Author: Dave Farquhar

Here’s a promising site

Dave Farquhar Music ,

I’ve been poking around at songfacts.com. For music junkies like me who want to know absolutely everything about their favorite songs, this site’s a fix. They’ve got something to say about the majority of the songs U2 and Peter Gabriel ever recorded. It was interesting to find out what Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood” was really about. Read more

Copyright terriorists can’t take what they dish out

Dave Farquhar Music , , , , , ,

Aw, poow widdle awe-aye-ay-ay! Poow widdle bay-bee!
The RIAA, if you recall correctly, is endorsing legislation that would permit copyright terrorists holders to knock off or hack into computers they suspect are being used to violate copyright law. So I guess calling what they want “copyright terrorism” is apt. Read more

Building a budget PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

As I procrastinated by bouncing between projects, I put together a low-budget PC for a friend of a friend. It’s very much a retro PC, but I think it’s useful, especially considering the budget I had to work with. Read more

My next project

Dave Farquhar General

I’m in the Web design phase of my next project, which I’ve alluded to in the past. I’ve got a fast machine here (I’m still trying to figure out why my site’s slow–CPU usage is low, memory usage is way low, and there’s no disk activity) with tons of capacity. I’ve got a fantastic piece of software. I’ve got the world’s best server operating system. And my guest has compelling and important things to say.
All we need is a kick-tail design. So I’ll put a design up there, and hopefully that’ll goad her graphic designer son-in-law to say, “Hey, I can do better than that!” and she’ll get her kick-tail design. (But nobody’s gettin’ their mitts on mine. I’m doing my own design, writing, and editing, to leave my mark on my site. It’s the same reason why Aimee Mann sometimes plays every instrument on one of her songs.)

I said Sunday it would go live Sunday. That didn’t quite happen. But soon, very soon.

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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