It\’s finally out!

Dave Farquhar Society

OK, do I really need to tell you why you need The Complete Calvin and Hobbes?

I didn’t think so.My favorite one of all time, unfortunately, isn’t available on the Web anymore. It’s from March 31, 1986. Calvin has to go to the doctor. And the doctor approaches him with all the standard gear–tongue depressor, stethoscope–and a terrified Calvin keeps asking, “WHAT’S THAT!? WILL IT HURT?” And the doctor calmly tells him what it is and assures him that it won’t hurt at all.

Except for the last thing. Calvin asks his standard question, and then the doctor calmly says, “It’s a cattle prod. It hurts a little less than a branding iron.”

Calvin faints, and the doctor laments that kids have no sense of humor.

If I drop off the face of the earth for a month, it’ll be because I got my copy.

Cheap buildings for a train layout

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Cheap buildings for a train layout

I’ve read about The New Pretty Village, published in book form by Dover Publications in 1980, as a source of buildings for a train layout, particularly a layout featuring tin litho Marx or prewar trains. Now I’ve got one in my hot little hands. I found some pictures of a reproduction online, and Marx expert Walt Hiteshew’s layout has used them as well.

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The truth about DVD recordables

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I read Jim Louderback’s column from this week on DVD recordables with interest, but it was disappointing.

The most useful information in this column: Generic recordable DVDs don’t necessarily cost less than the brand names.

The rest of the column is just about hazing and an incomplete description of how he did various things you’re not supposed to do to DVD discs and then tried to see if they still worked.Since he did lots of things that you’re not supposed to do and many of the discs still worked immediately afterward, he came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what discs you buy.

Well, I used to do lots of things you’re not supposed to do to floppy disks. Sometimes I got away with it, and sometimes I didn’t, but since they weren’t repeatable experiments, that experience means nothing. And I didn’t try to present any of that experience as useful information either.

There is some advice that pertains to pretty much all recorded media and I’ll go ahead and repeat it here.

Buy the brand/type of media the drive manufacturer recommends. It’s not fair to say that, for instance, Verbatim discs are junk based on one bad experience with a Verbatim disc in one particular drive. Some combinations of disc and drive work better than others. That’s not to say that untested media won’t work, but it does mean you don’t know what you’re getting into. It’s better to know what you’re getting into.

This is why some people swear TDK is the best media and Verbatim is the worst, while someone else may say (with just as much passion) that Verbatim is the best media and TDK is the worst. I guarantee that the two people doing the arguing don’t have identical DVD burners.

Make at least two copies of everything. If the data is worth something to you, it’s worth the dollar or less it costs you to burn a second copy. Store it in a jewel case in a cool, dry, dark place. Why? Heat, light, and moisture are the three things aside from physical abuse that cause discs to break down most quickly. The jewels will protect the disc from physical abuse. Ironically, polystyrene jewel cases intended for CDs are more fragile than the media they protect, but in a way that’s a good thing. It gives you fair warning that you’re handling it too roughly.

If possible, store the second (or a third) copy offsite. A locked desk drawer at the office is a good candidate, but be careful if the owners of your office turn off the air conditioning during the weekends. Or store it at a friend’s house, and return the favor by storing a cache of discs for that friend.

And if it’s super-duper important… If the data absolutely has to be right, burn it at the slowest speed your software allows, and walk away from your computer until it’s finished. Discs written at the slowest speed are slightly more reliable than discs burned at high speeds, as are discs that didn’t require buffer-underrun protection to write.

It’s extremely rare for either of these things to make a difference, but if you’re paranoid, keep it in mind.

Another look at color laser printing

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

I’ve been watching color laser printing for about 10 years. I remember when I was impressed to see one priced at $9,999. (No, that’s not a typo; I meant to type 10 grand minus a dollar.) And I remember I was riding the Metro in Washington DC in 1997 the first time I saw one priced under $4,000.

Today, you can buy a color laser for less than I paid for my first black and white laser, a Panasonic Sidewriter model that cost me $349 in 1994. If you shop around, you can get one for considerably less.

I haven’t bitten just yet, but I’m getting closer.I loved the Sidewriter line. I’d have loved it even more if I’d been paid on commission when I was selling them. You could tell how much I’d worked in a given week by the number of Sidewriters that were on the sales floor. If I’d been allowed to work 40-hour weeks, it might have been impossible to buy one in St. Louis.

The Sidewriter was an easy sell. At the time, a monochrome inkjet printer cost about $150. The Sidewriter cost $349 with rebates. (Regular price was $399.) I told the potential purchaser to do the math. Inkjet cartridges cost about $40 at the time, and, like today, were good for about 500 pages. Sidewriter toner cost $50 and was good for about 2,000 pages. So you’d have to buy $120 worth of ink to print as many pages as the Sidewriter would do, out of the box. By the time you used a second cartridge, the Sidewriter had paid for itself–and that’s just from a monetary standpoint. From a convenience standpoint, the Sidewriter won hands down. What would you do if you ran out of ink late at night in the middle of printing something that was due the next morning? In 1994, there wasn’t anyplace you could buy an ink cartridge at midnight. That’s not always true today.

Needless to say, if someone came in looking for a printer, if they weren’t interested in color, chances were they walked out with a Sidewriter if they talked to me.

I’m still looking for a color printer that matches the Sidewriter’s economy for home use.

If you’re looking for a color laser printer, there are several avaliable under $400 today from the likes of Hewlett Packard, Minolta, Lexmark, and Samsung. If you shop carefully, it’s possible to get HP’s most stripped-down model, the 2550L, for $250-$275.

But there’s a downside to the 2550L, besides the most obvious downside of the tiny 125-sheet tray. The cartridges are set to print 2,000 pages and then stop, regardless of whether there is toner left. You can’t refill them, and you can’t use third-party cartridges. At least the 2550L ships with full cartridges, not half- or 1/3-full starter cartridges.

But what’s worse is the toner cartridges cost $80 apiece. There are four of them. Do the math. Also consider that the drum unit is only good for about 5,000 pages in color, and it costs $175.

The HP 2550L is a throwaway printer. Your best bet with this printer is to buy it along with four reams of paper, and when you open that fourth ream, order a new printer. Hang on to any cartridges that still have some capacity left, of course.

From an economy standpoint, the best color lasers on the market today look like they come from Samsung. The Samsung CLP-550 costs more than the HP 2550L, but it’s faster, it’s compatible with PCL6 and Postscript Level 3 (so it’ll work with your favorite alternative operating system, which probably isn’t the case with the 2550L), it comes with both a 250-sheet tray and a 100-sheet tray, and it comes with a duplexer. Printing on both sides of the page without any manual intervention is cool. It’s not a feature you’ll use every time, but it’s hard to live without once you’ve had it.

And more importantly, the Samsung cartridges are refillable. The drum is rated for 50,000 pages, so you won’t necessarily replace it during the printer’s lifetime. The printer also has a $28 waste container that’s supposed to be replaced when it fills up.

The Samsung cartridges cost about $125 each, so they are are more expensive than the HP, but they last for 5,000 pages. And refill kits are available. I’ve seen kits priced at $55 and I’ve seen them priced at $36. If they’re good for 5,000 pages, the cost per page drops to close to a penny per page.

The downside is the CLP-550 comes with starter cartridges that are only rated for 1,500 pages. I don’t know if those starter cartridges can be refilled to full capacity.

I’m not ready to buy one, but if I were going to buy a color laser today, I’d probably get a Samsung.

A reminder about the most obvious money saver

Dave Farquhar Saving money , ,
A reminder about the most obvious money saver

I haven’t written about being a tightwad in a while. Not to worry, I’m still a big cheapskate–every dollar I save has a cascading effect. Remember, paying just an extra $10 a month on your mortgage is enough to shave a full month off the back end. So let’s talk about coupons.

The first thing about coupons is to resist the temptation to have to use them. Sometimes a generic still costs less than a name brand with a coupon. If that’s the case, put the coupon away and buy the generic. And if the coupon is for something you’d never buy anyway, resist the temptation to buy it just because you can get it for a quarter less.

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Microsoft getting into the backup business?

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , ,

I take issue with this Register story, which says Veritas has a better name in the storage arena than Microsoft.

Enron has a better name in the storage arena than Veritas. Ditto BALCO and FEMA and Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart.

So Microsoft wants to get into the backup business? Good.I gave three of the best years of my life to the shrink-wrapped stool sample that is Backup Exec. I believed, wrongly, that the Constitution protects sysadmins like me from that piece of software in the clause that mentions cruel and unusual punishment.

After that last job put me out with Thursday night’s garbage, one question I always asked on job interviews was what they used for tape backups. Had anyone said Backup Exec, I would have walked out of the room immediately.

Nobody did. That was good. There are still some smart people in the world. My confidence in humanity was somewhat restored.

Microsoft’s offering will no doubt have problems, but when batch files and Zip drives are more reliable than your competition, who cares? Backup software is one area that desperately needs some competition. Microsoft entering with its usual less-than-mediocre offering will force everyone else with their less-than-mediocre offerings to either improve or die, because Microsoft’s offering will be cheaper, and there will be people who will assume that Microsoft’s offering will work better with Windows because nobody knows Windows better than Microsoft. (In this case, that assumption might actually be true.)

What’s wrong with Backup Exec? Ask your friendly neighborhood Veritas sales rep what they’ve done about these issues:

If a Backup Exec job backing up to disk contains both disk and system state data and it’s the second job to run on a given night, it will fail just as certainly as the sun coming up the next morning. Unless they finally managed to fix that bug, but I doubt it. I sure reported it enough times.

Remote backups happening over second-tier switches (D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, and other brands you find in consumer electronics stores) usually fail. Not every time. But more than half the time.

Those are just the problems I remember clearly. There were others. I remember the Oracle agent liked to die a horrible death for weeks at a time. I’d do everything Veritas support told me to do and it’d make no difference. Eventually it’d right itself and inexplicably run fine for a few months.

Maybe competition will fix what support contracts wouldn’t. And if it doesn’t, maybe Backup Exec will die.

And if Backup Exec must die, I want to be part of that execution squad. Remember that scene in Office Space with the laser printer and the baseball bat?

I never thought I’d say this, but now I’m saying it.

Welcome, Microsoft.

Make sure you use this link before it gets sued off the web

Dave Farquhar General

It never occurred to me to type print.google.com into a web browser and see what happens. I’ve known for months that Google was digitizing books but I had no idea the service was out where you could get to it.

Visit and search for something. You’ll be amazed.This is a bonanza for genealogists. If there’s someone reasonably noteworthy you’ve had difficulty connecting to your tree, search for that elusive person. My elusive one is Arthur Briggs Farquhar. I’m a Farquhar (obviously). I also have Briggs blood in me. From what I can tell, A. B. Farquhar was born in Ohio (my grandfather was a Farquhar from Ohio) and he was a Quaker, as were my Farquhars until about three generations ago.

Thanks to Google Print, I’ve found the book American Grit: A Woman’s Letters from the Ohio Frontier. I don’t know just yet if this book will have any answers for me or not. But did I ever find a tantalizing line on page 20:

“When a family named Farquhar bought property near her in Ohio, she wrote home asking if they were related to her or not.”

Could this have been my ancestor Dr. Edward Andrew Farquhar’s family?

I can’t read the whole book on Google Print, but I can read enough to get a pretty good idea whether a book is worth pursuing further. And if a book only has one juicy tidbit about an individual, it finds it.

In 2002, Eric Schmidt said, “The speech I give everyday is: ‘This is what we do. Is what you are doing consistent with that, and does it change the world?'”

In this instance, “change the world” could be the understatement of the century.

But will the courts let it survive?

Can the Royals be saved?

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , , ,

So the Royals managed yesterday to avoid losing their 100th game this season. They have to win 14 games in a row to avoid their third 100-loss season in four years. While a 14-game winning streak to stave off that 100th loss isn’t impossible, it’s unlikely. This is a team that dropped 19 straight last month, after all.

Keep in mind that the cross-state Cardinals, the winningest team in baseball, haven’t won their 99th game yet.

So what do you do with a team that’s had a worse run than the 1962-1966 Mets, who at least had the excuse of being an expansion team?Get some average players. The problem with the Royals since, well, about 1990, is that they don’t have enough average players. Let’s face it, the addition of Barry Bonds to this team wouldn’t result in very many more wins because big hitters need people to get on base ahead of them if they’re going to produce runs, and they need some protection behind him. The Royals’ two best hitters are David DeJesus and Mike Sweeney. DeJesus isn’t a power threat. The Royals’ biggest power threats behind Mike Sweeney are Matt Stairs and Emil Brown, neither of whom have ever been able to hold down a regular job anywhere else, primarily because they’re average hitters and below-average fielders.

Get two hitters and one pitcher. Whenever I’ve run computer simulations, I’ve been able to turn the Royals into a .500 team with the addition of one good pitcher and one good hitter. Of course, the last time I ran that simulation, the Royals had Carlos Beltran, so now they’d need two hitters to accomplish the same thing. Since David Glass has expressed a willingness to raise the payroll to about $50 million and they’re about to shed more than $10 million in dead-weight salaries, it’s possible for the Royals to pay three $8 million salaries. The question is whether the Royals can manage to attract three $8 million players.

Even though San Diego has been trying for years to unload Phil Nevin, the Royals have never bitten. Nevin wouldn’t be happy in Kansas City, primarily because Nevin wouldn’t be happy anywhere. He’d be bad in the clubhouse, but the Royals only have a few guys who are good in the clubhouse. At least the guy can hit.

Maybe the Royals should take a chance on Rafael Palmeiro. Clearly nobody else wants him, and the steroids are a big question mark. Maybe he’ll never hit more than 14 homers again. Maybe he’ll never play baseball again once Congress gets hold of him. The Royals already have too many 1B/DH types but if Palmeiro can deliver a cheap 25 home runs from the left-hand side of the plate, he’s an upgrade. A slimmed-down Palmeiro would still be the second-best hitter on this team.

Do one thing well. The Royals are at or near the bottom of both leagues in fielding, hitting, pitching, and stolen bases. Doing just one of those things well would make a big difference. Defense is the cheapest of those problems to address. The Royals have been criticized for moving slick-fielding shortstop Andres Blanco to second base and handing him the job. But he’s hitting above .200, which Royals second basemen have struggled to do this year, and he’s making the plays at second, which Royals second basemen haven’t done at all this year. His bat won’t win any games, but arguably his glove won at least one game this past week against the White Sox. Yes, the White Sox made two bad baserunning mistakes and Blanco gunned them down, but with Donnie Murphy or Ruben Gotay playing second, you get away with those mistakes.

A team of seven Andres Blancos plus Mike Sweeney (whose glove can’t hurt you when he’s DHing) and David DeJesus (who wields a good glove in center field) would get about seven fewer hits a week than what it gets now, but it wouldn’t give away runs. The Royals would win a lot more 1-0 games.

Stolen bases are the second-cheapest problem to address. You can draft guys with good speed and/or trade for them, and then coach them. The Royals won a lot of games in the 1970s and early 1980s by relying on guys who could beat out an infield single and steal second or stretch singles to the outfield into doubles, then get driven in by a 3-4-5 combination of George Brett, Hal McRae, and John Mayberry/Willie Aikens/Steve Balboni (in other words, any affordable first baseman who could hit .250 with 25-30 home runs). And for that matter, Brett could steal bases and stretch singles into doubles, and until about 1982 when age caught up with him, so could McRae.

Since the Royals don’t seem to have anyone in the organization who is succeeding in teaching guys how to steal bases, why not find out what Davey Lopes is doing? Lopes has always been one of the best teachers around at the art of the stolen base, even going back to his days as a player.

Scout better. One reason last-place teams usually don’t stay there long is because they get the best draft picks. But from 1997 to 2002, the Royals have managed to draft exactly one #1 who is still in the big leagues. The one they drafted in 2002, Zack Greinke, is 4-16 with a 5.95 ERA. The kid clearly should have been in Omaha this year. A lot of people are giving up on him–he’s been touted as the next Greg Maddux–but critics forget that Maddux went 6-14 with a 5.61 ERA when he was 21.

Part of the difference is that Maddux had veteran pitchers to learn from at 21. I’m not sure that Jose Lima is the best example for young Greinke.

But I digress. The Royals need to start scouting better and drafting better. In 1999 the Royals drafted Kyle Snyder. The Cardinals drafted some kid who was attending college in Kansas City named Albert Pujols. Which one have you heard of?

And yes, I’ve run the numbers. Albert Pujols doesn’t drive in quite as many runs in a Royals lineup and he doesn’t hit for quite as much average with only Mike Sweeney to protect him, but he turns the Royals into a winning team. And for some reason Sweeney hits better with Pujols in the lineup. Imagine that.

The way you get good players when you can’t trade for them and you can’t sign them is to draft and develop them. The way you do that is to scout well. If the Royals aren’t willing to pay their draft picks (Alex Gordon is still holding out for more money), they need to use that money to lure the best scouts in the game. Find the scouts with the best track records and pay them double what anyone else is willing to pay. The result will be a team that drafts smarter and trades smarter.

Is there a bright side? In Mike MacDougal, Ambiorix Burgos, Andy Sisco and Jeremy Affeldt, the Royals have four lights-out relievers. If the Royals can get a lead after the sixth inning, their chances of nailing down the win are pretty good with those four pitchers, assuming good defense behind them. I happen to believe that either Sisco or Affeldt should go back into the starting rotation, but strong bullpens make good starters out of mediocre ones so I can see keeping them where they are. Affeldt’s been roughed up of late, but that’s more of a reflection on his fielding ability than on his ability to pitch.

Greinke has demonstrated that he has the ability to pitch, but he needs to turn that promise into results. Runelvys Hernandez and Denny Bautista have demonstrated an ability to pitch, but both have been injury-prone. A seasoned Greinke along with a healthy Hernandez and Bautista give a solid basis to build from. Given a couple of veterans to anchor the staff and teach them, it could go somewhere. I was too young to know at the time, but I wonder now if the reason the Royals kept Paul Splitorff and Larry Gura around in 1984 when both had ceased to be useful pitchers was to teach their young pitchers how to survive in the majors.

So I think the Royals’ poor pitching is temporary. Now if only I could say the same thing for the management…

Another meaningless security report…

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,

So Symantec is saying that IE is more secure than Mozilla-based browsers because there were 25 security vulnerabilities disclosed in the first half of 2005 for Mozilla, as opposed to 13 for IE.

Such reports are fine for Clueless Information Officers. Let’s analyze this like someone who actually knows what to do with that thing that sits between your ears.First and foremost, Mozilla lacks tight integration into the operating system, making it fundamentally less dangerous. Internet Explorer is like a bank that leaves its vault open after hours because it locked the front door. Since Mozilla lacks those ties that go directly into the operating system, it’s like a bank that locks the front door and the vault. The more locks the crook has to crack, the better.

Also, past performance isn’t necessarily an indication of future gains. People who invest know this all too well. Remember, the first half of 2005 was when Mozilla was seeing explosive growth. It was still a young product and had a lot of things to shake out.

But the potential is certainly there. Let’s look at Apache vs. IIS. You see fewer Apache vulnerabilities than IIS, even though Apache’s source code is visible for everyone to see, and even though Apache is a much larger market. Mozilla has this same potential.

In the meantime, Mozilla is still a minority browser. Since most hackers these days are motivated by profits, they’re going to do the same thing any other businessman does: Look for volume. Internet Explorer still has 12 times the exposure that Mozilla does. And Internet Explorer is often used in corporate environments, since many corporate intranets rely on IE-specific technology. That makes it an attractive target, since it’s easier to get through a browser than it is a corporate firewall. And once you do manage to get in, there’s a lot more good stuff inside a corporate LAN than there is inside a home LAN.

And by Symantec’s own admission, “at the time of writing, no widespread exploitation of any browser except Microsoft Internet Explorer has occurred.”

That tells us the Mozilla developers are working faster than the would-be Mozilla hackers, and it also suggests that hackers are looking harder at Internet Explorer.

Also, Symantec is being selective about the flaws it’s looking at. The article states that it only counts confirmed flaws. IE has 19 unconfirmed flaws versus 3 unconfirmed flaws for Mozilla. So IE has 19 unconfirmed and unfixed flaws plus 13 confirmed flaws, for a total of 32. Mozilla has 25 confirmed flaws plus 3 unconfirmed and unfixed, for a total of 28.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m more concerned about those unconfirmed and unfixed ones. As long as I’m running the current version of either browser, I’m protected against those 25 big bad flaws (for Mozilla) or the 13 (for IE) from earlier in the year. I can’t do anything about those 19 unfixed Internet Explorer flaws.

Frankly, I think Symantec is just trying to get a headline on a slow news day, and maybe trying to kiss up a bit to Microsoft, with whom it’s always had a very close relationship since Symantec traditionally has been willing to write the pieces of software that Microsoft for whatever reason doesn’t want to touch.

I’m sticking with Mozilla Firefox. Not only is it the safer browser when you look at the things that actually matter, it’s also the better one.

Another take on Google’s digital library

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , , , ,

CNN has an interesting analysis of Google’s attempts to digitize millions of books.

I still argue this project can only be a good thing.The article quotes Tim O’Reilly, and while anyone who knows me knows O’Reilly and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, he’s right when he says the biggest problem an author faces, by far, is obscurity.

I have a real-world example that I’ve seen firsthand. About 18 months ago, I was introduced to a pair of obscure books written by master modeler Wayne Wesolowski. Today, Wesolowski is best known for hand-building a huge model of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train, but an earlier generation knew him as someone who published articles in magazines like Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman on an almost monthly basis.

In the early 1980s, Wesolowski wrote a couple of books. Both were printed twice under different titles, but one dealt with building model railroad cars from scratch and the other dealt with buildings. At the time I was introduced to them, the books were believed to be rare, and it was impossible to find a copy of either of them for any less than $125.

Today, it’s still possible to buy used copies of the books for $125, but if you shop around, you can get them for a lot less. I found a copy of Wesolowski’s ABCs of Building Model Railroad Cars for less than $12 earlier this month. It sold before I could click on the link, but I found another copy for $18. I snapped it up immediately.

Wesolowski’s books may not always be possible to find for less than $30, but it’s pretty easy to find them at or around that price with just a little bit of patience. I believe what’s happening is that people who otherwise would have never known the book existed started looking for it, which in turn caused used booksellers to look for it. In the meantime, the sale of used books online has drummed up a lot of press, including in the New York Times, causing still more copies of the book to come off dusty shelves and into circulation, driving down prices and possibly driving up sales.

If snippets of text from this book were searchable online, as opposed to vague mentions on an obscure Yahoo discussion group, who knows what would happen to these books’ sales? Maybe it still wouldn’t be enough critical mass to ramp up publication again, but it’s possible. At the very least, it’d be a bonanza for used booksellers, whether it’s people who do it for a living or people who are thinning out their personal book collections.

In turn, that extra commerce can only help the economy.