Author: Dave Farquhar

Dealing with the loss of a father

Dave Farquhar Human Interest , ,

When does the pain of a father’s death ever end? Especially when that father dies at a especially cruel young age?
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist wrestled with that question the day after Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile was found dead at 33, leaving behind a wife and three kids. It’s a problem I’m all too familiar with. Read more

D’oh!

Dave Farquhar General ,

Sorry about the downtime today. I upgraded to Apache 1.3.26 to close a denial of service hole (since I never, ever write anything the least bit controversial–ahem–except on days that end in -ay) and then I neglected to restart it.
Welcome back to your normal, everyday life, Dave.

Incidentally, last week’s outage appears to have been due to a power failure. Steve DeLassus recognized it and e-mailed me in vain, but seeing as I’d sworn off e-mail for the week it didn’t do much good. I’m not overly concerned about it; my Linux servers’ uptime is measured in years as long as Ameren keeps the current flowing.

A couple of brief stories

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I spent the past week in Belle Glade, Fla., which is a farming city near Lake Okeechobee, and a curious mix of extremes–I’ve never seen such wealth and such poverty in such close proximity.
Literally 30 minutes away, we passed a large estate with a garage in the yard, full of vintage Rolls Royces. I zipped past pretty fast but it must have been five or six.

The church we stayed at in Belle Glade was in a lower middle-class neighborhood, not unlike the community just to the north of where I live. To one direction lay a bustling commercial district. In the other direction, ghetto.
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I’m back.

Dave Farquhar General

I just had the best week of my life. I came back to find my web server down (powered off even) and Raunche and RCIV nowhere to be found. Good thing. No idea how that happened, so I’ll be interested in their explanation (and very surprised if the stories match).
Anyway, I just took a luxurious 5-minute shower (and I left the water running the whole time–naughty me). I’ve gotta make some phone calls, then I’ll post a short story about my adventure. I doubt I’ll be talking about much else this week. Like I said, it was probably the best week of my life.

Outta here.

Dave Farquhar General

I’m outta here. In just a few hours, I’ll be boarding a plane with 37 other crazy people and we’ll be touching down a few more hours later. We’ll be there a week.
Meanwhile, you can read about us at www.adventures.org.

I’ve got people keeping an eye on things around here while I’m gone. There’ll be a little new content. And of course I’m sure there’ll be comments on some of the old stuff.

I’m equally sure I’ll have lots of stories when I get back.

Optimizing Windows 2000

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

Since there was no Windows 2000 version of my book Optimizing Windows, sometimes people ask me what tweaks they can use to improve Windows 2000’s performance.
It turns out there are a few things you can do to optimize Windows 2000. Here are some tips that I use on a fairly regular basis.
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A human being prefers being something else

Dave Farquhar Society ,

I hope you can help me.
I’m looking for the place I need to go to resign. Reign from what, you ask? Why, resign from being a human being. I’ve been a human being my whole life, and I’ve decided I don’t like being one. It’s time I try something else.
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The reason for last night’s weirdness

Dave Farquhar General

Steve was coding last night, so if the site was acting really goofy on you for a while, that was why. Meanwhile he got a few chuckles out of some minor changes I’d made to the code myself. Now we’ve got a recent comments sidebar, which’ll help me keep up with conversations on those really old threads. That’s always a good thing…

Should I file this under ‘Christianity’ or ‘Writing?’

Dave Farquhar Writing

We had two Christian authors at church Wednesday night. I went to Tim Wesemann’s presentation. The topic was family devotions with your children. I don’t have children. I’m still glad I went, because I didn’t have family devotions growing up, and neither did anyone else I know. So I’m dealing today with people in their twenties and even in their thirties who don’t know how to pray.
It’s a good thing I learned how to pray when I was 23, so there’s someone now, four years later, who can teach them, eh?
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Introducing the Silicon Underground Portal

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Tonight, as I was preparing for my upcoming mission trip (read: doing laundry and waiting around on it), I started messing with a piece of software called bk2site.
Like most cool software, it’s included with Debian. RPMs and tarballs are available if your distro of choice lacks it. Its purpose is to take your Netscape/Mozilla/Galeon bookmarks file and a few RSS feeds of your choice and make a site out of it, much like the Yahoo! of many years ago before its size got out of hand.
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