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).

I helped my girlfriend move this weekend

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , ,

It’s been a long weekend and I’m exhausted, but I like the situation my girlfriend finds herself in now. She has an apartment in the Holly Hills neighborhood in south St. Louis.Holly Hills is a pretty swanky place to live, if you have a house. The apartment situation is a bit different. A comparable one-bedroom apartment in the working-class suburb where I live would cost about $200 a month more than what she’s paying, and some of her utilities are included. You won’t find that in Mehlville. What you’re more likely to find is an apartment like the one where I lived for nearly five years, which was in a fairly safe neighborhood, but the building was about 20 years old and was falling apart, in spite of them wanting $550-$575 a month for a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen so small you couldn’t have both the fridge and the oven doors open at the same time.

And I noticed, as I looked down Gravois Ave. towards Holly Hills Ave. from Loughborough, that this neighborhood still has class. A block up the street is an old sign that reads 4 Sports & More. Twenty years ago, that was called The Baseball Card Store. The name of the guy who owned it escapes me, but I remember going there frequently to buy baseball cards. He retired about 10 years ago. Under the new ownership, the shop didn’t last long. It’s a shame, really.

Next door is what used to be a Rexall drugstore. I don’t know if the Rexall was still there 20 years ago. It’s a payday loans place now, a sign of the times. It wasn’t as easy to get a credit line 20 years ago, so it wasn’t as easy to overextend yourself.

On the end of the strip is an old-fashioned hardware store. The couple who own it are getting up in years so I don’t know how long it’ll still be there. It’ll be a shame if it closes. It’s not like those big box stores. Those two know exactly where everything is in their store, and they can tell you exactly what to do with it. No, I’m not being impolite. The two of them really are handy. And from what I can tell, she’s the handier of the two.

Across the street, there’s Elicia’s Pizza. It’s a local chain that serves up St. Louis-style pizza. It’s ultra-thin and sliced square. As far as famous St. Louis chains, it probably ranks fourth, and it may be a distant fourth, in numbers and fame. Quality-wise, I’d rank it second behind Fortel’s. We ordered pizza from there on Saturday. I kid you not, they had it ready in less than 10 minutes flat.

I have no idea what the proper name for these things are, but there’s a big clock on a pole on the street, too. It looks like the ones you see in a movie, or on a train layout or one of those ceramic villages. And it works.

It’s obviously not the bustling commercial district it once was, with about half the storefronts closed up, but it has charm and character. Who’s going to get nostalgic at the sight of a strip mall in Mehlville or Oakville?

Closer to her apartment, it’s a residential district. On the way there, you can see $200,000 homes and you can see a handful of $500,000+ homes. It’s near a big city park. The homes are old, so the trees are mature. One of the streets is even split to allow more trees to grow in the middle. It’s a gorgeous sight in the fall.

I’m happy for her. She has a nice apartment. She’s free from a very overbearing roommate. Her utility bills are about to take a dive. She has three grocery stores within two miles. And the neighborhood looks like a postcard.

I wish I’d known about the place when I moved back to St. Louis six years ago.

Undocumented Backup Exec error

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking

I got an odd Backup Exec error message on Thursday night that I wasn’t able to find in Veritas’ knowledge base.

The error code is 0x3a18 – 0x 3a18 (14872). Since it seems otherwise undocumented, I might as well document what I know about it.In my case at least, the cause of the error seems to have been insufficient disk space. The drive where Backup Exec was storing its catalogs was filling up, and this cryptic error message was the result. When I reran the job that failed, I got an "Insufficient disk space to write catalogs" error in the popup, but not in the system log. That doesn’t help you if you happen to not be logged in at the time of the error. Seeing as this error happened at 12:30 AM, I wasn’t.

This error was especially nasty because it caused Backup Exec to not recognize that the tape was allocated, so it overwrote the three good jobs it had completed that night with two bad jobs. If there’s anything more enraging than a failed backup, it’s a failed backup that took a bunch of others down with it.

Many other Backup Exec errors are caused by low disk space. This is so simple that it ought to be the first thing I check, but more often than not I forget. I need to remind myself.

How frequently you run out of disk space on your system drive, of course, increases exponentially with each person who has admin rights on the server.

Dave Farquhar\’s rules, Part 1

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

Unlike Colin Powell, I haven’t canonized my rules for living, but there is one of my rules that I think is worth wasting electrons to publish.

Don’t go to movies based on video games.What prompted this? I saw a link referring to a movie based on the game Doom. How you make a movie based on a game where you run around shooting monsters, I don’t know.

Probably the way you make a movie based on a game where a scantily clad woman with impossible proportions runs around in tombs gathering treasures and shooting baddies.

As I recall, Tomb Raider got about as much critical acclaim as Rambo. People went and saw it anyway, but I know it wasn’t for the plot. It was for the chance to see Angelina Jolie in tight clothes. But Doom won’t have that benefit.

But is either of them worse than making a movie based on two Italian plumbers who run around knocking down killer turtles and eating mushrooms? Discuss.

Backup Exec misadventures

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , ,

(Subtitle: My coworkers’ favorite new Dave Farquhar quote)

If your product isn’t suitable for use on production servers, then why didn’t you tell us that up front and save us all a lot of wasted time?

(To a Veritas Backup Exec support engineer when he insisted that I reboot four production web servers to see if that cleared up a backup problem.)When I refused to reboot my production web servers, he actually gave me a bit of useful information. Since Veritas doesn’t tell you this anywhere on their Web site, I don’t feel bad at all about giving that information here.

When backing up through a firewall, you have to tell Backup Exec what ports to use. It defaults to ports in the 10,000 range. That’s changeable, but changing it through the user interface (Tools, Options, Network) doesn’t do it. It takes an act of Congress to get that information out of Veritas.

What Veritas doesn’t tell you is that the media server (the server with the tape drive) should talk on a different range of ports than the remote servers you’re backing up. While it can still work if you don’t, chances are you’ll get a conflict.

The other thing Veritas doesn’t tell you is that you need a minimum of two, and an ideal of four, ports per resource being backed up. So if the server has four drives and a system registry, which isn’t unusual, it takes a minimum of 10 TCP ports to back it up, and 40 is safer.

Oh, and one other thing: If anyone is using any other product to back up Windows servers, I would love to hear about it.