Why I still like Debian

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

Say what you will about Debian–the development process is slow and plodding, the distribution is always trailing-edge and Debian is always the last to get everything–but installing it today reminded me why I still like it.I need a temporary holding place where I can experiment. I want to move my genealogy page to a new piece of software, and I want to migrate this blog to WordPress.

The only spare computer I have right now that works reliably is an ancient P2-266. I don’t know how that ended up being, but I’ll work with it..

The system has 192 MB of RAM. I have a pile of DIMMs, but it doesn’t like most of them. So 192 it is.

Ubuntu’s installer won’t load on this system. It tries and tries, but after several hours, the only result is a graphical screen with a heron on it and a mouse pointer.

Debian just loads in text mode and doesn’t complain. It asks a few questions along the way, and it’s slower than the last few installs I’ve done, but it’s steady.

I’m confident I could get it to work on my 486 too, if I had the need or inclination (I don’t). I’ll save the 486 for the day I want to set up a DOS box for some old-school gaming. Probably in another 10 years.

An old formula for making money

Dave Farquhar Landlording, Saving money ,

I picked up a copy of a financial classic today: How to Make a Fortune Today, Starting From Scratch by William Nickerson. In it, he presents a proven, old formula for making money.

While I don’t necessarily agree with everything Nickerson says, I’m not a millionaire and Nickerson was by the time he was my age (or well on his way at least). And his tactics are far, far safer than anyone writing about money today.

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So, should I buy a different car?

Dave Farquhar Saving money

Charlie posted a link to some controversial advice that it’s better to keep your car rather than get something more fuel efficient.

The advice makes a lot of sense when you do the math.I bought a fuel-efficient car in 2003. I had no choice; I had to buy something. My lease was up and I wasn’t going to buy that car. So I figured I should buy something really fuel efficient and reliable, so I bought a year-old Honda Civic. I’m still driving it today and it’s been a great car.

Now let’s say I’d bought something less fuel efficient, like a Hummer H2, that gets 14 MPG. If I drove that to work every day, I’d burn 29 gallons of fuel per week, and I’d be hurting. With gas at $3.53 a gallon right now, that would be $102.37 per week, which is ridiculous.

So let’s say I had my eye on a 2005 Hybrid Honda Civic priced at $17,000. It gets about 45 MPG. So it would burn a reasonable 9 gallons per week, at a cost of $31.77. The car would save me a cool 70 bucks a week.

It would only take 243 weeks for that car to pay for itself. In other words, not quite five years.

Of course if I traded in the Hummer, I wouldn’t have to pay the full $17,000. If I could manage to sell that H2 for the $18,000 a used Hummer H2 is supposedly worth, then it would make sense to do it. If I could get $10,000 in trade for it, it would take two years for the hybrid to pay for itself. That’s still worth doing, but it’s probably longer than you would expect.

This is proof that buying a car is often an emotional decision.

To make it a logical decision, you need to figure out what you’re spending in gas per week, then figure out what you’d spend driving something else. Subtract the difference, then divide the cost of the car by that savings.

This was a big reason why I bought a conventional Civic rather than some kind of hybrid back in 2003. I would have paid about a $7,000 premium for the hybrid. It probably would have paid for itself, barely, by now. But at the time I made the decision, gas cost less than half what it costs now.

In some cases, it would make sense to switch. But you have to be near the extremes (such as from Hummer to hybrid) to do it. The further you get from that kind of extreme, the less sense it starts to make.

Don’t let a salesman or what the neighbors say sway your decision. Do the math.

The international man of mystery

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

I’ve been following the Clark Rockefeller story with a lot of interest, perhaps because I’m a parent now, and perhaps because the early news stories kind of made it sound like I should know who he was, although I’d never heard of him before.

Now that the new details are out there, I don’t feel nearly so bad now. Even the people who knew him well didn’t know the half of it.The Telegraph has a good rundown on the current theory about the man. Personally, I think it’ll make a great book and perhaps a movie someday.

The story basically goes like this. Last week, an eccentric and mysterious Boston millionaire disappeared with his daughter during a custody visit. Rumors about their whereabouts spread quickly, including the Caribbean, but the two were eventually found in Baltimore, in an apartment he had recently purchased.

There was no trace of the man prior to 1991. The famous Nelson Rockefeller had a son named Michael Clark Rockefeller, and this Clark Rockefeller seemed to want people to think he either was that person or somehow related to him, but Michael Clark Rockefeller died in 1961 at the age of 23.

As people around the country followed the story, they started noticing this man looked familiar, but they didn’t know him as Clark Rockefeller. But they knew various other people who certainly looked and acted a lot like this Clark Rockefeller, and like him, they would just appear and vanish mysteriously.

Rockefeller appeared in New York in 1991. He never said much about his background, but was well spoken, appeared to be highly intelligent and educated, and could converse with authority on various subject matters. He soon talked his way into high society circles, participated in community groups, and gained influence, particularly in New England, where he settled with his wife, Sandra Boss, an ivy league graduate and wealthy executive. They had a daughter, and he played stay-at-home dad while she earned $1.4 million a year. They divorced in 2007, partly because she believed he might not be what he said he was. Unable to produce any kind of government-issued identification, he didn’t put up much of a fight in the divorce proceedings.

No marriage certificate was ever filed. I wonder if this could cause legal problems for Rockefeller now. After all, if the marriage was never legal, why is there need for a divorce and a settlement? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story seems to begin around 1979 or 1980. A German teenager named Christian Gerhartsreiter or Christian Gerhart Streiter met an American and exchanged addresses. The American said to look him up if he was ever on this side of the Atlantic. Surprisingly, he showed up on their doorstep in Connecticut not long afterward. Unable to accommodate him, they put an ad in the paper. A nearby family who had sponsored a number of exchange students answered.

The young German attended school but seemed put off by a middle class lifestyle. The people who knew Streiter remember him as condescending and arrogant, yet charming. He claimed an elite background, yet there is some indication that his father actually painted houses for a living.

He also could creep people out, so he lived with several different people during the school year, although he remained in touch occasionally with his first host family. After a year of school in the United States, he headed west, first to Minnesota, then to California, where he said he was using the name Christopher Crowe.

In the early 1980s, a man named Christopher Chichester appeared in high society circles in California. Claiming to be British, he charmed his way into belonging. During this time, it appears Chichester applied for a stockbroker’s license and perhaps a driver’s license as well. The fingerprints he provided would prove interesting a few years later.

In February 1985, Chichester’s landlords disappeared. A couple of months later, he disappeared as well. Although Chichester wasn’t a suspect, the authorities wanted to speak with him.

In 1988, a man identifying himself as Christopher Crowe surfaced in Connecticut, where he attempted to sell a truck belonging to John Sohus, the landlord who had vanished back in California. Crowe couldn’t produce the paperwork for the truck, so the potential buyer alerted police. But Crowe disappeared again.

In 1994, human remains turned up on the former Sohus property. Authorities believed they had found John Sohus, although his wife has never been found. Authorities still wanted to question Chichester, who they described as a con man who would mingle in social circles and make friends with wealthy, influential people.

But it was 13 years before any trace of Chichester appeared again.

In August 2007, after Baltimore police arrested Clark Rockefeller, people in California noticed that Rockefeller bore a striking resemblance to Christopher Chichester and started calling police. After Rockefeller was fingerprinted, California authorities checked the prints against the prints provided by Chichester more than two decades earlier. They seemed to match.

Rockefeller has said little. Through his attorney, he says that he has little or no memory prior to his marriage in 1995, that as far as he knows his name is Rockefeller, and he most definitely isn’t Christopher Chichester. Other than that, he refuses to stay anything. He sits in a cell, held without bail, because prosecutors don’t believe any amount of money will guarantee he will show up for trial.

And investigators don’t buy the memory story. While they’re giving limited information to the press, new details about Clark Rockefeller’s possible past appear every few hours.

Some questions certainly remain. Early on, some people observed Clark Rockefeller had the distinctive Rockefeller nose, saying it was either genuine or a very good copy. Is the resemblance coincidental? Did someone note once that he looked like a Rockefeller, planting the idea of a new identity in this man’s mind? Or did the former Christopher Chichester decide to take on the Rockefeller identity and have plastic surgery in the late 1980s or early 1990s to make the claim look more believable?

And while it’s possible to track the movements of the various aliases from New England to California and back from 1981 to 1985 to 1988 to 1991, what happened in those gaps?

And perhaps most chillingly, if he wasn’t a suspect in 1985, why did Christopher Chichester flee? If he had nothing to hide, why wouldn’t he answer investigators’ questions?

Some may wonder how a mediocre student could display such knowledge of travel and physics, among other subjects, but it looks like this guy has a fondness for libraries and hasn’t had a job in 28 years. I’m guessing if he spent a significant part of the day in libraries with his nose in books while everyone else is at work, he could become conversant in pretty much anything.

Of course I also wonder how he managed to travel the country and keep up appearances for nearly a decade and a half without a job. Travel and housing cost money, and how did he finance his expensive taste in clothes? Marrying a millionaire certainly helped during the last 12 years, but where did he find the money to woo her?

This story is only going to get better. But I do hope there are no more literal skeletons involved.

Shut up, McCain. Obama is right this time.

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

McCain’s camp is mocking Barack Obama’s suggestion that people need to inflate their tires to save fuel.

It’s not like the senator from Illinois said let them eat cake. It’s actually good advice.The biggest problem with Washington is its disconnect with reality, such as the time Bush I went grocery shopping as a publicity stunt and marveled at the scanners at the checkout as if they were something new. Well, newer than unleaded gasoline, perhaps.

Perhaps my biggest frustration with McCain is his lack of understanding at chipping away at a problem. I have news for him. Chipping away can be very effective. I nickel-and-dimed my way to paying off a mortgage in 6 years, partly by doing things like inflating my tires and changing my air filter and using synthetic oil. Besides that, I bought a programmable thermostat, bought compact fluorescent light bulbs, and brought my own coffee to work.

Take small amounts of savings here and there and make them work for you, and you can accomplish something a lot bigger than you might think.

Too bad it’s been seven years since Washington tried to chip away at its deficit. But that’s another issue.

If every U.S. citizen did the routine maintenance that helps improve gas mileage, it would have the dual effect of reducing demand (and therefore prices) slightly, and putting a little more money in consumers’ pockets, so they could better afford the market price.

McCain would rather encourage voters to wait for Washington to fix the problem.

Tell me, which one of these guys is the Republican and which one’s the Democrat? I’m having difficulty telling them apart.

So if a McCain supporter offers you a tire gauge, take it. And by all means use it.

On this issue, Obama is right. As in correct. And conservative, apparently.

Secret Service BBS raids from the other perspective

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve written in the past about the Feds busting people using BBSs for nefarious purposes in the early 1990s. But the only stories I’ve ever heard were from the perspective of the people who got busted, often second or third hand.

Here’s a story from the side of someone who helped the Secret Service for three days in the 1980s.

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Joel Osteen considered

Dave Farquhar Christianity

Every once in a while somebody asks me about Joel Osteen. Osteen is the pastor of the largest of the megachurches, and the author of a runaway bestselling self-help book.

I’m not a student of Osteen. I haven’t read much of his book, nor have I seen him much on TV. I may have an incomplete view of what he teaches, but I have a problem with the things he does teach.The biggest problem is that Osteen teaches that if you’re a Christian, God rewards you materially. Even with the little things. Osteen says that it’s not just OK to want the best spot in a parking lot, or to be seated quickly at a busy restaurant, but to expect it.

Here’s the problem with that. What if somebody else genuinely needs that spot or that table more than I do? I don’t know what’s going on in everybody else’s day, but God does.

The Bible tells me to deny myself, pick up my cross and follow Jesus. It also tells me to love my neighbor as myself.

Sure, I’d like to have the best available parking spot. But if one of my coworkers has a blister on his foot or a sore knee and it hurts him to walk, and if God intervenes so that coworker arrives exactly 30 seconds before me and he gets the prime spot, I should be OK with that. Sometimes the next-closest spot really is half a mile away (the parking at my workplace is extremely messed up), but if me walking half a mile saves someone else some pain, I’m supposed to be OK with that.

And I’m not in a position to judge all of that. God is.

For that matter, maybe God making me walk that half mile and back is the bigger blessing. Maybe I need the exercise. God knows more about what I need than I do.

Sometimes we don’t recognize God’s blessing until much later, and Osteen’s teaching doesn’t leave a lot of room for that. I got married in 2005. It was a tough year. The marriage wasn’t the problem. The problem was that for the first time in my life, I couldn’t hold down a job. I worked for three different employers that year. (In my defense, I’m still working for that third employer.) I didn’t recognize it then, but that was a big blessing. The first job I lost that year was literally taking years off my life. The second job had much better pay and much better hours, but it was repetitive and boring. The third job never was my dream job by any stretch, but they pay me what the salary engines say I should make, and I’ve been able to solve some real problems and make myself and my coworkers more productive. We’ve had our differences in the past and we’ll have them again, but my boss is willing to tell the higher ups that it’s a better place for me being there.

But besides all that, I learned a lot in those weeks in between jobs, things that I will use for the rest of my life, and things that I probably wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Painful? Definitely. Blessing? Most definitely.

The danger is that if I’d been attending a church like Joel Osteen’s in 2005, it would have been very easy to come to the conclusion that God wasn’t blessing me, and something was wrong, even though I was doing all the things I was supposed to do. The danger there is walking away.

Indeed, it was when I was going through another one of life’s valleys, a little more than 10 years ago now, that I realized I needed to walk away from the church I was attending because they were saying a lot of these kinds of things. And there’s nothing wrong with that–but it’s really best that you go find someplace else that tells the truth. Otherwise there’s a great danger of walking away from God entirely.

There’s an acoustic duo called Lost and Found. They’ve been traveling the country for the last couple of decades, at least, singing mostly original Christian songs targeted at teenagers. There’s a lot to say for them, but the biggest compliment I can give them is that I’ve seen them reach people in ways nobody ever did before, and possibly nobody has done since.

In 1999, I went and saw them play at my old high school. I was one of the oldest people there but I didn’t care. About halfway through, they warned us that they were going to sing a couple of songs that were controversial. One was a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Used to Be,” complete with the line, “in a world where people gave a damn.” The other was a song one of them had written years earlier, after a breakup with a girlfriend.

After the concert, I talked to them about those two songs. They were used to that. But I thanked them for playing those songs, because they’re a reminder that being a Christian doesn’t mean everything’s going to go your way every time. That wasn’t the reaction they were used to getting–they were more used to saying what I said, not hearing someone else say it.

They stopped singing “Used to Be” soon afterward, because of the d-bomb. I wish they hadn’t. They could always sing “in a world where people gave a care” instead, and still get the point across. And if anything, the older that song gets, the more relevant it becomes.

The point that Lost and Found make, and that people like Joel Osteen would like to ignore, is that Christians can’t just have mountaintop experiences all the time. We spend time in the valleys too, because we’re flawed people living in a flawed world.

But God is great enough that He can turn even those times in the valley into blessings too, even though sometimes it takes us years to recognize it, and even then we may be reluctant to admit it (or maybe that’s just me). At best, ignoring it loses out on those blessings. At worst, it diminishes God and who He is. I don’t really want to do either of those two things.

Intel\’s Atom mini-ITX board has some interesting possibilities

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

A story on The Register tipped me off to a small motherboard using Intel’s new Atom CPU. A UK data center is using the chip to power servers, and The Reg asks if it’s madness or genius.

More on that in a minute.It’s an interesting minimalist board. It has a single PCI slot, one DIMM slot, PATA and 2 SATA connectors for storage, and the usual complement of I/O slots. The CPU runs at 1.6 GHz. Newegg sells it for about 75 bucks.

One could use this board to build a minimalist PC, but it would also work well as a cheap upgrade for an old PC. It can bolt into a case designed for an ATX or micro-ATX board. It’s made by Intel, so its quality is likely to be comparable to any board it replaces. And the board consumes about 25 watts of power.

Paired up with some sort of solid-state storage, be it a compact flash card in an adapter or a proper SATA SSD like the OCZ Core, it would be a very quiet, low-power system. Performance-wise, it wouldn’t be a barn burner, but it has more than enough horsepower for word processing, e-mail, web browsing, and other productivity apps. At 1.6 GHz, the Atom doesn’t outrun a Pentium M or even a modern Celeron at comparable clock speed, but it should outrun a sub-2 GHz P4.

I think this thing would be awesome in many business environments. Tasks that would bog it down are the kinds of things you don’t want going on in the office anyway–stuff like 3D gaming, ripping and re-encoding DVDs, stuff like that. The power it would save would be tremendous, especially when paired with an LCD monitor and an SSD.

But I even think it has a place in the server room. For example, my first employer used desktop PCs for domain controllers. The logic was simple: DCs don’t work all that hard most of the day, and by their very nature they are redundant, so if a DC were to fail, it’s not in the same league as your mail server failing. You can grab another desktop PC, stand it up as a domain controller, then start asking questions.

In 1997, when a server cost $4,000 and a desktop PC cost $1,000, this was an obvious place for a college with budget problems to save some money.

I think Intel Atoms would make great domain controllers. They have enough CPU power to do the job, but they sip power, which is increasingly important in datacenters. The PCI slot would limit the type of gigabit NIC you could install, but it should still be OK.

They’d make fine web servers too. They might get bogged down on high traffic sites, but they would have little trouble serving up most corporate intranets, and let’s face it, most people’s web sites aren’t nearly as busy as they would like to think they are. You could always use more than one and load balance them. Besides, it’s typically the database servers behind the web servers that do the heavy lifting. Serving up static web pages isn’t all that difficult of a task, and a 1.6 GHz CPU ought to be up to it.

None of these uses are what Intel had in mind when they designed the Atom–I really think their ultimate goal is to end up in cell phones and PDAs, which was why they sold off their ARM-based Xscale CPU.

But if some enterprising company (or struggling behemoth *cough* Dell *cough*) wanted to build business PCs around these, it would be an easy sell. For that matter, they could stuff two of these boards into a 1U rackmount chassis and sell it as an inexpensive, power-saving alternative to blade servers.

Call me crazy, but having actually administered blade servers, I’d much rather have a bunch of 1U systems with two computers inside the case. Besides costing a lot less money up front, they would be more reliable and consume less power while actually saving space–an HP blade enclosure gives you 16 servers in 10 Us, while my crazy scheme would give you 20 servers in the same space.

Maybe instead of posting this idea where anyone can see it and run with it, I ought to buy a couple of motherboards, take them into my basement and start bending some metal myself. Hmm…