David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
Determining the age of electronic equipment is fairly easy to do. There’s actually a secret code that allows one to do this and gain other insights into the history of such devices. This works for computers, of course, but also for most any other device that contains computer chips.
You just need to know how to read the code. Read more
I went on vacation and I guess my DSL connection got jealous. As far as I can tell it died two days into the trip. Figures. So that’s why the site’s been dead.
If it interests youm I’ll tell you about my trip.I went with the girlfriend’s family to Orange Beach, Alabama, which is close to Pensacola, Florida. In Alabama the beaches are just about as white and much easier to walk on because it’s softer, but the shell hunting is better across the Florida border.
My St. Louis buddies say I’ve already lost the twang I picked up down there. That’s a good thing. I’m a northern boy.
Train fans will have something to look at near the intersection of highways 59 and 98 in Foley, AL. An old Louisville & Nashville diesel switcher locomotive, L&N caboose and boxcar are there, along with a St. Louis-San Francisco (Frisco) boxcar. They appear to be in reasonably good condition.
The Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola is excellent. I could spend days there. Take the 11 AM restoration tour if at all possible. They take you out into the airfield where planes that won’t fit in the museum are displayed, but they also take you inside the hangar where you can see their works in progress. In front of the hanger was what was left of a Brewster Buffalo, an early Navy fighter from World War II. It’s something of a holy grail today, because its ineffectiveness against the Japanese Zero doomed it early in the war. We sold a bunch of them to Finland and palmed a few more off on the British while the Navy did its best with the Grumman Wildcat, which was slightly less ineffective, while waiting for the Hellcat and Corsair fighters.
But anyway, they had the *censored*pit section of a Buffalo in front of the hangar and another Buffalo inside, which was waiting for its wings to be installed and a trip to the paint shop. They were also working on a replica of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. She wasn’t in the Navy, but her role in aviation and women’s acceptance in it means the museum was interested in the plane. The widespread belief that the Japanese believed her to be a U.S. spy and shot her plane down doesn’t hurt, either.
For great fish and seafood, check out Original Oyster House in Gulf Shores, AL. We had an hour and a half wait, which we passed by browsing the adjacent shops. I imagine that’s the source of most of those shops’ business. The shops aren’t earth-shattering but won’t bore you to tears either. The seafood is.
Flounders Chowder House in Pensacola Beach, Florida, is also amazing. Don’t ask me which one’s better. I think Flounders has the better atmosphere but the food in both places is first-rate. While just about every seafood place in the area is going to be better than Red Lobster, it’s easy to find disappointingly mediocre seafood in the area. But these two places knocked my socks off.
I made a new friend outside Papa Rocco’s in Gulf Shores. A sign outside Papa Rocco’s advertises warm beer and lousy pizza. Seriously, that’s what it said. I was walking across the Papa Rocco’s lot on my way to a souvenir shop when a woman started yelling at me. I kept walking but turned a couple of times. When I turned and looked at her, she yelled, "Yeah, I’m talking to you!" She wasn’t anyone I knew and she was obviously drunk. I have no idea why she was upset with me. I picked up my pace and got lost in the souvenir shop as quickly as I could.
I was crossing Papa Rocco’s to get a good look at Tracks To BBQ. Obviously if I’m on the Atlantic coast I’m going to eat seafood, since I can get good BBQ closer to home. But the ad for Tracks To advertised "Antique model train cars on display." So of course I wanted to check it out. Peering into the window, I was able to see that it was a small establishment, with only two or three tables inside. I saw a couple of Lionel posters on the wall and some assorted trinkets in the window. Further back, next to the cash register, I saw a couple of old OO or HO scale train cars that looked pretty old. What appeared to be a locomotive in the original box sat next to them. On a shelf below that I saw a postwar Lionel hopper car. I paid $10 for the same car at a swap meet last month. Nothing earth shattering there, at least not from what I could see inside. That’s not to say there wasn’t something cool running on a shelf under the ceiling, but I couldn’t tell from outside and the establishment was closed.
I’d hoped to see some prewar tinplate. Oh well.
The outlet mall in Foley is large and you can spot the occasional bargain. Some of the shops were handing out 40% off coupons for other shops in the complex. I got a pair of $50 Reebok tennis shoes for $20. I thought about buying a pair of the canvas Reebok Classic shoes as well. They would have been $12 with a coupon. I’ve had a couple of pairs of them in the past and they’re decent shoes. I’ve had shoes that were better looking and lasted longer, but in most cases I also paid $60 for them.
But as with all of these kinds of places, caveat emptor. I tried on plenty of shoes with lumpy soles. Those shoes aren’t worth taking for free because of what they’ll do to your feet. And mixed with the bargains you can find some high-priced items that are trading on reputation. Careful shoppers can save a bundle though.
I also learned that a large sand castle can attract a lot of attention. We built one large enough for a 4-year-old to hide in completely. It drew lots of looks and comments.
So, I’m driving home and flipping through the radio stations, and I get to the local Michael W. Smith/Stephen Curtis Chapman/Amy Grant station, and the most unusual thing is playing: David Crowder!
If I had a radio station, of course, I’d just play David Crowder over and over. And when people bugged me about the repetition, I’d just write to him and tell him he needs to make another album quick because people are complaining about the repetition.
The Register, Slashdot, and others have been posting the story of Katie.com, a personal website that’s existed since 1996 but whose name was hijacked for a book about an online victim of a sexual predator, published in 2000 by Penguin Putnam.
The author has been getting harassed now, and that’s misguided. Here’s why.The short answer is that authors often don’t have any control over the titles of their books. They can make suggestions, but ultimately, the book title is usually up to the publisher.
That’s my experience as an author. My book was titled Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics, and Multimedia. It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, contained an oft-misunderstood technical term (“Optimizing”) and a dated buzzword (“Multimedia”), and, well, don’t get me started. I lobbied against it. I wrote in with a dozen alternatives, at least. None were picked.
I didn’t make a huge deal about it. I was more concerned about getting published.
Maybe the author, Katie Tarbox, approved of the name. Maybe she didn’t. Ultimately, it was the publisher’s decision and the publisher who is accountable. By some accounts, she seems to approve now of the publisher’s actions, but to think she has the ability to control her publisher is foolhardy. And to think she’s going to contradict her publisher is equally foolhardy. Getting into print is hard. Staying in print is just as hard, if not harder.
The Slashdot crowd has written numerous negative reviews on Amazon.com, and today Slashdot seems dismayed that the negative reviews and ratings are gone. Why? Amazon is not a public forum for your personal agenda. Amazon has had problems in the past with authors sending their shills to post glowing reviews of their books and/or malign their competitors’ books, and has tried to eliminate some of that. If you want to exercise your right to free speech online, exercise it on your own web site.
Don’t get me wrong. The groundswell of support is good. A book publisher should not have the right to steal someone else’s pre-existing web domain, whether it’s a registered trademark or not. I’m not one of those people who believe that big corporations can do no wrong. They’re just like Big Labor and Big Government: They’ll all do as much wrong as they think they can get away with, as long as that wrong is somehow profitable.
Penguin Putnam had intended to call the book girl.com but realized that name was taken and probably owned by someone who would put up more of a fight. Besides, at the time it was a porn site.
Corporate bullying? It looks like it.
So complain to Penguin Putnam. Tell them you’re not going to buy their books until they quit victimizing innocent bystanders online. Tell them you’re going to ask your local bookseller not to stock Penguin Putnam books for the same reason. If you own any Penguin Putnam books, consider dumping them on the used market, cheap, to take away a potential new book sale from the company. One way is to list them on half.com and see if you find any takers. You can let Penguin Putnam know you’re doing this as well. (Don’t burn the books–that doesn’t hurt the publisher any, but the used channel potentially does.)
For that matter, tell ’em it’s a stupid and misleading name anyway, because 13-year-old girls generally don’t use names like katie.com in chatrooms.
The key is to not make this about the book. Make it about the publisher. Books come and go, and publishers know this. Negative balance sheets and corporate image last much longer.
That type of protest has a small but real chance of making a difference. Online harrassment via Amazon.com does not.
Spyware was grinding this PC to a screeching halt. I’d click on an icon, and the program never appeared. Or maybe it would finally appear 15 minutes later. And once I finally got a browser window open, it was so slow, I could pretty much forget about downloading any tools to fix it.
What to do?I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL. There was all sorts of stuff in the task list. (This was a Windows 98 computer.) I followed the same rule that I once heard in a movie. Desperado, I think it was. The crime boss said something like this: “How tough can it be? Go around town. Don’t recognize someone? Shoot him.”
So if I didn’t recognize a task, I closed it. In the end, nothing but Explorer.exe and Systray.exe were left running.
The result? When I clicked on icons, programs ran!
I then ran the usual battery of tools: Bazooka, Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, then Bazooka again (I have Bazooka scan to give me a quick overview of how bad it is, since it finishes in seconds, then run the others, then run Bazooka again since Bazooka only assists you in removing stuff, but doesn’t actually do it).
Then for good measure, I ran AVERT Stinger, which removes common trojan horses.
No trojan horses, but he had just over 200 different spyware infections. He asked how he could prevent them in the future. I showed him how to use the tools.
Then I installed Mozilla Firefox. I explained to him that it doesn’t have the hooks into the OS that Internet Explorer has, so if a website tries to maliciously install spyware when he visits, the chances are much lower. And since it blocks the popups, his chances of accidentally visiting those kinds of slimeball places drop. Then I showed him the tabbed browsing feature, and the built-in Google search bar. He dug it. I think Mozilla may have gained a convert.
This job took me a while. I cut him a break on my hourly rate, since he’s referred people to me in the past. And besides, he let me see his old S gauge American Flyer train, still in its original box. Letting me spend five minutes with something cool like that is always good for a discount.
3-2-1 Studios, best known for its DVDXCopy software, has been sued out of business by the MPAA lynch mob.
It’s unfortunate. The company had a number of good products, and they were in at least one regard a very cool company.I had some of their products for DVD editing and authoring. I liked them. I also really liked one thing about the company’s policy. Unlike most companies, who make their money by making a piece of software and then selling upgrades to it, 3-2-1 had a policy of free upgrades for life. You could just download the newest version whenever you wanted.
So it’s a shame.
I never bought DVDXCopy, as I had no use for the software. I’ve never looked into copying DVDs, so I can’t judge whether the free alternatives to DVDXCopy are, as alleged on Slashdot, better.
I do regret that it’s legal to make copies of movies for personal use but illegal to provide the tools one would use to exercise that right.
I run this website off a server running on an ADSL line in a spare bedroom of my home. That causes some weird issues from time to time, like the time I had to figure out setting the MTU automatically in Debian.
My server of choice is Debian, because it’s Linux which makes it fast, reliable, and cheap, and Debian makes it pretty easy to install only what you want and need, so I can have a server OS that’s only using 125 megabytes of disk space, leaving most of my drive available for content. I like having space for content.
This will work in Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu and Linux Mint too.
Now, the downside of modern DSL: Southwestern Bell, like most ISPs these days, uses PPPoE. So not only can your IP address change with no notice whatsoever, you also have the hassles of PPPoE. With the default settings, some unknown but noticeably large percentage of web users won’t be able to access a web server running on a DSL connection using PPPoE.
The reason is MTU and fragmentation.Yes, you remember MTU if you used Windows 9x back in the bad old days of dialup. Tweakers would play around with the MTU settings in hopes of squeezing just a little more performance out of their 56K modems, and they would swear that one utility did a better job than any others, or that this MTU setting was optimal and the conventional wisdom of 576 stank… Remember those flamewars?
Well, with broadband, theoretically the right setting to use is 1500. Trouble is, PPPoE steals some of that packet space, and the result is something worse than slow speeds. In some scenarios, you completely vanish.
The way to make my website reappear is to issue the command ifconfig eth0 mtu 1472. The exact number doesn’t seem to matter much. It appears for me that 1472 is the maximum I can use. (It can vary from ISP to ISP, in case you’re wondering.)
Excellent. Problem solved.
Not so fast. Problem solved until my server reboots. Linux doesn’t need to reboot, right? Right you are. But here in St. Louis, the power likes to hiccup a lot, especially in the summertime. My server is on a UPS, but every once in a while, in the middle of the night, there must be a long enough power failure that my UPS dies, because every once in a while I fall off the ‘net again.
To set the default MTU permanently–that is, to change it automatically on bootup–one normally would change the ifup script or the rc.startup script. Except Debian doesn’t have either of those.
My kludgy solution: cron. Log in as root, issue the command crontab -e, and add the following line:
*/2 * * * * ifconfig eth0 mtu 1472
With this in place, only seconds will elapse between the time my power comes back on for good and I reappear on the ‘net. I can live with that.
If you change your network card or motherboard, you don’t have to reinstall Debian but you may lose eth0. Here’s how to get eth0 back. And here’s how to get a list of the installed packages in Debian.
It’s that time of year again. Time for PC Magazine’s annual reliability and service survey. I’ve been reading it for almost half my life, and half a lifetime ago, it really meant something.
Today, the subtitle ought to be “What happens when you outsource.”So what does happen when you outsource? All the PCs are basically the same these days. It makes sense. We’re down to three or four suppliers for almost all of the chips on the motherboard, and everyone, including the big vendors, buy their motherboards from one of a half dozen or so companies now. Some contract manufacturer in the Far East puts them all together and puts some other company’s name on it.
The good news is that if there’s a secret to building good, reliable PCs, it’s really poorly kept. The basic hardware is much more reliable today than a decade ago. Back when I sold computers at retail, I remember a Compaq sales rep complaining bitterly that Intel’s “Intel Inside” campaign was hurting them by making everyone think all computers were the same inside. At the time they weren’t. Compaq’s engineering and rigorous testing didn’t always produce the fastest PCs, but they were always near the top, and it did produce some really reliable stuff.
Would that same philosophy applied to today’s technology yield something better? It’s impossible to know. Compaq PCs are exactly the same as everyone else’s these days. The good news is the hardware is about as problem-free as it was back then. And so is everyone else’s. The only difference is the software the manufacturer loads on them.
You may be surprised, but even the bargain-basement eMachines scored high on reliability ratings. It turns out it’s cheaper to get things right the first time than it is to cut corners on quality and have to accept lots of returns. Their machines were dirt cheap, the company was profitable, and the reliability was good. That’s why Gateway bought them and then turned management of the combined company over to the eMachines management.
Speaking of Gateway, support is almost uniformly lousy across the board. People have always complained to me that the support people don’t know what they’re doing. Now it’s hard to know how much the phone techs know because you can’t understand them.
Someone has got to realize this makes poor business sense and make a change. IBM knows, but IBM doesn’t sell PCs at retail anymore. In the early ’90s, Gateway had tremendous brand loyalty. Their PCs were terrible, but the tech support was friendly and determined. When Dell and others started undercutting Gateway’s prices, they cut costs by decimating their tech support. The result was lousy computers and no help getting the problem fixed. The only thing left to do was to buy eMachines, whose management had walked into a similarly bad situation in 2001 and righted it.
It’s pretty obvious to me that the way to break this logjam of sameness is to offer first-rate technical support. I want to believe that the first company that moves its technical support back to the United States and advertises the fact would even be able to get by with charging a premium price.
In the meantime, you stand to get slightly better support by buying from a retail store rather than over the phone or web, if only because the store will be able to help you with basic questions. The quality of in-store help varies widely, but if you find good help in the store, find out that person’s name and ask for that person if you have to call again. Most people who are really good don’t stay in retail for long–at least one company here in St. Louis scouts the retail stores’ computer help and tries to hire away anyone over the age of 21 or 22 who seems to be any good–but you may get some good help in the meantime. Use the manufacturer’s support as a backup, if the store will let you.
I did a little moonlighting this past weekend fixing Internet Explorer for somebody. It’s been several years since I’ve used that web browser regularly, but if someone pays me to fix IE, then I fix IE.
The problem was that after he paid someone else to fix his spyware problems, IE quit displaying SSL (secure) sites. So much for online banking and bill paying.
So here are some simple things to try if IE breaks and switching to an alternative browser like Opera or Mozilla isn’t an option.My guess is he got trigger happy with disabling stuff. IE was about as secure as it was going to get, but it was no longer useful as a web browser either. It was kind of like taking the tires off your car to keep it from getting in a wreck. The "Cannot display this page" page gave some troubleshooting information. It didn’t help. I searched Google for information. There were some suggestions of things to enable. It didn’t help.
So I figured I’d just download IE6 and see if running the installation program would give me an option to do a repair install. No dice. The installation program couldn’t access the Internet to phone home to Microsoft.
Two words: Personal firewall. I went looking. I found two. I uninstalled one. No dice. I uninstalled the second one and enabled Microsoft’s built-in firewall. It still couldn’t call home. This was weird.
As a last resort, I went into Tools, Internet Options, and cleared the browser cache and the history and everything else you could clear. And then I stepped through each tab, resetting the defaults everywhere I could.
In all honesty, I couldn’t see what difference there was between the defaults and the settings he had after I’d followed all those suggestions I found online. But after I reset the defaults, his browser was displaying SSL pages again.
All I can think of was that there may have been some hidden setting or settings in the Registry that got wiped out when I reset the defaults.
Then I went back and tightened things down a bit more–stuff like ActiveX controls and the like.
It’s always best to start with the simplest known configuration that works, then secure it one step at a time. That was definitely the case here.
Slashdot published an interview today with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. I found it entertaining reading. Even though I’m a semi-regular contributor over at Wikipedia, I’ve never encountered its founder, possibly because I do my best these days to stay under the radar over there.The discussion on Slashdot was interesting. As always, someone questioned Wikipedia’s accuracy, wondering how anything but chaos can come from something that anyone can edit at any time. A few people read two articles and came back with the usual “99.9% of Wikipedia articles cite no sources and have inaccuracies in them.” Someone else came back and said he’d made a change to the M1A1 Abrams article and was corrected by an Army mechanic. I always like comments like that. It shows who actually has experience and who’s talking out his butt.
Wales was incredibly idealistic, with a vision of free textbooks educating the world and ridding the world of places where people have no sanitation. Free access to the sum of all human knowledge will solve all the world’s problems.
I wish I could be so idealistic.
Oh well, shoot for the stars and maybe you have a chance of hitting the moon, right?
I found the discussion on credibility more interesting. Someone asked how an encyclopedia produced by anarchy could have more credibility than the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica or even World Book. Linux Kernel hacker Alan Cox weighed in, pointing out that there’s plenty of bias in academia too, that academia is a tyranny of the day’s popular ideas and that generally ideas change by one generation dying out and a new generation with different ideas taking over. At least with Wikipedia, the divergent ideas get a chance to be heard. He had a point.
I disagree with Wales that his project will drive Britannica out of business, but I agree with Cox about credibility. I had an argument with a college professor over using the Internet as a primary source of information. This was in 1995 or 1996. I wrote a short paper on the Irish Republican Army, and I wanted to find out what people sympathetic to the IRA were saying. So I went to Alta Vista, did some searching, and cited what I found. I wanted to know what the people who made the bombs were thinking, and figured the people who made the bombs were more likely to have Web pages than they were to write books that would be in the University of Missouri library. But my professor wanted me to look for books. I decided he was a pompous, arrogant ass and maybe I didn’t want to minor in political science after all, especially if that meant I’d have to deal with him again.
I forgot what my point was. Oh yes. In journalism we have a sort of unwritten rule. You can cite as many sources as you want. In fact, the more sources the better. If a story doesn’t have three sources, it really ought not to be printed. That rule gets selectively enforced at times, but it’s there. Your sources can spout off all they want. That’s opinion. When three sources’ stories match independently, then it’s fact.
So what if Wikipedia is never the Britannica or even the World Book? It’s a source. It’s much more in touch with popular culture than either of those institutions ever will be. Most people will think you’re a bit odd if you sit down with a volume or two of the Britannica or World Book and read it like you would a novel. I know people who claim to have done it, but that doesn’t make the behavior unusual. Hitting random pages of Wikipedia can be entertaining reading, however. As long as you don’t get stuck in a rut of geography articles. But that’s become less and less likely.
So I don’t think it matters if the Wikipedia ever attains the status of the paper encyclopedias. You’ve got what the academics are saying. Wikipedia gives you the word on the street or in the coffee shop. Neither is necessarily a substitute for the other.
I’ve appealed to this before, but I’ll do it again. Visit Wikipedia. See what it has to say about your areas of interest. If it doesn’t say enough, take a few minutes to add to it. Resist the temptation to go to the articles on controversial people like Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler. It’s a good way to get into an edit war and get frustrated. Find something obscure. I mostly write about old computers, old baseball players and old trains. Not too many Wikipedians are interested in those things. Especially the trains, so that’s what I write about most. (Other people seem to be; when I troll the ‘net for more information on those old companies, I frequently find copies of what I’ve already written and put in Wikipedia. It’s flattering.)
I look at it as a way of giving back. It’s relaxing to me. But there’s a community who’s written a ton of software, including an operating system, a web server, and a blogging system, and they’ve given it to me and never asked for a dime in return. I can’t program so I can’t give anything back in that way. But I have interests and I have knowledge in my head that doesn’t seem to be out there on the ‘net, and I have the ability to communicate it. So I give back that way.
It won’t change the world. Maybe all it’ll accomplish is me seeing fewer “Mar” trains on eBay and more Marx trains. But isn’t that something?