General

So Dave, how do I use this site?

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve tried to make this look as much like the old one, but there are some new features here. Please give the Comments feature a look. If you’ve got something you want to say, just click Comments and write away. No registration required. Punch in your name, and if you want, your e-mail address and Web address. Spam-filter your e-mail address if you want. Or leave it out entirely. Use an assumed name if you want. I think my system logs an IP address somewhere, so don’t go posting death threats, but aside from that, comments can be anonymous. For privacy hounds, e-mail is a greater threat to your privacy than the Comments section. I can find an awful lot about you from your e-mail headers. (Not that I bother–who’s got time for that?)
So when should you e-mail me? If I’m not talking about what you want to talk about. I read all my mail, but I can’t always be timely about it. There are days when I leave here at 7 or 7:30 a.m. and then I don’t get home until after 9 p.m. On those days, the last thing I feel like doing is reading a ton of e-mail, so it sits while I fix something to eat or listen to music or read a book (or all three). I don’t read my personal mail from work. But I have been known to take a quick peek at the site from work during breaks or slow periods. I’ll read the comments and sometimes fire off a response.

Basically, I’m trying to encourage you to use the Comments section. It’s getting harder and harder to deal with all the e-mail. Comments will get a faster response from me, if they’re necessary. And it saves me the time of posting them, which is good. Lively topics can quickly bury me in e-mail; I’ve started to avoid such topics for exactly that reason. But I do like lively discussion, so this is a nice solution to that problem if people use it.

One last thing on Comments. Please keep it clean. I can’t imagine 11-year-olds being interested in the topics here, but I want the content to be appropriate for all ages. I know I’ve dropped an F-bomb here and there, especially really early on back on my original site whose contents are temporarily unavailable. I started to watch that after a schoolteacher commented about that. Greymatter can optionally filter words out. For the time being, I have that turned off. I’ll turn it on if I have to.

You’ll also notice a Karma rating. If you read something and really like it, click the little plus sign. If you hate it, click the minus sign. If you’re neutral or indifferent, leave it alone. It may be possible down the line to write a script that tallies up the karma and gives a “Best of” based on your votes. I haven’t looked into it yet, but I think I’d like that. Short-term, I look at that to see how I’m doing. If certain topics consistently get me negative votes, I’ll probably avoid them. If a topic gets tons of positive votes, I’ll probably head that direction some more. It’s just a quick, easy, anonymous way to give a little feedback.

The search engine works, but there isn’t much to search yet, obviously. Performance may lag once there are a lot of entries, but that’s curable. Down the line I can always throw more CPU at that problem. On the plus side, the search engine searches both my entries and my comments.

The site’s very unfinished, as you can see. I plan to add more features as I think of them. I’m open to ideas of course. This is a community.

Not sure what we’ll get back to tomorrow. I’ll come up with something.

My apologies to those whose e-mail I haven’t answered yet. I just haven’t been up to it. See Sunday’s post. Later this week, I hope, I’ll get caught up.

Time to come clean

Dave Farquhar General ,

And now the torch
And shadows lead
Were it not so black and not so hard to see
How can it help you when you don’t know what you need
How can anybody set you free?
Would he walk upon the water
If he couldn’t walk away?
And would you
Would you carry the torch
For me?

And what if I gave you the key
To the doors of your design…
Lit the corridors of desire?
Where if not so black
And not so hard to see
What use to you then any fire?
–The Sisters of Mercy, “Torch” (Floodland, 1987)

I don’t bare my soul on my web page too often. Not that I’m unwilling to do that; I made a brief career of baring my soul in a newspaper column a few years ago. This weekend, as I visited weblog after weblog, looking for elements to steal and possibly improve upon, I realized that that’s mostly what people read weblogs for. At least the cool thing about Greymatter is I can make my postings in such a way as to serve whatever audience comes this direction. But I’ve become sidetracked. That happens a lot lately.

Very obviously, something’s bothering me, and I’m trying to figure out what. I see the symptoms. I sat down Friday night to write a manifesto. What I ended up with was a shotgun blast followed by a couple of quotable paragraphs. I get irritated easily. I flew off the handle last week about rankings on the Daynotes.com/org/net portals. I get irritated when editthispage.com crashes. I know what service delays do to readership. I know it far too well.

One of my very best friends is moving to Colorado in a couple of months. He’s talked to me, his boss has talked to me, and I kinda sorta understand where each is coming from but not really. Not that my opinion matters. I think the guy walks on water, but it looks like I’m the only one. Both of them want me to understand, and now he and the members of his Gen X ministry are looking to me to pick up his torch and lead. Given six months, I might be ready to do that. I don’t have six months. Meanwhile, I feel for him. He doesn’t feel like his contributions are valued. All of the communication he’s received indicates–to him at least–that it isn’t. I totally understand the desire to be valued. Maybe that’s a Gen X thing.

Another one of my very best friends is moving to Kansas City as soon as he finds a job there. Then he’s marrying my sister. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just really weird.

Another friend isn’t making plans to leave town–yet. She’s alienated. She’s just like my other friend I mentioned before–she feels like no one values her or the things she does, and I see her point. Will she leave? It probably comes down to how good the offers are and how mad she is the day they come in. I want to help her but I know there’s nothing I can do.

I probably shouldn’t be writing any of this because yesterday at the grocery store, I struggled to keep a proper grip on my grocery bags. It wasn’t that they were heavy–it was that my hand just wouldn’t do what my mind told it to do. The startled cashier asked if I needed help.

At work, my department’s getting cutback after cutback. I know I’ll be the last one cut. I’m not popular because I’m not a Microsoft lackey and I’m not a yes man. But I solve the problems no one else can solve, and I solve the normal problems much faster than anyone else in my group. I don’t want to be the last one cut, because the number of problems and the expectations of your clients don’t fall just because your staff numbers fell.

So I guess I know where my recent tendency to always assume the worst came from. None of this is insurmountable. Frankly most of it’s similar to things I’ve dealt with before.

At my worst, I fall into overdominant overanalysis, and I caught myself in there today. Then I realized I’ve been doing it all week. Then the question that song raises hit. “How can it help you when you don’t know what you need?” What’s “it?” Who cares? How can anything help you when you don’t know what you need?

Well, now that I see the problems, I know what I need. I can lapse into poor-me, or I can do what needs to be done and learn what I can from it.

Please be patient with me. This isn’t quite like setting up a two-computer TCP/IP network. Or like setting up Linux, Apache, and Greymatter and forwarding port 80 on my router to it, for that matter. Those things are a lot easier.

Two phone calls, one weird, one sad

Dave Farquhar General

My phone rang at about 1 p.m. this afternoon. I picked up. “Hello?”
“Hi!” Some unfamiliar female voice was overly happy to hear mine.

“Hi!” I said back, figuring I’d play along and try to buy some time to figure out who on earth this was.

“Dave?” she asked.

“Uhh, yee-ah,” I said, slowly.

“How are you!?” she asked forcefully, still way too happy.

I paused and analyzed the voice. Adult. Pre-middle age, probably in the 20s or 30s. Female. African-American. I ran through the list of people I know matching that description. No match. “Umm, I’m sorry, but I have no idea who this is,” I said.

“Yes you do!” her enthusiasm was unwaning.

“Umm,” I know, I know, I’m just a stupid male, but I honestly was drawing a blank.

“It’s your lover,” she said, tenderly and huskily enough to really freak me out.

Now, I haven’t had a date in eight months, so the likelihood of any female believing herself to be my lover is, well, really remote. Besides, I’m of the persuasion that the act that most people associate with the endearing term “lover” ought to wait until after marriage. So, very obviously, one of the people in this conversation was mistaken, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t me.

“It’s your lover,” she said again, pretty much the same way. I was starting to wonder if this wasn’t a practical joke someone was pulling off on me. I know more than a few pranksters, after all. I decided to play it safe.

“I… don’t have… one,” I said finally.

She laughed. “Sure you do, Dave!” And she said her name. I didn’t know anybody by that name.

“I’m pretty sure you’ve got the wrong number. This is Dave Farquhar.”

She let out a very embarrassed laugh. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said.

“That’s OK,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

She laughed some more. She was still laughing when I hung up the phone.

I laid the phone down on its cradle, and it wasn’t 30 seconds later that it was ringing again. I picked up again. “Hello?”

It was the same woman again. Her mood changed quickly. Very quickly. She verified the phone number she dialed. Then she turned desperate. “Are you visiting from out of town?” Nope, this is my phone number, and I live alone. “Did you just get this number?” Nope, I’ve had it for more than two years. I could hear the hurt. She didn’t have to tell me the story. I could pretty much put it together myself. Boy meets girl. Boy sleeps with girl, probably promising something more later. Boy gets what he wants. Boy makes up a phone number and gives it to girl so he won’t have to deal with commitment.

Scumbag.

04/29/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

Please bookmark http://208.190.221.250 . There’s no guarantee the site will stay there, but Southwestern Bell’s DHCP servers tend to give systems that stay on 24/7 the same IP address over and over. It seems like editthispage has at least one outage a day now. Frankly, I’d rather trust Southwestern Bell’s DHCP servers, scary thought as that may be.

I’ll be making arrangements soon for an address with words in it. New content will be going up over there. I don’t want to give myself even more stuff over here to migrate. That would be kinda like buying new furniture the week before moving day.

For those of you who are curious, I forwarded port 80 on my router to a Pentium-120 running Mandrake Linux 7.2. I’m running the Apache Web server, and Greymatter on top of that. It’s fast. I’ve got a DSL connection, which isn’t the fastest upstream connection, but it’s reasonably quick. Greymatter’s demands aren’t all that high.

Anyway. Time to finish writing up some content, then run some errands.

04/28/2001

Dave Farquhar General

Site update: Speaking of miracles, I got Apache and Greymatter working right on my ancient Pentium-120. I haven’t registered yet with any of the dynamic Web address providers, so right now I’m at the mercy of the DHCP server. At the moment, you can get to my experimental site at 208.190.221.250. I tried to make it look a lot like this site. I have successfully connected to it from the outside world (finally).

I’m still playing around with it a lot, but I like the results I’m getting so far.

Miracles. Fair warning: strong religious content ahead. If you already know you don’t want to read something like that, click over to Discussions and read some of that stuff. We’ve been talking about Weblogging software and who knows what else over there. I’ve got smart readers. Their contributions are worth a looksee.

I do still believe in miracles. I want to tell a story here about a minor miracle, but it has no impact without knowing the parties involved. And I’m not going to embarrass them by trying to tell it. I’ll get too many details wrong.

So instead, I’ll repeat something I said in Bible study last night. Yeah, last night. I get together with a bunch of other twentysomethings two Fridays a night for Bible study. Most people assume people my age have no interest in that sort of thing. Remember, the root word of “assume” is “ass.” Those who assume we never had any interest never asked. Yes, we’re the ones who typically wander into the 10:45 service on Sunday morning at 10:50 or 10:55. Frequently we burned out on church when we were younger, and we run so hard all week due to work and other growing responsibilities that Sunday is the only day we can sleep in a little. And it’s hard for us to get our acts together. Plus, the churches worth going to are frequently in neighborhoods we can’t afford to live in yet. So we have to drive a few miles to get there. All these factors combine to make it hard for us to make it on time. But we’ll gladly give God an evening, even if that’s a Friday evening.

Hey, that’s another miracle, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s just plain weird. I don’t care. I like weird. Remember, I listen to the Velvet Underground and The Pixies and The Cure and Joy Division.

Back to what I said. We were praying last night too. Yes, we’re the same people who grew up fidgeting a lot during prayer. Those of us who don’t pray much generally don’t for a couple of reasons. One, in most cases no one ever taught us how. And for another, we frequently haven’t seen enough results of prayer yet to have enough confidence. We’ll do things when we know it works. The subsection of Generation X that comprises our group has seen some results, so we pray. So as we were taking requests last night, I mentioned Kaycee. I’ve never met Kaycee and probably never will. I called her “a friend of a friend,” which I believe is accurate. I talked about the remarkable aspects of her story. I was totally wrong on her age–I said mid-twenties, because her writings display a maturity and a quality that’s rare even in a 29-year-old. She’s 19, which makes her all the more remarkable. She’s been dead twice. Only briefly, but yes, clinically dead, twice, from medical accidents. And she beat cancer, coming back from outlooks that for a while looked very grim indeed. Now she’s dying of liver failure.

At that point, I paused, and then I said something that I’ve halfway thought but never said and I’ve never heard anyone else say. God gave her three major miracles. Well, major in that she got to live longer than it looked. A miracle by definition can’t be explained by science, and I don’t know if her comebacks can be explained by science. I’m not close enough to the situation to be able to talk to the people who’d really know. But to me, three long shots happening to one person is a good indication of Someone Upstairs keeping an eye out for her.

So then I asked the big question. Why doesn’t it seem like anyone is praying for a miracle for her now? God did it three times. To bring her back from certain death again is nothing to God. It requires less effort from Him than picking up a piece of paper laying on the floor takes from us.

And the great guy who was leading the study last night along with his wife said, “Yeah. We don’t ask for miracles enough, even though we know they can happen.”

We asked God’s will, of course. Life, no matter how great, is nothing compared to heaven, so when God calls someone home, it’s cause for celebration for them. When a believer dies, the true victims are those who are left behind, not the believer who’s died. But sometimes God’s not finished yet.

When you love someone, you’ll do things for that person without them asking. Parents generally don’t wait until their kids ask for something to eat before they start fixing dinner. Loving parents give their kids healthy food for dinner instead of ice cream, because they know it’s better for them, even though vegetables sometimes don’t seem like something a loving parent would inflict on anyone.

But think about it. Don’t you like to be asked, sometimes? Don’t you like it when your son or daughter asks you to read a story? Or when your significant other asks a small favor? I’m not talking about nagging or manipulative asking. I’m talking about asking in a sincere, loving fashion. Isn’t that one of the coolest things you’ve ever felt?

I think it’s that way for God. God doesn’t like it when people try to manipulate Him, of course. But when someone asks for something sincerely and lovingly, I think He derives pleasure from that. He still doesn’t always say yes (just like you’re not going to hand your car keys over to your six-year-old, no matter how sincere and loving the request), but frequently He does.

Frequently enough that yes, I believe in miracles.

04/27/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

Well, I just wasted 45 minutes stumbling into and through a brawl on a mailing list. I’m really sick of people arguing over petty technicalities. I should have written something worth your time to read, or booted up one of my Linux boxes to see if by some chance I forgot to disable Apache on one of them and tried testing Greymatter, or better yet, answered some of my growing pile of mail.

I think I’d see fewer flames if I walked into an Apple users’ group meeting wearing a Windows t-shirt. Now I remember why I usually write about computers. At least being controversial and outspoken in that field is usually funny. (Where’s my copy of OS/2?)

Yesterday I complained about not having any time anymore. I think it’s because I waste too much of the time I do have on things like mailing lists.

On a more pleasant note, thanks to those of you who’ve written in with encouragement and suggestions on Weblogging software. At least that’s not a waste of time.

04/26/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Ugh. I’m dead tired. Why does it seem like I’m busier now than I was when I was dating or when I was writing a book? It doesn’t make any sense. I wanted to talk about something other than computers today, but I’m beat as I write this (10 pm Wednesday night), so I’m taking the lazy route.

Umm, I do have this. Most of the Daynoters have already mentioned it. I don’t know all the details of Kaycee’s story, but if I’ve got the details right, she’s come back from being clinically dead twice, and she beat cancer last year. Now her liver is failing and there’s nothing the doctors can do.

We said a prayer for her in church last night. I can’t claim to know God’s plan for her (I’m clueless about God’s plan for me, let alone for anyone else), but obviously He wanted to keep her around a while longer for some reason. If He’s through with her here, or nearly so, nothing can stop it. But if He’s not…

Don’t write off Kaycee just yet.

We’d all do well to follow her lead. Look what Kaycee’s doing now. She’s got at least a little time left. She’s making the very most of it. We’d all do well to appreciate and make the most of what we have.

Hmm. On to much less important stuff.

Asus reports they’re selling more P4 motherboards now. Don’t fall into that trap. Don’t buy one. Planned obsolescence. Intel’s changing the socket again later this year, so you’ll hit a dead-end on upgradability. Besides, the P4’s just a lousy performer. Give Intel a year to sort the thing out, and don’t fund them in the meantime. Intel needs to learn that they can’t just ship lousy product and people will buy it just because it says Intel on it.

Meanwhile, reader David Huff sent me this:  An AMD Duron-750 for 38 lousy bucks. Astounding. The retail box version with a fan and 3-year-warranty is $50. T he same place has an FIC AZ11 motherboard for $65, so you can be in a Duron-750 for $120 or so considering CPU fan and shipping costs. (I checked; shipping is $10.50.) Red Hill doesn’t like the AZ11’s BIOS, but at that price, whaddya want? Red Hill also doesn’t like the lack of ISA slots, but unless you have a nice ISA modem, that probably won’t bother you. (Put your ISA modem in another computer, get Freesco, network ’em together, and share your net connection.)

AMD will cut prices Monday or Tuesday, but I can’t imagine they’ll have anything in the $38 price range. I’m about 98% ready to bite on this one.

04/25/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

The St. Louis Cardinals want a new stadium. It seems like everyone else is building a new stadium, and Busch Stadium was one of five multipurpose stadiums built in the late 1960s (Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cincinatti, St. Louis, and Atlanta) that looked almost exactly alike–and that wouldn’t have been so bad, I suppose, except they all looked like toilets. Well, after Anheuser-Busch sold the team to a group of investors, the new owners realized that humongous toilet-shaped stadiums with artificial turf are ugly, so they moved in the fences, ripped out the turf and put in grass, and since retro is in, they erected a hand-operated scoreboard in the upper deck (the seats they displaced were lousy anyway).

Now, Busch Stadium has always been a lousy place to watch a baseball game. The architecture harkens back to post-war East Germany. The stadium has no charms, aside from the retrofitted scoreboard. And unless you’re in the box seats, you need binoculars to see anything. There isn’t a good seat in the house. Once you’ve been to a game at Wrigley Field, or Royals Stadium (yeah, yeah, it’s officially Kaufmann Stadium now, but I’ll never change), you realize what watching a baseball game is supposed to be, and Busch Stadium ain’t it. It’s more fun to watch the Royals and Cubs lose in their home parks than it is to be there–it’s hard to call what you do at Busch “watching”–when the Cardinals win in theirs. Force large numbers of Kansas Citians to watch a few games at Busch Stadium at gunpoint, and they’ll realize how good they’ve got it with Royals Stadium, and then the Royals will start drawing two million fans again.

So the Cardinals want to tear it down. Great, I say. Blow it up. I’ll help. I’ll even donate a little money to the cause.

So, what’s wrong with the Cardinals’ plan to get rid of Busch? They want the State of Missouri to pay for it. And that’s wrong. Why should the citizens of Kansas City be helping to pay for St. Louis’ new stadium? Why should my mom, who’ll probably never go to another baseball game in her life and who almost certainly will never go to a Cardinal game, be ponying up towards that stadium? The argument is that it’ll bring in jobs and revenue.

Fine. So if Boeing decides it wants to move its corporate headquarters here to St. Louis, where it already has some presence anyway, the State of Missouri should pay for it. After all, that’ll bring in even more jobs (and white-collar jobs at that!), and the revenue it brings in will last all year.

There is no difference between those two things. They’re private enterprises that should get their own funding. Period. And besides, the Cardinals aren’t a good investment. If the players strike or are locked out at the end of the season, which is likely, nobody knows what will happen. At best, baseball will be damaged goods. At worst, diehards like me will be following Japanese baseball next season because there won’t be any pro baseball left in the States. If the State of Missouri wants to give the Cardinals a loan, fine, but a handout, no.

And that’s not even figuring in the other parts of the argument. The proposed new stadium is smaller and has less seating capacity than Busch. The Cardinals draw three million fans a year. They fill that wretched place. Cardinal fans would watch baseball on a playground in a slum if that was where the Cards were playing. So, somehow, building a smaller but much prettier stadium is going to help team revenue? Only if they raise ticket prices through the roof. And ticket prices are already awfully high. That move could very easily backfire. Football and hockey are already so expensive that you can’t go to a game without sitting in the middle of a bunch of yuppies complaining that they only made $100,000 on the stock market last year. So the solution is to make baseball, with its 81 home games, the same way? While it might work for a little while, it’s not sustainable. The Cardinals have a rabid following in central Illinois and throughout Missouri, but neither of those places is exactly yuppie town. Make baseball a game for the elite, and the The Rest of Us, who the team’s revenue is built on, will go to fewer games and spend less money as a result.

There’s always the veiled threat that the Cardinals will move, to the Missouri suburbs or the Illinois suburbs, or, ridiculously, out of St. Louis entirely. That last prospect won’t happen. The Cardinals won’t draw three million fans anywhere else. Two million, tops. The move to the Missouri suburbs isn’t likely–Missouri doesn’t want to pay for the stadium whether it’s in St. Louis or in Creve Couer. Illinois is a possibility, but not a risk the Cardinals ownership should be interested in taking. The Illinois suburbs are known for two things: crime and strip clubs. Do they really want their brand-new stadium to be next door to the Diamond Cabaret?

Yes, Cardinal fans will go watch baseball next door to the Diamond Cabaret. They’d watch baseball in the middle of East St. Louis if they had to. Or they’ll keep right on packing it in at Busch, lousy though it may be. It’s lousy, but it’s a good match for the team because it seats buttloads of people, and they consistently fill it, and the stadium may be an eyesore, but it’s nowhere near as old as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field and no one’s complaining about their structural integrity. Busch Stadium will be around for a while. And a lot of fans even like it.

Cardinal management doesn’t know how good they’ve got it, and Missouri needs to continue to call their bluff.

Enough of that. Let’s talk about us. That got your attention I’m sure. Performance this morning was, to put it mildly, pants. Then the system went down like a… never mind. I’m getting really tired of it. I’m paying nothing for this, and lately I’m getting what I pay for. I want to control my own destiny, and I’ve got this nice broadband Internet connection, and some spare parts (and what I lack is cheap) and I want some real sysadmin experience. So, I’m thinking really seriously about moving. I wanted to hit the Userland Top 100 before I moved on, and enough time may pass between now and the time that I get set up for that to happen I may meet that goal yet.

At the moment I’m leaning toward Greymatter, as it’ll give me everything I have here, just about, plus better discussion facilities. Suggestions welcome.

04/24/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

A sense of wonder. It must have been almost 20 years ago, I read a short story in a magazine involving a wondrous new tool. I don’t exactly remember the plot line, but it was something similar to this: a preteen boy comes into a sum of money under questionable circumstances. He’s uncomfortable going to his parents about it, or even his peers. Not knowing where else to go, he turns on his dad’s computer and types his story into it–whether this was a built-in Basic language interpreter like a Commodore or Atari, or a command line like CP/M or MS-DOS, it didn’t say. At the end of the story he hits Return, or Enter, or whatever that key’s supposed to be called, and the computer responds with one sentence:

Sorry, can’t compute.

That line gave the story its title.

I don’t know why I remember that story, except maybe for the technical inaccuracy. At any rate, I seem to recall he left without turning the computer off, so his dad came home, noticed the computer was on, read what was on screen, and confronted him. And that was pretty much the end, at least how I remember it.

Last night I was making up a batch of barley and mushroom soup from a recipe I found over the weekend. I know when I’m out of my element, and trying new recipes without any help at all is among them. The recipe called for 4 tablespoons of dry sherry. Now, I’m not a wine drinker, unless drinking wine twice a year counts. I was pretty sure that sherry is a type of wine. But white wine? Red wine? I didn’t know. As I was picking up the other ingredients I needed, I went to the wine and liquor section of the local grocery store and wandered around a while. I couldn’t find any sherry.

So I went home. I figured I was probably in the minority as far as not knowing anything about dry sherry, but I also figured I probably wasn’t the first one to have questions about it. I fired up a Web browser, went to Google, and typed a question: What is dry sherry? I was able to infer very quickly from the site hits that, indeed, dry sherry is a wine. But I couldn’t find any. So I typed in another search phrase: “dry sherry substitute.” That put me in business. A lot of people have asked that question. One of the first documents hit offered several suggestions, marsala among them. I have a little bottle of marsala in one of my kitchen cabinets. So I made the soup, and it wasn’t bad.

The moral of that short story remains unchanged: A computer still can’t answer questions on its own, particularly questions of ethics–the experiments of www.mindpixel.com notwithstanding. What Mindpixel is doing is storing and cross-referencing the answers to millions of simple questions in hopes of one day being able to answer complex ones. (The results of that are fairly impressive–last night I asked it several simple questions like, “Was Ronald Reagan president of the United States in 1981?” and “Is Joe Jackson the name of both a famous musician and a famous baseball player?” and it answered all of them correctly.) But what Mindpixel, or for that matter, any good search engine can do effectively is gather and retain information. And that in itself is extremely useful, and the idea of search engines indexing a global database and answering simple–and not-so-simple–questions was unthinkable to most people just 20 years ago.

And I found a sale. I’m suddenly in need of a large number of network cards, as regular readers know. Just out of curiosity, I checked CompUSA’s pricing on Bay Netgear FA311 NICs, and–drum roll–they’re $14.99 with a $5 mail-in rebate. That’s a steal. It’s not quite as striking as the deal I found on D-Link cards at Circuit City back in January, but I like the Netgear–or at least its predecessor, the FA310TX–better anyway.

04/22/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

The times they are a-changin’. I made the pilgrimage to north St. Louis, to visit my church’s sister congregation, to see their new PCs. I spotted some Compaq Deskpro EXs at Insight for an insanely low price, and I wanted a respectable name brand, so that was what I had them order. I set one up and let it run, and was surprised to see it came up with a standard AMI BIOS. No more Compaq disk partition-based BIOS? Nope. Not even a Compaq logo. Just an AMI logo, like a clone. The case was a standard microATX case with a Compaq case badge on it. I popped open the case. I couldn’t tell for certain if it was an Intel-made board or not (the AMI BIOS suggests yes) but it’s a standard microATX board. No weird Compaq drive rails either. Seagate hard drive. The CD-ROM firmware says Compaq. But it’s a standard ATAPI CD-ROM. It looks like a Hitachi, but I could be mistaken.

This is good. While the quality may or may not be up to the standards of an oldschool Compaq, in the event of a failure after the warranty period, off-the-shelf parts will work to keep these things running. I can get microATX power supplies and motherboards.

Oh, how do they run? Well, after I cleaned up the root and Windows directories, put in my usual msdos.sys parameters, and replaced emm386.exe with umbpci.sys–they paid for that shadow RAM, so they might as well use it as RAM–the system boots in 20 seconds. That’ll slow down after adding the network card and installing more software, of course, but at least we’re starting out really strong.

I thought I read in the system specs that they’d have built-in Ethernet, but I may be mistaken. That’s fairly easy to remedy. I can pick up a 5-pack of Netgear FA-311s at Mwave for about $70. Two of those will put us in business. I’m disappointed that the FA-310TX, an old favorite of mine, seems to be discontinued; hopefully the 311 uses the same or a similar chipset. In a lab situation I’d prefer Intel or 3Com cards, but the Netgears sell for much less, and I have lots of experience with Netgears in Linux. I’ve occasionally had problems with Intels and 3Coms in Linux, and since there’ll be one or possibly two Linux servers in the lab, and I’d rather start out with standardized parts all around, I’ll give Netgear the nod.

Bloatbusters. I believe I mentioned this site before on my old site, but maybe not. These guys look at utilities, tell you what’s wrong with them, and sometimes provide a tightly-coded alternative. For instance, here’s a Windows CD player. It’s 3K in size. Personally, I prefer the play button on the front of my CD-ROM drives, but not every CD-ROM drive has one.

I can’t stand their site navigation and layout, but their essays are often entertaining to read.

Along the same lines, there’s Radsoft , who plays host to Bloatbusters. Radsoft’s product is Extreme Power Tools, a $47 collection of over 100 tightly written utilities, including a 25K file manager that claims to pack in more features than any of Microsoft’s file managers. Evidently they used to provide a demo download, but the only demo I can find now contains just their task management tools, which are interesting but certainly not the most generally useful.