An irreverent look at this day in history, April 3

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

In 1882, my fellow Missourian Jesse James was shot in the back of the head and killed by a man he’d recruited to help him rob a bank in Platte City. Rumors persist to this day that James faked his death, even though 1995 DNA analysis of the body buried in Kearney, Missouri under a headstone reading “Jesse James” proved 99.7% conclusive. A man named Frank Dalton died in Granbury, Texas at the age of 104 in 1951 and he claimed to his dying day that he was Jesse James. Dalton’s body was to be exhumed in 2000 for DNA analysis and the story was a media sensation that you might remember. You probably don’t remember the results, because a mismarked gravestone caused the body of a one-armed man who died in 1927 to be exhumed instead, and the body buried as “Jesse James, supposedly killed in 1882” has yet to be tested. Despite the 1995 tests, citizens of Gransbury and citizens of Kearney still argue over which of them has the real Jesse James.
In other news, Adolf Hitler, FDR, Abraham Lincoln and Elvis were last spotted playing cards together in Argentina.

In 1826, Boss Tweed was born. Tweed was the political boss of the Tammany Hall machine in New York City. Their motto: Vote early and often. Tweed’s downfall came when one of his own men felt he got shortchanged when the embezzled money was split up, so he ratted to the New York Times. Tweed was imprisoned twice, on criminal and then on civil charges. He escaped and fled to Spain in December 1875, only to be recognized (supposedly a series of famous political cartoons gave him away) and he was returned to New York, where he died in prison in 1878.

In 1783, Washington Irving was born. I’m sure you’ve read his Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow or seen at least one of the many movies or Scooby Doo episodes based on it.

In 1942 and 1944, singers Wayne Newton and Tony Orlando, respectively, were born. Branson, Missouri would never be the same.

Maintaining a healthy distance

Dave Farquhar Personal

Yesterday we managed to back up our 40 or so NT servers without incident for the first time in years. OK, months. It seemed like years. It wasn’t that long ago that I nearly woke up my neighbors after receiving my fourth 2-am backup failure phone call that week. As I walked through the hallway to fire up the laptop and log in, I pounded the wall in frustration and screamed, “Just once, let me sleep through the night without bothering me. Just once!”
Microsoft is my least favorite software company and has been for years. But once I had to deal with Backup Exec on a daily–who am I kidding?–nightly basis, Veritas quickly rocketed past Network Associates and Adobe to get the #2 spot.

To anyone else struggling with Backup Exec, I offer this bit of advice: Tell the first PHB who comes around that you’d be working on it if you weren’t busy talking to him or her, then take your phone off the hook and deal with the problem one backup job at a time. Better yet, narrow it down to one directory at a time. Keep in mind that Backup Exec seems to subscribe to the domino theory–one failure causes eight. OK, two or three. And if Backup Exec is flagging jobs as failures because it can’t back up the DHCP database, then exclude the DHCP database. If you have to do a restore and that file’s gone, the OS will regenerate it. It’s easier to explain that to the PHBs than it is repeated failures. If they insist on 100% identical hot backups, tell them they’re going to have to swallow hard and buy you a SAN with snapshot capability. If they don’t have $50,000 laying around, I can come up with creative ways to get it–eliminating a layer or two of management would probably pay for several SANs–but I don’t know of a tactful way to say that.

If I seem a bit disconnected these days, I am. A few weeks ago I realized I was letting a Microsoft lackey from Utah with all the class of that thing you find behind a horse’s tail set my agenda. And I decided I wouldn’t let him set my agenda, or anyone else, for that matter. And I quit looking at my site statistics. And I haven’t even looked at comments since Saturday.

Daily hits are nice, and they’re great for the ego. But prime time for writing used to start around 9 pm. That also happens to be the time when my girlfriend can call me for free. So guess what budged? I’ll adjust eventually, but that’s not all that’s changed. A year ago, I’d ask myself several times a week what I was going to write about the next day. I never ask myself that question anymore. Nowadays I sit down and write when I’ve found something interesting, or I do what I’m doing now–force myself to sit down and write something, anything.

And of course, on the nights when she comes over or we go out, I don’t write anything.

So I’m not writing my best-ever content these days, but it’s because I have other priorities. That includes keeping the girlfriend happy, but truth be told, I’m at least as happy writing a Wikipedia entry as I’ve ever been writing stuff here. So a lot of energy that would normally go here goes elsewhere. Cracking the upper ranks of Technorati or another blogging community just isn’t high on my priority list anymore, if it ever was.

But I’m still in my 20s, and I’m still just as moody as I’ve ever been. Everything’s subject to change with as little notice as St. Louis weather patterns.

I know this will be interpreted as me saying I quit, so let me make one thing clear: I don’t quit. I may or may not write something tomorrow (I probably will). But if I don’t, I’ll be back later in the week. And I might even read comments that time.

Good thing: It’s baseball season. Better thing: My Royals won

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , ,

Every time I turn on the radio or go online, I hear about how the Bush Dictatorship has plunged us into another Vietnam or how I’m a redneck just like everyone else who ever voted Republican. And at work, I’m buried in Backup Exec problems, a program so bad that it continues to make me think its main purpose for being written was industrial sabotage.
Am I glad it’s baseball season? You betcha. I need a distraction. Take your pick: baseball or booze. I’ll take baseball. It’s cheaper and healthier.

So we’re 12 days into this war and it’s another Vietnam. People seem to have forgotten it took us 6 weeks to drive the madman out of Kuwait. Did we really expect him to roll over and play dead when we hit his mother country?

And for some reason people seem to think appeasement is the way to go. A little over 60 years ago, people said the same thing about a guy named Adolf Hitler. You might have heard of him. Neither man had any qualms about overrunning their neighbors or killing their own people. Fortunately for us, they have comparable technology.

But I’m either preaching to the choir or a redneck. So I don’t think I wanna talk about it.

The Royals, on the other hand, I’ll talk about. They shut out the Chicago White Sox 3-0. That doesn’t happen often. Shutouts are rare in Kansas City anymore, especially against pennant contenders. And on opening day. Nice. New rookie closer Mike MacDougal got the save. That’s a good sign, because for the past four years or so, a three-run lead has been an adventure. You couldn’t count on Roberto Hernandez or Ricky Bottalico to hold that lead. There was a time when you could count on Jeff Montgomery, but not in his final season. So it’s been 1998 since a three-run lead in the 9th was a given.

And they did it in front of a sellout crowd at home. And visions of 1985 danced in Dave’s head. I know it’s too early to believe. But I think I’m gonna anyway. When it comes to baseball, I’m hopeless. I’ll grasp at anything that looks like you can hold onto it.

Sorry I’ve been away

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I meant to post last night, then I noticed nobody had written a Wikipedia entry for Daniel Pearl. I had to jump on that one. We’re talking about a guy who wrote a feature story about Iranian pop music and got it published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, folks. Who gets those kinds of ideas? And then gets them published in a venue like that?
OK, OK, getting it published on the front page of the WSJ isn’t quite the accomplishment it first seems–the WSJ seeks out stories like that to put on its front page to break up its notorious monotony. Still, this is one of the holy grails of journalism.

He also wrote a story about a Stradivarius violin being found on a highway on-ramp. That’s not something you hear about very often. The best story I ever heard like that was about someone finding a working Micron laptop on a highway on-ramp. The reason those things ended up on the on-ramp was the same: both of them allegedly were placed on top of a car before the driver absentmindedly forgot and drove off.

In the case of the Stradivarius, it’s also highly possible the thing was just stolen. In the case of the Micron laptop, it’s the theory of my coworkers that the guy who did it just wanted a new one and wasn’t quite as thrilled as everyone else when the laptop was returned to him in perfect working order. But, as usual, I digress.

There was a lot of drama surrounding the Daniel Pearl story. He was a highly-regarded WSJ bureau chief, chasing the trail of shoe bomber Richard Reid. He was kidnapped because he was an American Jew in a Muslim country. (Never mind that there’s every indication that to Pearl, being Jewish was just a label and he had no particular hatred of Arabs or Mohammedanism, and that Pearl was known at the WSJ for being one of its most outspoken critics of the U.S. government.) His loving wife was pregnant with their first child. That child was born several months later without a father. His grisly death was highly publicized because it was videotaped and released.

It’s easy to forget in all of that that Daniel Pearl was a human being, with a sense of humor and the unusual quirks you find and enjoy in your best friends.

So I had to jump at writing his story.

This is priceless

Dave Farquhar General ,

I don’t normally do this–wait, I’m doing two things I don’t normally do, namely, post to my blog at work and link to someone else’s blog without writing anything containing a hint of originality–but you’ve got to read Charlie’s entry for today.
And in typical blogger fashion, I’m going to point out that he forgot something. Or maybe I just know a way to infuriate him that nobody else has discovered yet. Or maybe it just infuriates me.

  • Every time the latest spyware-laden, blinky, annoying, whiz-bang novelty app you downloaded from the Internet doesn’t work, walk up to the first IT person you find and say, “You changed the firewall, didn’t you?”

    • Replacing wall warts with PC power supplies

    Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , ,

    I wrote a long, long time ago about my adventures trying to find a wall wart for my old 8-port Netgear dual-speed hub. The other day I stumbled across a novel idea for a replacement.
    I won’t rehash how you determine whether a unit is a suitable replacement–read the above link if you’re curious–but suffice it to say a $5 universal adapter from Kmart is fine for my answering machine or my cordless phone and can probably provide the 5 volts my Netgear needs, but my Netgear also needs 3 amps and the universal adapter I keep around can only deliver 20% of that. The beefiest 5v unit I could find at Radio Shack could only deliver 1.5 amps.

    A PC power supply delivers 5V and 12V on its hard drive connectors. And PC power supplies deliver plenty of amperage: one of mine will deliver 25 amps on its 5V line, and 10 amps on its 12V line.

    In a pinch, I could just obtain a suitable plug barrel that fits my Netgear from Radio Shack, clip the power connector off a dead CPU fan, and solder the plug to the red wire (5 volts) and a black wire (ground), put it in a PC, and use that to run my Netgear hub. The increased power draw would be equivalent to putting three typical PCI cards in the system. Just be sure to wire things right–reverse polarity can kill some devices.

    Rather than using one of the PCs I actually use, it would be better to obtain a cheap microATX case, short the green and one of the black wires on the 20-pin motherboard connector with a paper clip, insulate the paper clip with electrical tape, and then wire things up to the drive connectors. Or, for that matter, you could use some of the other leads available on the 20-pin connector if you have a device that needs 3.3 volts (pinout here.) You could also just use a bare ATX power supply with a paper clip connecting the green wire and one of the black wires on the 20-pin motherboard connector, if you’re into the ghetto look.

    An AT power supply would also work and it offers the advantage of being really cheap and common (here’s a nice writeup about an AT power supply’s capabilities), but most AT boxes require you to hook up enough 5-volt devices to chew up about 20% of its rating on that power rail before they’ll power up. I have a 200-watt AT power supply that delivers 20 amps on its 5-volt rail, so my 3-watt Netgear hub probably wouldn’t be quite enough on its own. So it might be necessary to either connect an obsolete motherboard to the power supply or connect a 1-ohm resistor between a +5 lead and ground, if you don’t have a plethora of power-hungry 5-volt devices to plug in.

    But PC power supplies provide a cheap and commonly available way to replace odd wall warts, or at the very least, to reduce the clutter around the computer room.

    The Abit BP6 and modern Linux distributions

    Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

    Mail from Dave T.: I bumped into a place that is selling a used, functional Abit BP6 and a 400MHz Celeron to go with it. I already got another 400 MHz Celeron so it would be perfect. I always wanted to try out SMP but so far I haven't thought it was worth it. Now I can buy this combo and make my dream come true 🙂
    I looked for reviews on the board but most of them were from 1999 and early 2000, when Linux was using kernel 2.2 and there also seemed to be problems with bios on the BP6 causing stability issues. None of the reviews were recent.

    Being a long time reader I remembered you talking about owning a BP6 and a quick search confirmed that you were running a dual 500MHz BP6. Do you still have it? If I buy the board then I’ll be running Linux of course so I was wondering if you do that as well? How well does it work? Stability? I know that processors in a dual configuration should have identical stepping. If the two are not the same stepping, do you think it will pose a problem? What power supply rating would you recommend for 2x400MHz Celerons?

    Thanks,

    /Dave T.

    The Abit BP6, for those who are unfamiliar with it, was a popular board among enthusiasts back at the turn of the millenium, because it was the first really cheap and easy SMP board. Prior to the BP6, to run dual Celerons you had to resort to some trickery, either soldering on slocket-type adapters or, later, playing with jumpers on them. The BP6 just allowed you to buy a pair of cheap Socket 370 Celerons and drop them on. A lot of people bought Celeron-366s and overclocked them to 550 MHz with this board.

    It’s been forever since I’ve mentioned my BP6 because I’ve never found it newsworthy. My main Linux workstation runs on an Abit BP6 with dual Celeron-500s (originally a pair of 366s, which I upgraded a couple of years ago). I bought the board in late 1999 or early 2000 and it’s still my second-fastest PC.

    I run Debian Unstable on it, running updates every month or two, so I’m running bleeding-edge everything on it most of the time. The kernel is either at 2.4.19 or 2.4.20. I’ve been running 2.4-series kernels on the BP6 pretty much since the 2.4 series came out, although I’ve changed distributions several times since then. The board has an Intel 440BX chipset, which used to be common as dirt, so I expect even 2.6 kernels and beyond won’t have problems with it.

    I haven’t updated the BIOS on my BP6 in years, if ever. I’ve found the system to be stable–the only problems I’ve ever had could easily be attributed to memory leaks. Things would get goofy, I’d run top, and I’d find XFree86 had several hundred megs of memory allocated to it. I’d kill X, and then the system would be fine. So the rare problems I have probably aren’t the board’s fault, but rather the fault of bleeding-edge software. I was confident enough in the system’s stability that this Web site ran on that system for several weeks and I never had problems.

    CPUs are supposed to be identical stepping. I’ve seen dual-CPU machines with different steppings work together without having any problems that I could directly attribute to the mismatch. It’s not a great idea and I wouldn’t run my enterprise on a mismatched system–although one of my clients does–but for hobbyist use at home at a bargain price, why not?

    As far as power supplies, I ran my BP6 with dual 500s on a 235W box in an emergency. It’s had a 300W box in it for most of its life, so I’d go with a 300W unit, or a 350W unit if you want to overengineer the box a little bit.

    Performance wise, I find it adequate but I run IceWM on it, and my primary browser is Galeon. Evolution runs fine on it. Some of the more resource-intensive desktop environments might pose a bit of a problem.

    As far as upgradability, if you don’t overclock, the fastest Celerons you can use are Celeron-533s. If you want to do dual processing, you’re limited to the Mendocino-core Celerons. Celerons faster than 366 MHz didn’t overclock well; the limit of the Mendocino core seems to have been around 550 MHz or so.

    Adapters to allow newer Celerons to work on the board ought to let you go higher (I haven’t tried it) but the newer Celerons have their SMP capability removed. So theoretically this board tops out at a 1.2 GHz Celeron with an adapter, but that pretty much defeats the purpose of getting a BP6. That’s also probably why they’re cheap when you can find them; the kinds of people who bought these boards in the first place aren’t going to be too happy with two CPUs in the 500 MHz range these days.

    But I’m pretty happy with mine. I’ll run it until it dies, and that’ll probably be a while.

    Slashdot just located another sleazy spammer

    Dave Farquhar Spam ,

    The Dayton Daily News ran a story today about another sleazy spammer. Naturally, it took Slashdot mere hours to dig up an address, based on clues from the article.
    The guy leads a lifestyle even more over the top than that described by R. Collins Farquhar IV and Jacques Pierre Cousteau Bouillabaise de Raunche de la Stenche: Sleep until 1, work for five hours cluttering your inbox and mine while holding a brandy snifter and wearing a silk kimono and leather slippers, then go out for a night on the town.

    If you’d like to, oh, I don’t know, send him a postcard from your hometown voicing your appreciation for what he does, click on the Slashdot link. Do a search for “Dayton.”

    Don’t even think about DogDoo.com. That’s harrassment.