Author: Dave Farquhar

And the axe falls

Dave Farquhar Personal , , ,

I don’t talk about work very often, and usually in vague terms. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned my current employer by name here, and I very rarely mention a former employer by name, mostly because they sometimes made decisions I disagree with. I figure if I’m going to trash them, it’s better if I do it without mentioning them by name.
But something happened Friday. I was going to just ignore it, but I’m not going to accomplish anything by doing that. I might as well confront it. Read more

Buying a monitor

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I don’t have any strong opinions about monitors. None at all. I don’t have strong opinions about anything, but I especially don’t have strong opinions about monitors.
The reason for my overwhelmingly weak opinions about monitors is twofold. For one, I very rarely have hardware fail. When I do, it’s almost always a monitor, and it’s rarely cost-effective to repair one. The parts are costly, the hourly rates are costly, and in my experience, a monitor that’s failed once is likely to fail again anyway. So it pays to get it right the first time. Read more

The best Linux distro meets the best file system

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

So what’s so special about this server? It’s running Debian 3.0 on XFS, which is SGI’s industrial-strength journaling file system. It’s faster than ext3, more feature-complete than ReiserFS, and it’s been reliably shuffling bits as part of SGI’s IRIX operating system for the better part of a decade. You know you want it.
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Drowning my sorrows in cholesterol and punk

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

I can wait a long, long time
Before I hear another love song.
— Sisters of Mercy
It was a clear and muggy Thursday night, and I had a bad case of the blues. So I did what I usually do–I laid down until it went away. An hour and a half later, it was worse. So I got in my car and drove, intending to drown my sorrows.
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Dude! I’m getting a… Packard Bell!

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

Oh wait. No, I’m thinking of Steve. Although he and I did just get identical Dell Optiplex GX1 P2-450 workstations to use as Web servers. We learned a little bit about them too.
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All of this and nothing

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

There’s no one thing to write about. So I’ll write about a few little things. Deal?
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Looks like Premiere 6.5 will be a keeper

Dave Farquhar Video

Adobe announced Premiere 6.5 yesterday, and it’s got just about everything that should have been in 6.0.
It promises to work better with native DV (which will alleviate the need for hardware like the Pinnacle DV500 card), provides native tools for exporting your video to DVD, VCD, and SVCD, and a titling app, a busload of fonts, better audio tools, and real-time effects and transitions. That’s probably the most important thing; it’s annoying to apply a bunch of effects and then to have to wait a few minutes for it to render all the frames, only to find it wasn’t quite what you were looking for.

I guess it’s like the difference between a film camera and digital. Read more

I think I need to learn about VCD

Dave Farquhar Video , , , ,

R. Collins Farquhar IV, before seeing my new video:
You don’t call art a “video” or a “movie” or a “tape.” You call art a film.

R. Collins Farquhar IV, after seeing my new vi… whatever:

Yes, that is definitely a video. Read more

Words to live by

Dave Farquhar General ,

I do what I do, and I don’t plan how I ought to do it. I never have. I don’t believe in being rigid about anything. If I see an opportunity, I will drop all the rules, even when doing so is probably a mistake. –John Cocke, inventor of RISC
I’d never heard of John Cocke until he died, but that figures. Since I didn’t major in CS or EE, there are a lot of important people I’ve never heard of. But the father of virtually every non-x86 CPU still standing died this past week at age 77. Like many geniuses, he was eccentric and didn’t like to be bothered with mundane, everyday stuff. And like many geniuses, he didn’t think about his methods much. Read more

Where does faith come from?

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , , ,

Following closely on the heels of the question of how to pray, people often ask me where faith comes from, and where they can get more of it.
The best response to that question, usually, is, “Why do you want more faith?” Read more