The R. Collins Guide to Health

Dave Farquhar General

R. Collins Farquhar IV, aristocrat and scientist.
To the uneducated rabble.

Greeting:

I awoke this morning at my usual 11 a.m., and my manservants bathed me, as they usually do. As I had planned to visit my black-sheep brother, I had instructed my man-servant to have one of my modernized 1967 Rolls-Royces across the river in nearby Columbia, Illinois, which is the closest place I can land my Tu-144. The roads around David’s house are positively wretched, totally inadequate for an aristocrat, and one such as myself should minimize the amount of time he spends on them.

When I arrived, I instantly perceived something was wrong. The white Honda I have grown used to seeing in front of his house in addition to his silver Honda was absent. It seems my brother has been courting lately and probably not with much success. He has never asked my advice on courtship, which probably has much to do with his lack of success in that department. Of course, one never arose to the ranks of the aristocracy by sharing, which is why I personally do not recommend courtship or marriage.

I found David in his bed with two very old comforters pulled over his contumacious body. He never sleeps at this hour unless he is sick. I, of course, never get sick, owing my good health to my steady consumption of fine brandy and cigars. My pipe also helps. I understand that David has never smoked a pipe in his life, and only three cigars, and cheap ones at that, which might explain why he was laying there in his sotto voce state.

He never said a word. Typically he makes some comment about being really buff, and when he is in a particularly obstinate mood, he talks about being little and dainty and really buff. In reality, my brother’s body is as little and scrawny as his little-and-dainty mind, which is demonstrated by his obvious lack of knowledge of what “little and dainty” actually means. Just call my brother super-tryo.

Which reminds me: Thanks to my cigars and brandy and steady diet of imported caviar, my rotund being makes me the paragon of fine health. But I only drink decaffienated brandy, because caffeine dehydrates you.

Another clue was that he was not sleepwalking. That boy walks more in his sleep than I walk in a year. Of course, the upper crust should not have to walk. That is what manservants are for. Aristocrats should be carried. When I walked into his little-and-dainty bedroom in his little-and-dainty house and found him sleeping on his little-and-dainty queen-sized bed, he sort of sat up and growled something at me. One of my manservants said he said to go away. So I went into his little-and-dainty computer room and sat down at one of his little-and-dainty computers, and found it logged into his web site. He really needs to learn not to stay logged in. He could slow me down by 15 minutes if I had to hack my way in the way I did the first few times.

I will have to get Jacques Pierre Cousteau Bouilliabaise Nouveau Riche Ongle d’orteil le Raunche de la Stenche to take time from his busy schedule and accompany me when I next return to David’s house. We can cheer him up by insulting him, and he can watch two fine members of the upper crust enjoy cigars and aged brandy in our smoking jackets as we rebuild an antique radio.

Why IPO?

Dave Farquhar General ,

I’ve been reading a lot lately about Google and the anticipation surrounding its IPO, and I just can’t help but wonder something.
Why?

What do I mean, why? Just that. Why do an IPO? Why go public? What do they gain?

I remember, what seems like a million years ago, I saw a segment on 60 Minutes about software maker SAS. I vaguely remember SAS because they made a–what am I talking about? THE ONLY–highly regarded C compiler for the Amiga. But 60 Minutes wasn’t talking about Amigas. They were talking about how in an era when companies are universally cutting benefits, working for SAS continues to be more like living on a resort. Need to see the doctor? The company doctor is down the hall. Free day care for your kids on campus. You’re encouraged to eat lunch with your family. You’re encouraged to work 35 hours a week. All sorts of exercise equipment, including a pool and a track. Massages. We’re talking the kinds of excesses Netscape was infamous for here. Once you work for SAS, you never, ever leave. When the interviewer told the president he was crazy, he laughed and asked what’s crazy about treating your people well. And he pointed out the company has always been profitable, has never had to lay anyone off. His employees are happy and productive and they do good work. When the interviewer asked why, he said part of it is because there are no investors. He’s accountable only to himself. The investors don’t like the resort-on-campus because that costs money that could be going to dividends. He doesn’t have to worry about that.

Investors don’t think about much of anything but dividends. Except when the time comes to cash out the stock, which is often. Executives need to think long-term, but that’s hard when your main job is to please the investors, who come in with a Las Vegas mentality. And why should you be accountable to investors? Just because they have money doesn’t mean they know anything.

That’s not to say all investors are clueless people who make you question whether mammals really are the highest form of animal. Some companies do just fine in spite of their investors. But how many good companies turned bad once they had vast herds of greedy investors to answer to? Google is cool because it’s so anti-commercial, so unubtrusive, so… Well, have you ever wondered how Google makes its money? I have.

My fear is that the minute after some investor starts asking how Google makes its money, we’ll be seeing X10 popunders when we go there.

Yes, $15 billion is a lot of money. I’m sure Google could come up with lots of cool things to do if it had it. But I remember someone asking once what your soul is worth. Does $15 billion really seem like a lot when compared to the value of Google’s soul?

For some companies, the IPO is the next step on the way to greatness. But for a larger percentage, it seems to be the first step toward mediocrity. If I’d invented Google, I wouldn’t take that chance. Do the IPO after I retire.

But I didn’t invent Google, so I guess that’s not my decision, eh?

Knoppix: A low-commitment way to try Linux

Dave Farquhar Linux

I’m posting this from a computer running Knoppix. Charlie brought a copy in to work the other day and handed it to me. I actually downloaded Knoppix several months ago but never burned myself a copy because I didn’t have any 80-minute CD-Rs–I’ve still got about 20 74-minute jobs I haven’t used yet.
Yep, it’s an excuse. I know a lot of people have several objections to Linux:

1. There’s no software, or at least nothing I’d want.
2. It’s hard to install.
3. If I do manage to install it, I can’t get a good graphical interface working.
4. It takes too long.
5. I really don’t want to go to the trouble of repartitioning my hard drive, and I don’t want to run it on my old computer because it’ll be slow.

Knoppix is a full Linux distribution on a CD. You pop it in a PC (it’s best if it has at least 128 megs of RAM) and boot off it. It detects your hardware and boots you into a full-blown KDE environment.

Software? It has three word processors, three spreadsheets, two web browsers, two graphical mail clients, a desktop publisher, an MP3 player, a bunch of games (including a Civilization clone) and a bunch more stuff. In short, far more software than the typical Windows user has installed.

And if you don’t like it, just go to the “K” menu and hit Logoff. It shuts down. Pop out the CD, and boot back into Windows or whatever else it was that was on that computer.

I really wish the people who talk about Linux on the desktop would take the few minutes it takes to download and boot Knoppix. Their reaction would be telling.

A coupla MP3 jukebox solutions

Dave Farquhar Music

I’ve been playing with MP3 jukebox solutions. Grind! looks perfect, except for the life of me I can’t get it to work, which puts a bit of a damper on things. It acts like it’s playing, but the sound never comes out of the sound card. The sound card works fine. The www-data account (Apache’s user) has access to the sound card. The MP3 player software runs as www-data. It works fine when I log in and su into the www-data account. But when I hit the web page to control it, the music never plays.
So I’m about to give up for a while and give Gina a look. Gina’s got lots of cool features. But I’d rather have a computer that plays the music rather than streaming it–I want to hook up a headless computer to my stereo. I suppose I could put an MP3 server in my basement and put a headless computer on my stereo and control it remotely using remote X or VNC or something. It doesn’t do scoring of music the way Grind! does, but I think I can hack that in. You know, create another database of songs, assign a score to each, then when it picks a track, discard it if its score is zero, and when it picks one track, pick two instead, play the higher-scored track and put the other one back in the queue (unless it’s a zero, in which case you discard it). I think I can code that. And that way I’ll hear U2’s “I Will Follow” a lot more frequently than U2’s “Mysterious Ways” (which, don’t get me wrong, was a good song… THE FIRST 3 BILLION TIMES I HEARD IT).

And hey, maybe I can figure out how to hack Gina to play the song instead of streaming it. Because it does lots of other cool stuff. Click the link, check it out.

I wrote up a bunch of stuff today but technical difficulties prevent me from posting it. I’ll post tomorrow.

Looks like I’m a Florida Marlins fan now

Dave Farquhar Baseball

I thought Boston would make it… And they broke my heart. Was it as bad as ’86? Not quite, but close. Very close.
Of course last night I thought the same thing about the Cubs, and they, too, once again flashed their unusual talent for pulling defeat from the clutching jaws of victory. So now we’ve got a Marlins/Yankees World Series, which means only one thing. I’m now a Marlins fan.

If the Cuban Nationals played the Yankees, I’d root for the Cubans.

At least with this arrangement, nobody questions my patriotism.

Fighting spam two ways

Dave Farquhar Spam , ,

I read a statement in a very right-leaning publication not long ago that made me really mad. It made the statement that government regulation is never the solution to a problem, and the problem of spam should be dealt with through software, not legislation.
This is a statement from a very clueless knee-jerk conservative. Don’t get me wrong; I’m conservative too, but I have a brain and I’m going to use it, even when I’m not towing the party line. Software does absolutely nothing to solve the problem of spam taking up 50% of the SMTP traffic coming in through my employer’s T1 line. That problem probably isn’t big enough to cost anyone a job yet. But is spam costing some people their annual keep-up-with-inflation raises? I think it could be.

Missouri has an anti-spam law. I think that’s a very good thing. Spam that doesn’t have a subject line that begins with the four-letter string adv: is illegal in Missouri. Spam with adult content that doesn’t begin with the eight-character string adv:adlt is illegal in Missouri. There are a few other regulations as well. The punishment? A $5,000 fine per message, not to exceed $25,000 per day.

I hope that amount is high enough to fund a decent-sized army of spam hunters in Jefferson City.

So if you live in Missouri, or work in Missouri, or there’s a decent chance that your mail server is in Missouri, or you can get your mail server moved to Missouri, or can determine that your spam originated from Missouri (you must be really

The problem with spam is that it costs next to nothing to do it. But if a spammer gets five complaints a day from Missourians, that amounts to over $9 million a year. Even the Alan Ralskys of this world may have difficulty with that bill. Spam has made some people multi-millionaires, but it’s hard to imagine Ralsky being able to foot that bill.

There’s a precedent in Missouri. Missouri had a no-call list before the embattled federal no-call list came into existence. There was a body shop not far from me that was literally sued out of business due to this law. A couple of poor-little-small-business-being-picked-on-by-the-government stories predictably showed up in the local press, but I’m still trying to figure out why he was picked on. He broke the law and couldn’t afford the consequences.

And that’s what we need to do with spammers. I won’t shed a tear, but I might throw a party.

In the meantime while I wait for Jay Nixon to sue some spammers out of business, I need a technical solution. Mozilla provides a mail client with built-in Bayesian spam filtering. It works pretty well. But there are situations where you may be pretty much forced to use Outlook in an Exchange environment, or some other product that doesn’t have built-in spam filtering. For those situations there’s POPFile, and if you need POPFile to work with Outlook in Corporate Workgroup mode, there’s Outclass. They work pretty well once trained. I’ve been using Outclass and POPFile for a number of months, and since I get between 30-50 spam messages per day, intermixed with legit stuff (of which I get several hundred a day), it probably saves me an hour or two a day, even when it classifies stuff wrong. But the latest Outclass has whitelisting, which will help that. (For some reason earlier versions of Outclass always classified mail from my boss as spam. I whitelisted him after I upgraded.)

The ultimate solution is 50 different states with 50 incompatible sets of regulations (such as some states requiring the exact string “[adv]” and others requiring “adv:”), making it virtually impossible to comply and still make a profit. Those who do manage will be so small as to probably not be bothersome. I’m not so eager for the Feds to step in simply because then it would be easier to be universally legal.

Yes, I’m alive

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve been incredibly, incredibly busy. I’ve been working overtime, I’m still trying to work through my backlog of short consulting gigs, and I’ve been dealing with one of those with-friends-like-that-who-needs-enemies? problems, and, yes, a couple of sniper-type comments on the site this past month or so really torqued me off.
I really wish b2 or WordPress had a Slashdot-style comments system, where registration was required for comments, and users could vote up or down the karma of comments, so that snipers could be, basically, shouted down by the masses. I can insert some commentary from R. Collins Farquhar IV in some of those messages, but that requires energy too. Energy I just haven’t had recently.

I’ve got some spam-type stuff in the works, and I’ve been playing with a new MP3 jukebox system. If I don’t get it working, I’ll probably be back asking for help; if I do get it working, I’ll be back with a report.

Rediscovering OS/2

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,
Rediscovering OS/2

So I picked up a surplus computer from work this week. Honestly, I bought it more because it was cheap than because I needed it. But it was a giveaway price for a good-quality system. Micron’s Client Pro line (its business-class line) is as well-built a PC as I’ve ever seen. The machine didn’t come as advertised, but it was still a good price for what I got: a 266 MHz Pentium II, 64 MB of RAM, a 4-gig Maxtor hard drive, a Lite-On CD-ROM drive of unspecified speed (it seems to be at least 24X), an Intel 10/100 PCI NIC, Nvidia Riva-based AGP video, an ISA Sound Blaster, and an ISA US Robotics 56K faxmodem.

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Spend your computer money on your monitor, not some hopped-up CPU

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

I read an editorial at Tom’s Hardware this morning that struck me as a bit unusual. Not only did it not mention Quake once (or Doom or whatever the FPS flavor of the week is today), it didn’t mention overclocking, and it wasn’t especially excited about AMD and Intel’s new CPU releases today.
In fact, it argued that by rushing out and buying those CPUs, all you’re doing is giving AMD and Intel an interest-free loan. You buy the chips now. The apps that need them will come later. And that, he said, is just plain wrong.

And I thought to myself: How is this any different from history? Yes, I’ll concede that every chip from the 486 up to, say, the chips of the gigahertz race was overdue. But let’s face it. When Gatermann’s dad needed a computer, we tracked down a used Dell P2-450. When a mutual friend’s sister went off to college, we tracked down another off-lease Dell, added a CD burner, and sent her on her way. If you know how to set a computer up right, it’s entirely possible to be plenty productive on a P2.

And the majority of people are mainly interested in using a computer to surf the Web, read e-mail, do some word processing, listen to MP3s and burn music CDs. For tasks like that, a P2 is, frankly, overkill.

When the first 386 PCs appeared in 1986, they were overkill. People were content with their 4.77 MHz XTs. Some of them had just gotten 6 or 8 MHz ATs, which were themselves overkill. Everyone seems to think the x86 series debuted in 1981. It didn’t. Intel released the 8088 in 1977. It was four years before the chip got mainstream use! (The 8086, after which the family is named, waited even longer.)

This industry has always been built with the bucks from the early adopters and enthusiasts. Always. And if you don’t want to play, nobody’s making you. I haven’t ordered my Athlon 64 yet.

It’s never made sense for me to be the first one on my block with the hottest new CPU. The same is true for most people I know. A lot of people would do well with a $150 used computer from one of these guys–click one of the links and scroll to the bottom and find a link that says “systems” or “desktop PCs”–and a really good keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Or if you want new, buy the cheapest PC available from a first-tier vendor you trust, then spend the money you would have spent on a 3 GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU on something that’s actually useful, like that thing you spend all that time staring at. Get a flat-panel LCD monitor that runs at a comfortable resolution. Ditch the $3 keyboard and mouse that comes with the system and buy nice(r) ones. (The best keyboards on the market bring sticker shock–I have trouble justifying a $150 computer keyboard too, I know.)

Chances are you’ll have money left over. Good. In two years the budget CPU will be faster than that P4 Extreme Edition that Intel is touting today. Start saving for 2005’s budget PC now. The monitor, keyboard, and mouse you just shelled out the big bucks for will still work with it, and you’ll be a lot happier.