It’s Friday and I’m tired. I was tired last night too, so I just laid around and read. I’ll write some more this weekend as I have time.
Now.. Generations.
Generations. Today I relate better to 40-year-olds than I do to 19-year-olds. I have friends in their 30s who relate really well to me, and to everyone else I know who’s close to my age, but I can’t step down the same number of years that they can.
One possible explanation is intelligence and/or maturity level, but I know some 19-year-olds who are more mature than I was at that age, and I know our 18-year-old intern at work is one of the most brilliant people I’ve met. So that explanation, though it may have had some merit when I was a lot younger, doesn’t have much now.
I’ve found a possible explanation.
The theory of generations goes like this. There are four basic generation “personality types,” if you will. They’re cyclical. We hiccuped once after the Civil War and skipped one type, but that’s the only time we’ve done so in the roughly 500 years that people of European descent have lived in the Americas.
Quick disclaimer: All of the examples I’m about to cite are male. My source doesn’t include a lot of female examples. Knowing the birth dates, obviously, you can fit female examples into these.
The first type is the Civics. The book says this is the most basic type, but it’s the one I understand least. They’re very rationalist and value social harmony. The two Civic generations of recent memory were born in 1901-1924 and 1982-2003. Historical figures from Civic generations include Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. Two recent examples of Civics are Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. (This was the generation we skipped immediately after the Civil War. That makes sense–that time period wasn’t very compatible with rationalism and social harmony.)
The Adaptive generations understand the others better than any other type does. They’re compromisers, above all else. Recent adaptive generations were born in the years 1925-1942 and 1843-1859. Interestingly, the current adaptive generation, known as the Silent Generation, has yet to produce a U.S. president and looks ever less likely to do so. Historical Adaptives include Teddy Roosevelt and The Great Compromiser Henry Clay. Contemporary examples of Adaptives include Ralph Nader and Walter Mondale.
Does the Idealist generation need any further explanation? OK. Think hippies. Recent Idealist generations were born 1860-1882 and 1943-1960. Historical examples of Idealists include Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Winston Churchill. Contemporary examples of Idealists include George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Hmm. We was robbed. Or maybe we just gave our Idealists too much power too soon this time around. Churchill was 66 when he became Prime Minister. (It also would have helped if we’d picked an Idealist who could keep it in his pants, but hey. We make these stupid mistakes so future generations don’t have to, if they’re paying attention.)
I don’t think the Reactionist type needs much explanation either. GenX (born 1961-1981) is reactionist. So was the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900) that so influenced the Roaring Twenties. Reactionist Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and aptly described his generation and mine. We’re all or nothing. We produce crooks like Al Capone, we produce traitors like Benedict Arnold, pirates like Captain Kidd. We also produce scathingly perceptive artists like Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and wildly successful tycoons like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. We also produce great generals like Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and can even claim the Father of our Country, George Washington, as one of our own.
Now, here’s the idea. Knowing the cycle and the general characteristics, it’s easier to watch history repeat itself. And while you can’t predict the future, you can predict future trends on this model. You can’t predict who the great leaders of a generation will be, but you can in broad, general terms describe the heroes and goats of a future generation based on the best and worst characteristics of that generation. And since generations define events as much as events define generations, it’s sometimes even possible to describe future events in broad, sweeping terms.
But I think I like it best as a tool for understanding people. I’m not going to understand today’s 14-year-olds by looking at how I was at 14. Sure, there’ll be some similarities but just as many differences. Since today’s 14-year-olds are a Civic generation, in order to understand it, I really have to go back to the next-most-recent Civic generation. In my case, I have to go to my grandparents. If you want to know what GenX is going to be like when it starts hitting the big 50, your best bet is to look at the Lost Generation (those who survived that long–which should, in itself, tell you something) at a similar age.
Based on past history, GenX will have its day, crisis will come–and GenX will prove to be very adept at being both part of the problem and part of the solution–then struggle with and eventually give way to an Eisenhower-like generation, which will either comfort you or scare you.
[added later] Well, duh… I forgot the best example of what GenX coulda shoulda woulda been (and still could be). Unfortunately, not many of us remember the story of Samantha Smith, the 10-year-old from Maine who wrote to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov in 1982 and asked why the Soviets wanted to conquer the world.What was remarkable about her? Mostly she was in the right place at the right time. At the peak of the Cold War, here was a child who stepped forward and asked a tough, innocent question no other generation was willing to ask. She asked her question, unafraid of whether she’d be ignored. And her question just happened to be heard.
She’d be 28 now. Who knows whether she would have faded away back into a normal life, or if she would have become a voice of the generation. Unfortunately, she died in a 1985 plane crash.
But we’ve still got time. GenX’s spokesperson doesn’t necessarily have to be Kurt Cobain.
Let the revolution begin…
I was called in to an emergency meeting yesterday morning. I was up to my eyebrows in alligators, but my boss was insistent. I had to be there. So I went. When we sat down, the tone was somber and slightly meandering. The guy who called the meeting just didn’t want to get to the point. Finally it hit me: Layoffs. That’s what this has to be about. So… Who’s gone? I’m not the highest-paid guy in my group, I’m probably the most versatile, and I’m not the most recent hire, so I’m probably safe. I was right about layoffs, or, more accurately, one layoff, followed by a restructuring. And the layoff wasn’t me.
I think we’re a better fit in our new structure (under our old organization we were married to a group that really didn’t like my group, or at least they didn’t like me, and now we’re married to a group that does, for the most part, like my group), and my boss’ new boss is so busy we shouldn’t have to worry about him messing with much. But I don’t like change, and my Scottish clan’s motto, “Fide et Fortitudine” loosely translates into “loyalty and guts” today. The loyalty side of me has some problems with what happened yesterday, but looking at it strictly from a business standpoint, I sure can’t argue with it.
Meanwhile, I needed about three minutes’ worth of quality time with that indignant hard drive to get the data I so desperately wanted. I got it. Next struggle: Getting Windows NT to work properly with eighth-rate hardware. This PC has a generic RealTek 8139-based card (so we’re talking a generic clone of a Linksys or D-Link card here… A clone of a clone), Trident Blade 3D video, ESS 1868 sound, and an AOpen 56K modem (at least it wasn’t a Winmodem). The AOpen modem is, by a longshot, the best component in the machine outside of the Gigabyte motherboard and Pentium II-450 CPU. I’ll say one thing for brand-name hardware. Drivers are easy to come by and they generally install correctly the first time, every time. It took me an hour to track down Blade 3D drivers that work, then it took me a good 30-45 minutes to get those working. The Realtek drivers at least worked the first time. I never did get the ESS drivers working. The AOpen modem driver went off without a hitch, mostly because it’s actually a controller-based modem. I stand by my assertion that you can buy $10 components and spend $100 worth of time trying to get each of them working right, or you can buy $50-$75 components from a reputable maker and make them work the first time. Seeing as the more expensive components will probably work well together too and give better performance, it’s a no-brainer for me. Gimme Creative or Guillemot video and sound cards and pair that up with a 3Com or Intel NIC and I’ll be a happy camper.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about my bookstore adventures. I want to go read for a while.
OK, I’m back for a second. I can’t resist. Not quite four years ago, I had a conversation with another Journalism major/history minor (one who, unlike me, actually finished his history minor, if I recall correctly). Over dinner with my then-significant other, he told me all about his theory of generations, as she looked on, entranced. The nasty breakup that soon followed that conversation overshadowed it, and I didn’t think of it again until last night, when I spotted the book Generations, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, on the shelf of a used bookstore. Curious, I looked at it, and sure enough, this was where that guy got his ideas. It was marked six bucks. I bought it, started reading, and gained some insight on myself. Why do I go ga-ga over the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and get chills whenever I read about his personal life because it all feels so familiar? He and I are from parallel generational cycles. His generation thought like mine does, so we grew up in similar peer environments. Why do I understand people 10 years older than me so much better than people 10 years younger than me? I was born 7 years before the end of my generational cycle.
All day I couldn’t wait ’til Tuesday…
First, a diversion. I came home, popped in Peter Murphy’s Deep, which I’d never listened to, and I called a friend. An hour later all was well with the world. Well, not really. But Dave’s world was fine.
And Deep… It starts off with a really dark, brooding song, but when you listen to the lyrics it sounds like a love song. A goth love song? Huh? So I looked at the lyrics. I think the song is really about going swimming. I love that kind of irony. I need to make a mix CD:
Not Love Songs
1. Drive — The Cars (about mental illness)
2. The One I Love — R.E.M. (about a barbecue joint)
3. Cruel Summer — Bananarama (not a breakup song–it’s about a hot beach)
4. Deep Ocean Vast Sea — Peter Murphy (sounds like a love song but it’s about going swimming)
I’m sure there are others. I need to go find them.
Work. Yesterday was my first day supporting a new client. And wouldn’t you know it? After we led off the morning with a visit from SirCam in one of the finance departments, the hard drive in the PC sitting in the president of the company’s office conked out. You turn it on and it sounds like a jackhammer. If you let the drive rest for a while, you can operate it for anywhere from 1-2 minutes before it completely stops responding. So I connected the president’s drive to another system and started copying data, a few files at a time. Finally I wised up and optimized the box I was using, while the president’s drive rested. I defragmented the destination drive, and I set the system to load absolutely nothing at startup. It’s NT, so it takes about a minute to boot, but at least I can get about a minute’s worth of copying per hour.
But I just realized I’ve got a P3-866 with a nice 7200 RPM disk in it sitting on the desk, waiting to be rebuilt. I think I need to draft that machine into data recovery duty first. That machine might boot in under 30 seconds, especially with nothing loading at startup. That’d make me at least 50% more productive. I still haven’t recovered his PST file, and that’s what concerns me the most. We’ve gotta get his e-mail back, whatever it takes.
I seem to attract problems like this. At least I have a decent record of solving them. (And yes, I do know the trick of putting a hard drive in the freezer for four hours–I won’t do it this time because the drive is under warranty.)
And in the meantime, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. This might as well be like a chance to hit a grand slam to win the World Series.
It’s Monday. Have a day.
There’s a band called The Happy Mondays. Whoever came up with that name is sick. And yes, I know I’m a curmudgeon.
I had too much stuff to think about this weekend, very little of it involving me, and talking about most of it here is totally inappropriate. A bunch of different things culminated into me starting to write a long diatribe about discerning God’s will. The problem with it is, there are books of the Bible shorter than what I’ve written, and all I’ve said is a couple of ways not to do it.
The other thing I did yesterday was to get the data recovered off that laptop hard drive I was working on Saturday. After a 14-hour SpinRite session, the drive was readable again under both Win98 and Linux. The drive is still slow and headed for early retirement, but now it’s a whole lot more sound than it was and it looks like it’ll be our decision when the drive retires, not the drive’s decision. I don’t know everything that SpinRite does and I know even less about how it works, but in this case SpinRite didn’t claim to have done anything at all but suddenly, after running it, a hard drive that had been all but unusable is readable again. At $89 for a single license, SpinRite is expensive, but I don’t know how I ever got along without it.
I wish Steve Gibson would quit being the Don Quixote of Internet security and get back to what he does better than anyone else. Not many people in business environments format their hard drives FAT anymore, and SpinRite does nothing for NTFS drives. How about a SpinRite 6.0 that supports NTFS, Steve?
Windows XP has much greater implications for Steve Gibson than just raw sockets. It brings with it the consumerization of NTFS, which means his bread-and-butter product is going to be mostly obsolete. I format all of my drives FAT, partly so that SpinRite remains an option for me, but Gibson can’t count on everyone doing that.
Weekend adventures and Low-profile PCs
Saturday. I finally managed to drag my sorry butt to work about 11 or so. I went to pay my rent at 10; the office was closed even though it was supposed to be open. The manager called me yesterday about 10, wondering where I was (gee, could it be I was at work, and that sometimes I have things to do other than sit by the phone waiting for her to call?) complaining that they needed to get into my apartment to fix a leak. I called and left a message saying go on in. She called back a couple of hours later and bawled me out for having a busted hose (I didn’t bust it) and for having stuff in the closet with the hot water heater, in violation of fire code. “The maintenance guy said you had a bunch of stuff in there, and that busted the hose, and that’s a violation of code so you have to clean it out.”
I checked when I got home. Apparently a snow shovel (necessary because they never clear the parking lot) and a kitchen mop sitting in the corner opposite everything constitutes “a bunch of stuff.” I put the check in an envelope, and since there was no one there to complain to, I scribled a note on the envelope. “I moved my mop and my snow shovel out of the closet. Apparently that constitutes ‘a bunch of stuff.'”
And Friday night I got out my lease and looked at it. I’d never read it thoroughly and I was shocked. For one thing, playing a musical instrument is strictly prohibited. Even with headphones. That’s a load of bull. If you can play a guitar on the Metro in Washington D.C. as long as you use headphones, then if I feel like strumming my bass inside the four walls of my apartment and no one can hear it, that’s my business. But I found what I was looking for. Since I’ve been here two years, the penalty for breaking the lease is one month’s rent. Losing me for the remainder of the lease hurts them more than the month’s rent hurts me, so I started looking for houses.
One of the girls at church (her name is Wendy) had mentioned earlier in the week that houses in Lemay are inexpensive, and Lemay, despite what Gatermann says, isn’t a bad place. For one, there’s a great pizza joint in Lemay. There’s reasonably easy access to I-255 to get around St. Louis. Plus two grocery stores and a department store. And if Wendy’s comfortable walking to her car at night in Lemay, my black trenchcoat and I will be just fine.
At work, an unexpected but totally welcome distraction happened. My phone rang. I was hoping it was the girl from church, but it was an inside ring. I picked up. “This is Dave,” I said.
“Hi! It’s Heather.”
That’s the name of my best friend from college, and it sure sounded like her voice. But she lives in Florida and she’s been bouncing from dot-com to dot-com since college.
“I saw your car outside so I thought I’d give you a call. I’m here with Olivia and we’re just checking on houses with my computer. I thought you might like to meet her.”
Oh. That Heather. She’s a twentysomething Kentucky native who’s lived in St. Louis for about three years. Olivia is her four-year-old daughter. She’s been looking for a house for about the past six months. Extremely nice girl, easy to talk to. Pretty too.
Talking to Heather and meeting Olivia promised to be a whole lot more intersesting than watching SpinRite run on that failing hard drive that forced me into the office on my day off, so I walked over to her area. Olivia saw me first. She hid behind a chair. I recognized her immediately, because Heather’s cubicle is practically wallpapered with pictures of her. I knocked on the side of the cube wall. Heather looked up. “Hi!” she said. She looked around and saw Olivia behind the chair. “Come out, Olivia.” Olivia shyly emerged. “Say Hi.” Olivia waved shyly and said hi. Yep, she’s just like her mom: way tall, and very shy at first. Olivia crawled up into Heather’s lap and started playing with her adding machine. She whispered something to her mom. She looked at her, puzzled. Olivia whispered it again. “You tell him,” she said.
“I like to dig through the trash,” Olivia said.
“Why do you like to dig in the trash?” I asked her. Heather laughed and explained. Olivia keeps everything. When she throws something away, Olivia usually goes digging for it. I told Olivia I used to dig through the trash when my mom would throw my stuff away too.
“Oh! I haven’t told you. We made an offer on a house!” Heather said, visibly excited. I asked her about it. Two-bedroom, nice heated garage, small yard but within walking distance of a park… in Lemay. I smiled.
I told her congratulations, and told her I started looking last night. She said there was a lot of stuff in Lemay. Meanwhile, Olivia and I played catch with beanbags. She has a lively arm on her, not that that should be too surprising. When you’ve got long arms like hers and get them extended, you’ll have some pop. Her first throw hit me below the belt, if you know what I mean. I saw it coming, couldn’t get my arm down there fast enough, and grimaced. Olivia laughed. I don’t think Heather saw. I picked the beanbag off the ground and tossed it back to her. No lasting effects–it was a beanbag, after all. But guys instinctively grimace whenever anything heads that direction, even a Nerf ball. It’s instinctual. Olivia’s next throw sailed past my outstretched hand and plunked the back of Heather’s chair.
“I’m glad you weren’t the second baseman the last softball game I played,” I said to Olivia.
So Heather and I talked houses while Olivia and I tossed beanbags around. I’m like her, I like South County and don’t really want to live anywhere else. She’s been looking long enough to have a pretty good idea what’s available. She printed off a couple of houses for me, and told me a couple of places in Lemay where several houses were available.
Eventually, I thanked her and left. I told Olivia it was nice to meet her.
Then last night, after none of my Saturday plans panned out, I wandered out in search of a haircut and the new Echo and the Bunnymen album. I found neither. I bought some used stuff: Echo and the Bunnymen’s self-titled 1987 release which I’d never gotten around to buying, Peter Gabriel’s fourth album, Peter Murphy’s surprise 1989 hit Deep, and a New Wave compilation that contained a couple of good songs from bands who only recorded one good song, plus a bunch of stuff I didn’t remember ever hearing. The sales clerk reacted to my selections. “Uh oh. Echo and the Bunnymen. Hmm. Peter Murphy. Who was he with?”
“Bauhaus,” I said.
“Was he in Love and Rockets too, or was that the other guys from Bauhaus?”
“Love and Rockets was Bauhaus without Peter Murphy.”
Yep, I was earning the right to wear a black trenchcoat last night. Too bad it’s August. I was impressed that the clerk recognized Murphy, seeing as he was probably born the same year Bauhaus broke up and Murphy’s only had one solo hit, though his post-Bauhaus stuff is really good.
So I hopped in my car, popped in the compilation CD, and went exploring. I found the area Heather told me about. But mostly I explored Lemay–what kind of stuff could I find? Being fairly close to a park would be nice. I found the pizza joint my dad and I used to go to, many years ago. Just about everything I need is pretty close together, and not terribly far from the big commercial district. The houses are older, which can be good and bad, and like Heather warned me, there are some areas that are a little bit redneck, but you’ll find that in a lot of parts of St. Louis. And like Wendy said, Lemay’s not a ritzy place and the people who live there know it, so the pretension you see in a lot of parts of St. Louis isn’t present there. That’s nice.
Low-profile. Dan Bowman sent me a couple of links yesterday to low-profile cases that would be suitable as low-end servers or routers. Over at CSO they’re selling Dell low-profile Pentium Pro-200 systems for $99, with 64 MB RAM, 2.1 gig HD, and a NIC. A Pentium II-266 runs $129. Specs vary on the PII.
That got me thinking and looking around some more. Over at www.compgeeks.com, I found a couple of other things. An ultra low-profile LPX case (sans power supply) is running $10.50. It only has three bays, but that’s plenty for a floppy, CD-ROM, and single HD. An Intel HX-based LPX mobo (with built-in video) runs $19. It’ll take up to a P200, non-MMX though. The LPX riser card is $4.95. CPU availability is limited there; a P90 runs five bucks. Back at CSO, a P166 runs $15.
If you’re really cramped for space, building an LPX-based system is your best bet. But the CSO deal on the Dell is tough to beat. You won’t build an LPX system that even comes close for $99.
Tough day yesterday.
Yesterday was tough. Upon arrival at work, a nasty Mac problem hit–a totally dead machine that wouldn’t boot. I dinked around with that for a couple of hours. And when my boss saw me, he told me I’d be working out of another building for the next week. On a normal week I wouldn’t have any problem with that. Last week and next week don’t look to be normal weeks.
The Mac problem ended up being an extremely corrupt system folder. The drive was perfectly readable, but wouldn’t boot (and the drive made a lot of unpleasant noises while trying). I copied the contents to another drive and it did the very same thing. Hopefully this user has learned not to screw around, but I doubt it. That’s a huge advantage of Windows NT: The user is much more limited in what’s permitted. At a couple of points during this fiasco I exclaimed, “Get a real computer!” One of the people in the department said, “Bind and gag that man!”
But the statistics back me up. The people in that department running NT have a small percentage of the number of problems the people with overdesigned, overpriced, unreliable Mac boxes have. There are times when I’ll give someone a PC, then I never hear from them again until it’s time for the machine to be replaced or a mandatory upgrade goes around. But if a Mac doesn’t get intense monthly maintenance, you can forget about the thing ever being reliable.
I got the Mac running by installing a new copy of the OS and dragging all the preferences over from the corrupt system folder. I left the extensions behind since it was well past 5, I had to be somewhere at 5:30, and I didn’t cause this problem.
On top of all that, I had a laptop from the field come in. It had been giving the user problems for a while (he didn’t say how long), and the symptoms he described sounded to me like the hard drive was failing. I asked if he had a recent backup. He did not. He sent me the laptop. I powered it up, and it’s no longer capable of booting. It tries but never gets far. I pulled the drive and put it in another machine so I could try to recover the data. Linux won’t even mount the drive, it’s in such bad shape. NT won’t read it because it’s formatted FAT32 (that’s it–this next build for deployed users is using FAT16 so I can recover their data with whatever OS I want, seeing as I’ll have to do a lot of it since they refuse to make backups), so I’m spending my Saturday building a Win98 box so I can read the drive and hopefully get some data back. Good thing I get time and a half…
Friday hodgepodge.
Now are we going to take viruses seriously? Top-secret Ukranian documents leaked out to the Ukranian press, courtesy of SirCam, including the president’s movements during the upcoming independence celebration. An assassin’s delight, to be sure.
Lessons learned:
1. Macro viruses can do damage without trashing your computer. Sometimes they can do more damage if they don’t trash your computer.
2. Don’t count on anti-virus software to save you. SirCam hides out in places McAfee Anti-Virus doesn’t look, and Norton Anti-Virus is reportedly not 100% effective against it either, especially if a document was already infected with another virus.
What can save you? Download your software from reputable sources only, and don’t open strange attachments. I used to say it’s much better to miss the joke than to wipe out your computer. Now we can amend that. It’s much better to miss the joke than to wipe out your computer or get the president of the Ukraine killed.
Motherboards. The Good Dr. Crider e-mailed me (among others) earlier this week asking for motherboard advice. He wanted respectable power for under $200. Interestingly, just the day before I went looking at mwave.com for motherboards for no particular reason. I spied the ultra-basic Gigabyte GA-7IXe4 motherboard (AMD 750-based) for 66 bucks. It won’t win any glamour contests, but it’s a fine meat-and-potato board at a fabulous price, and it’s not made in China so you’re not supporting an immoral government with your purchase either. You can pair that up with a $36 Duron-750 and a $10 fan and have a great start on a fantabulous bang-for-the-buck system. Of course, with a budget of $200, it’s possible to step up to a Duron-950 and still have a little left over.
Speaking of bang for the buck, here’s a review of the first commercially available SiS 735-based board. Put simply, right now it’s the fastest DDR motherboard you can buy. Pretty impressive, especially considering it’s coming from budget-minded ECS. I can’t wait to see what Asus or Abit will be able to do with it. But I know I’ll be waiting. ECS has manufacturing facilities in China.
Why the big deal about China? I’m not exactly in favor of slave labor–we freed our slaves about 135 years ago and we should be ashamed it took us that long. But slave labor exists in China today. I’m tired of China provoking the United States every chance it gets. I’m tired of China persecuting people who believe in Christianity and/or democracy. Need more reasons? OK. Fair warning: Some of the atrocities on this site will make you sick.
Completely boycotting China when buying computer products is tough. Really tough. For example, Intel’s Craig Barrett publicly advocates Chinese manufacturing. Does that mean Intel’s next fab will sit on Chinese soil? Fortunately, a Web search with a manufacturer’s name, plus the words “manufacturing” and “China” will almost always tell you conclusively if a company produces any of its stuff in China. If you want American-made stuff, good luck. Supermicro and AMI make motherboards in the States, but neither has a very diverse product line.
Need a dictionary? OK. Visit www.wordweb.co.uk.
Building 98 boxes
I knuckled down yesterday at work and started building a new laptop image for some deployed users. What they’re using now isn’t stable and it isn’t fast, and much of the software is dated. So rather than patch yet again, we’re starting over. I built a 98 install, leaving out anything I could (such as Drive Converter, since we’re already using FAT32 over my protests, and Disk Compression, which isn’t compatible with FAT32 and I just know it’s only a matter of time before some end user decides he’s too short on disk space and runs it only to be greeted by a PC that won’t boot).
Law #1: The more you install, the slower the system runs, and no amount of disk or registry optimization will completely make up for that.
After I got a decent 98 install down, I did some cleanup. All the .txt files in the Windows directory? Gone. All the BMP files? See ya. Channel Screen Saver? B’bye. I got the C:Windows directory down under 150 entries without losing any functionality. There are probably some GIF and JPEG files in there, and some WAVs possibly, that can also go. I’ll have to check. And of course I did my standard MSDOS.SYS tweaks.
Then I defragmented the drive, mostly to get the directories compressed, rebooted, and timed it. 18 seconds. Not bad for a P2-300.
Next, I installed Office 2000. Once I got all that in place, Windows’ boot time ballooned to 32 seconds, which just goes to show how Microsoft apps screw around on the OS’s turf entirely too much–Office makes more changes to the OS than Internet Explorer–but the boot time is still well below what we’ve come to expect from a P2-300.
One of my coworkers had the nerve to say, “Don’t forget to run Cacheman!” Cacheman my ass. I can put vcache entries in system.ini myself, thank you very much. And I can change the file and path cache in the Registry myself, without having to use some lame program to do it. And cleaning up the directories makes a much bigger difference than those hacks do. It just doesn’t make you feel l33t or anything. Heaven forbid we should ever do anything simple and effective to improve system performance.
Law #2: Most of the tweaks floating around there on the ‘Net do little more than let you feel like you’ve done something. I condensed the useful tricks into a single book chapter. And I also told you what those tricks really do, and the side effects they have, unlike a certain multi-megabyte Web site hosted on AOL… You can do the majority of the things you need to do by practicing restraint and judiciously using just a small number of software tools.
I know how to make a fast Win98 PC. It’s not like I wrote a book about that or anything…
Oh, but how am I ensuring stability? I’m forcing the issue. Yes, I see that list of 47 software packages they have to have. Here’s Windows and Office 2000 and ACT!. Now they have to test it. Does it crash? OK. Now we’ll add the remaining 44 things, one at a time and see which one is breaking stuff. If it’s unstable by the time all of that’s done, it’s because the end users who were testing were sloppy with their testing.
Optimizing Linux. Part 1 of who-knows-what
Optimizing Linux. I found this link yesterday. Its main thrust is troubleshooting nVidia 3D acceleration, but it also provides some generally useful tweakage. For example:
cat /proc/interrupts
Tells you what cards are using what interrupts.
lspci -v
Tells you what PCI cards you have and what latencies they’re using.
setpci -v -s [id from lspci] latency_timer=##
Changes the latency of a card. Higher latency means higher bandwidth, and vice-versa. In this case, latency means the device is a bus hog–once it gets the bus, it’s less likely to let go of it. I issued this command on my Web server to give my network card free reign (this is more important on local fileservers, obviously–my DSL connection is more than slow enough to keep my Ethernet card from being overwhelmed):
setpci -v -s 00:0f.0 latency_timer=ff
Add that command to /etc/rc.d/rc.local if you want it to stick.
Linux will let you tweak the living daylights out of it.
And yes, there’s a ton more. Check out this: Optimizing and Securing Red Hat Linux 6.1 and 6.2. I just turned off last-access attribute updating on my Web server to improve performance with the command chattr -R +A /var/www. That’s a trick I’ve been using on NT boxes for a long time.
Baseball. I’m frustrated. The Royals let the Twins trade promising lefty Mark Redmon to the Tigers for Todd Jones. Why didn’t the Royals dangle Roberto Hernandez in the Twins’ face? Hernandez would have fetched Redmon and a borderline prospect, saved some salary, and, let’s face it, we’re in last place with Hernandez, so what happens if we deal him? It’s not like we can sink any further.
Meanwhile, the hot rumor is that Rey Sanchez will be traded to the Dodgers for Alex Cora, a young, slick-fielding shortstop who can’t hit. Waitaminute. We just traded half the franchise away for Neifi Perez, an enthusiastic, youngish shortstop who can’t hit outside of Coors Field and is overrated defensively and makes 3 and a half mil a year. What’s up with that?
Moral dilemma: Since the Royals don’t seem to care about their present or their future at the moment, is rooting for Oakland (featuring ex-Royals Jermaine Dye and Johnny Damon and Jeremy Giambi) and Boston (featuring ex-Royals Jose Offerman and Chris Stynes and Hippolito Pichardo and the last link to that glorious 1985 season, Bret Saberhagen) to make the playoffs like cheating on your wife?