Author: Dave Farquhar

I like Firefox 1.0

Dave Farquhar Software

Big surprise, huh? Seeing as I’ve been running it since the very first version, back when it was called Firebird, and the version number was probably 0.1.

And I really liked 1.0PR, so it was a given that I’d like 1.0. So there’s no big difference, right?

I’m not so sure about that.Maybe it’s just me, but I think 1.0 renders pages faster. Quite a bit faster. And there are some bug fixes, some minor and some less minor, but nothing we haven’t gotten used to from living with IE for all these years. If you were using 1.0PR, there’s no reason not to upgrade to the gold release code.

I see from my logs that 25% of my site’s visitors use some flavor of Mozilla. That’s good. If you’re not in that group, you owe it to yourself to try it.

Believe it or not, you can get excited about a web browser again.

So there is a benefit to running Windows Server 2003 and XP

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , , ,

One of the reasons Windows Server 2003 and XP haven’t caught on in corporate network environments is that Microsoft has yet to demonstrate any real benefit to either one of them over Windows 2000.

Believe it or not, there actually is one benefit. It may or may not be worth the cost of upgrading, but if you’re buying licenses now and installing 2000, this information might convince you it’s worth it to install the current versions instead.The benefit: NTFS compression.

Hang on there Dave, I hear you saying. NTFS compression has been around since 1994, and hard drives are bigger and cheaper now than ever before. So why do I want to mess around with risky data compression?

Well, data compression isn’t fundamentally risky–this site uses data compression, and I’ve got the server logs that prove it works just fine–it just got a bad rap in the early 90s when Microsoft released the disastrous Doublespace with DOS 6.0. And when your I/O bus is slow and your CPU is really fast, data compression actually speeds things up, as people who installed DR DOS on their 386DX-40s with a pokey 8 MHz ISA bus found out in 1991.

So, here’s the rub with NTFS compression when it’s used on Windows Server 2003 with XP clients: the data is transferred from the server to the clients in compressed form.

If budget cuts still have you saddled with a 100 Mb or, worse yet, a 10 Mb network, that data compression will speed things up mightily. It won’t help you move jpegs around your network any faster, but Word and Excel documents sure will zoom around a lot quicker, because those types of documents pack down mightily.

The faster the computers are on both ends, the better this works. But if the server has one or more multi-GHz CPUs, you won’t slow down disk writes a lot. And you can use this strategically. Don’t compress the shares belonging to your graphic artists and web developers, for instance. Their stuff tends not to compress, and if any of them are using Macintoshes, the server will have to decompress it to send it to the Macs anyway.

But for shares that are primarily made up of files created by MS Office, compress away and enjoy your newfound network speed.

Firefox 1.0 is out, and mozilla.org is down

Dave Farquhar Software

So I wait. Now I know what it was like to stand in line waiting to buy Windows 95.

Wait. No I don’t. I’m actually standing in line waiting to get something good.

Flash drive durability vs. microdrives

Dave Farquhar Hardware

The Inquirer dropped a bombshell today: Microdrives are less reliable than flash memory.

Does this surprise anyone?Microdrives are conventional hard drives, shrunk down to the smallest size possible using current technology. The problem with doing this should be evident from watching laptops. Laptop hard drives fail more often than desktop hard drives because they get slung around a lot more.

For that matter, desktop hard drives don’t have all that great of a reputation for reliability, and they lead much calmer, safer lives than their portable bretheren.

Flash memory has no moving parts, so its lifespan is measured, generally, in number of writes. A true torture test for flash memory is to put it in a computer and stick a Windows swap file on it (don’t do it). That will kill it much faster than giving it repeated swims in a cup of hot coffee.

The downside to flash memory is its limited capacity in comparison to spinning media, not to mention its sometimes annoyingly slow write speeds, but for reliability in harsh environments, it’s hard to beat something with no moving parts that can get stuck, whether it’s from expansion and contraction due to low temperatures or debris gumming up the works.

Umm, no, as a matter of fact everything isn\’t OK…

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

The site’s been down again. As far as I can tell it didn’t stay up for very long on Saturday, but by 8 PM last Saturday, my DSL connection was the least of my concerns.

I got the phone call nobody ever wants to get. My girlfriend’s father was in the hospital and wasn’t expected to live.

They patched him together long enough for his closest relatives to get there, but Jerry died at 12:45 Sunday morning.I’ve been there, done that before. Today just so happens to mark 10 years since my own father’s sudden death.

The rest of what I write may not make a lot of sense, but I hope it will be helpful.

If there is anything worse than losing the closest of your relatives, I don’t know what it is. By “closest of your relatives” I mean your mother, your father, a child, or a brother or sister, or your spouse.

As my girlfriend and I drove to the nearest polling place last night to cast provisional ballots, she observed that it was like the aftermath of a breakup: Everywhere she looked, she saw things that reminded her of her dad.

That’s true. In fact, when describing dealing with a death to others who’ve never lost someone that close, I’ve compared it to a breakup. But, as I compare a death with the last breakup I had–which messed me up pretty badly, and I’ve got the therapy bills to prove it–I see two differences. Maybe three.

Difference one: It’s a lot easier for something good to come of a breakup than from a death, from your selfish perspective. It takes some time and effort, but it is possible to convince yourself that with a world population of 12 billion, your chances of finding something better than that b-word who dumped you (or who you just dumped) are pretty good.

But with death, those things that annoy you about that person start to matter a lot less to you. There was only one Jerry. Just like there was only one Ralph (my dad). To her, Jerry will always be the best dad there ever was, faults and all. Just like to me, my dad will always be the best dad there ever was. The best doctor there ever was, too. I will go to my grave believing that my dad could have saved Jerry. The fact that my dad actually was very highly qualified to treat Jerry is a technicality. I would probably still believe Dad could have saved Jerry even if Dad had been a dermatologist.

Difference two: Usually there is some choice involved with breakups. A couple of days, or maybe a week before my last messy breakup, I told a number of people that I needed to break up with her. When the time for the breakup conversation came, I had a list of conditions I wanted to present in order for the relationship to continue. As it turned out, I didn’t present that list because she broke up with me first.

Death is different. When that person’s time comes, there is no room for bargaining. Jerry was a classic example of that. When Jerry died, he had nothing left. There were at least three things that were racing to kill him. What had worked against the North Vietnamese and what had worked against his wounds and physical handicap and what had worked against his cancer didn’t matter anymore. Jerry was fighting to the end though. As he died, I looked down at his hands. They were clenched into a fist.

Difference 3: Death is permanent. With a breakup, there’s always hope, however remote, that it can be worked out and things can be every bit as good as they ever were, or maybe better. Or, to again overuse the example of my last relationship, if it can’t be worked out, you can go find someone a whole lot better who’ll make you forget about that old b-word.

Death doesn’t offer that.

So, since one’s previous experience with the end of a romantic relationship only inadequately prepares one to deal with death, how does one deal with it?

I have some ideas.

Grieve. I can’t tell you how to grieve. I asked a lot of people once how. They said, “Grieve.” Thanks a bunch. I once paid $1,400 for that answer. Hopefully you’re paying a lot less than that for the ability to read this. I’ll see if I can do better than that answer. Don’t stuff your emotions. Let them out. If they don’t come out in tears and screams and other stuff like that, they’re going to come out in other harmful and self-defeating ways that will poison your relationships and the rest of your life. So whatever it is that your body wants to do when you think about that person, let it, and the sooner the better. If a week has passed and you haven’t cried once, or maybe only once, you’ve got a world of hurt ahead of you. I know because I’ve been there. This is no time to be macho.

Take care of unfinished business. One of the things the Methodist minister who performed Jerry’s ceremony stressed the most was to bury the things about him that weren’t all they could be with him. Carry the good with you everywhere, but bury that bad stuff. I know for me, one of the things that finally helped was to role-play, so I could finally say those things I wanted to say to my dad but never got the chance.

Remember. Talking about the person helps. Tell those stories, and you might even want to go so far as to write them down. One of the reasons I got into genealogy was to preserve the memory of my dad and what made him the way he was. I only know the basics about his grandparents, but it’s something.

Find the things you both enjoyed and continue to enjoy them. Probably my best childhood memory of my dad and me was setting up and playing with his Lionel electric trains. My dad wasn’t a railroad buff in the traditional sense and I’m not either, but those trains were something we enjoyed together in 1986, and that’s the main reason they’re something I enjoy now. You’ll find things like that too. You’ll find some of them right away. Others will take years. That’s OK.

Honor. This is the one place where I’ll get Biblical. In Genesis, God said (I’m paraphrasing), “Honor your father and mother, so that it may go well with you and you will live a long time on the earth.” We all have our own ways of honoring our loved ones, but one of the best ways is to take that person’s qualities and not only emulate them–that is, make them our qualities as well–but to pass them on.

Take care of yourself. In some cases, it will be clear that some of the person’s personal habits contributed to an early death. I don’t think I need to say that smoking provides zero benefit and does a lot of harm to your body. The same goes for drinking excessively. And it’s very clear that some aspects of diet cause things like heart attacks and cancer. Some families are very prone to these things anyway, but while we can’t control our genetics, we can control our diet. So eat healthier than your departed loved one did, and the next time you see your doctor, mention what you know of your family’s medical history so that your doctor has some clue what to be watching for.

Learn from your loved one’s mistakes. I’ve already mentioned things like diet, drinking and smoking, but most people made other mistakes in life too. If you think about it, you’ll see what that person’s other mistakes were. Don’t copy those mistakes. Make your own. (You’ll have to work at that first part. You won’t have to work at the second.)

How to get a provisional ballot

Dave Farquhar General ,

Since requests for an absentee ballot had to be in by October 27 and my family emergency happened on October 30, I had to use another method.

I voted using a provisional ballot.There isn’t much information on provisional ballots on the Missouri Secretary of State’s web site. So I’ll relay my experience.

First of all, let me say I like provisional ballots. I hope I’m in the minority on this, but in my young life, I’ve needed them twice. Sure, many times when you’re gone on election day, you know in advance and can get a request for an absentee ballot in. That doesn’t always happen. I didn’t get to vote in 1994 because of a sudden death in the family two days before election day. The same thing happened this year.

In 1994, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. In 2004, there was.

To vote provisionally, you simply go to the local polling place where you happen to be, and ask an election judge for a provisional ballot. Be prepared for the judge to not know how to handle the situation and to collect all sorts of information about you. He wanted my name, address, last four digits of my social security number, driver’s license number, and date of birth. I showed him my driver’s license as identification. My girlfriend didn’t have hers, but I happened to have some of her mail in my car, including a utility bill. She used that as ID, and the judge accepted that as well, as the secretary of state’s office said he would. He also wanted to know why I wanted to vote using a provisional ballot. He then called the county courthouse, and came back a few minutes later with two provisional ballots.

He said we got there just in time because they only had two left. So get there early.

The second thing to know about provisional ballots is they will only be counted in the case of close elections. Chances are our ballots were never counted.

The third thing to know is that the provisional ballot doesn’t have a lot on it. I was able to vote for president, governor, lt. governor, state senator, the local U.S. representative, and a statewide initiative. I was not able to vote for my representative (as it turned out, he was the candidate who probably needed my vote the most) or anyone in the Missouri senate or house. I probably could have voted for that district’s U.S. representative, but I left that blank. I didn’t feel like I should be voting in another district’s race. I don’t know if the vote would have counted or not.

With the ballot, you have to fill out an envelope that asks for more information, such as when you registered to vote and where, as well as other information that hopefully is known by nobody else other than you. You sign under penalty of perjury. Not knowing the exact date I registered, or whether it was at the Cliff Cave or Tesson Ferry branch of the St. Louis County Library, I wrote down what I could remember.

I definitely see holes in this system but I see holes in the rest of the system as well and don’t see that provisional ballots make them much easier to exploit, provided someone actually checks out the information written on that envelope. In St. Louis County, it’s harder to get a library card than it is to register to vote.

Provisional ballots or no, if someone can go to the library with convincing evidence that I have moved, he can register as me and steal my vote. Likewise, if someone shows up at my polling place and manages to convince an election judge that he is me, he can steal my vote. To me, those are bigger holes in the system than the provisional ballot.

Problems the last two days

Dave Farquhar This weblog ,

The site’s been up and down, mostly down, the last two days. The reason is simple: my DSL connection has been mostly down the last two days.

Why, I don’t know.The only thing I can possibly think of is we got some unseasonably warm weather for October, and temperatures in the house topped 80 degrees. The DSL modem doesn’t seem to like heat very much.

I set the DSL modem on an unused piece of Lionel track to raise it up higher in the air and get better air circulation on all four sides.

Powering down, letting it cool off, and then powering back up seems to have helped, especially now that I have the temperature back down to 73 degrees in the house.

We’ll see what happens. Southwestern Bell swore this Speedstream 5360 modem was less finicky than my old Alcatel 1000, but I don’t know. I think both of them can have their moments. Maybe I need to open up the Speedstream and kludge a fan in there, since it seems to have its worst problems when it gets warm.

Apple II clones

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , ,
Apple II clones

In the 1980s, IBM wasn’t the only company with a clone problem. Apple II clones were less common, but a surprising number existed.

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Team of destiny?

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , ,

The Boston Red Sox just won a World Series.

A lot of people won’t understand the irony of that. But lots of baseball fans are shaking their heads with me.It was a story. Facing their arch-rivals in the playoffs, the New York Scum, the S*censored*had the Sox down three games to none. In all of American sports, only two teams had ever come back from 3-0 to win a championship. Both times, it had been in the NHL. No baseball team had done it. Especially not against a baseball team with a $183 million payroll.

Boston did it, with nothing going for it. One of the sportscasters put it this way, after game 3. He asked whether Boston had ever won 4 straight during the regular season. Still, it looked gloomy, but Boston did it.

Next up: The St. Louis Cardinals. A team with the best record in baseball, and a roster that looked like an All-Star team.

Game 1 was a slugfest. Such is to be expected from two teams with depleted pitching staffs. But Boston outslugged the National League All-Stars, er, Cardinals.

Game 2, the Red Sox pitched Curt Schilling, again. There was little doubt Schilling would win, at least not from me. No pitcher has ever been more determined to win a World Series game than Schilling was on that day.

One telling sign: Boston made 8 errors in those two games. The Cardinals normally eat up teams that play shoddy defense. The Cardinals didn’t.

Game 3 was the turning point. Pedro Martinez is a formidable but moody pitcher. When he’s pitching well, he’s as good as anyone ever was. When he’s not pitching well, it’s like extended batting practice. St. Louis expected batting practice.

For three innings it was. Martinez looked shaky. Leading off the third, Martinez allowed Jeff Suppan, the opposing pitcher, to reach base. Suppan pitched most of his career in the American League, where he got about 12 opportunities a year to swing a bat. Then Edgar Renteria hit a long double. Second and third, nobody out, with the big boppers coming to bat. But then Larry Walker hit a ground ball, and for some reason, Suppan didn’t run home. Why? Beats me. But Suppan doesn’t run the bases much. He got hung up after Walker was thrown out at first. What should have been the tying run turned into a double play.

And that was the turning point of the game. From that play on, Pedro Martinez finally showed up at the ballpark. Batting practice over. Enter the 3-time Cy Young Award winner. Boston cruised to a 4-1 victory.

And Boston not only didn’t make any errors, but both of Boston’s most notorious glove handlers, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz–two arguments for the DH, to be certain–contributed good defensive plays with their gloves.

Suddenly St. Louis faced the same odds Boston had beaten a week earlier. But did the Cardinals ever win 4 straight during the regular season? And what did Boston have left? Derek Lowe, a pitcher whose sinking pitches are often matched by his attitude, in Game 4. Tim Wakefield, most likely, in Game 5–a knuckleballer who tends to give up runs in bunches. There was question whether Curt Schilling could come back to pitch Game 6–he had to be sewed back together before every outing and there wasn’t much of anything left to sew. More likely, Bronson Arroyo would have to start. Arroyo was the losing pitcher in Boston’s humiliating 19-8 loss. And in Game 7, the unpredictable Pedro Martinez.

I wasn’t ready to write off the Cardinals.

But then Johnny Damon led off Game 4 with a home run. It proved to be the game winner, as St. Louis only managed four hits against Derek Lowe and three relievers. And Boston’s defense held up once again.

Team of destiny? Maybe, maybe not. I think it was more a team of intimidation. The Red Sox weren’t intimidated, and the Cardinals were.

Both teams look likely to have different makeups next year. Perhaps dramatically different.

But for now, Boston has what it hasn’t had for 86 years: A World Series trophy.

But the Cardinals have nothing to be disappointed about. They were supposed to finish fourth. They ended up with the best record in baseball. With their division rivals looking different next year too, the Cardinals can look forward to next year.

Floppies, meet your replacement

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , ,

I must be the next-to-last person in the world to spend significant lengths of time experimenting with these, but for the benefit of the last person in the world, I’d like to talk about USB flash drives, also known as thumb drives (for a brand name), pen drives, or keychain drives, because they’re small enough to fit on a keychain.They are, as that popular brand name suggests, about the size of your thumb. It’s possible to buy one that holds as little as 64 megabytes of data, which is still a lot of Word and Excel files, but currently the sweet spot seems to be 512 megabytes or 1 GB. This is, of course, always a moving target, but as I write, it’s entirely possible to find a 512-meg drive for around $40, although sometimes you have to deal with rebates to get the price that low. It’s harder, but still possible, to get a 1 GB drive for under $90. That will change. Currently a 2 GB drive is more than $200.

I remember when people went ga-ga over a 1 GB hard drive priced at an astounding $399. That price was astoundingly low, and that was only 10 years ago. Progress marches on, and sometimes progress really is an improvement.

The drives are so small because they use flash memory–a type of readable/writable memory chip that doesn’t lose its contents when it loses power. It’s not as fast as RAM, and it’s a lot more expensive, and its lifespan is much more finite, so you won’t see flash memory replacing your computer’s RAM any time soon. But as a replacement for the floppy disk, it’s ideal. It’s fast, it’s compatible, and unlike writable CDs and DVDs, they require no special software or hardware to write.

The drive plugs into a USB port, which is present on nearly every computer made since about 1997. Use with Windows 98 will almost certainly require the installation of a driver (hopefully your drive comes with either a driver or a web site you can use to download a driver–check compatibility before you buy one for Win98), but with Windows 2000, XP, and Mac OS X, these devices should just plug in and work, for the most part. With one Windows 2000 box, I had to reboot after plugging the drive in the first time.

From then on, it just looks like a hard drive. You can edit files from it, or drag files onto it. If the computer has USB 2.0 ports, its speed rivals that of a hard drive. It’s pokier on the older, more common USB 1.1 ports, but still very tolerable.

The only thing you have to remember is to stop the device before you yank it out of the USB port, to avoid data loss. Windows 2000 and XP provide an icon in the system tray for this.

These are great as a personal backup device. They’re small enough to carry with you anywhere–the small flashlight I keep on my keychain is bigger than most of these drives–and it only take a few minutes to copy, so you can copy those files to computers belonging to friends or relatives for safekeeping.

If your only interest in a laptop is carrying work with you–as opposed to being able to cruise the net in trendy coffee shops while you drink a $5 cup of coffee–a pen drive makes a very affordable alternative to a laptop. Plug one into your work computer, copy your files, and take work home with you. Take it on the road and you can plug it into any available computer to do work. It’s not the same as having your computer with you all the time, but for many people, it’s more than good enough, and the drives make a Palm Pilot look portly, let alone a laptop.

So how do you maximize the usable space on these devices? The ubiquitous Zip and Unzip work well, and you can download small command-line versions from info-zip.org. If you want something more transparent, there’s an old PC Magazine utility from 1997, confusingly named UnFrag, that reduces the size of many Word and Excel files. Saving in older file formats can also reduce the size, and it increases the possibility of being able to work elsewhere. Some computers still only have Office 97.

You may be tempted to reformat the drive as NTFS and turn on compression. Don’t. Some drives respond well to NTFS and others stop working. But beyond that, NTFS’s overhead makes it impractical for drives smaller than a couple of gigs (like most flash drives), and you probably want your drive to be readable in as many computers as possible. So FAT is the best option, being the lowest common denominator.

To maximize the lifespan of these drives, reduce the number of times you write to it. It’s better to copy your files to a local hard drive, edit them there, then copy them back to the flash drive. But in practice, their life expectancy is much longer than that of a Zip or floppy drive or a CD-RW. Most people are going to find the device is obsolete before it fails.

The technologically savvy can even install Linux on one of these drives. As long as a computer is capable of booting off a USB device, then these drives can be used either as a data recovery tool, or as a means to run Linux on any available computer. 512 megabytes is enough to hold a very usable Linux distribution and still leave some space for data.