Getting back into business…

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

My mail’s working again. My mail server problems seem to be mostly solved. It was indeed a hardware problem–with my Linksys router. My mail server couldn’t talk to the outside world, and my Windows boxes couldn’t talk to (couldn’t even ping) the mail server. But my Web server could. But since my Web server is a Web server, it doesn’t have a mail client on it. Oh well. So I pulled the plug on the Linksys router, called it a few names, then plugged it back in. Soon I had a flood of mail, telling me all about how I can make $5K a month online, get high legally, drive my Web counter ballistic, get out of debt… And a really weird one: I love you and I don’t want you to die! I had to check that one. Weight-loss spam. Hmm. I guess that spammer doesn’t know that if I lost 40 pounds, I probably would die…
You know, I wonder if maybe I liked my mail server better when it didn’t work. Nah. There was some legit stuff buried in it, and I’m slowly replying to it all.

The funeral was yesterday. Since I wasn’t quite the only one who had trouble figuring out when to sit and when to stand, I take it I wasn’t the only Protestant there. It was a very nice service.

And there’s this, courtesy of Dan… He sent me the first installment in a series about using Linux as a thin client. Well, technically, I suppose the machines he’s describing are fat clients, since they do have some local storage. No importa. Dan asked if I’ve made this point before. I think I have. I know I started to make it in my second book, The Linux Book You’ll Never Read, but it was cancelled before I started on the research to tell how to implement it.

So here’s the story. You get yourself a big, honkin’ server. Go ahead and go all out. I’m talking dual CPUs, I’m talking 60K RPM Ultra1280 SCSI drives (OK, you can settle for 15K RPM Ultra320 SCSI, since that’s all they make), I’m talking a gig or two of RAM if you’ve got the slots–build a powerhouse.

Then you go round up the dinkiest, sorriest bunch of PCs you can find. Well, actually, since video performance is fairly important, the ideal system would be a P100 with 24 MB RAM, a fairly nice PCI video card, a smallish hard drive, and a network card. The most important component is the video card, far and away. The fat clients connect to your network and run applications off that honkin’ server. The apps run on the server and display on the fat client. Data is stored on the applications server.

Yes, you’ll want a good sysadmin to keep that honkin’ applications server happy. But desktop support virtually ceases to exist. When you have problems with your PC, someone comes, swaps out the unit, and you get back to work. You’re supposed to have one desktop support guy for every 25 end users (in reality most places have one for every 75). That’s 40,000 smackers plus benefits annually for an army of people whose job it is to make sure NT keeps running right. These people are expensive, hard to find, and if they’re any good, even harder to keep.

Move to fat clients, and you can probably replace desktop support with one desktop support guy (to play Dr. Frankenstein on the dead systems and support the remaining few who can’t get by with a fat client) and a kick-butt sysadmin.

Troubleshooting a flaky PC

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting ,

After church on Wednesday, Pastor pointed at me. “I need to talk to you,” he mouthed. That’s usually not a good sign, but I hadn’t done anything too stupid lately, so I figured he probably didn’t want to talk about me. I was right. His computer was flaking out.
Having, at that point, nothing to go on, I suggested he run SFC.EXE, which scans system files for corruption. It flagged a few files, including user.exe. This isn’t always indicative of a problem, but it can be. I had him go ahead and replace the files it flagged. He called me and we walked through the process, then the computer just crashed. Bluescreen, in the kernel. Constant spontaneous crashes were the norm now. And the error messages were never the same, he said.

He asked what causes these things. I told him if I knew precisely, I’d be able to write a book that’d sell a whole lot more copies than my last one. Microsoft doesn’t even know why Windows does these things sometimes.

At one point he got an error message that said, in essence, to reinstall Windows. I told him I could walk him through it, but at that point I’d be more comfortable seeing it myself.

So that was what I did yesterday. The computer booted up fine, and I couldn’t find anything wrong. So we tried going online. That flaked out–the modem couldn’t connect and just gave false busy signals. I brought up HyperTerminal, tried dialing my own phone number with it, and the system crashed. Bluescreen. Kernel. OK, so I reinstalled Windows. It crashed during the installation.

Several things can cause that. I jumped straight to memory. Opening the case, I saw several possibilities. No-name Eastern Rim power supply. A microATX motherboard with the notorious SiS 530 chipset. I told him I’d run a diagnostic on it. Just to be on the safe side, I pulled the memory. It wasn’t commodity memory–it was an Apacer module. Apacer isn’t the best but it’s far from the worst. I cleaned the module’s contacts with a dollar bill, then put it back in and turned the system on to see if Windows could pick up where it left off. Note that I didn’t replace the case cover. An experienced tech never does that. Why not? I noticed something the minute I turned on the power. The CPU fan wasn’t turning. I found the problem. The dead CPU fan, incidentally, was a Vantec. No, not Antec–Vantec. It was a ball-bearing fan, and Vantec is fairly reputable, so this fan just died before its time. It happens sometimes.

So it appeared the crashes were due to overheating.

The local CompUSA didn’t have a single Pentium/K6/Mendocino Celeron CPU fan in stock. Bummer, because the marked price on an Antec was $13. So I went to Best Bait-n-Switch, where I found an Antec fan, made in Taiwan (good), for $15. This one had a drive connector, and I’d have preferred one with a motherboard connector, and I’d have preferred a slightly bigger heatsink, but it was all they had, it was bigger than the part it was replacing, and I wanted something right then and there. I bought it, brought it back, swapped it in, and the computer booted up fine, and finished Windows installation without a problem. I even ran Defrag afterward, since that’s pretty taxing on the whole system. I let it go for half an hour without a single hiccup. Problem solved, apparently.

It’s nice when you can tell someone it wasn’t anything they did, that it was a hardware problem. And a CPU fan is a pretty cheap item.

Sorcerer: An easier way to get Linux your way

Dave Farquhar Linux , ,

I’ve talked about Linux From Scratch before, and I like how it gives you just what you want, compiled how you want, by your system, for your system, but it doesn’t actually give you a very useful system in the end.
Sure, you’ve got a text-based system with all the standard Unix utilities, and it boots like greased lightning, but there’s still a fair bit of configuration you have to do afterward. And the attitude of the committee that wrote it seems to be that if the documentation to do something exists elsewhere, it shouldn’t be repeated there. Speaking as a published author, I don’t agree with that absolute. Sure, a table listing DOS commands and their Unix equivalents is out of place in that kind of book, because that’s non-essential for getting a working system. But the two paragraphs required to tell you how to get your network card configured isn’t a big deal. Just do it!

I could spend way too much time ragging on the project, and it wouldn’t accomplish anything productive. Linux From Scratch is a fabulous way to learn a lot about the inner workings of a Linux system, and it’s an opportunity few, if any, other operating systems give you. And I guess since it makes you work so hard and look in other places for information, you learn more.

But if your main goal is a lean, mean system built the way you want it, rather than education, and you’re willing to give up a little control, there’s another way: Sorcerer Linux.

For Sorcerer, you download an ISO image that contains the essentials like a kernel, file utilities, a C compiler, and necessary libraries, all compiled for i586. This gives a good balance of compatibility and performance. When you install it, it compiles a kernel for your system, then it copies everything else to the drive.

The heart of Sorcerer is a set of shell scripts that automatically downloads current versions of software, checks dependencies, and compiles and installs them for you. It’s not as convenient or as polished as RPM, but it’s usable and the benefits, of course, are tremendous. You get the newest, most secure, most stable (and, usually, fastest) versions of the software you need, compiled for your particular architecture rather than the lowest common denominator.

I had some trouble installing Sorcerer at first. I found that after compiling the kernel, I had to answer Yes to the question, “Edit /etc/lilo.conf?” and make a change. The default /boot parameter didn’t work for my system. I had to change it from /devices/discs/disc0/part7 to /devices/discs/disc0/disc.

To avoid having to recompile the kernel over and over to get to that menu option that let me edit LILO’s parameters, here’s what I did:

chroot /mnt/root
mount -t devfs /devices /devices
nano /etc/lilo.conf
lilo -f
exit

Sorcerer doesn’t currently have spells (sorcerers cast spells, therefore, Sorcerer packages are called spells, get it?) for every package under the sun, but most of the essentials are covered. I’ll have to write spells for a few of my faves and contribute them.

Some day…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , ,

It was some day. And someday I’ll get a clue. I had a major confrontation at work today, though it was with someone who never did like me all that much. Everyone who’s heard the story says she was being unreasonable. But I just can’t help but notice one thing: Every major confrontation I’ve ever had in the workplace during my professional career has been with an older woman. By “older,” I mean 20+ years my senior.
I don’t like that pattern.

On a brighter note… I was quoted on CNET! It’s Linux’s 10th birthday, so CNET solicited some opinions. A lot of people said Linux can overtake Microsoft, an equal number said no way, but I don’t think anyone said what would have to take place for it to happen.

Essentially, I said someone with an anti-Microsoft chip on its shoulder would have to bundle Linux and StarOffice, already configured and ready to go (meaning it boots straight to a desktop when you turn it on–no setup questions or license agreements whatsoever), price it at $349, and make it available in places people normally shop.

That’s not the only scenario that I see working, but it’s the one that’d work best. History states people will sacrifice the status quo if the price is right–Commodore and Atari mopped up the floor of the home market with Apple and IBM for most of the 1980s, because they gave you twice the computer for half the money. It’d be impossible to do that today, but if someone with name recognition (say, Oracle or Sun) stamped its name on Taiwanese-made clones (made by, say, Acer or FIC) and got into the distribution channel, pricing it below an eMachine and using an ad campaign like, “We made performance computing affordable for big businesses. Now we’re making it affordable for you,” they’d stand a chance. They’d probably need to go outside the company to run the operation. Maybe Jack Tramiel, a veteran of both Commodore and Atari, could be coaxed out of retirement.

What about applications? An awful lot of home users live with Microsoft Works. StarOffice is better. Internet access? Take a cue from the iMac and stick an icon on the desktop that signs you up for Earthlink. Games? There are tons of open-source games available for Linux. Include any and every game that doesn’t crash XFree86. Cut a deal with Loki to include demo versions of all their games, and maybe the full version of an older title. Loki needs the exposure anyway. Digital imaging? Include The Gimp, along with drivers that talk with a certain type of digital camera. Include a coupon for a decent-sized discount off that camera.

It won’t dominate the market, but I can see it grabbing a decent-sized chunk. It’d do everything a small percentage of the population needs to do, and it would do it cheaply and reliably and quickly.

Will it happen? I doubt it. It’s a risk. For a company to be able to pull this off, this operation has to have little or nothing to do with the company’s core business. Shareholders don’t like ventures that have nothing to do with your core business. As much as Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison hate Microsoft, I don’t think they’re willing to risk hundreds of millions of dollars just to try to steal a couple million sales from Microsoft each year. The company that does it would have to have name recognition, but it’d be best if the general public didn’t know exactly what they sell. A company like IBM or HP couldn’t do it, because they can’t afford to offend Microsoft, and the general public expects an IBM or HP computer to run Windows apps.

What God has to say when someone in your familiy just died

Dave Farquhar Christianity

One of my best friends called me last night with news you never want to hear.
“Dave, is this a bad time?”

“No.”

“My mom died yesterday.”

Like there’s such thing as a bad time for news like that. Wait. There’s never a good time for news like that, but you’ve always got time for a friend with news like that. I don’t care if it’s Game 7 of the World Series, bottom of the 9th, two out, the bases are loaded, my team’s down by a run, I’m due up and I’m the team’s superstar. Sorry, Mr. Manager, I know the team needs me but you’d better get a pinch hitter ready because I’ve got a friend who needs me more.

What she needed, besides someone who would listen, was a trio of Bible verses for her mom’s funeral mass. I guess I was the logical person to call, because her dad asked who she was talking to, and then he must have asked something like, “Why’d you call him?” because she said, “Because he’s putting together a Bible study for tomorrow night.”

Actually at the time my phone rang, I was laying on my futon thinking about cleaning off my coffee table–hard drives are not appropriate coffee table decoration, and you don’t have to be Martha Stewart to know that–but I did spend some time putting together a Bible study, yes.

After a little digging, we came up with some stuff. And that’s how Protestant Boy here ended up injecting his two cents’ worth into a funeral mass.

“Somewhere in the Bible, it says, ‘Fight the good fight,'” she said.

“That’s St. Paul if I’ve ever heard him,” I thought as I got out my concordance. It was an easy find: 1 Timothy 6:12.

The books of 1 and 2 Timothy are really cool books, because Paul was well along in years when he wrote them–2 Timothy may have been the last thing Paul wrote before he died. Timothy was a dear friend, about 30 years Paul’s junior, so Paul regarded Timothy as the son he never had. So these two books read like a father’s last words to his son–“Since I don’t have much time left, let me make sure I say these last things to you now,” you can hear Paul saying.

A mother-daughter relationship has similarities to that, and Jeanne’s mom spent the majority of her life fighting the good fight. I wasn’t about to suggest any other verse.

For the gospel lesson, there was only one obvious choice: John 11.

“Jesus told her [Martha], ‘Your brother will rise again.’

“‘Yes,’ Martha said, ‘when everyone else rises, on resurrection day.’

“Jesus told her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die like everyone else, will live again. They are given eternal life for believing in me and will never perish. Do you believe this, Martha?’

“‘Yes, Lord,’ she told him. ‘I have always believed…'” (John 11:23-27a, NLT.)

In a mass, you have Old Testament, New Testament, and Gospel lessons. 1 Timothy gets New Testament out of the way. For Old Testament, there’s the old standby, Psalm 23. I stumbled around looking for an alternative. I looked in Job 7, which was a mistake–that just gets you depressed. I looked at a verse in Isaiah that my Bible recommended, but it didn’t seem to fit.

I found a passage in Psalm 91 that I underlined long ago:

The Lord says, “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them. I will satisfy them with a long life and give them my salvation.” (Ps. 91:14-16, New Living Translation.)

Then I read it in a couple of other translations and didn’t like it so much. Maybe the NLT played it a little too fast and loose with the translation; others didn’t sound appropriate for use in a funeral mass.

So I flipped around to what’s probably my very favorite Psalm: Psalm 18. It’s a little unconventional, as it’s a prayer of praise after deliverance from your biggest enemy, but compared to heaven, isn’t this world your biggest enemy? Even though it’s not the first passage that comes to mind, it just seemed to fit:

“I love you Lord, you are my strength. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my savior. My God is my rock, in whom I find protection. He is my shield, the strength of my salvation, and my stronghold. I will call on the Lord, who is worthy of praise, for he saves me from my enemies.” (Ps. 18:1-3, NLT)

Jeanne liked it. The more I think about it, the more I like it. Jeanne’s mom was a brilliant woman; she held two advanced degrees. Her health held that brilliant mind captive for the majority of her years. I don’t understand her illness; I won’t go into any details because I have none. For the people left behind, it’s no good. But this life truly was her greatest enemy. Now God has set her free.

And just as with the rest of us, in due time God will set Jeanne free too. Then they’ll see each other again, each the way God intended them to be all along. What can be cooler than that?

Today, it’s no good. Tomorrow and the next day won’t be much good either, and neither will next week. If she’s like me, she’ll wake up sweating and panting, having just dreamt it was all just a terrible mistake and her mom just walked in the room. My dad died almost 7 years ago, but I’ve had that dream at least once this year. And there’ll be days next year that won’t be so great.

But one day, when God calls us all home, none of that will matter anymore. In the meantime, God still needs us here. And he’s put people around us to deal with getting through all that.

The only Internet chain letter that actually works

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

One of my coworkers got a phone call this afternoon and immediately started laughing. It was his wife on the phone, and she was telling him about how a bunch of people in her department had gotten a chain letter that promised if they forward it to a certain number of people, a picture of Tweety Bird or something will appear on their screen. They were wondering why it didn’t work. For all I know, they were ready to call the helpdesk and complain their computers were broken because the chain letter didn’t work. His wife, knowing better, started laughing and immediately shared the story with her systems analyst husband.
That gave me an idea. Why not devise a chain letter that absolutely will do what it says it will do, especially if it manages to go five or six generations without the chain breaking? Here goes nothing:

Dear friend:

This is another one of those Internet chain letters. You’ve undoubtedly received tons of them before and deleted them. This chain letter is different. It actually works.

Below you will find a list of 100 e-mail addresses. The way this works is simple. Remove the top address, then add your e-mail address to the bottom. Forward a copy of this message to all 99 people ahead of you. If there are no addresses at the bottom of the message, insert the e-mail addresses of 99 of your friends or co-workers, and forward a copy to them. Be sure to include your own address at the bottom. If you really want to get results, attach a 40-megabyte MPEG movie as well.

Very soon, one angry person, or if you’re very lucky, an angry mob, will appear at your doorstep or cubicle and beat you to a bloody pulp for clogging up their inboxes with useless junk. If you’re not so lucky, you’ll get a nice visit or phone call from your mail administrator politely telling you to cut it out.

Pretty neat, huh?

Your friend,

Dave Rhodes

Disappointment… Plus Linux vs. The World

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , ,

It was looking like I’d get to call a l337 h4x0r to the carpet and lay some smackdown at work, but unfortunately I had a prior commitment. Too many things to do, not enough Daves to go around. It’s the story of my life.
And I see Infoworld’s Bob Lewis is recommending companies do more than give Linux a long, hard look–he’s saying they should consider it on the desktop.

He’s got a point. Let’s face it. None of the contenders get it right. So-called “classic” Mac OS isn’t a modern OS–it has no protected memory architecture, pre-emptive multitasking, and limited threading support. It’s got all the disadvantages of Windows 3.1 save being built atop the crumbling foundation of MS-DOS. I could run Windows 3.1 for an afternoon without a crash. I can run Windows 95 for a week or two. I can usually coax about 3-4 days out of Mac OS. Mac users sometimes seem to define “crash” differently, so I’ll define what I mean here. By a crash, I mean an application dying with an error Type 1, Type 2, or Type 10. Or the system freezing and not letting you do anything. Or a program quitting unexpectedly.

But I digress. Mac OS X has usability problems, it’s slow, and it has compatibility problems. It has promise, but it’s been thrust into duty that it’s not necessarily ready for. Like System 7 of the early ’90s, it’s a radical change from the past, and it’s going to take time to get it ready for general use. Since compilers and debuggers are much faster now, I don’t think it’ll take as long necessarily, but I don’t expect Mac OS X’s day to arrive this year. Developers also have to jump on the bandwagon, which hasn’t happened.

Windows XP… It’s slow, it’s way too cutesy, and only time will tell if it will actually succeed at displacing both 9x and NT/2000. With Product Activation being an upgrader’s nightmare, Microsoft may shoot themselves in the foot with it. Even if XP is twice as good as people say it’s going to be, a lot of people are going to stay away from it. Users don’t like Microsoft policing what they do with their computers, and that’s the perception that Product Activation gives. So what if it’s quick and easy? We don’t like picking up the phone and explaining ourselves.

Linux… It hasn’t lived up to its hype. But when I’ve got business users who insist on using Microsoft Works because they find Office too complicated, I have a hard time buying the argument that Linux can’t make it in the business environment without Office. Besides, you can run Office on Linux with Win4Lin or VMWare. But alternatives exist. WordPerfect Office gets the job done on both platforms–and I know law offices are starting to consider the move. All a lawyer or a lawyer’s secretary needs to be happy, typically, is a familiar word processor, a Web browser, and a mail client. The accountant needs a spreadsheet, and maybe another financial package. Linux has at least as many Web browsers as Windows does, and plenty of capable mail clients; WP Office includes Quattro Pro, which is good enough that I’ve got a group of users who absolutely refuse to migrate away from it. I don’t know if I could run a business on GnuCash. But I’m not an accountant. The increased stability and decreased cost makes Linux make a lot of sense in a law firm though. And in the businesses I count as clients, anywhere from 75-90% of the users could get their job done in Linux just as productively. Yes, the initial setup would be more work than Windows’ initial setup, but the same system cloning tricks will work, mitigating that. So even if it takes 12 hours to build a Linux image as opposed to 6 hours to build a Windows image, the decreased cost and decreased maintenance will pay for it.

I think Linux is going to get there. As far as Linux looking and acting like Windows, I’ve moved enough users between platforms that I don’t buy the common argument that that’s necessary. Most users save their documents wherever the program defaults to. Linux defaults to your home directory, which can be local or on a server somewhere. The user doesn’t know or care. Most users I support call someone for help when it comes time to save something on a floppy (or do anything remotely complicated, for that matter), then they write down the steps required and robotically repeat them. When they change platforms, they complain about having to learn something new, then they open up their notebook, write down new steps, and rip out the old page they’ve been blindly following for months or years and they follow that new process.

It amuses me that most of the problems I have with Linux are with recent distributions that try to layer Microsoft-like Plug and Play onto it. Linux, unlike Windows, is pretty tolerant of major changes. I can install TurboLinux 6.0 on a 386SX, then take out the hard drive and put it in a Pentium IV and it’ll boot. I’ll have to reconfigure XFree86 to take full advantage of the new architecture, but that’s no more difficult than changing a video driver in Windows–and that’s been true since about 1997, with the advent of Xconfigurator. Linux needs to look out for changes of sound cards and video cards, and, sometimes, network cards. The Linux kernel can handle changes to just about anything else without a hiccup. Once Red Hat and Mandrake realize that, they’ll be able to develop a Plug and Play that puts Windows to shame.

The biggest thing that Linux lacks is applications, and they’re coming. I’m not worried about Linux’s future.

Hello again…

Dave Farquhar General ,

I’m rested but not caught up. I semi-successfully built a Linux From Scratch box; it’s easily the fastest computer I’ve ever seen but not everything works quite right. I made the mistake of using Mandrake 8.0 as my source platform. In some regards Mandrake 8 makes sense; it has recent kernel and glibc versions. Unfortunately it also uses the infamous GCC 2.96; an unofficial release of GNU’s C compiler that’s so wretched that Linus Torvalds actually has asked people to not do any kernel development using any OS that uses it. One of the first things LFS does is build its own copy of GCC 2.95.3, but unfortunately, there’s code in my system that GCC 2.96 got its grubby mitts on and stuff doesn’t work. Notably, I can’t build another LFS system using it as the source. Crimony.
Meanwhile, I found out this afternoon that Bible study is at my place on Friday. My apartment’s always a mess and today’s no exception; it’s not as bad now as it has been at times but it is much less than presentable. So that’s my big project for the week. Hopefully I’ll get a mail server going too.

But I’ll try to check in every day.

I think I’m going to take a couple of days off again…

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

There’s an old Oasis lyric that I’ve hated for most of the past four years, mostly because of the memories it conjurs up, and now it really bugs me that it seems appropriate: “‘Cos I need more time just to make things right.”
The other fragments of the song that have survived my efforts to blot them out also seem fitting. “Don’t go away… Say that you’ll stay… Forever and a day…”

So, to ward off those perpetual rumors/fears/whatever that I’m hanging things up, I’ll just say this. I’ve “hung it up for good” before. The longest it ever lasted was 6 months, and that time was due to serious injury. Right around that time, someone insinuated that I should hang it up. We haven’t spoken since that time, and I’m better for it and I don’t give a rip about how he feels.

I fully expect this break to last through Saturday, then run out of gas sometime late Sunday afternoon.

I’ve overextended myself the past month or so. I’m tired. My Web server is running fabulously (it never hiccups, so long as Union Electric keeps the power flowing) but I haven’t come up with an effective way to upload content to it or add new features. I can live with that.

Meanwhile, my mail server’s a royal piece of… Nah. That doesn’t go far enough. My mail server is a Backstreet Boys Fan. It runs like a 16 MHz 386, and I can’t tell if it’s a configuration problem or if it’s just overwhelmed with spam. No matter. I’m overwhelmed with spam. On a good day I get 7. On a bad day I get 60+. I got 38 copies of the same spam message from some stupid online casino Tuesday. I absolutely have to get some spam filters in place, and some priority filters in place.

So the mail needs to be archived, a bare-essentials mail server built (Linux 2.4.8 kernel, sendmail, IMAP, fetchmail, procmail, and whatever else those five things force me to install so they can run, all built from the newest sources of course, using the most aggressive compiler settings known to man), then the archives restored, then spam filters put in place and run. Then I will have regained my ability to communicate and will be able to do something about my guilt over having week-old e-mail sitting around unanswered because it’s buried in worthless spam.

I need to tend to my servers. I need to rebuild a couple of workstations. I really ought to try to salvage the Baseball Mogul season that’s sitting on the corrupted hard drive in one of those workstations… (Though I hesitate to call anything that runs Microsoft Wintendo 2000 a “workstation…”)

Meanwhile, a couple of other projects need to get done, and I just realized today that I haven’t talked to Gatermann in more than a week and for all that group of friends knows, I’ve run off to the ends of the Earth only to find an Internet cafe, so I continued posting. I need to do something about that too.

I’ll be back. I have the same love/hate relationship with writing that most writers have. It’s like breathing after running a couple of miles on a brisk day in early March. I always hated breathing after that, because it hurt so badly. But no matter how much it hurt, I couldn’t stop.

Eliminating Flash ads

Dave Farquhar General

Flash and popunder ads begone! Normally I prefer to just use a hosts file with common ad servers redirected to 127.0.0.1 to eliminate annoying online ads, but that often doesn’t eliminate annoying Flash ads. Putting sites that use Flash in the Restricted Sites zone can help, but only in IE, and when you do that, other things cease working (such as Acrobat). The Restricted Sites setting also kills a lot of popup and popunder ads, but at the same cost.
So what to do? The Web’s not going to get any less annoying, so I turned once again to a big gun that I used to use all the time: Proxomitron.

Occasionally I have to bypass Proxomitron for a site to work right, but I’d say 90-95% of the sites I visit work just fine with it enabled, and it clears out the junk nicely. And the memory usage isn’t really any higher than that of the various popup killer programs.

So if Flash ads are getting you down, and popunders are really starting to get you riled up (I hate finding I suddenly have 17 browser windows active that I didn’t open, and as leaky as IE is, such behavior is downright rude), give Proxomitron a long, hard look. You’ll be a whole lot happier.

Open mouth, insert foot. At work, we’re an NT shop, and we format our drives NTFS for security purposes. A few systems formatted FAT16 slipped out, but we had a project about a year ago to go back and convert all those systems to NTFS. Well, today, we were doing an Office 2000 upgrade on a system and it lacked sufficient free space. So I went up to have a look. I found 50 megs here, 50 megs there that I could clear out, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the drive up over 300 megs free. So, out of desperation, I went to look for some data I could compress, and I found compression wasn’t enabled. Huh? So I checked the drive. It was formatted FAT16.

So I ran back to my office to ask one of my coworkers if he still had the batch files we used way back when to convert FAT to NTFS. I walked into his cube.

“Sharon’s still FAT,” I said.

He gave me a funny look. “Well, I know she just got off maternity leave,” he said.

I turned red. “No, no, Sharon looks fine,” I said. (Yes, she just got off maternity leave but you wouldn’t be able to tell from looking.)

“Oh, you mean her computer’s not NTFS,” he said as everyone else in the office got a good laugh.

“Yeah,” I said.

The moral of the story ought to be really obvious. I got the batch files, scurried back up to her cube, converted her drive to NTFS–freeing up about 600 megs due to NTFS’ much smaller cluster size–and got out of there. I didn’t tell her the story.