Getting serious about budgeting

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,

My wife and I are adopting an envelope system.

We did OK budgeting up until now–I’d say paying off a mortgage 5 /12 years after I moved into the house qualifies as OK–but it doesn’t work as well when there are multiple things you’re saving for.The problem is that we want several things like new windows and new kitchen cabinets, and my wife kept asking when we’d be able to afford to get them. I never had an answer.

This week I sat down with a spreadsheet and made up a budget. I entered everything we spend that I knew, then I asked my wife about the things she knew. When we didn’t have an exact figure, we estimated. An estimate is better than nothing. Then I added line items for the things we want to save for.

So then we got some envelopes, wrote the line items on them, and put the cash inside. When the money runs out, we’re done spending on that for the month.

But really what I’m hoping is that the envelope system will cause us to be more careful spenders on most things. We’ll adjust when there’s a shortfall (when we need diapers and formula, we need them, and if the quantities change, something else has to give) but I’m hoping that in a lot of instances, we’ll be able to find ways to cut back a little. And then, of course, we can get those windows and cabinets more quickly.

And beyond that? We still have lots of things to save for, so having a system to do it will help us get there. We may or may not get there faster, but it’ll be a lot easier to know where we are and to project endpoints.

Now, as far as plans. I’ve had plenty of conversations about whether John Cummuta’s plan, the one I used, is better or if someone else’s plan is better.

As long as the plan has you paying down debt and not making risky investments (that’s not to say all investments are risky–but many financial books are just get rich quick schemes), and most importantly, you’re able to stick with it, I don’t think there’s a huge amount of difference. What bothers me is when I see people fretting over the differences in the approaches, and then not following any of them. The person being interested in helping people moreso than yelling at them also helps.

Like I told my insurance agent earlier this week: If you pick the wrong plan and pay your debts in the wrong order, you’re in debt one more month. Whichever way you go, you save thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands.

The effect of registry optimizers on a run-of-the-mill PC

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

So I had a chance to try a registry optimizer out on a typical PC. It’s a 2.7 GHz Celeron, made by HP, restored with the factory restore discs. So it was as pristine as any consumer HP PC ships from the factory.

It helped. You’d think the opposite, of course.I used NTregopt. There’s no point in paying for a registry optimizer.

It ran for what seemed like a very long time, and it trimmed about 11% off the size of the registry. Not a lot, but this was a fresh PC (supposedly). More importantly, after running it, boot time decreased by a good 20 seconds, and once it booted, I had a wee bit more memory available.

I also ran JK-Defrag on it. What it found wasn’t horrible, and it only took about 15 minutes to clean it up.

So the stock HP computer runs more nicely now. And if one were to remove all the HP crapware that comes with it (remember, it’s only crapware if you won’t use it), that will help, but doing a registry optimization and a quality defrag will help even more. Not quite as much as a fresh Windows install slipstreamed with the current service pack and all patches, but for most people, close enough.

Utility programs are no substitute for adequate system memory and a respectable graphics subsystem. That’s probably why people who build new PCs twice a year don’t think much of them. But for the rest of us, utility programs in skilled hands can squeeze more life out of an aging PC. I’d be willing to submit the six-year-old Compaq I’m using to type this as Exhibit A.

Dead computer? Check the CPU fan.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

My wife came upstairs last night. “The mouse froze,” she said. I walked downstairs to the computer. Sure enough: Frozen mouse, no caps lock light, no vital signs to speak of. Ctrl-Alt-Del didn’t do anything either. I shut down, powered back up, and got the black screen of death.I pulled the power plug and waited a minute, then plugged back in. It powered on, but crashed while Windows tried to boot. So I repeated the sequence and went into the BIOS hoping to find some health status in there.

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How to pay off the national debt in less than 30 years

Dave Farquhar Society , , , ,

A couple of coworkers were talking about taxes, deficits and the national debt this week. One of them looked my direction and said, “I’ll bet Dave can figure out how to pay off the national debt.”

It’s actually not as hard as it sounds.

The biggest problem is that we’ve convinced ourselves that the national debt is impossible to pay. I believed this back in the mid-1990s, when it was around $4 trillion. Today, it’s right around $10 trillion. (Note: That was in 2008. In 2016 it’s about $19 trillion. So double any of the dollar figures you see from here on out.)

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DIY paper CD cases

Dave Farquhar General

I have no idea why I never found this sooner: papercdcase.com.

Type in an artist and album name (or publisher and software name) and a track list, and this thing generates a PDF that you can print and fold into a paper case/envelope, complete with spine.I printed a couple at work for discs I use frequently. I think it would take about 10 to really master the folding technique.

This is much cheaper than buying plastic jewel cases, the result is more useful, and you’d still have to print and cut out inserts to put in that jewel to make it useful anyway.

I’ve made these myself manually, but it’s much easier to just type the information into a web form and have a computer do the formatting for me.

On transitioning from high school to college

Dave Farquhar Personal

I took a phone call tonight from my old college fraternity. I’ve been trying to be nicer when they call asking for money. The organization and I see eye-to-eye on virtually nothing, but the poor pledges who have to make these phone calls every year have no control over any of that.

We actually ended up having a nice conversation about the transition from college to high school.I can’t say it’s something I’ve ever talked about, but the transition was a bit rough for me in some ways. I wasn’t valedictorian, but I generally took harder classes than many of the people who outpaced me in GPA. In some of my classes I was more like a teacher’s assistant than a student, because I knew the subject matter better than the teachers did, and they would readily admit it.

Frequently I was the smartest guy in the room, and I liked it that way.

In college, I was never the best at anything. I told him one of my classmates is now the beat writer covering the Cardinals for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That’s the caliber of person I found myself competing against.

It was hard to settle for being good, or very good, when I’d spent the previous 12 years being elite.

Yet, it wasn’t until I got over my ego that I actually managed to even be good. Considering my course load, my first-semester 2.8 GPA wasn’t all that bad, but it was a lot closer to average than I’d ever been. I never dropped below 3.0 the rest of the way, but I never approached my high school numbers.

I guess it was good preparation for adult life. There’ve been times when I was the smartest guy in the room again. But it doesn’t happen very often at work. But at work, the guys who are smarter than me who also have bigger egos than me also aren’t all that happy.

Give me a choice between being content and being the star, and I’ll take contentment every time.

I only talked to the 18-year-old pledge for about five minutes, so I didn’t go into this kind of depth. I don’t think he wanted to hear that kind of a lecture from a stranger 15 years older than him.

There are lots of other questions I would have liked to ask him, but I know the answers to all of those are the same as they were in 1993, and I can’t change any of that for him. I don’t know if that brief conversation that resulted from me asking how his studies were going helped him. But maybe it did. Or at least I didn’t make him feel any worse.

That’s David L. Farquhar, Security+ now

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

I got a few letters behind my name this afternoon. I passed the CompTIA Security+ exam with flying colors. And that means two things: I get to keep my job, and I was qualified to have the job in the first place, but now I have a certificate that says a third party agrees.My personal opinion on the test: You have to approach it like any other test. Another coworker took the test at the same time I did. He was joking around with other people and talking up a storm beforehand. Meanwhile, I was pacing, counting on my fingers and not talking to anyone. I had five things I needed to remember until the clock on the test started and I could scribble them down, so I was focused solely on those five things.

My coworker said he was worried about me because I appeared to be nervous. But that’s just how I am before tests. I review a few things up until the time I’m supposed to walk in, and I take any aid the system provides. If I can carry in an index card, I do that. In the case of CompTIA tests, you can ask for a pencil and piece of paper and scribble down whatever you want on it after the test starts. So I did.

I probably would have passed without that, but I didn’t want to score a 765 on the test (passing is either 764 or 765 out of a possible 900). I wanted an 899. For what it’s worth, my score was a lot closer to 899 than 765.

My coworker and I also both believe the test is designed to frustrate you. The first 30 or so questions were pretty easy. Then my coworker missed 18 questions in a row. He knew he missed them, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. I was pretty confident about my test, but most of my questionable questions came in bunches too. The real key is to not get bogged down in those rough stretches. It gets better.

Of the 100 questions on the test, only 85 count. The contents of the other 15 are anyone’s guess. Some are questions they’re considering to add to the test’s question pool, and based on how people answer them, they’ll decide if they’re fair or unfair. Some are just plain garbage. I had two questions, I think, that had no right answer out of the four options. I think those are control questions to thwart the companies who pay people to take the test and remember a few questions verbatim so they can build up a bank of test questions to sell. If, for example, you pay for some questions and see one asking where the password hashes are stored on a Linux system, and all four responses start with C:\, you’re going to lose confidence in that provider.

As for classes and books… CompTIA’s official class and book cover a lot of material, but there’s an awful lot of middle-management bull in the book and class that isn’t on the test. We had a manager take the test, and he knew the book forward and backward and paid attention in class, but he didn’t pass.

By the same token, every sysadmin who attended the same class and took the test has passed so far. Having lots of recent experience to draw on helps. I can harden Windows systems in my sleep because that’s been my job description for the last couple of years, and no week-long class can cover that kind of depth.

But the interesting thing is, I got very few questions about system hardening. I got a lot more questions about encryption and firewalls, where my knowledge is weaker. I don’t know if the test determines all of your questions at the start or if it uses the first few questions to figure out your weaker areas and then tries to concentrate on those, but I suspect it might be the latter.

But with Security+ out of the way, I’m thinking about other certifications. Network+ is supposed to be easy when Security+ is fresh in your mind. Given my hardware and operating systems background, A+ should be easy.

Cheap upgrades

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

Yesterday, during my weekly garage sale adventures, I bought some computer equipment. Among the haul: a Biostar Socket A motherboard with an AMD Sempron 2200+ CPU and 512MB of RAM. It’s not state of the art, but can hold its own against some of the stuff still on the market, and it’s a big upgrade over the 450 MHz Pentium II that’s been powering this web site since July 2002.I swapped the board into my 266 MHz Pentium II. That first-generation P2 was a useful machine for me for a while, but mostly it’s just been taking up space. I had to do some slight modifications to get the newer board to bolt in, but it fit without too much trouble and now some of the 11-year-old hardware is useful again. It reminded me a lot of my college days, when I used to drop 486 and Pentium boards into IBM PC/ATs.

Debian installed on the upgraded system with no complaints, but I quickly found my Linux command line skills are rusty. And there have been enough changes in the last six years that I can’t just copy over /var/www and /var/lib/mysql and expect it to run like it used to.

So I’ll apply my 15 minutes per day principle. My chances of finding a block of 2-3 hours to get it all done are near zero, but I should be able to find a few minutes each day. So one day I can move the databases, then I can move the HTML and PHP another day, convert to WordPress still another day, and maybe, just maybe, have a vastly improved site in about a week if it all goes well.

Adventures in flooring

Dave Farquhar Personal

My wife and I went shopping for a new kitchen floor tonight.

I think we may have found perfection.Everyone I’ve talked to who has linoleum floors loves them. They’re durable, water resistant, and easy to clean. I’ve read about linoleum floors in 100-year-old houses holding up just fine. I think 100 years sounds good to me–that’s more years than I have left. And it’s made from materials that grow in friendly countries, which is something we would do well to consider more often.

There’s even a company named Forbo making a product called Marmoleum Click, which is a linoleum floor that clicks together like laminate. So potentially I could rip out the old floor on a Saturday and spend Sunday afternoon and early evening putting down the new floor, and have it ready to go immediately. Or with some luck, I could finish the project in a day.

The problem is that Marmoleum (and linoleum in general) isn’t something you can run down to the local big-box store and buy. Forbo has exactly one dealer in St. Louis, but fortunately it’s a charming store not far from where my wife lived when we met. And supporting a small locally owned business appeals to me.

At $4.99 per square foot, the price is comparable to any other kind of floor worth having, if not lower. Plus I’ll save a bundle by being able to put it down myself, and it has a 25-year warranty, not to mention the track record of lasting 100 years or more. Stingy Scottish misers like me really like that aspect.

Buffer overflows explained

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , , , , ,

Buffer overflows are a common topic on a Security+ exam. The textbook explanation of them is confusing, perhaps even wrong. I’ve never seen buffer overflows explained well.

So I’m going to give a simplified example and explanation of a buffer overflow, similar to the one I gave to the instructor, and then to the class.

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