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.

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Darl\’s getting a blog…

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,

For those of you who don’t know, SCO is tired of Groklaw and setting up its own blog, prosco.net (not yet active; it goes live Nov. 1) to provide a counterpoint.

SCO, for the uninitiated, is a software company turned litigation company whose lawsuits against the likes of IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Daimler Chrysler and Autozone aren’t doing well.SCO says they’re going to answer questions from the public. I have a few questions they can answer.

Their stock was trading at or around $50 a share during the past year, but the share price is currently near $3. What are they going to do about their dwindling stock price?

Is SCO in danger of being delisted?

What sources of revenue does SCO have?

Is Darl McBride buying or selling SCO stock right now?

When SCO goes out of business next year, what company will Darl McBride and his friends go to? I still owe about $10,000 on my Honda and I’m realizing now that if I had shorted $5,000 worth of SCO stock a year ago, I would have nearly doubled my money by now. Investment opportunities like that don’t come along every day, so I’d like to find the next one.

Can I see a line of the code that IBM stole? One line would suffice. I would prefer it not include the strings “#include” and “stdio.h”.

Why November 1? Why tease us? Why not just start writing and then publicize it? That’s what I did, and I get lots of traffic. Surely not as much as SCO does though. I’m sure the traffic they receive from disgruntled sysadmins redirecting Nimda and similar requests to www.sco.com dwarfs mine. And Yahoo’s.

Intel scraps its 4 GHz P4!

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Intel has announced it’s scrapping its 4 GHz P4. That’s a big turnaround.Intel got where it is today by cranking the megahertz, and then the gigahertz, just as high as it could and as quickly as it could, hoping competitors wouldn’t be able to keep up, and trumpeting clock speed as the only thing that really mattered.

When it designed the P4, it extended its pipeline to ridiculously long lengths, allowing it to pump up the clock rate, but the efficiency was so low that Intel had to be ashamed of it. The last of the P3s cleaned the P4’s clock. As did a number of AMD’s chips.

Now Intel is having difficulty reaching 4 Ghz. AMD still has room to ramp up its speeds, but it hasn’t even reached 3 GHz yet. They’ve been taking other approaches to increasing speed.

Now Intel’s taking yet another page from AMD’s book. First, Intel clones AMD’s 64-bit instruction set, next, Intel replaces clock speed with model numbers, and now it throws in the towel on the gigahertz race.

It’ll be interesting to see how Intel’s marketing adjusts. And while I don’t expect AMD to topple them any time soon, if ever, it’ll be interesting to see if AMD manages to turn this into another opportunity.

What’s this deal with RFID chips in humans?

Dave Farquhar Society

Ars Technica is reporting that RFID chips for humans have received FDA approval. The question for me is, what benefit do we get from this?RFID, for the uninitiated, is a computer chip used for tracking. Wal-Mart wants to use them to track merchandise, because they’ll know exactly where all of the merchandise is in the store. This makes good sense. No more scanning barcodes to keep track of the merchandise. And, in theory, when a telephone ends up in the socks section of the store–things like this happen–the store’s computer system is going to know about it, so lost merchandise can get put back where it belongs.

Presumably, it’ll also make it possible to track the movement of the product in the store. If something makes its way out of the store without passing through a checker’s hands, then, well, it’s stolen, right? So it could eliminate shoplifting.

If implemented properly, it could also stop people from buying a piece of merchandise, taking it home, replacing it with another piece of similar merchandise, and returning it.

It also ties in with Wal-Mart’s philosophy of knowing what items sell better in what stores, so it can adjust its warehousing.

It makes a lot of business sense. Any retailer that can implement this is going to have a huge advantage over any retailers who don’t. Kmart would stand a chance of making a huge comeback if it could manage to implement this first.

So now you know what RFID is. So now let’s think about RFID in humans.

The selling point of it is that medical records are instantly accessible. But I don’t want my medical records to be instantly accessible. I want my doctor to have them. I do not want my employer or insurance company to have them. What if some insurance adjuster sees the phrase “could benefit from ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction surgery” in my records? I can’t count on that flunky knowing what ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction is. Might I get denied coverage or employment because of that really serious-sounding condition?

A phone call to my doctor will tell you that phrase means you really don’t want me playing right field for the company softball team if you can avoid it, because I have a weak elbow in my throwing arm. But aside from that, I lead a pretty normal life.

Insurance companies and employers do enough practicing medicine without a license as it is. We don’t need to be giving them access to this kind of information.

Imagine the other possibilities. My employer can know exactly how many times I go to the bathroom. Or how much time I spend in my cubicle versus the server room or test lab. Do I really want vast herds of management dolts knowing that I spent 43 minutes longer in the server room this week than last week and then asking me why?

But that’s a minor annoyance. Imagine this scenario.

Any idiot driving around in a car can stop at a house and quickly know how many people are inside. This person might even know the identities of the people inside.

Parents, do you really want anyone who wants to know to be able to find out when your children are home alone?

It’ll also be possible to keep track of what kinds of seedy places politicians visit when they’re supposed to be in session, representing us. We might not want to know that information. There’s little chance of that, though. Once they read that, they’ll exclude themselves from this, of course.

Proponents of RFID for humans argue that you have to be within a few centimeters to read the chip. This has already been demonstrated not to be true, and as time goes on, the maximum distance of today will only increase. Early adopters of wireless networking quickly figured out that they could extend its usable distance to a mile or more by using Pringles cans.

Some people are speculating the Department of Homeland Security wants this so they can know where terrorists and suspected terrorists are.

But if knowing where the terrorists are all the time means anyone who wants to know can know where anyone else is, as well as their entire medical history and other details, the downside more than eliminates any possible upside.

Schilling didn’t read the script

Dave Farquhar Baseball

Curt Schilling didn’t read the script tonight. I don’t know where this Yankees-scoring-twice-in-the-first business came from.

Here’s how it was supposed to go.1. Schilling hits Derek "Mariah Carey isn’t good enough for me" Jeter with the first pitch.
2. Schilling hits A-spoiled-brat-Rod with the second pitch.
3. Schilling hits Sheffield with the third pitch.
4. Schilling fans Matsui on three pitches.
5. Schilling throws one pitch over the head of Bernie "Jim Edmonds isn’t as good of a center fielder as me" Williams. Then fans him on three pitches. Looking.
6. Schilling fans Jorge Posada on three pitches.

That’s how you become the toast of Boston. As well as everyplace else where the Yankees are hated. Which is everywhere.

Build better ads with Taguchi

Dave Farquhar General

Ever since I first read about the Taguchi method in Robert X. Cringely’s PBS column a year ago, I’ve been fascinated by it.

Since then I’ve seen a few more references to it on the Web, but frankly I think I need an engineer and a statistician to explain the formula to me.Here’s the theory behind Taguchi: Let’s stay I’m trying to design a high-quality chair. I can make lots of decisions when I design it: the type of wood to use, the brand of sealer to use, and what color to paint it. Now any idiot ought to know that white paint versus green paint should make no difference on the durability of the chair. But if it’s less obvious, how do you figure out what variables matter?

Enter Taguchi. Mathematically you can figure out which variable matters, so you can reduce the number of tests. Let’s say I have 12 different types of wood I can buy locally, 12 brands of sealer, and 144 different paints. If I’m remembering high school algebra correctly, that gives me 20,736 different combinations to test. Taguchi will let me quickly figure out that the type of wood I use is the most important factor, letting me build and test 12 chairs instead of 20,000+.

If you’ve noticed that cars are a lot more reliable today than they were 20 years ago, Taguchi has a lot to do with it. The Japanese learned about Taguchi first, which was why Toyota and Honda came from out of nowhere. I remember when people made fun of Hondas. Nobody does that anymore.

Cringley talked over a year ago about applying Taguchi to advertising. Well, I found a free Taguchi ad comparator. That’s a lot better than the $499 product he was talking about a year ago.

I haven’t had time to test it yet, but if I ever decide to try to sell something on Ebay, I’m going to search for old ads for the same thing and run them through it to see if I can figure out why some listings fetch more bids than others (assuming it isn’t an obvious reason, like the item being in poor condition, having a bad photograph, or being listed in the wrong category).