General

Pretentious Pontifications, Part II

Dave Farquhar General

David’s off on a gig. So I get to post again.
I flew my private Tu-144 out to Hearst Castle last weekend, where I rented a room and set up sound equipment. It was a grand day. Because Hearst Castle is on the ocean, the waves beat against the castle.

I sat down to pontificate, and I found that the sentient sound of the waves didn’t sound nearly as inveigling as the sound of my voice.

I asked the audio engineer if he could filter out the sound of the waves. He said he could.

So I picked up where I left off, pontificating about whatever came to mind.

It was fabulous. I spoke with panache. I was laconic. It was completely unlike le Raunche a la Stenche’s recent bumptious platitudes, and way out of the league of most of the drivel I read on the Web.

David actually found the Tu-144 for me. After the highly-publicized Concorde crash nearly two years ago, David read a story claiming that the Concorde was the only operational supersonic airliner. In a flash of memory that almost impressed me, he said, “The Soviets had an SST. What was it called, the Tu-144? Whatever happened to that?” So he did a Web search. Then he found out the Tu-144 last flew as a jetliner in 1978. He could have found that out a lot faster if he had just asked me, but he didn’t.

But one of the pages he found listed a pair of Tu-144s for sale. His ignorance paid off, in the form of the private jet I’ve been looking for.

As for le Raunche a la Stenche’s assertions about my aviation, astute readers will note that the Tu-144 page I linked to was from the Wayback Machine. The real page is no longer available, and for good reason. I bought the plane. It would truly be an anathema if they sold my plane, after I paid a perfectly good $10 million for it. Raunche is just mad that he couldn’t schmooze his way into getting them to give the plane to him for “evaluation and review.” That didn’t work for this. This is quality hardware.

Too bad it wasn’t built by Intel.

We’ve got problems.

Dave Farquhar General , ,

It all happened two nights ago when I put a questionable disk in my Linux box that’s running a highly experimental kernel. The task crashed. OK, fine. Everything else was still happy. So I tried to close out that shell. Hello, Mr. Freeze. Well, that’s what I get for running an experimental kernel. These things happen. So I rebooted. It came up fine, except it couldn’t see the network.
Figuring I’d catch all kinds of crap about this one, I shut off the monitor and resolved to come back to it later.

Then I came home last night and figured I’d check my mail on one of my Windows boxes. It errored out immediately. So I opened a command prompt and tried to ping. The network was unreachable. What? Is this contagious? So I went to my Web server. It saw the world just fine, and the world could see it. Curious.

So my router/switch was fine. I looked under my desk. There it was, blinking away. Then I noticed something wrong down there. I glanced at my hub. No lights. No nothing.

I reached down and unplugged it. Dead. I unplugged the power cable from the power supply. Dead. I reached over to the hub’s plug and pulled it.

My Web server went dead. So much for my 270+ days of uptime. And I guess that wasn’t my hub after all.

So I traced the cable from my Windows box to the hub, and moved it to the switch. I opened a command prompt and typed ipconfig /renew. I was back in business immediately.

I tried my Linux box, but I couldn’t trace its cable. I’ll do that some other time.

And of course I needed to plug my work laptop in and VPN into the LAN to try to do a little maintenance. Every night needs to be spiced up with some adventure, you know.

I guess I’ll be finding out about Netgear’s customer service later.

CSS and XHTML and standards

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Our Unix/VMS admin popped his head over his cube the other day and asked me if I’d tried a particular site on our corporate intranet under Galeon in Linux. I hadn’t; I’d never had occasion to use the site. I was booted into Wintendo at the time, which is normal, since I’m basically an NT administrator. Personal beliefs about Windows aside, administering NT pays the bills, and computers are tools, not a religion.
But my workaday browser is K-Meleon, a lightweight browser based on the Mozilla project’s Gecko engine. It’s small, it’s fast, it’s standards-compliant, and it’s easy to tell it to ignore the JavaScript code that creates popups and popunders. So I tried visiting the site in question with K-Meleon.

Denied.

This made me mad. TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML were all intended to be cross-platform. The first graphical Web browser was written on a NeXT, for crying out loud! NeXT! How many people today even know what NeXT was?

Of course, when you use Microsoft Web servers serving up pages using Microsoft tools, all the rules change. Microsoft doesn’t even care about previous versions of its own browser. Rule #1 of Web design, which most designers have sadly forgotten, is that you test your site with several different browsers, and preferably several versions of them. It’s easy to make multiple versions of Netscape happily coexist on a machine, but Microsoft has made it next to impossible for more than one version of IE to exist on a machine without resorting to multi-booting. With IE4, IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 all in widespread use and the wretched IE3 unfortunately not extinct, that’s a burden.

A couple of days later, the site’s administrator came back with a snippy response: Use the company standard Web browser.

This, to a Unix and VMS administrator. The only time he ever runs Windows is to fill out his timesheet, since we use a Windows-only app to do it. He’s got a beat-up Micron Pentium-166 in the back of his cube for that purpose. While he could do his job with a PC running Windows and a decent Telnet client, he’s much better off running Linux. He can develop shell scripts locally before sending them up to our big Digital Unix box. Running Linux makes him more productive.

But forget him being able to do his job. He needs to run Windows and Internet Exploiter so he can log into this Web site.

While we’re at it, forget that Internet Exploiter has security holes big enough to drive a truck through. Forget that keeping IIS patches up to date is a full-time job in and of itself. Let’s be Microsoft lackeys. All hail Gates and Ballmer.

I guess the few remaining Mac users at work are going to have to get PCs so they can use this intranet site as well. While I can think of reasons to replace Macs with something else, the inability to display a Web page isn’t among them.

Want to know why it’s a really bad idea to code for just one browser?

Internet Exploiter users can’t read this paragraph, so, those of you who, like me, use a real Web browser written by someone other than an imperialistic monopolist, can share in a dirty little secret. Want to know how to sabotage inept browsers and encourage the use of standards-compliant browsers like Opera and the Mozilla family? Use the tag. Simply nest something inside and , and those who have yet to be liberated from the Evil Empire won’t be able to read it. (Remove the leading and trailing spaces–I had to put those in because some browsers don’t interpret the less-than/greater-than sequences either. Hmm…)

If you want to really be nasty, code your pages so that the only thing visible outside of those tags are the words, “This site can only be viewed with something other than Internet Explorer.” You’ll hack a lot of people off, but you’ll make your point.

Quick question: What’s the first line of the paragraph immediately preceeding this one? If your answer is, “Want to know,” you’re running a Microsoft browser. If your answer is “Internet Exploiter users can’t read this paragraph,” you’re not. There are two paragraphs here nested in non-standard tags. Browsers not made in Redmond correctly ignore this tag and display the text.

There are plenty of sites on the Web that ignore non-IE browsers for no good reason, and who could easily support everything by just following industry standards.

So, for security, what’s wrong with .htaccess files? They work, they’re easy to use, and they don’t tie you to any particular OS or browser on the client side. Especially on a corporate intranet, they’re great.

For layout, what’s wrong with sticking with standard XHTML and CSS? It’s easy to create beautiful pages that look beautiful in any modern browser (not just the one you happen to have installed on your machine), and remain perfectly readable in text browsers and ancient versions of the old standbys. Here’s a great tutorial on basic text styling, a more complete tutorial, some tips on converting existing content, and a site with several elegant layouts you can steal and adapt.

You can even do a cool trick to give your users a choice between your design and the preferences they set in browser setup.

It’s not incredbily difficult to make a layout that looks extremely good and is easy to navigate, plus is readable on all browsers, plus allows the user to gracefully resize it. The end result is files that are smaller than old-school HTML, so the pages download and render faster.

XHTML and CSS are all the rage now, with tutorials in the popular press, and with bloggers flocking to it. It goes a long way towards solving the complaints I had about HTML when I was learning it (let’s face it, when you’re used to designing in QuarkXPress, HTML 3.0 is just plain clunky) so talented designers can do some really impressive things with it.

I’m going to start moving in that direction. It’s time we all did. It’s time to take back the Web. Install Netscape 6.2 and Netscape 4.79 on your machine so you can check your pages in them. At the very least, install OffByOne to ensure your pages are viewable in a third-generation browser (it’s just 1.2 megs in size, so it won’t kill you).

XHTML and CSS are cool if you’re the artsy type, but they’re more than just cool. They’re the right thing to do. I hope I can find the time…

As as for that Intranet site at work? If using it ever becomes part of my job, I’ll re-code it and store it on an Apache server, protected by an htaccess file to show how easy it is to develop cross-platform apps on the Web. After all, it’s what it was designed for.

Not that I expect anyone to listen. It’s distressingly hard to find people who think for themselves, rather than just repeating everything that Microsoft tells them.

Overdue update on Katelyn

Dave Farquhar General

I actually saw Katelyn last night. She’s growing. She’s now about six months old. Her brother, Tommy, weighs 15 pounds, 2 ounces. Katie weighs just over 12 pounds. She’s not eating too well though.
I’ve told a couple of people privately that Katelyn has a breathing tube, but I was wrong about that. It’s a feeding tube. When I saw her, she was awake and as aware of her surroundings as you could expect any six-month-old to be. She was the center of attention and seemed to enjoy it.

I’m making a short documentary about her. I’ve got some good footage. I filmed her baptism, about five months ago, and I’ve got that. The camera at church is amazing so it looks good, and the camera was hooked in to the house audio, so the audio is perfect. I’ve got pastor’s tears and his voice quaking as he baptized her.

I’ve also got tape I shot back in January as their small-group was meeting. Mostly it looks like what it was: a room full of adults. But I got some good shots of Karin just being a mom, and the group praying for Katelyn, and I caught some stories on audio that I’ll probably clean up and use. (The acoustics in that room were awful, so I’ll have to clean up the audio).

I’ve been watching John and Karin’s home movies. There are some shots of Katie and Tommy together, some shots of them feeding Katie, lots of shots of them burping or sleeping and/or chomping on pacifiers–the things you’d expect babies to do. I found a little footage where Katie appeared to be having trouble breathing, which illustrates the severity of her situation at the time.

But if you want to talk severity, we’ve got some shots of her in the hospital with more tubes and wires coming out of her than out of most of my computers. I’ll have to do some editing on that shot. I want to convey her being in the hospital, but I don’t want to gross people out and I don’t want to make anything that’ll embarrass her when she’s older.

I’m more concerned on the latter point. I can’t watch ER because it grosses me out, and that footage didn’t bother me.

There were also a few shots of the family dogs. The best stories are about kids and dogs. But I haven’t found an excuse yet to get a dog into it. But trust me. If there’s a way, I’ll find it. If there’s a shot of Katelyn with one of the family dogs, it’s so in there.

The challenge here is that people sitting in front of the camera talking aren’t especially interesting. So you want to find some other video that somehow ties in to what they’re talking about, or, better yet, tells more of the story. But babies don’t tell much of the story, not without considerable help.

My job is to be that help.

Honest, the money was burning a hole in my pocket!

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

I went out shopping yesterday for a white gold rope to go with a white gold cross pendant I bought a month or so ago. I’m no expert on jewelry, but my sister knows as much about jewelry as I do about computers and baseball combined, and she said I shouldn’t buy silver unless I was going to wear it all the time. I don’t wear jewelry all the time, so I took her advice and bought white gold.
I found the chain.

Then I wandered over to the electronics aisle. I saw a $129 KDS 17″ monitor. Pass. I saw other monitors of varying sizes and qualities. Then I walked down the next aisle, where I saw HP Pavilion and Sony VAIO computers. Nothing earth-shattering. Then I saw something that made me do a couple of quadruple takes. A Lexmark color laser printer. Price? Seven hundred bucks. I was shocked. I’m pretty sure the last time I looked, the cheapest color laser you could find was $1500. I remember in the summer of 1994 selling a number of color inkjet printers for $649. So $700 for a color laser printer is a significant milestone, and it’s reason not to pay more than $100-$150 for a color inkjet. If you’re serious about color printing, that laser will give far better output, much faster, and at a much lower cost per page.

Yes, I’d love to have one. But I’ve got a Lexmark 4039 I bought in 1996. It still works fabulously. It also still has the toner cartridge that came from the factory in it. Needless to say, I don’t print a lot. So I really don’t know how I could justify a color laser printer.

So I walked on. I spied some DVDs. I flipped through them. Just a bunch of mediocre movies, most of which I’d never bothered seeing, so I wouldn’t have any inclination to pay $12.99 for them either. Then I turned around. Camcorders! I saw some Sony and Hitachi models, VHS-C and Digital-8, priced very nicely. Very nicely. At $200, I don’t understand why camcorders aren’t as common as VCRs were 10 years ago. You can get a nice camcorder now for what a nice VCR cost then. But that wasn’t what I was looking for.

Next section: JVC and Sony camcorders. Much pricier, but they had the magic word I was looking for: miniDV. I looked at the price: $480 on the entry model. That was about half what the entry models cost the last time I looked. I played around with it. The picture was awfully nice. I played around with the more expensive models. The picture wasn’t any nicer. So I wrote down the model numbers. At $480, I was almost ready to buy right then and there. But $480 is too much to spend casually, so I did a little research online.

Camcorder tip: Go ahead and search the Web for camcorder specs and reviews, but expect not to find much. Searching the web gives the impression the JVC GR-DVL805 doesn’t exist. The low-end JVC GR-DVL100 did have some positive reviews. I searched Google groups and found lots of good insights on both models. (If I find a consensus amongst a bunch of hobbyists who bought a product with their own money and used it long enough to get an opinion on it, I generally trust them. I certainly trust them more than a salesman, and there are problems these people will notice that a video magazine won’t due to lack of time with the unit.)

The DVL100 is lightweight, does a great job of gathering light (most JVCs do, in my limited experience), reasonably easy to use, and the price is right. Only complaint I could find: the tape motor is close to the mic, so you’ll get some motor noise. That’s not much concern for me.

The 805 is essentially the same camera, but it can double as a 0.8-megapixel digital still camera. Other than that, it has the same strengths and weaknesses as its cheaper brother. Since a 0.8-megapixel digital still camera is essentially worthless unless you’re shooting pictures for the Web, that feature isn’t useful to me.

Both camcorders had a few other weaknesses: You can’t plug an external mic into them, and while you can dump video from the camera into the computer via a firewire port, you can’t dump edited video from the computer back to the camera. Those are higher-end features. Neither of those matter much to me either. When I’m doing really serious work that requires those, I’ll be borrowing my church’s professional-grade JVC camera, which does everything but autofocus and make coffee. For projects where I record the audio separately (which is common), this camera will be fine. And as a second camera, it’ll be great.

So I bought it.

I’m amazed at how much video recording and editing power you can buy for $2,000 these days. For 2 grand, you can get a Pinnacle DV500 editing board (with Adobe Premiere bundled) and a low-end digital camcorder and still have plenty left over to buy a computer to connect it all to.

A couple of quick things

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Scanners in Windows 2000. While those two pompous, arrogant gits were out romping about and insulting one another, I was helping Gatermann put together an all-SCSI Windows 2000 system. I talked about that earlier this week. After much wrestling, we got the system booting and working, but his expensive Canon film scanner, which was the reason for all of this adventuring in the first place–his eclectic mix of Ultra160 and SCSI-2 and internal and external components was too much for his old card to handle–wouldn’t work under 2000. It worked fine in Win98, however. But if you’re scanning film, you’re pretty serious about your work, and 2000’s lack of stability is bad enough, while Win98’s lack of stability is enraging.
Side note: His scanner worked just fine in Linux with SANE and GIMP. The SANE driver was alpha-quality, but once he figured out the mislabeled buttons, it worked. Though flawed, it was no worse than a lot of drivers people ship for Windows, and it wasn’t any harder to set up either. Not bad, especially considering what he paid for it.

Gatermann, being a resourceful sort, did a search on Google groups and found a suggestion that he update his ASPI drivers. Since he had an Adaptec card, he could freely download and use Adaptec’s ASPI layer. He did, and the scanner started working.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to do that to get a scanner going, but it’s been a long time since I’ve set up a SCSI scanner too.

Debian. At work on Friday, I booted the computer on my desk into Linux out of protest (more on that later… a lot more) and I figured while I was in Linux reading and responding to e-mail and keeping up with the usual news sources (I wasn’t having to do any NT administration at the time, which was why I was able to protest), I’d run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. I run Debian Unstable at work, because Debian Unstable, though it’s considered alpha, is still every bit as stable as the stuff Mandrake and Red Hat have been pushing out the door the past 18 months. It’s also about as close to cutting-edge as I want to live on. Well, it had been a while since I did an update, and I was pleasantly surprised to find I suddenly had antialiased text in Galeon. That’s been my only gripe about Galeon until recently; the fonts looked OK, but they looked a whole lot better in Windows or on a Mac. The quality of the antialiasing still isn’t as good as in Windows, which in turn isn’t as good as on the Mac, but it’s better than none at all.

Galeon was already faster than any Windows-based browser I’d seen, but a recent Galeon build combined with the 0.99 build of Mozilla seemed even faster, and Web sites that previously didn’t render quite right (like Dan’s Data now rendered the same way as in that big, ugly browser from that monopolist in Redmond.

I expect with these last couple of updates, I’ll be spending even more time in Linux from here on out. I already have a full-time Linux station, but I use it about half the time and my Windows 2000 station about half the time. I may limit the Windows 2000 station to video editing very soon. And with some of the cool video programs out there for Linux now, it may share time. I suspect I’ll be doing editing on the Windows box, post-production on the Linux box, and then outputting the results to tape on the Windows box.

Dinner with an old friend

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Whew. I’m glad that’s over. Well, I’m not so sure it’s over. But that was a little too weird for me.
I had dinner last night with a former colleague I hadn’t seen in a while. Too long, really. When I first met him, I was an ignoramus with some ambition. I knew where I wanted to go, but I had no idea how to get there. He took me under his wing and showed me the road. And for a time, we traveled that road together.

I continued down the road after we parted ways, and I still haven’t arrived at that destination, but I’m not sure we ever do. No matter what we accomplish, it’s never enough. We never know enough, see enough, or have enough. The destination always moves. Not that that’s always a bad thing.

We reflected on that, and he shared some wisdom. I’m frustrated. He helped me sort some of that out. Not everyone wants to go along for the ride, it seems. So things change, and sometimes we’re disappointed.

Just as importantly, he brought his new girlfriend along. I was glad to meet her. She’s a nice girl, down to earth, and doesn’t take herself too seriously. She can take a lot of good-natured ribbing, and she’s not afraid to dish it out either. She came across as being more than just pleasant to be around–she was fun to be around.

At one point in the conversation, he started talking about “his girlfriend” as if she wasn’t there, describing her, saying what he liked about her. I could tell part of her enjoyed hearing it, but part of her was embarrassed. I was impressed. I’ve done that in the past. The last girl I did that to was too full of herself to be embarrassed. (The embrace I got afterward was pretty cool. Too bad it was worth about as much as the advice that was dished out in these pages yesterday.)

I just smiled knowingly as he went on and on about her. He was doing good. “Stop it,” she said. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“You know her?” he asked.

Bzzt. Wrong answer, Jack.

She let him get by with it. The cool ones always do.

She left the table for a minute and he told me a few things. Things he didn’t want her to know, at least not yet. I’ve forgotten what they were, which is just as well. He mentioned some potential red flags that never rose. Good signs all. I gave him my observations, for what they were worth, based on living for three years with about 30 guys, most of whom had girlfriends, and from other friends’ relationships. He didn’t have anything to learn from my personal experience.

I looked over my shoulder a few times as I was talking. It would have been awkward if she’d returned in the middle of a sentence, potentially. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I had one last thing to say, and I finished it as she was sitting back down at the table:

“…and you can see it in their choices of where they go to school, or where they start their careers,” I said.

She sat back down. She didn’t demand to know what we’d been talking about when we were gone. She didn’t ask what that was about. Nothing.

I was severely impressed.

We shifted gears in the conversation a couple of times. She has a brother who’s going to be starting at the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism, soon. I told her I’d answer any questions he had. I told her about a few of my misadventures in my four years there. I had more than a few. The head of my sequence still remembers me, to this day, and not because I was one of his most brilliant students (I got an A in his class, by the skin of my teeth). We tangled bitterly. If duels had been legal, I would have challenged him to one. I never backed down. I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me, no matter who he was. And he was somebody–ultimately, the decision whether I got into the program and could continue my major rested with him. He backed down. He won a battle, definitely. But I won the war.

He’s one of two professors who teach that class. When her brother asks which professor to take, I’ll be torn.

She asked if he could call me. I said certainly. Actually she asked me for my phone number.

“I see,” my friend said. “I take you out to dinner with one of my friends, and the next thing I know, you’re getting his phone number.”

She had trouble finding a pen. “And now you’re going to ask me for my pen so you can write down his phone number,” he said.

She found her pen. I told her my number. I look forward to talking about journalism with her brother.

I don’t know what the future holds for them, and two hours does not a final impression make, but I know most guys settle for a whole lot worse.

Pretentious Pontifications: Meet R. Collins Farquhar IV

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

Hello. David’s taking a day off. I’m sure I need no introduction. I am R. Collins Farquhar IV. After writing all the good parts of David’s book and not getting any credit whatsoever, I’ve spent the last couple of years working as a playwright, trying to follow in the footsteps of my slightly more famous ancestor, George Farquhar. It went OK. My ideal job, though, would allow me to sit on the floor all day and pontificate, and people, wowed by my vast intellect, would pay me.
I’m still waiting for the phone to ring. Something is very wrong with this world.

But a good friend did pass me an invitation last night. He’s a French nobleman, the closest thing I’ve found to being worthy of my company. His name is something along the lines of Jacques Luc Pepe “Ham’n’Cheese” Croissant Crepe de Raunche. He’s not quite worthy of my company, which is why I never bother to remember his proper name completely. He gets annoyed when I just call him Raunche. He gets even more annoyed when I call him Steve.

Raunche invited me to the new home he just finished building. “Will you be joining me for cigars and old cognac tonight?” he wrote me. “But of course,” I wrote back. And I offered to provide the music. In typical French fashion, he declined. Rudely.

I was going to fly in my private jet, but Raunche is in the habit of letting his dogs roam free on it. I didn’t want to dirty up my plane, so I drove. Well, actually, I was driven. I couldn’t help but notice he lives off a road called Bentley Park. It’s very appropriate, what with a Bentley being a car for a man who can’t quite handle a Rolls. I told him that upon my arrival, after he greeted me in a gruff voice.

He said he’s already got one.

Vivaldi was playing in the background. How cliche. I told him that too. He said something about taunting me a second time.

I’m still wondering if I went to the right place, because there were no cigars and no old cognac. No new cognac either, for that matter. All he had was Girl Scout cookies and chocolate soy milk. And Vivaldi. He didn’t even have the decency to play it on a tube receiver. It’s impossible to hear music the way it was meant to be heard on transistor equipment. But he insisted on playing it on — get this — a COMPUTER.

Was I wondering whether I went to the right house? Strike that thought. Playing Vivaldi on a computer is just like Raunche. He’s always more interested in trying to show off his computer skills than he is in doing things right.

So we sat around and talked about what he needed for his firewall. David fancies himself the computer expert in the family, but his intellect is no match for mine. He can’t possibly know as much as I know. He doesn’t even know as much as Raunche. So Raunche and I laid out some plans, and I tried not to think about David being out and about, doing middle-class things:

Intel D850MV motherboard (dual processor)
(2) 2.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 CPUs
4 GB RDRAM
Adaptec 39160 dual-channel Ultra160 SCSI controller
(2) Seagate Cheetah X15 36LP 36-GB hard drives
Pioneer DVD-305S SCSI DVD-ROM drive
1 Quantum DLT 8000 40/80 GB tape drive
Asus V8200 GeForce3 video card
Intel Pro/1000 XT Gigabit Ethernet adapter
Microsoft humpback keyboard
5-button Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer optical mouse

Raunche and I argued about the specs for a long time. I wanted Fibre Channel hard drives, but Raunche didn’t like that idea. Finally I relented. This isn’t going to be a serious computer, after all. It’s just going to be a firewall and a router. Raunche asked about GeForce4 cards, but they’re still a little bit hard to find. I wouldn’t put anything less than a GeForce3 in a server-class machine, but I’m not too interested in waiting for a GeForce4. People say we never get anything done and just sit around pontificating too much already.

Raunche said the board would only take 2 GB of memory, but that’s nonsense. I read somewhere recently that Linux will run in as little as 4 MB of memory. Obviously that was a typo and they meant to say GB. So if Linux requires a minimum of 4 GB of memory, we should get 4 GB of memory. Obviously if we build a computer so that it will run Linux well, it will also run Windows well. That’s just common sense. Still, computer hardware has gotten so cheap, he’ll be able to build himself a nice simple little firewall for around $10,000.

I really wish Intel would go back to making memory and high-end video chipsets and cards, and I wish they would get into the SCSI controller business. There are two hardware companies I trust: Intel and Microsoft. Raunche agrees.

With our plans laid out, Raunche bid me adieu late in the night. I’d have liked to have stayed and debated longer, but the upper crust need their sleep.

As I left, I thought it was rather nice of me to drive in rather than flying in. That way I wouldn’t awaken his neighbors by taking off in a jet late at night. Not that they care, I’m sure. One must make provisions to live in such close proximity to the upper crust.

In fact, I’m sure some of the neighbors were disappointed not to get the chance to see my plane. I’ll have to get on to Raunche about having his runway cleaned.

Adventure in SCSI

Dave Farquhar General ,

Gatermann called me last night. He’d gotten his new Adaptec 19160, but Windows 2000 wouldn’t recognize it. Unfortunately, he’d reformatted his main drive too, so there was no going back and cheating by installing both his old and new SCSI cards side by side, then installing the driver, then pulling the old card and moving the drive.
We tried a couple of things over the phone. No go. I suggested he try installing Linux just to make sure the card was good.

By the time I arrived, he had a working Red Hat 7.2 configuration. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Microsoft.

We downloaded the latest Adaptec PCI drivers, using his other Linux box. Windows 2000 didn’t like them. We downloaded the previous version. That one, unlike the other, had a dedicated Adaptec 19160 driver. We installed that and it actually worked.

Forty minutes later, we had a working all-SCSI Windows configuration.

I like Linux more and more every day.

How to build a reliable PC.

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

We touched on the topic of reliability last week. I figure I might as well give a more thorough discussion of what makes a PC reliable.
1. Power supply. I see more power supply failures than any other single component. Good power supplies fail without a whimper and don’t damage the rest of your equipment. Bad power supplies take other stuff with ’em when they die. Antec and Sparkle are examples of good basic power supplies. The power supplies that come in InWin and other brand-name cases tend to be fine as well. A notch above that is Enermax, maker of the ultimate in show-off power supplies, with plated finger guards and odd colors. Top-tier is PC Power and Cooling. If I wanted to build a computer and have absolute assurance it would still work in five years, I’d start with a PCP&C or at the very least, an Enermax.

Buy more wattage than you think you need. The power supply will run cooler and last longer if you do. Besides, you never know what you’ll want to stick in the case down the road.

2. Memory. Last time I checked, you could get 64-meg PC133 sticks for under $5. I wouldn’t trust ’em with my archenemy’s work though. Cheap memory may be untested, the PCB may not be a good design, or even worse, it may have chips that were tested and deemed unsuitable for use in PCs (but fine in other less-demanding devices). Unscrupulous makers sometimes buy up these chips and take their chances. It may seem foolhardy to pay $100 for a 256-meg stick from Crucial, but I haven’t just heard horror stories about commodity memory. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’ve had more than 1,000 brand-name modules cross my desk. Three were defective. I’ve had fewer than 50 commodity modules cross my desk. More than half proved defective. Some wouldn’t even work–the system would just beep at you. The worse ones appeared to work for a while, but the system was always crashing. Don’t take chances on your memory. I tend to buy my memory over-spec as well. Even if a motherboard takes PC100 memory, I go ahead and buy PC133 CAS2 memory. The chips will run just fine at a lower speed, so I have an overengineered system for a while, and if I ever upgrade I’m more likely to be able to take the memory with me.

3. Motherboards. Buy brand-name boards. I’ve never had an Asus board fail. (Watch one fail next week now that I’ve said that. But I’m happy with the reliability and longevity of Asus boards.) I’ve done well with other brands too, like AOpen, Abit, FIC, and Tyan. I know MSI boards are popular but I don’t have any personal experience with them. Asus has impressed me with their farsighted engineering–in my experience, you’re more likely to be able to upgrade an Asus board in three or four years than others.

Most people know to check the hardware enthusiast sites when researching a board. I urge you to also check the Usenet newsgroups. You’ll find some good advice. Finding very little on a board can be a good sign too-it’s an indication that a board doesn’t have many problems. Years ago, I was researching the Asus SP97V motherboard, because it was dirt cheap, but it was an Asus. I searched on Usenet and found very little about it–maybe a half-dozen messages. Most of it was just idle chatter. One message was talking about various boards, including the offhanded comment, “The SP97V is a good board for the money, BTW. I’ve used three of them.” That clinched it. Nobody was talking bad about the thing. I had one positive, and very little talk overall, which generally indicates satisfaction. Satisfied people rarely talk about stuff unless its quality blows them away.

4. CPU fans. Never go cheap on CPU fans. There’s a humongous roundup of currently available fans. Get a heavy-duty fan, even if you don’t overclock. Remember, the CPU you’re protecting is a lot more valuable than the fan. A good fan will keep your CPU well within its specified operating temperature range, and I’d like to think that the pricier fans will have a longer life. Get a ball-bearing fan rather than a sleeve-bearing fan; a cheap sleeve-bearing fan is quieter but it’s also likely to conk out on you in a couple of years if you leave your systems on 24/7.

Bookmark that site, by the way. Dan’s one of the better technology writers out there today, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’s an entertaining read, explains things well, knows what he’s doing (and he’s pretty open about his methodology), and he’s probably a certifiable genius, but he’s not pretentious. In fact, he seems to enjoy making people think he’s not quite sane. I make sure I pay that site a visit at least twice a week.

5. Case fans. It’s a good idea to put a supplemental fan in the machine. Two is usually overkill unless you’ve got some really hot hard drives, and it’ll make your computer louder. You can quiet them by manipulating the voltage. Dan’s Data talks a lot about them too, including how to slow them down. For typical users, a simple ball-bearing case fan is sufficient.

6. Hard drives. IBM currently recommends you not run their drives more than 8 hours a day. So that eliminates IBM from the running. That’s a shame, because they used to make spectacular drives. (I still like their laptop drives better than any others I’ve seen though, and I’m not the only one.) I’ve seen fewer dead Quantum and Maxtor drives than any other brand, although Samsung really has surprised me with their reliability, and the drives are cheap. Seagate has a good reputation but I have very limited experience with their recent drives. Maxtor’s a safe choice at the mid range and high end, while Samsung is tough to beat for the low end.

7. Cabling. The cables that come with brand-name PC motherboards seem to be of good quality, as are the cables I’ve seen bundled in Maxtor retail kits. If an IDE cable looks flimsy, don’t buy it. Problematic cables slow you down due to the need to retransmit data. Also never buy an IDE cable that’s longer than 18 inches. Longer cables are available, but IDE specs state 18 inches as the maximum. Longer cables may work, but it’s questionable. If you have to reach the top bays in a tall tower case, you’ll have to go SCSI. Sorry.

Rounded cables will improve airflow, but be careful. Rounding shortens cables, so the wires inside a long rounded cable are even longer than stated. While a relatively new practice on the desktop, I saw rounded SCSI cables in IBM servers and workstations as long ago as 1995.