of advice worth mentioning that he didn’t mention: If there’s a modem on the system, lose it, especially if it’s a Winmodem. That’ll save lots of precious RAM and CPU cycles.

How to retire a millionaire without doing much of anything

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

I just finished reading The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach. It’s a good book. It promises to turn just about anyone into a millionaire in one easy step–if you do it right, you can make one phone call, do nothing else, and retire a millionaire.

I recommend the book.He’s saying essentially the same thing a lot of popular financial advisors right now are saying, but the spin is a bit different. You have to market something.

Essentially, what he says to do is to open up some kind of an IRA, be it a 401(K), 403(B), or Roth, and set up automatic deductions every month that happen before you get a chance to spend any of your paycheck.

If you were to start doing such a thing at age 16, it’s entirely possible to pile up more than $13 million by retirement age. Of course the later you start, the less you’ll pile up, but $1 million is within reach for most Americans.

It’s a boring way to make money but it works.

Of course he also advocates paying off all debts early, which makes it possible to save even more.

I believe that over the next decade, the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer, maybe much poorer. People will blame the politicians, but I don’t know that politicans have much control over this situation. Here’s what I expect will happen.

A lot of people are getting non-traditional mortgages without necessarily understanding all of the terms. In many instances, at the end of five years, they will owe the entire cost of the house. Large numbers of people aren’t going to be able to afford to do this, and they aren’t going to be able to afford to refinance because they won’t be able to afford the higher monthly payments.

The homeowners will be forced to sell. And since so many of these mortgages are being handed out now, at some point there will be more sellers than buyers. That will be the end of today’s real estate boom. Thosee who have cash will buy these houses at depressed prices and rent them out to former homeowners who can no longer afford to buy a home.

When the real estate market recovers, which it will, the people who bought lots of real estate at bargain basement prices will be extraordinarily wealthy–both from the rising value of the property they bought, and the money they made by renting it out.

I know what I need to be doing. I’m ahead of the game on paying off my mortgage. I need to get better about dumping money into a Roth IRA. And right about the time I make the last payment on the house, I expect I’ll get my yearly bill from the county, and for the first time ever, the number on it will be lower than it was the year before. That’ll be when I know it’s time to go for a walk and look for For Sale signs.

This is a good time to be buying financial books, using their advice to get your finances in order, and wait for up-and-coming troubled times. Because for the people who get out of debt now, the next depression (let’s not mince words here–when the economy is in the toilet, it’s called a depression) will be an opportunity.