David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I propose a new rule. I think it’s a very modest and very reasonable proposal. It has two parts.
1. No meeting can last longer than 6 hours (the length of the CISSP exam)
2. Material presented in said meetings may have no more than 250 items (the same number of questions in a CISSP exam)
It was 1997. I was working my first full-time job, and my phone rang with my first crisis.
“What happened to the K drive?” the caller asked.
I glanced over at my network drive cheat sheet, which listed all of our shares and what server they were on. In those days, most of our servers still had 300-400 megabyte drives and that meant every file server hosted, at most, a couple of shares. There was no K drive on our list. I was afraid this was about to get interesting. Read more
My wife found a dining room table she really liked on Craigslist. But the logistics of me picking it up just weren’t good because I’m going to be really busy the next few weeks. If I couldn’t get it done on Sunday the 29th, it wasn’t going to happen.
The deal ended up falling through because I couldn’t get enough cash on a Sunday, and they wouldn’t take $400 in cash and a check for the rest because everyone knows everyone on Craigslist is a scammer (I’m paraphrasing, but he pretty much told me that only scammers use checks). I won’t have time any other day this week, and next weekend I’m taking my boys to a train show (you gotta keep your priorities straight, you know). But as it turned out, it’s probably for the best anyway.
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Last week, John C Dvorak wrote about technical duds. And it’s unfortunate about what happened to Word macros, because at times they can be extremely useful, and not terribly difficult to use, either.
Here’s my favorite macro–a method to join single lines. You’ll wonder why it never became a standard feature in Word. You won’t use it often, but when you need it, you need it badly.
Christopher Mims argues that 3D printing is the next Virtual Reality. I think he misses the point. I see 3D printing as having a bright future, but not because I see it as necessarily the future of mass production. I see 3D printing taking over the fringes, because it makes small-scale manufacturing practical.
Five and a half hours ago, I turned in my test and departed the CISSP test site. It took me four hours to answer the nastiest 250 test questions I’ve ever seen in my life.
I felt better about it than the other guys milling around the lobby, but….
It was like ordering Chinese takeout.
I wrote yesterday about how I needed a motherboard to try to solve my ongoing webserver issue. I don’t live or work anywhere near Micro Center. The computer store near my house closed, and I don’t like the one near my workplace anymore since they jerked my friend around. Frequently I order computer equipment online, but Micro Center’s pricing is really good right now, so I asked my wife if she would mind trying a pickup order.
It worked. Splendidly.
I went to the web site, created an account, then added the items I wanted to my cart. I’ve known for a couple of days that I wanted an Asus P5G41T-M LX motherboard, a Pentium E5700 CPU (two cores of 3 GHz goodness for 65 watts and 50 bux0rZ), and 8 GB of Kingston DDR3. I also added a 32 GB SDHC memory card for my wife’s new camera, to make the trip worth her while. I added my wife as an authorized pickup person and created a PIN for her.
Seven minutes later, I received an e-mail message saying my order was ready.
She went to the store, walked right up to a sign at the front of the store that read Internet Pickup, handed them her driver’s license, told them her PIN, and they grabbed a pile of stuff with my name on it, put it in a bag, and handed it to her.
And I know now that you can place your order and pick it up any time within three calendar days.
I already have a 40 GB SSD and a Corsair power supply I’ve been saving for the project. Now I just need to find an ATX case to gut, put my pieces together, install Linux, and I’ll have a new web server.
So I bought an Intel Socket 775 board to support a crash webserver rebuild project. I present the story in hopes that it might be useful, or entertaining, or both. I don’t know the ultimate outcome of it yet, but all of the decisions made sense at the time.
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One of my coworkers asked me a good question this week. He said one of his neighbors just bought a new computer from a big-box consumer electronics store whose name doesn’t really matter all that much (but it’s one I pick on frequently) and didn’t really know a lot about computers.
He asked what someone in that situation can do to avoid being taken advantage of, and what they can do once they get the computer home, to learn how to actually use the thing. For now, they’re asking him, but long-term, that’s not the right answer. At least I don’t think it is.
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I got my new webserver motherboard. There’s a story there. I’m saving it for later in the week.
The board doesn’t work. I power it on, and it shuts itself off after 2-3 seconds. The power supply works with a different board. So for the first time in my life, I’m contacting Asus technical support, because I can’t figure out if it’s something I did, or just a DOA board. So there’s going to be a story with that, too. Let’s hope for a happy ending.