My buddy Halon-2402

Dave Farquhar security ,
My buddy Halon-2402

Halon-2402 and I have met. Some years ago, I saw an old sign in a computer room. The sign had to be old, because smoking in offices has been banned since the 1980s, and the sign appeared to be hand-lettered in colored permanent marker. It read something like this:

No smoking is allowed. Smoke in this room will cause the release of an expensive gas (Halon) and require its replacement. Absolutely no smoking is allowed!

The sign omitted one relatively significant detail. Not only is (was) Halon-2402 expensive, it will also kill you!

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Is overclocking over?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Extreme Tech (via Slashdot) asks if overclocking is over. It’s an interesting question. It has a long and colorful history. But maybe it is history.

I have a 4-core machine whose cores can all run at a top speed of over 3 GHz. And it’s a midrange PC at best, these days. The only time I ever push its CPU usage is when I’m encoding video. Web pages that bring a P4-class machine to its knees momentarily bring this PC’s CPU usage to 10%.

Not being a gamer, I haven’t had any reason to overclock in years. In fact, even back in 2000 I was recommending against it. Bad things can happen when you overclock.
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Advice for upgrading from a CRT to an LCD

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , ,

Like a lot of people are doing these days, my brother- and sister-in-law replaced a CRT TV with an LCD. I helped my brother-in-law hook it up last weekend, and we got it working, but probably could have done things a little bit differently.

A lot of inexpensive LCDs have a limited number of inputs in order to meet a price point, and that’s what we ran into. The LCD had just as many inputs as the TV it replaced, but with some cable shuffling, we would have been able to make the new TV easier to use.
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Message says Firefox is already running when it isn’t

Dave Farquhar Software , ,

Earlier this week, when doing an emergency computer upgrade, Firefox gave me a weird problem. I installed Firefox, then when I tried to launch it, I got the popup dialog box stating that Firefox is already running. When, of course, it wasn’t–I’d just installed it.

There are a couple of helpful articles on Mozilla’s knowledge base.  It didn’t quite solve my problem, but it pointed me in the right direction.
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And now I think it’s time for a new doctor

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

I’m sick. I’ve been sick for about three weeks. Not major major–I’ve only missed a day of work–but it’s irritating. And it’s been three weeks. A cold lasts about 10 days.

So I asked my wife to see if I could get in with her doctor. I don’t like my doctor very much. But my wife’s doctor isn’t accepting new patients until February. No political comments, please–I couldn’t find another doctor accepting patients in a reasonable time when Clinton or Bush were president either.

Last night, my throat started bothering me worse. My wife pulled off a miracle and got me an appointment with my doctor the same day, at 4:15.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before. New Firefox.

Dave Farquhar Software ,

Firefox 9 is out. I’m running it, but due to an emergency involving a power supply deciding to cook itself, I’m running it on a different system than the one I ran Firefox 8 on. Everything’s faster on this machine–partly because I’m doing some experiments that make it stupid fast anyway–so it’s not fair to call Firefox 9 faster. Netscape 4.0 would be fast on this machine.

Once I’m comfortable that what I’m doing is safe, I’ll share.

But Firefox 9 features a new Javascript engine that’s supposed to be a lot faster, for what it’s worth. You can go get it the usual ways if you want. And if you’re conservative, given a little time you’ll be running it whether you know it or want it anyway.

And in somewhat surprising news, Mozilla and Google renewed their search agreement. Mozilla makes Google the default search engine in Firefox, and Google pays them a lot of money. So much money that Google is essentially funding the operation. Mozilla has a strange relationship with its competitors.

There goes the neighborhood

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

“Dave, you need to look at this.”

Those aren’t my favorite words to hear first thing Monday morning. I went outside to see, and there, I found a lot of debris scattered on the ground. At first, it looked like some animal had torn open a garbage bag. But then I got closer and saw it wasn’t garbage and trash. I saw coupons, credit cards, some change, and other personal effects.

Around that time, one of our next-door neighbors came out to let her dogs do their morning ritual. She and my wife waited while I went inside to call the police.
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