Time for a core dump

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , ,

I’ve been keeping a low profile lately. That’s for a lot of reasons. I’ve been doing mostly routine sysadmin work lately, which is mind-numbingly boring to write about, and possibly just a little bit less mind-numbingly boring to read about. While a numb mind might not necessarily be a bad thing, there are other reasons not to write about it.
During my college career, I felt like I had less of a private life than most of my classmates because of my weekly newspaper column. I wrote some pretty intensely personal stuff in there, and frankly, it seemed like a lot of the people I hung out with learned more about me from those columns than they did from hanging out with me. Plus, with my picture being attached, I’d get recognized when I went places. I remember many a Friday night, going to Rally’s for a hamburger and having people roll down their windows at stoplights and talk to me. That was pretty cool. But it also made me self-conscious. College towns have some seedy places, you know, and I worried sometimes about whether I’d be seen in the vicinity of some of those places and what people might think.

Looking back now, I should have wondered what they would be doing in the vicinity of those places and why it was OK for them to be nearby and not me. But that’s the difference between how I think now and how I thought when I was 20.

Plus, I know now a lot fewer people read that newspaper than its circulation and advertising departments wanted anyone to think. So I could have had a lot more fun in college and no one would have known.

I’m kidding, of course. And I’m going off on tangent after tangent here.

In the fall of 1999, I willingly gave up having a private life. The upside to that is that writing about things helps me to understand them a lot better. And sometimes I get stunningly brilliant advice. The downside? Well, not everyone knows how to handle being involved in a relationship with a writer. Things are going to come up in writing that you wish wouldn’t have. I know now that’s something you have to talk about, fairly early. Writing about past girlfriends didn’t in and of itself cost me those relationships but I can think of one case where it certainly didn’t help anything. The advice I got might have been able to save that relationship; now it’s going to improve some as-yet-to-be-determined relationship.

There’s another downside too. When you meet a girl and then she punches your name into a search engine, if you’re a guy like me who has four years’ worth of introspective revelations out on the Web, it kind of puts you at a disadvantage in the relationship. She knows a whole lot more about you than you do about her. It kind of throws off the getting-to-know-you process. I’d really rather not say how many times that’s happened in the past year. Maybe those relationships/prospective relationships were doomed anyway. I don’t have any way of knowing. One of them really hurt a lot and I really don’t want to go through it again.

So I’ve been trying to figure out for the past few weeks what to do about all this. Closing up shop isn’t an option. Writing strictly about the newest Linux trick I’ve discovered and nothing else isn’t an option. Writing blather about the same things everyone else is blathering about is a waste of time and worthless. Yes, I’ve been saying since March that much, if not all, of the SCO Unix code duplicated in Linux is probably BSD code that both of them ripped off at different points in time. And now it’s pretty much been proven that I was right. So what? How many hundreds of other people speculated the same thing? How could some of us be more right than others?

I’m going to write what I want, but I’m having a hard time deciding what I want to write. I know I have to learn how to hold something back. Dave Farquhar needs a private life again.

For a while, this may just turn into a log of Wikipedia entries I made that day. Yes, I’m back over there again, toiling in obscurity this time. For a while I was specializing in entries about 1980s home computing. For some reason when I get to thinking about that stuff I remember a lot, and I still have a pile of old books and magazines so I can check my facts. Plus a lot of those old texts are showing up online now. So now the Wikipedia has entries on things like the Coleco Adam and the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Hey, I find it interesting to go back and look at why these products were failures, OK? TI should have owned the market. It didn’t. Coleco should have owned the market, and they didn’t. Atari really should have owned the market and they crashed almost as hard as Worldcom. So how did a Canadian typewriter company end up owning the home computer market? And why is it that probably four people reading this know who on earth I’m talking about now, in 2003? Call me weird, but I think that’s interesting.

And baseball, well, Darrell Porter and Dick Howser didn’t have entries. They were good men who died way too young, long before they’d given everything they had to offer to this world. Roger Maris didn’t have an entry. There was more to Roger Maris than his 61 home runs.

The entries are chronicled here, if you’re interested in what I’ve been writing lately while I’ve been ignoring this place.

A worthwhile link for Christians wanting to stay in touch with the rest of the world

Dave Farquhar Christianity

One of the seminarians from my church pointed me to a Christian pop-culture magazine this past week: Relevant.
For a Christian Gen-X type like me, it seems like a good mag. Christians need to be different from the rest of the world, a point Pastor brought home in his sermon this morning, but if we totally cut ourselves off from it, we’re not doing what God told us to do. You can’t reach the world if you can’t relate at all to it. So you have to walk the line between understanding and immersion.

It talks about and reviews both contemporary Christian and secular music, and its recommended movies list hit home.

It’s no substitute for going to church or other resources for living the Christian life; I think of it as a Details-like magazine that’s more sensitive to my beliefs. But that’s certainly welcome.

At the request of a friend: Your thoughts on feeding tubes?

Dave Farquhar General

A longtime friend asked me (along with a couple of other friends) for an opinion on the ethics of using feeding tubes as life support.
I have a lot more problem with taking a tube away than I do with giving one in the first place, personally. If a person is, as my dad used to say, “that warm blob over there, which shows no brain activity and no response to stimulus,” then it’s a non-issue. Pull the tube, let go, and let the person go. To me, that’s not a gray area.

Whether you give the tube in the first place is another question. The answer, for me, if it’s me, is yes, but I’m a fighter. If something has a one in a million chance of working, I take it, so I don’t ever regret not having taken that chance. So in my case, give me what I need in order to be able to fight.

I have a lot less problem with not giving the tube in the first place than I do with giving the tube and then taking it away later. Unless the person stops being a viable life form.

But that’s just me.

She’s looking for other opinions. Anyone else have any?

Don’t argue amongst yourselves; if this turns into an all-out war, I close the thread and I post absolutely nothing to the site for the rest of the month. Just post your opinions. I hope I made that clear.

Shrinking Windows 9x

Dave Farquhar Windows

There seems to be a competition to see how small one can make Windows 9x and have it still boot into a GUI. The latest salvo in this war reduces Win98SE to under 5 megs.
People brag about how fast Windows runs when you do this. Well, yeah! Look at the file listing and the most crowded directory is 28 entries. I’ve seen 1,000+ files in C:\Windows at times. Since FAT is very efficient when dealing with small numbers of files (MS themselves said in the DOS 5 manual to never put more than 100 files in a directory) but inefficient when not, it’s no wonder to me that Windows, cut down this much, can boot in seconds. A computer’s disk is its biggest bottleneck, and the FAT filesystem doesn’t help.

The only problem is, as far as I can tell, Windows cut this small has no networking capabilities or anything else interesting besides a GUI. Which raises the question: Whatcha gonna do with it now? These days, an OS without Internet connectivity and some means to print isn’t very useful to anyone. I know that eliminates two of the three reasons I wanted a computer in the first place.

The battle of unforgiveness

Dave Farquhar Personal

I’m writing this for me. If it helps you, great.
The concept of generational sin is something that I take very seriously and something that has great potential to affect the people around me in unpleasant ways. I think I can say without offending anybody that my grandfather wasn’t as faithful to my grandmother as he should have been, and that his son, my Dad, was an alcoholic.

Well, when I’m dating someone I can’t look at another girl without feeling guilty about it, and alcohol does nothing for me. I’d much rather have a cup of coffee. So I think my future wife and kids are safe from those. Unfortunately, I’ve been blinded by pride or something else, because I totally missed my signature sin. And it’s a serious one.

Unforgiveness.

Unforgiveness is serious because it destroys relationships, but if that wasn’t enough, it’s one of only two sins that’s absolutely, positively guaranteed to keep you out of heaven. Matthew 6:14-15 states that if we don’t forgive the people who sin against us, God won’t forgive us either. Remember that line in The Lord’s Prayer? “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” A modern translation would say, “And forgive my sins the same way I forgive people who sin against me.” (The other, if you’re curious, is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, which, I think, means to totally reject God and God’s work. The notes I have jotted down next to that verse in my veteran NIV Bible read, “If you’re afraid you might have, then you know you didn’t.” I recall The Rev. Dr. LaBore–yes, that was his name, and yes, he did bore some students, but I found him interesting–saying in Theology class some 11 years ago that it’s impossible for a Christian to blaspheme the Holy Spirit.)

Back to the topic: The really frightening thing to me is that I’ve walked people through the process of dealing with this before. I can teach what I have difficulty doing. Yes, that’s every bit as wrong as finding out your teacher can’t read and your preacher doesn’t pray and your president has no soul.

My unforgiveness manifests itself as bitterness. It doesn’t happen all the time. I’m pretty forgiving of minor stuff. I don’t yell at other drivers very often and it’s been years since I’ve given another driver the finger. In a recent softball game the pitcher, covering home plate, applied the tag harder than he thought he should have. I didn’t even notice. Not counting telemarketers, I’ve only hung up the phone on someone twice in my life. One was a college newspaper editor. I don’t remember who the other person was.

So I handle the small stuff pretty well. But if you injure me seriously, that’s usually another story.

I’ll tell you how I found out about this. I was out with my sister and we stopped in a store that sells a lot of beer memorabilia. At one point, she turned to me and asked me what was wrong, because I looked really miffed. I wasn’t comfortable there, but consciously, I wasn’t mad or anything. Then I realized there’ve been two other times this year that I was around something that really glorified alcohol and someone thought I was really mad when I wasn’t.

My dad was an alcoholic. I believe that his drinking contributed to his early death. His drinking absolutely affected our relationship. I never knew when I came home if I’d meet Cool Dad or Obnoxious Dad. I didn’t like having friends over because I didn’t know which of my Dads they’d see. And I think my relationship (or lack of one) with Dad has something to do with why I’m an extreme introvert, which has always made it a lot harder for me to make friends with guys and to talk to girls. At least on some level I know I blame him for it. After all, if my own father didn’t want to talk to me, why would a stranger?

There’s some baggage associated with alcohol.

Unfortunately, I’ve projected Dad onto other people. Remember what I said about unforgiveness destroying relationships? It doesn’t just destroy the relationship with the person who committed the sin. It can destroy relationships with people who remind you of that person too. Even if the attributes they share with that person are the good ones.

There are other red flags, but I think I’ve proved my point that unforgiveness can easily turn a respected, accomplished man into a pathetic wreck.

How to know if you’re harboring unforgiveness? Well, there are my earlier examples. Or negative thoughts that always get associated with a person. Going out of the way to avoid a certain person. Those are possible signs.

So what to do about it? In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis recommends practice, and he recommends practicing on things that are easy to forgive. I remember his advice being not to start off by trying to forgive Nazi Germany. Start by forgiving Camaro Boy for gunning it and cutting you off making a right turn in front of you from the left lane on your way home from work.

But I don’t think that’s enough. It’s been a long time since I’ve had difficulty forgiving people like Camaro Boy and Van Boy and Truck Boy and the other people seemingly bent on destruction that I encounter on my way to and from work. And yet I still had difficulty forgiving my own father.

Sometimes it helps to know what forgiveness is and isn’t.

What forgiveness is: It’s accepting the pain that someone has caused you, and giving up your right to retaliation. You hand it over to the proper authorities. In some cases that’s the legal system. Sometimes that’s God.

What forgiveness isn’t: It’s not forgetting, it’s not ignoring it, it’s not acting like it didn’t happen, and, contrary to what it feels like, it isn’t letting the person off scot-free.

I’ve heard the saying: What goes around comes around. That’s almost Biblical. Deuteronomy 32:35 reads as follows: “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. I will repay.” (I wonder how many pastors stay up nights worrying what to do if someone picks that as a confirmation verse?) God forgives our sins, but God doesn’t necessarily shield us from the consequences of them. And God knows the proper balance of justice and mercy. We may think we know our offenders, but only God knows what our offenders are living with, so only God can truly hand out what’s appropriate.

But I know what forgiveness is, and I’ve practiced on the small stuff. How do you forgive when you still just can’t? See Philippians 4:13. It reads: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

When I finally noticed the problem, I didn’t have to pray that God would make me want to forgive Dad. But that might be a good first step, for those times when we just don’t want to. I already wanted to forgive, because, well, it’s my Dad. That’s reason enough, let alone I’d had enough of the consequences of not doing it for all these years. So I prayed that God would enable me to forgive Dad. That’s a prayer that I can know God will answer affirmatively, because what I’m doing is asking God to enable me to do what He told me to do.

I came up with this exercise a number of years ago. It may help. I’ll close with it.

Picture that person that you just can’t forgive. Put that person on trial in your mind. The crime doesn’t matter, because the punishment is crucifixion: the most painful, vile, slow death ever concocted by mankind. And of course the person is guilty, because you’ve been harboring the unforgiveness. You’re fair, aren’t you? Watch the condemned carry the cross down the street, the crowd on either side, mocking, taunting. Watch as that person collapses under the weight of the cross. Two soldiers unstrap it, and they pull some guy out of the crowd. He looks vaguely familiar. They make that guy carry it. Slowly, the two of them march down the street and up the hill. The soldiers take the crossbeam and put the cross together. One of the soldiers beckons for you to come up the hill. He hands you a hammer and a big nail and asks if you’d like to drive the first one. And as the other soldier grabs the condemned, the man who carried the cross speaks.

“Wait! I’ll go instead.”

The soldiers give one another a puzzled look and mouth the words, “Did he just say he’d go instead?”

Then he lays down on the cross and looks at you. “Whenever you’re ready.”

And then you recognize the man. It’s Jesus.

Jesus finished your unfinished business and mine nearly 2,000 years ago.

Fiction again

Dave Farquhar General

I find myself wanting to take three weeks’ vacation all at once and go somewhere far, far away–I’m trying to think of who my farthest-flung relatives are these days–and write a novel. I could emulate F. Scott Fitzgerald and rework, yet again, the same tired novel I first started writing my freshman year of college. Or I could try something new.
I know I would rework that same old one again. But I know it would be no This Side of Paradise. The stolen character names from “Babylon Revisited” and the title lifted from the part of the story I remember best probably won’t be enough to save it.

I see myself now, sitting in an upper room with the window open, looking outside at the trees, listening to The Cure too much, insanity creeping over me, coloring my words, which get better and better the more I lose my grip on reality, until finally the work is finished and I (maybe) snap back.

In the end, it would purely to say I did it. (At first I was going to say it would be therapeutic, but that’s certainly debatable.) Publishing fiction is tough. Fitzgerald wallpapered a wall of his apartment with rejection letters. In this day and age of readily available word processors, there’s a much larger pool of talent competing. Making time to write is easy for me. Making time to publish is something else altogether.

But it would be fun.

I’ll place my bets on one thing: If it were published, it would sell better in Trinidad than in the States.

A few words from Dave the Bloody Pulp after learning about NT software RAID

Dave Farquhar Windows

I’ve worked 26 hours so far this week. I’d say I hope there’s an end in sight, but then again I hoped to leave work at 3:30 this afternoon and that didn’t happen. I’m gonna go read a book and try not to think about work or much of anything else.
I learned something today. I learned that it’s possible for NT4 software RAID (mirroring) to cause a bluescreen and immediate reboot loop on bootup. Funny how the thing that’s supposed to make the server reliable can make it unbootable. One of my colleagues and I figured it out after about three hours of messing around with a downed server. An NT repair install failed; after loading a device driver for the SCSI card, it would refuse to see the drives. At one point we booted the thing up with only one of the drives present (accidentally, I think) and it started. And then we accidentally booted it up with the other one. And that was how we learned that the system was mirrored. The system was set up by some other consulting shop, in case you’re wondering why we didn’t know our own server.

And I’m sure that even a tyro (ahem) knows this about NT4 software RAID, but seeing as I’ve only ever done hardware mirroring, personally, with NT4 (and it’s been six years since I did software striping with it), it’s new to me.

Nothing in the event logs gave any indication what corrupted the mirror, but we broke and recreated the mirror and the server’s been fine.

And maybe this isn’t a tyro problem, because the configuration was unusual. There were two drives and two SCSI host adapters in the mirror. It should make it even more reliable that way, theoretically. But it didn’t turn out that way.

I’m gonna go read a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. That ought to take my mind of things.

1997 again: Spending an evening with White Light, White Heat, White Trash

Dave Farquhar Music

So, the other day Gatermann and I were headed out for pizza–if you’re ever in St. Louis and in the mood for pizza, Fortel’s is your place–and he had the local alternateen station on the radio (105.7), and to my shock and amazement, they quit playing Bush and Linkin Park and Bush and Korn and Bush long enough to play an old Social Distortion song.
And I must interrupt myself again. If you’re ever in St. Louis and you’re into modern and/or eclectic music and need a decent radio station to listen to, start with 89.1 and 93.3.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah. 105.7 was playing Social D. I’d forgotten about Social Distortion so long ago that I struggled to remember the name of the band. “The lead singer’s name is Mike Ness,” I said. And halfway through the song I remembered Social D. “Real punk,” I said.

“Now what’s wrong with Green Day?” Gatermann asked me. I’ll have to point out that his tone was joking, otherwise I’ll end up with four tires with no air in them. So let me make one thing loud and clear: GATERMANN DOES NOT LIKE GREEN DAY, FOR THE RECORD!

Well, what’s wrong with Green Day is that punk was supposed to be three chords and an attitude. Green Day’s got the three-chords bit down, but the attitude… Billy what’s-his-name just sings about being slackers. Mike Ness is always worked up about something.

So tonight I threw in White Light White Heat White Trash and gave it a listen, all the way through, for the first time in a long time. I know I’ve ripped a choice few tracks, like “I Was Wrong” and “Down Here With the Rest of Us” into MP3 form and listened to them a lot, but I don’t think I’ve sat down with the album since college. Suddenly it was like it was the summer of 1997 again and everything was OK. And the songs I didn’t like then, I liked just fine now. I’ve lived enough to understand them now. Critics didn’t like the album all that much. Maybe if they bottomed out a few times and had God pick them back up again, maybe, just maybe, they’d like it better.

Fortunately for me, bottom isn’t nearly as deep for me as it was for Ness.

And then I got curious and did a web search. I wanted some insight into Mike Ness’ lyrics. How autobiographical were they? Were they just words to him, or did he live them? And I found a quote. Something he said to the Los Angeles Times, apparently. It’s one for the quote wall.

“It used to be, ‘Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.’ Now I want to live to be 100. I don’t want to leave my kids without a dad.”

A day of catching up

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , ,

I might finally have reliable DSL. Gatermann and I spent a good part of the day cleaning up my phone wiring. The wiring appeared to have been done by someone who couldn’t make up his mind how he wanted to do it. Seeing as I had two jacks that didn’t work anyway, and I own exactly three telephones plus an answering machine, we pulled out a number of the runs altogether (the wires are still there, just not hooked up at the box). And we cleaned up some oxidation that had shown up on some of the lines that were there.
My DSL connection does seem to be more reliable as a result. We’ll see in time how it turns out, but I know the brief storm we had tonight would normally knock me off the ‘net, and I haven’t fallen off yet since we did the work.

We also rebuilt a system. I’ve been intending to rebuild this one for some time (I pulled the case out of storage months ago) but never got around to it. Anymore, it seems like it’s a lot more fun to mess with other people’s computer projects than with my own. Anyway, we pulled out the system that served up this web site up until about a year or so ago (a Celeron on one of the last of the AT motherboards, a socket 370 job from Soyo), removed it from the old Micron case I’d put it in, and we put it in a monster server case, a former Everex 486/33. It’s a really good-looking case–battleship gray with black drives. And it’s built like a battleship too–very heavy gauge steel. It was pretty funny when we pulled out the full AT motherboard that had been in there and installed the Soyo, which is even smaller than what we used to call baby AT. We installed my CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives and a few other bits and pieces, and… an ISA video card. Yes, I’m sick. I was out of PCI slots and I loaned the AGP video card for the system (a Radeon 7000) to Steve last week and won’t be able to meet up with him to get it back until Wednesday at the earliest. I am half tempted to go ISA for either the sound or network card for the time being in order to free a PCI slot for an Nvidia Riva 128 card I have kicking around. It would be a big improvement. The screen writes remind me of BBSing; the text comes onto the screen at a rate somewhere between what I remember 300 bps and 1200 bps looking like.

But then again, what I want this system for (primarily) is to do things like burn CDs, and I don’t need superfast video for that. And I don’t know that I’m going to be burning anything between now and then.

Yes, I know, catch-up days are terribly exciting to read about.

But somewhere around here I think I have some stuff I wrote last week and never posted. I’ll have to see if I can find it to post tomorrow.

How to remember lots and lots of stuff

Dave Farquhar Health , , ,

I’ve been slogging away in nostalgiaville, writing obscure stuff over at Wikipedia again (once an addict, always an addict, even if the addiction hurts you), and I started wondering about something. Why is 20 years ago easier for me to remember than last week?
I think there are two reasons for that, but if I go off exploring those, I’ll never get back on track. I stumbled across a web site today called Supermem. It extols the virtues of repetition for memory. It’s really heavy reading and not terribly eloquent, at least I don’t think. I think the author’s strategy is showing off how much stuff he can remember and trying to make you jealous, in the meantime arguing that even ordinary people, given enough knowledge, can become geniuses. And maybe the people he cites in his stories are examples of people who became geniuses through knowledge.

And I’ve mostly summed up what he spent pages and pages saying.

The basic premise is that knowledge isn’t everything but it sure can add value to anything else you have, and from the outside, sometimes knowledge can look like everything. But we forget lots of things. The key to remembering things is repetition. The hard part is coming up with a strategy for repetition that works.

Of course he has a solution. As you might have guessed, he wants to sell you something. In this case, it’s a piece of commercial software.

The only reason I didn’t scramble for the back button right then and there was because old versions of the program–specifically, the DOS and Win3.1 versions–are now public domain. And the program inspired a similar Linux program called Memaid. So you can try it out without spending any money.

So here’s how it works. Take some things you don’t want to forget, then figure out how to phrase them in the form of a question. Then you enter those things into the program. It drills you. And it figures out how often you need to repeat something in order to retain it.

The idea is to establish a pattern. Seek out things you won’t want to forget. Then figure out how to restate those things in Q&A form. Enter them into the program, then spend 30 minutes a day with the program. If you do both–learn at least one new thing every day and drill on the old stuff–you’ll accumulate a body of knowledge.

Here are a couple of examples from my job:

Q: What’s the optimal Linux command to create/write images of floppy disks? (The device name will vary in other Unix-like environments)
A: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=(filename) bs=18k
dd if=(filename) of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k

Q: What’s the DOS command to rewrite the boot record on a hard drive that won’t boot or has been corrupted by a boot-sector virus?
A: fdisk /mbr

Q: What’s the web site I can go to in order to find the geographic location of an IP address?
A: www.networldmap.com

And I would do well to add some specific questions to the list as well, such as, “What’s the primary nameserver at our Sunset Hills office?”

So if you want to sound like William F. Buckley Jr. and not come off like an idiot–like one person I know who likes to pepper the dictionary.com word of the day into everything he can, except he frequently misspells or misuses it–add that. If your goal is to lose as many coolness points as possible, put things like Vanilla Ice’s real name in there. If I’d known about this program when I was in college, I’d have put my Spanish vocabulary words and verb conjugations in there, and today I’d be able to say more than just hablo pocísimo español without embarrassing myself. (And for all I know, you’re not supposed to put the -ísimo suffix on poco and when I do it, I come off like someone who would say no sabo. OK, so I guess I do remember a little Spanish, but not enough to hold much of a conversation.)

It’s an interesting idea. I think I’m going to give it more than just a try.

Putting every question I ask Charlie (along with the answer) in there would be a good start.