David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
I spent the afternoon putting plastic window insulation film on my windows. It was supposed to be a short project, and I do get better at it every year, but it still ended up taking about an hour per window. Was it worth it? Does window insulation film work?
Window insulation film is a cheap, effective way to save money and make your house more comfortable in the winter. It can cut your heating bills by 30 percent.
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend lately on the Classic Toy Trains forums. It seems like every time a new issue hits the street, someone has to find an article that has something wrong with it and point it out.It started a few months ago when my friend and mentor Joe Rampolla published an article about adding a capacitor to a toy train to make it stall less often and run more smoothly. The claims, as far as I can tell, were false (I had my longtime friend Steve DeLassus, who has a degree in electrical engineering from Washington University, check them out).
But practically every month since then, someone’s publicly taken issue with something in the magazine.
It’s not about a vendetta against a single author. One issue it was Joe. But last issue it was repair expert Ray Plummer’s advice on repairing a Lionel 2037. This issue it’s the legendary Peter Riddle’s article about getting Lionel’s TMCC and MTH’s DCS (two rival control systems) working together on the same layout.
In the case of each of these articles, the things the author said to do work. There might be an alternative way to do them. But that’s the nature of the hobby. Doesn’t it seem like Model Railroader publishes an article at least once a year about making trees, and not one of those articles has been a repeat since at least 1972 (and possibly 1942)? And if you were to read a complete run of Railroad Model Craftsman, you could probably find another 50 different ways to make trees.
Fifty or a hundred people having different ways to do it doesn’t make the guy who wrote the first article about making trees wrong.
In the case of Ray Plummer, what Plummer said matches what my local repair guy said and did when my Lionel 2037 had problems. When the pilot truck is adjusted within specifications, the 2037 and its many cousins run just fine. Plummer’s critic said the pilot truck is a poor design, and when you lengthen the truck to change its pivot point, it works more reliably.
That’s possible. I don’t know the theory behind pivot points. One of my best friends happens to be a mechanical engineer and maybe he could confirm that for me.
What I can say is that Plummer’s advice preserves the historical integrity and collector value of the locomotive. While modifying the pivot point probably wouldn’t make the locomotive worth any less to someone who just wants to run it, it would make it worth less to a collector.
I can also confirm that Plummer’s advice worked just fine on the locomotive that once belonged to my Dad. It’s almost as dependable as my Honda now.
As far as this month’s article to hit the avalanche of criticism, I don’t use any command control system on my layout and I have no interest in doing so. So I don’t have any experience that would back him up, and neither do either of my engineer buddies.
But I trust Peter Riddle. Riddle has written more than a dozen excellent books about trains. Wiring is a subject that confuses almost everyone, but I’m confident that a fifth grader could read one of Riddle’s books on wiring and understand it, then proceed to wire a Lionel layout effectively. Seriously.
I’ve heard the argument presented in these arguments that if an author is wrong about one thing, the reader loses confidence in everything he says. I don’t buy that argument. Riddle’s advice that the Lionel 1121 switch is a good match for early Marx locomotives isn’t entirely correct. From my own experience I know a Marx locomotive will bounce if it enters the switch from a particular direction.
So do I doubt what Riddle says on the other 95 pages of the same book? No. I also know from experience that the things he says on the other 95 pages work. And I know that even though that Marx locomotive bounces through the switch 33% of the time, it doesn’t derail every time it bounces. So maybe he’s never seen the problem I observed.
I’ll daresay there’s at least one mistake in every computer book I’ve ever read. It doesn’t mean I stop reading computer books. I’ve been wrong once or twice before too. Just ask my boss.
Actually, come to think of it I’d really rather you just took my word on that one.
This criticism bothers me on another level too. Writing an article and getting it published isn’t an easy task. For most people it probably takes about 40 hours’ worth of work. CTT pays $70 per page, and a typical article is 3-4 pages long, so you do the math.
How many people want to spend a week of their lives writing an article only to have some self-styled expert rip it apart in five minutes? Is it worth putting your neck on the line for $300?
Most reasonable people would say no.
I’m sure this is largely an ego thing. Most people regard published authors as special people. So when someone knows something that a published author doesn’t, it must make for some kind of a high.
But the price is also high. How many great ideas languish in the mind of a would-be author, never to see the light of day, because the benefits just don’t outweigh that onslaught of criticism if it happens?
So the next time you catch a mistake in print, that’s great. It means you know enough to be an author. So think of something you know better than anyone else and go write an article and advance the hobby.
Of course, criticism is easier than craftsmanship. Zeuxis made that observation 2400 years ago, and it’s just as true today as it was then. Unfortunately.
So 105.7 morning DJ Donnie Fandango was distressed this morning over finding a gray hair. At 31, he’s convinced (so he says) this means he’s dying.
I say get used to it. I’m 32. I started going gray in the sixth grade. Since I have gray hairs that are old enough to vote, I have a hard time feeling sorry for him.
I have other worries. Like whether those gray hairs vote for Ron Paul or not.
I was talking to a new coworker today and of course the topic of our first PCs came up. It was Cyrix-based. I didn’t mention my first PC (it seems I’m about four years older–it was an Am486SX2/66).
With only a couple of exceptions, I’ve always bought non-Intel PCs. Most of the Intel PCs I have bought have been used. One boss once went so far as to call me anti-corporate.
I’m not so much anti-corporate as I am pro-competition.
I’ve been writing a lot about personal finance lately. I make no apologies for that; it’s what’s on my mind. Something that happened this weekend reminded me of why it’s hard to get on the personal finance treadmill to begin with.
The numbers are big. They’re intimidating. You can’t possibly fix it all right now.
So don’t try to fix it all right now.I had an unplanned incident this weekend. It was unplanned, avoidable, and expensive. Some people will spend $400 at the drop of a hat without flinching, but my wife and I aren’t among them. I wouldn’t let myself get upset over it, but truth be told, I thought about it a lot over the weekend.
Mainly I tried to formulate a plan to make the money back quickly. And making $400 is certainly doable, but most people don’t come up with a way to make an extra $400 in just a day.
And that’s when it hit me. Don’t try to do it all in a day.
It’s like in baseball, when a team is losing by 8 runs the way the Indians were against the Red Sox for most of last night. Usually when a team is down by 8 runs, they’re going to lose because everyone’s going to go up there and try to hit an 8-run home run. But it’s physically impossible to hit an 8-run home run.
The way you win a game when you’re losing by 8 is by getting on base any way you can, and then getting around and scoring any way you can. If enough people manage to do that, they can chip away at the lead and soon it’s a close game again.
And that’s the way I have to approach this unexpected expense. Look for the opportunity I normally wouldn’t bother with. Take snacks to work so I stay away from the vending machine for a while. Chip away at it, whether it’s a dollar at a time or ten.
That trick works with big debts too. I once used a mortgage calculator to figure out the smallest amount of extra money you could put toward your mortgage and still see a benefit. On my mortgage, the amount turned out to be $10. Just paying $10 extra per month every month would pay the house off a full month early. Ten lousy bucks. Up that to a hundred and you can start talking about years.
So that’s the key. Nickel and dime your way out of debt, and then you can be on your way to nickel and diming yourself into prosperity.
So I got this Xbox really cheap. When I got it home, I found out why–the DVD drive wouldn’t open. Here’s what to do when an Xbox DVD drive sticks.
It’s a good thing I didn’t pay much for it.As it turns out, there’s an emergency eject hole below the drive, about an inch and a half to the left of the console’s eject button. Turn the power off (this is important) and then straighten a paper clip and poke that into the hole to release the tray. Provided there isn’t anything obstructing the tray, it will come out.
Hopefully it’s a temporary problem, but as a drive ages, apparently the teeth on the tray or the gears that mesh with them can wear down, making it hard for the drive to eject its tray. Supposedly you can also cause this problem by leaving discs in the system while it’s powered off.
Whatever the cause, the problem with my Xbox seems to be permanent. After I manually eject it, it will usually work a couple of times after that, then it starts sticking again. I can live with it, since I bought it mostly to experiment with. I probably won’t play Xbox games with it very often.
If you dropped your Xbox and now it won’t open, there’s a good chance something broke off and is obstructing the tray. In that case your best bet is to replace the drive. The best source for replacement drives anymore is eBay, at a cost of $35 and up depending on the vintage. Thomson drives tend to be the cheapest. Samsung drives, which are the most desirable, cost more. If you’re adventurous, read this Xbox repair page, but be careful. Once you open an Xbox, there is an exposed power supply inside, and if you touch the wrong thing, it will ruin your day at the very least. At worst, it really can kill you. I don’t think that page stresses that enough. The power supply sits under the hard drive. Don’t touch anything over there.
If any of this makes you nervous, you’re probably better off calling around and seeing if you can trade in a broken Xbox for one that works. Call your local game shops, or look on your local Craigslist for someone advertising Xbox repair or modifications.
As far as Xbox reliability goes, I don’t have any solid statistics. Whether the Xbox or the PS2 is more reliable depends on who you ask, but I see (and hear about) more broken Xboxes than PS2s. If you buy a used first-generation Xbox, make sure you buy it somewhere that gives you some kind of a guarantee.
Usually the manufacturer sells its consoles at a loss, hoping to make up for it by selling games, which are extremely profitable. Microsoft seems to cut more corners on its consoles than Sony or Nintendo, and the result is that the Xbox and Xbox 360 aren’t as reliable as they could be. I don’t usually recommend extended warranties, but if I were buying an Xbox 360, I would get one. (The original Xbox is discontinued now, so buying a new one of those isn’t an option, unfortunately.)
Buddy Bell resigned his job as Royals manager at the end of the season to spend more time with his family, then promptly took a minor-league job with the White Sox. Given their last-place finish, it’s not much of a loss.
They named a replacement today.His name is Trey Hillman. I know little about him, except that he managed in the Yankees system and he turned around a poor team in Japan. He’s won everywhere he’s been.
I see this as a good thing, since Buddy Bell hasn’t won anywhere he’s been. And Hillman has experience as a turnaround artist, which is what the Royals need.
The best Royals managers (Dick Howser, Whitey Herzog) had big-league experience, which is a knock on Hillman, but neither was what you could call distinguished. Herzog was nobody before coming to KC, but then the Royals went on to have several of their best seasons under him. Howser won a championship with the Yankees but didn’t bring home the World Series title that Steinbrenner wanted, so he axed him. The Royals hired him, and they never finished lower than second place with him at the helm.
In this ESPN piece about Tillman, he says all the right things: Work ethic, develop in-house talent, pay attention to the team atmosphere and adjust when you feel it drop.
If he does half those things, I know he’ll do better than Buddy Bell did with his all-veterans-all-the-time approach.
I’ve been waiting with anticipation for flash-based SSDs to come out. If you’re unfamiliar with these, they’re hard drives with no moving parts, so their life expectancy is 10 years, and they’re quiet, run cool, and they have virtually no seek time so for some tasks they’re lightning fast.
The best drives on the market, from what limited information is available, seem to be the Samsungs.The problem is that these drives have a sustained read speed of 50 MB/sec and write speed of 27 MB/sec. Under ideal circumstances, a conventional hard drive can exceed those numbers–especially the write speed. So what’s going on?
The main reason is that these drives have no cache on them. Conventional hard drives have a small amount of RAM that acts as a buffer between the computer and the platters. Today a budget drive has 8 megs of RAM. A lot of high-performance drives have 16, and I’ve even seen some that have 32.
The most frequently used data can come off this buffer at high speed. Writes can go to the buffer and the computer can get on with life, and the drive can write the data to the platters when it gets less busy. The other advantages of a solid state disk often can make up the difference when reading data, but if you’re writing a lot of data, the conventional hard drive wins the race most of the time.
SSDs could benefit from cache for one good reason: conventional RAM chips are still much faster than flash memory.
Now for the good news: I’ve read reports that the Samsung drive can boot Windows in 15 seconds and most common applications have single-digit load times. So if you don’t do a lot of writes, these drives can give you a performance boost.
The other complaint is capacity. You can pay $400 for a 32 gig SSD, which is more than you’d pay for a full terrabyte of conventional storage. For some people, this is a problem. Given the work I usually do these days, 32 gigs is plenty for me, and I could probably find ways to get by with 8. I just don’t keep a lot of huge data files around. But if I needed acres of data storage, I could load the operating system and my most critical apps on the SSD, and use the conventional drive for storage.
The old knock on flash memory was its finite lifespan. Put Windows’ swap file on a flash drive and let it run, and theoretically you could wear out the memory in a matter of days. And that’s always one of the first comments that shows up when the topic of flash drives comes up on sites like Digg and Slashdot. But today’s flash memory sustains more writes than the old stuff did, and newer drives use a technique called wear-leveling, where it distributes writes amongst the available chips. This technique makes the chips last a lot longer now, to the point where one respected tech journalist, Dan Rutter, actually recommends putting flash drives in old laptopos with maxed-out memory for the express purpose of holding a swap file. And Macintosh users have been using flash disks to soup up old Mac laptops for several years now. Flash disks give obsolete laptops a boost in both speed and battery life while reducing noise and heat, and it’s pretty safe to say that current technology allows a flash drive to last 3-5 years when used for this purpose, which is about as long as a conventional drive.
My next major system upgrade will probably be a Samsung SSD for at least one of my computers. It’d make a fantastic upgrade for my laptop, at the very least. The laptop will run faster (the hard drive in it is several years old, and I think it runs at 4200 RPM) and the battery life will improve considerably. I also like the idea of having a super quiet, cool-running desktop for the family room. But I definitely hope the second-generation SSDs will include some cache. Otherwise, there’s not much advantage to them over the old trick of buying a large, high-speed Compact Flash card and an IDE-CF adapter (Addonics is one source of these), as long as both the card and the adapter support UltraDMA.
An old idea hit me again recently: Why can’t you use the memory that’s sitting unused on your video card (unless you’re playing Doom) as a ramdisk? It turns out you can, just not if you’re using Windows. Some Linux people have been doing <a href=”http://hedera.linuxnews.pl/_news/2002/09/03/_long/1445.html”>it</a> for two years.<p>Where’d I get this loony idea? Commodore, that’s where. It was fairly common practice to use the video RAM dedicated to the C-128’s 80-column display for other purposes when you weren’t using it. As convoluted as PC video memory is, it had nothing on the C-128, where the 80-column video chip was a netherword accessible only via a handful of chip registers. Using the memory for anything else was slow, it was painful, but it was still a lot faster than Commodore’s floppy drives.<p>
So along comes someone on Slashdot, asking about using idle video memory as swap space. I really like the idea on principle: The memory isn’t doing anything, and RAM is at least an order of magnitude faster than disk, so even slow memory is going to give better performance.<p>
The principle goes like this: You use the Linux MTD module and point it at the video card’s memory in the PCI address space. The memory is now a block device, which you can format and put a filesystem on. Format it ext2 (who needs journaling on a ramdisk?), and you’ve got a ramdisk. Format it swap, and you’ve got swap space.<p>
The downside? Reads and writes don’t happen at the same speed with AGP. Since swap space needs to happen quickly both directions, this is a problem. It could work a lot better with older PCI video cards, but those of course are a lot less likely to have a useful amount of memory on them. It would also work a lot better on newer PCIe video cards, but of course if your system is new enough to have a PCIe card, it’s also likely to have huge amounts of system RAM.<p>
The other downside is that CPU usage tends to really jump while accessing the video RAM.<p>
If you happen to have a system that has fast access to its video RAM, there’s no reason not to try using it as swap space. On some systems it seems to work really well. On others it seems to work really poorly.<p>
If it’s too slow for swap space, try it as a ramdisk. Point your browser cache at it, or mount it as /tmp. It’s going to have lower latency than disk, guaranteed. The only question is the throughput. But if it’s handling large numbers of small files, latency matters more than throughput.<p>
And if you’re concerned about the quality of the memory chips on a video card being lower than the quality of the chips used on the motherboard, a concern some people on Slashdot expressed, using that memory as a ramdisk is safer than as a system file. If there’s slight corruption in the memory, the filesystem will report an error. Personally I’m not sure I buy that argument, since GPUs tend to be even more demanding on memory than CPUs are, and the consequences of using second-rate memory on a video card could be worse than just some stray blips on the screen. But if you’re a worry wart, using it for something less important than swap means you’re not risking a system crash by doing it.<p>
If you’re the type who likes to tinker, this could be a way to get some performance at no cost other than your time. Of course if you like to tinker and enjoy this kind of stuff anyway, your time is essentially free.<p>
And if you want to get really crazy, RAID your new ramdisk with a small partition on your hard drive to make it permanent. But that seems a little too out there even for me.
I saw a link to a short story on Get Rich Slowly called What to do during a recession.
I think I can do a little better. So I’m gonna try.You might not lose your job, so don’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The story states that most people don’t lose their jobs when the economy goes south. That’s important to remember. I lost not one, but two jobs in 2005, not the worst year on record but certainly not the best for either of those two employers. I was pretty certain in both cases that there would be cuts and I would be one of them. I couldn’t do anything about the second case because an edict came down from a new CEO to get rid of all contractors, and I was a contractor. In the first case though, yes, I probably made myself a more likely target for downsizing. I wasn’t as bad as the guy in Office Space who got hit by a truck, but if management thinks you think you’re on your way out, they have an excuse to not feel as bad about letting you go. After all, if you saw it coming and you’re not prepared for it, it’s your fault if something bad happens, right?
So if you think you might be on the short list, don’t let anyone know you think that way, and be quiet and discrete about finding your next job.
Work your contacts. When I lost that job, I knew some people who’d asked me at one point or another if I might be interested in opportunities elsewhere. Of course I called them within 24 hours. None of that panned out for me, but at least I got some practice interviewing and some good resume advice out of the deal.
I think it’s a very good idea to ask your friends once a year or so if they know of any openings. In the event of an emergency, it gives you a much better idea of what might be out there.
Build an emergency fund, just in case. Having an emergency fund is also important. When I got hired on at my current job, my boss told me to try to have half a year’s salary in the bank. Some vote of confidence, huh? But the reality of our business model is that we can be forced to make cuts at any time, with no warning. It even happened to him once a few years ago. The upside is that the pay is pretty good and we get at least one or two opportunities to make some extra money each year, so we put up with it.
Six months’ salary can be hard to save, but you should have at least two, and more is better. Sometimes I can find a new job in less than two months, but I can think of two times in my career where my new employer dragged the hiring process out by a month. That was fine the first time it happened, because I still had my previous job, but it really stank the last time, because I’d been out of work a month.
Make a bare-bones budget. I also suggest having a bare-bones budget. Make up a spreadsheet listing the non-negotiable expenses that happen every month (mortgage or rent, car payment, utility bills, car insurance). Then figure the cheapest you can feed yourself for a day. I have a coworker who might try getting by on three packs of Ramen noodles and feed himself for 30 cents a day, but for most people, $3-$4 per day for food is about as low as they can go. Multiply that number by 30 and add that as a line item. Then add a few bucks for gas (it costs money to drive to the store and to job interviews too). It’s much easier to make a budget like this before you need it than when you need it.
You don’t necessarily need to kick into the emergency bare-bones budget the day you lose work, but I did. It helped my savings last longer.
Start saving money now. Knowing where to get things cheaper will help you build your emergency fund faster, and it will help you when you can’t afford to pay full price. Find out where the nearest day-old bakery is. If there’s a thrift store near you, wander into it sometime to see if it’s any good. If there’s a farmer’s market near you, check it out and compare its produce prices to your regular grocery store–and prepare for a pleasant surprise.
Don’t bail on your stocks. This might be the most important thing. When the stock market takes a dive, a lot of people hop on the phone and take their money out. Unless you own marginal stocks, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. You don’t need to know what to do with marginal stocks when a recession hits. If you own stock in companies that can’t survive a recession, you should sell them now and buy stock in companies that can. I had a relative who made himself rich by investing in boring companies like General Electric and Coca-Cola–companies that sell things that people buy no matter how much money they have–and holding those stocks for several decades.
That money vanished after a generation (and no, I don’t have any of it), but that’s another story.
There’s a financial cliche that poor people run to buy when stores have a sale, but when Wall Street has a sale, they rush to sell.
The thing to remember is that stock prices are purely theoretical unless you sell. So when they go down, you don’t lose anything. If the company still has decent products to sell, its price will rebound if only because vast heards of rich people will come in and buy more of the stock while the price is low. If you have some savings and you know how to stretch it, there’s absolutely no reason for those rich people to be buying that stock from you.