Team of destiny?

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , ,

The Boston Red Sox just won a World Series.

A lot of people won’t understand the irony of that. But lots of baseball fans are shaking their heads with me.It was a story. Facing their arch-rivals in the playoffs, the New York Scum, the S*censored*had the Sox down three games to none. In all of American sports, only two teams had ever come back from 3-0 to win a championship. Both times, it had been in the NHL. No baseball team had done it. Especially not against a baseball team with a $183 million payroll.

Boston did it, with nothing going for it. One of the sportscasters put it this way, after game 3. He asked whether Boston had ever won 4 straight during the regular season. Still, it looked gloomy, but Boston did it.

Next up: The St. Louis Cardinals. A team with the best record in baseball, and a roster that looked like an All-Star team.

Game 1 was a slugfest. Such is to be expected from two teams with depleted pitching staffs. But Boston outslugged the National League All-Stars, er, Cardinals.

Game 2, the Red Sox pitched Curt Schilling, again. There was little doubt Schilling would win, at least not from me. No pitcher has ever been more determined to win a World Series game than Schilling was on that day.

One telling sign: Boston made 8 errors in those two games. The Cardinals normally eat up teams that play shoddy defense. The Cardinals didn’t.

Game 3 was the turning point. Pedro Martinez is a formidable but moody pitcher. When he’s pitching well, he’s as good as anyone ever was. When he’s not pitching well, it’s like extended batting practice. St. Louis expected batting practice.

For three innings it was. Martinez looked shaky. Leading off the third, Martinez allowed Jeff Suppan, the opposing pitcher, to reach base. Suppan pitched most of his career in the American League, where he got about 12 opportunities a year to swing a bat. Then Edgar Renteria hit a long double. Second and third, nobody out, with the big boppers coming to bat. But then Larry Walker hit a ground ball, and for some reason, Suppan didn’t run home. Why? Beats me. But Suppan doesn’t run the bases much. He got hung up after Walker was thrown out at first. What should have been the tying run turned into a double play.

And that was the turning point of the game. From that play on, Pedro Martinez finally showed up at the ballpark. Batting practice over. Enter the 3-time Cy Young Award winner. Boston cruised to a 4-1 victory.

And Boston not only didn’t make any errors, but both of Boston’s most notorious glove handlers, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz–two arguments for the DH, to be certain–contributed good defensive plays with their gloves.

Suddenly St. Louis faced the same odds Boston had beaten a week earlier. But did the Cardinals ever win 4 straight during the regular season? And what did Boston have left? Derek Lowe, a pitcher whose sinking pitches are often matched by his attitude, in Game 4. Tim Wakefield, most likely, in Game 5–a knuckleballer who tends to give up runs in bunches. There was question whether Curt Schilling could come back to pitch Game 6–he had to be sewed back together before every outing and there wasn’t much of anything left to sew. More likely, Bronson Arroyo would have to start. Arroyo was the losing pitcher in Boston’s humiliating 19-8 loss. And in Game 7, the unpredictable Pedro Martinez.

I wasn’t ready to write off the Cardinals.

But then Johnny Damon led off Game 4 with a home run. It proved to be the game winner, as St. Louis only managed four hits against Derek Lowe and three relievers. And Boston’s defense held up once again.

Team of destiny? Maybe, maybe not. I think it was more a team of intimidation. The Red Sox weren’t intimidated, and the Cardinals were.

Both teams look likely to have different makeups next year. Perhaps dramatically different.

But for now, Boston has what it hasn’t had for 86 years: A World Series trophy.

But the Cardinals have nothing to be disappointed about. They were supposed to finish fourth. They ended up with the best record in baseball. With their division rivals looking different next year too, the Cardinals can look forward to next year.

Floppies, meet your replacement

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , ,

I must be the next-to-last person in the world to spend significant lengths of time experimenting with these, but for the benefit of the last person in the world, I’d like to talk about USB flash drives, also known as thumb drives (for a brand name), pen drives, or keychain drives, because they’re small enough to fit on a keychain.They are, as that popular brand name suggests, about the size of your thumb. It’s possible to buy one that holds as little as 64 megabytes of data, which is still a lot of Word and Excel files, but currently the sweet spot seems to be 512 megabytes or 1 GB. This is, of course, always a moving target, but as I write, it’s entirely possible to find a 512-meg drive for around $40, although sometimes you have to deal with rebates to get the price that low. It’s harder, but still possible, to get a 1 GB drive for under $90. That will change. Currently a 2 GB drive is more than $200.

I remember when people went ga-ga over a 1 GB hard drive priced at an astounding $399. That price was astoundingly low, and that was only 10 years ago. Progress marches on, and sometimes progress really is an improvement.

The drives are so small because they use flash memory–a type of readable/writable memory chip that doesn’t lose its contents when it loses power. It’s not as fast as RAM, and it’s a lot more expensive, and its lifespan is much more finite, so you won’t see flash memory replacing your computer’s RAM any time soon. But as a replacement for the floppy disk, it’s ideal. It’s fast, it’s compatible, and unlike writable CDs and DVDs, they require no special software or hardware to write.

The drive plugs into a USB port, which is present on nearly every computer made since about 1997. Use with Windows 98 will almost certainly require the installation of a driver (hopefully your drive comes with either a driver or a web site you can use to download a driver–check compatibility before you buy one for Win98), but with Windows 2000, XP, and Mac OS X, these devices should just plug in and work, for the most part. With one Windows 2000 box, I had to reboot after plugging the drive in the first time.

From then on, it just looks like a hard drive. You can edit files from it, or drag files onto it. If the computer has USB 2.0 ports, its speed rivals that of a hard drive. It’s pokier on the older, more common USB 1.1 ports, but still very tolerable.

The only thing you have to remember is to stop the device before you yank it out of the USB port, to avoid data loss. Windows 2000 and XP provide an icon in the system tray for this.

These are great as a personal backup device. They’re small enough to carry with you anywhere–the small flashlight I keep on my keychain is bigger than most of these drives–and it only take a few minutes to copy, so you can copy those files to computers belonging to friends or relatives for safekeeping.

If your only interest in a laptop is carrying work with you–as opposed to being able to cruise the net in trendy coffee shops while you drink a $5 cup of coffee–a pen drive makes a very affordable alternative to a laptop. Plug one into your work computer, copy your files, and take work home with you. Take it on the road and you can plug it into any available computer to do work. It’s not the same as having your computer with you all the time, but for many people, it’s more than good enough, and the drives make a Palm Pilot look portly, let alone a laptop.

So how do you maximize the usable space on these devices? The ubiquitous Zip and Unzip work well, and you can download small command-line versions from info-zip.org. If you want something more transparent, there’s an old PC Magazine utility from 1997, confusingly named UnFrag, that reduces the size of many Word and Excel files. Saving in older file formats can also reduce the size, and it increases the possibility of being able to work elsewhere. Some computers still only have Office 97.

You may be tempted to reformat the drive as NTFS and turn on compression. Don’t. Some drives respond well to NTFS and others stop working. But beyond that, NTFS’s overhead makes it impractical for drives smaller than a couple of gigs (like most flash drives), and you probably want your drive to be readable in as many computers as possible. So FAT is the best option, being the lowest common denominator.

To maximize the lifespan of these drives, reduce the number of times you write to it. It’s better to copy your files to a local hard drive, edit them there, then copy them back to the flash drive. But in practice, their life expectancy is much longer than that of a Zip or floppy drive or a CD-RW. Most people are going to find the device is obsolete before it fails.

The technologically savvy can even install Linux on one of these drives. As long as a computer is capable of booting off a USB device, then these drives can be used either as a data recovery tool, or as a means to run Linux on any available computer. 512 megabytes is enough to hold a very usable Linux distribution and still leave some space for data.

Odd genealogy fact of the day: Bush and Kerry are cousins

Dave Farquhar Genealogy

Yes, George W. Bush and John Kerry are cousins. Ninth cousins twice removed, but still cousins.They’re also both related to Dracula.

Bush and Cheney are also related, as are Bush and Colin Powell. I also have a long list of other cousins.

Something else you may not have known, which is on that long list: The only two father-son combinations to be president were John and John Quincy Adams, followed by George H. W. and George W. Bush. That’s pretty widely known. But what you may not have known is the Bushes are distantly related to the Adamses (5th cousins), which makes them as closely related as Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt.

Cheap hardware won’t stop software piracy

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Who’s to blame for rampant software piracy? According to Steve Ballmer, AMD and Intel. Oh, and Dell. Charge less for the computer, and there’ll be more money to pay for Windows and Office.

Steve Ballmer doesn’t know his history.

Read more

Who could have scripted a better ALCS than this?

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , ,

I watched the Yankees’ 19-8 trouncing of the Red Sox on Saturday, all 96 hours of it. Well, I guess that game only seemed 96 hours long. Officially it was only four hours and 20 minutes.

A brave sportscaster interviewed Stephen King during the game. King insisted the Red Sox could come back. David Ortiz would win it with a homer if he was writing it, he said.

It didn’t happen. They were down 3 games to 0 and coming off a game where the Yankees broke almost every conceivable postseason record, and the only bright spot was they were headed back to Boston, so at least they could face insurmountable odds at home.What followed was an epic 12-inning game, pitched effectively by a very bitter Derek Lowe,
followed by an epic 14-inning game. Boston wasn’t dead. David Ortiz won both of those games. But Boston’s pitching staff was depleted. Tim Wakefield, the knuckleballer who was supposed to be Boston’s #4 starter, had to be used in relief again and again.

Game six. Do or die. Tim Wakefield was supposed to pitch. But he had to pitch the night before. As much as Boston fans boast of Wakefield’s ability to pitch on no rest, it’s really not a good idea for him to do it. Not at age 38. Since Boston left first baseman/pitcher (and former Kansas City Royal, I must add) Dave McCarty off its postseason roster, their two options were third baseman Bill Mueller (yeah, right) or Curt Schilling.

Fortunately, Boston’s medical staff had anticipated needing Curt Schilling again and had been experimenting, trying to find ways to patch the torn tendon in his right ankle together enough that he could pitch after being blown out by the Yankees in Game 1.

So they literally sewed the torn tendon to the skin to hold it together, and Schilling managed to hold them to one run in seven innings without his best stuff.

Schilling said in a postgame interview that he became a Christian seven years ago and that was him relying on God out there in that game. I don’t know how much God cares about baseball, but I can’t come up with a better explanation.

Boston deviated from the script a little on this game. David Ortiz didn’t deliver the game-winning hit. They also managed to keep the game under four hours.

The Yankees and their fans also showed their true colors. On a close play at first, with Derek Jeter on base, Alex “$252 million” Rodriguez did his best Ed Armbrister impersonation and smacked the ball out of pitcher Bronson Arroyo’s hand.

Jeter started mouthing off in the dugout. The Red Sox protested the call. The umpires huddled. The rest of the umps, who would have been able to see the cheap shot pretty clearly, reversed the call. They put Jeter back on first where he belonged and sent Rodriguez to the dugout where he belonged.

A-Rod’s reaction? “I should have run [Arroyo] over.”

I think A-Rod earned himself a new nickname. Hint: it rhymes with “stick.” The fielder’s job is to tag you out, whether you’re paying to play like I do, or you’re being paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars to play a kid’s game.

And I thought Julian Tavarez’s temper tantrum in the Houston/St. Louis series was out of line.

Yankees fans reacted with similar class and maturity. They started chanting four letter words and throwing everything they could find onto the field. Officials had to dispatch riot police. Really.

Note to self: Don’t worry about who to root against when the Yankees play the Mets anymore. For six days out of the year now, the Davester is the world’s biggest Mets fan.

Game 7. Do or die. The Red Sox called on Derek Lowe again. On short rest. But he was the best-rested pitcher on the Bosox staff. Still, Boston had plenty of reason to be nervous. Lowe’s inability to put crucial games away earned him a one-way ticket to long relief, which was why he was bitter. Only Curt Schilling’s injury followed by Tim Wakefield’s heroic sacrificial lamb performance in Game 3 got him out.

(Count Terry Francona brilliant for using Wakefield instead of Lowe in Game 3.)

Lowe pitched brilliantly. Kevin Brown suffered a meltdown, and subsequent Yankee pitchers weren’t much better, serving up fat pitch after fat pitch and letting Boston’s left-handed hitters take advantage of the short porch in right field. Although, in all honesty, all but Johnny Damon’s initial homer probably would have gone out of every park, not just the House that was Built for Ruth.

Derek Jeter drove in a run in the third. But we saw something no human being has ever before seen on Derek Jeter’s face: desperation.

The Sox answered every run the Yankees scored and maintained a six-run lead, but I still remembered Game 3. I never got comfortable and I doubt many other people did either. But as the Yankees failed to make play after play that they’ve been making in the postseason for the past eight years, it became evident which team showed up to play Game 7 and which one didn’t.

Frankly, I expected exactly the opposite of what happened.

So now Boston’s headed to the World Series for the first time since 1986.

One of the sportscasters said Boston always wants to clinch things at home, but clinching in New York is the second-best thing.

Wrong. This depleted team pieced together four wins out of scraps after being down 3-0, something that’s never, ever been done in baseball or, for that matter, any professional sport other than hockey. There is no better way to win it than to win it on their archrivals’ home turf.

Next year, Steinbrenner will offer the A-Rod money to Scott Boras for Carlos Beltran’s services, and Scott Boras will take it. I’m sure he’ll also add whatever starting pitchers he can find on the market, next year’s payroll might jump to a quarter billion, and the Yankees might manage to buy themselves another championship, assuming the new, expensive players don’t melt in New York.

No matter. This year belongs to Boston.

Resolving an issue with slow Windows XP network printing

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , , , ,

There is a little-known issue with Windows XP and network printing that does not seem to have been completely resolved. It’s a bit elusive and hard to track down. Here are my notes and suggestions, after chasing the problem for a couple of weeks.The symptoms are that printing occurs very slowly, if at all. Bringing up the properties for the printer likewise happens very slowly, if at all. An otherwise identical Windows 2000 system will not exhibit the same behavior.

The first idea that came into my head was disabling QoS in the network properties, just because that’s solved other odd problems for me. It didn’t help me but it might help you.

Hard-coding the speed of the NIC rather than using autonegotiate sometimes helps odd networking issues. Try 10 mB/half duplex first, since it’s the least common denominator.

Some people have claimed using PCL instead of PostScript, or vice versa, cleared up the issue. It didn’t help us. PCL is usually faster than PostScript since it’s a more compact language. Changing printer languages may or may not be an option for you anyway.

Some people say installing SP2 helps. Others say it makes the problem worse.

The only reliable answer I have found, which makes no sense to me whatsoever, is network equipment. People who are plugged in to switches don’t have this problem. People who are plugged into hubs often have this problem, but not always.

The first thing to try is plugging the user into a different hub port, if possible. Sometimes ports go bad, and XP seems to be more sensitive to an deterriorating port than previous versions of Windows.

In the environment where I have observed this problem, the XP users who are plugged into relatively new (less than 5 years old) Cisco 10/100 switches do not have this problem at all.

This observation makes me believe that Windows XP may also like aging consumer-grade switches, like D-Link, Belkin, Linksys, and the like, a lot less than newer and/or professional grade, uber-expensive switches from companies like Cisco. I have never tried Windows XP with old, inexpensive switches. I say this only because I have observed Veritas Backup Exec, which is very network intensive, break on a six-year-old D-Link switch but work fine on a Cisco.

I do not have the resources to conduct a truly scientific experiment, but these are my observations based on the behavior of about a dozen machines using two different 3Com 10-megabit hubs and about three different Cisco 10/100 switches.

What pop singer is your OS?

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
–Unix pioneer (and Plan 9 co-creator) Rob Pike on Slashdot

Ah, the questions that inspires…If Unix is David Cassidy, then what’s Windows?

I nominate Britney Spears. She and her management can’t decide what her name is, she’s tempermental, unstable, lacks talent… You can have a heyday with that analogy.

Is Mac OS the Grateful Dead? Hmm…. There’s not only that “Flower Power” Imac, there’s also that cult following…

Amiga OS must be the Velvet Underground. Ahead of its time, obscure but not so obscure that nobody has heard of it, influenced virtually everything that came after it, and 20 years later, lots of things still haven’t completely caught up…

SCO obviously wants us to think Linux is Milli Vanilli.

So which OS has to be New Kids on the Block? Vanilla Ice? MC Hammer? David Hasselhof?

Troubleshoot your locomotives on the floor!

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , ,

I’m not going to write up a comprehensive tutorial on troubleshooting old Lionel, American Flyer, Marx, and Ives trains just yet. But I’m going to present a hard-learned lesson.

When troubleshooting a locomotive, set it up on the floor, not on a table.I was working on an Ives locomotive this evening. A lot of Ives frames were made of cast iron, where Lionel and American Flyer had a tendency to use pressed steel, or when they were feeling saucy, brass. And Ives locomotives were top heavy.

Read more