Mail from Frank Gross. I don’t know if I’ve ever outlined a process for installing Windows 98 cleanly, at least not here. There’s little need to do a clean install if the system works right, but if a system just won’t play nice, it’s not something one should be afraid of.
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The immoral, despicable “journalism” at the Church of the Nativity
Charlie asked what I, as a trained and sometimes-practicing journalist, think of Caroyln Cole’s work at the Church of the Nativity.
Well, the story linked here hits on precisely why I’m not a full-time journalist slogging words for some magazine full-time and climbing the ladder towards editorship. What usually passes for journalism today can at best be considered advocacy; in the case of what Cole sometimes practices, it’s better described as fraud.
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Pretentious Pontifications: Tennis
Raunche and I took advantage of our extended weekend by playing a gentlemanly game of tennis. I don’t know why people make such a big deal of weekends, extended or otherwise, because they should just become like Raunche and me. Every day is like Saturday for us, since neither of us actually has to get up in the morning and drive, you know, to work or anything.
But I digress so badly you must think this is my evil twin brother writing. Unfortunately I have learned a bad habit or two from David.
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Retro is in, so I’m bringing back some old stuff
I’m adding some old stuff today from this site’s first incarnation, back when it was a series of poorly executed static pages. There’s good stuff and bad stuff, so I’m leaving out some of the bad stuff. The style of the early posts is different. I wasn’t as comfortable writing every day then. But some of the stuff is really, really useful (and the information not really available elsewhere).
So there’ll be weird posts, referring to things that happened long ago, since I enter them 7 at a time, then I go back and edit the dates so they’re correct.
Optimizing Web graphics
Gatermann told me about a piece of freeware he found on one of my favorite sites, tinyapps.org, called JPG Cleaner. It strips out the thumbnails and other metadata that editing programs and digital cameras put in your graphics that isn’t necessary for your Web browser to render them. Sometimes it saves you 20K, and sometimes it saves you 16 bytes. Still, it’s worth doing, because more often than not it saves you something halfway significant.
That’s great but I don’t want to be tied to Windows, so I went looking for a similar Linux program. There isn’t much. All I was able to find was a command-line program, written in 1996, called jpegoptim. I downloaded the source, but didn’t have the headers to compile it. I went digging and found that someone built an RPM for it back in 1997, but Red Hat never officially adopted it. I guess it’s just too special-purpose. The RPM is floating around, I found it on a Japanese site. If that ever goes away, just do a Google search for jpegoptim-1.1-0.i386.rpm.
I used the Debian utility alien to convert the RPM to a Debian package. It’s just a 12K binary, so there’s nothing to installing it. So if you prefer SuSE or TurboLinux or Mandrake or Caldera, it’ll install just fine for you. And Debian users can convert it, no problem.
Jpegoptim actually goes a step further than JPG Cleaner. Aside from discarding all that metadata in the header, its main claim is that it optimizes the Huffman tables that make up the image data itself, reducing the image in size without affecting its quality at all. The difference varies; I ran it on several megabytes’ worth of graphics, and found that on images that still had all those headers, it frequently shaved 20-35K from their size. On images that didn’t have all the extra baggage (including some that I’d optimized with JPG Cleaner), it reduced the file size by another 1.5-3 percent. That’s not a huge amount, but on a 3K image, that’s 40-50 bytes. On a Web page that has lots of small images, those bytes add up. Your modem-based users will notice it.
And Jpegoptim will also let you do the standard JPEG optimization, where you set the file quality to a numeric value between 1 and 100, the higher being the truest to the original. Some image editors don’t let you adjust the quality in a very fine-grained manner. I’ve found that a level of 70 is almost always perfectly acceptable.
So, to try to get something for nothing, change into an image directory and type this:
jpegoptim -t *
And the program will see what it can save you. Don’t worry if you get a negative number; if the “optimized” file ends up actually being bigger, it’ll discard the results.
To lower the quality and potentially save even more, do this:
jpegoptim -m70 -t *
And once again, it’ll tell you what it saves you. (The program always optimizes the Huffman tables, so there’s no need to do multiple steps.) Be sure to eyeball the results if you play with quality, and back up the originals.
Commercial programs that claim to do what these programs do cost anywhere from $50 to $100. This program may be obscure, but that’s criminal. Go get it and take advantage of it.
Also, don’t forget the general rule of file formats. GIF is the most backward-compatible, but it’s encumbered by patents and it’s limited to 256-color images. It’s good for line drawings and cartoons, because it’s a lossless format (it only compresses the data, it doesn’t change it).
PNG is the successor to GIF, sporting better compression and support for 24-color images. Like GIF, it’s lossless, so it’s good for line drawings, cartoons, and photographs that require every detail to be preserved. Unfortunately, not all browsers support PNG.
JPEG has the best compression, because it’s lossy. That means it looks for details that it can discard to make the image compress better. The problem with this is that when you edit JPEGs, especially if you convert them between formats, you’ll run into generation loss. Since JPEG is lossy, line drawings and cartoons generally look really bad in JPEG format. Photographs, which usually have a lot of subtle detail, survive JPEG’s onslaught much better. The advantage of JPEG is the file sizes are much smaller. But you should always examine a JPEG before putting it on the Web; blindly compressing your pictures with high compression settings can lead to hideous results. There’s not much point in squeezing an image down to 1.5K when the result is something no one wants to look at.
R.I.P.: One W2K box
My video editing box bit the dust earlier this week. I loaded a rather large image into Photoshop LE, and it hung. I killed Photoshop LE, and all appeared to be well. Then the desktop and Start menu went away. A few seconds later, they reappeared. They went away again, then reappeared. The cycle continued like a beating drum.
So I did what you should always do when a Windows box starts acting goofy: Reboot. And? After logging in, the problem reappeared.
So I scanned for viruses. The system was clean. I found that if I killed explorer.exe, everything else ran fine. So I could run programs from Task Manager, bring up a command line (just run cmd.exe) or bring up the old Program Manager (remember that from the worse-than-awful Windows 3.1?) and run programs that way. It’s a safe and easy way to save memory, but I really don’t care to subject myself to it on a regular basis. Explorer isn’t perfect, but Program Manager might be the worst shell I’ve ever seen. And I fear that if Explorer is constantly crashing, there’s probably something else wrong with the installation.
I tried doing a recovery install. No go. The installation media couldn’t find a Windows installation on the disk. Figures.
I don’t know if I have a Ghost image of this machine, which is a major pain. W2K got along just fine with all the hardware in the machine, but when I added the Pinnacle DV500, it took me a really long time to get it working right.
So I’m not sure what I’m going to do.
Leave Mike Piazza Alone
Rumor has it baseball’s most eligible bachelor is gay.
Mike Piazza says he’s not.
That should be the end of it.
Now, if some player came out and said he was gay, he wouldn’t be the first gay baseball player. He probably wouldn’t be the most prominent either. I’ve been told from a reliable source that a baseball superstar who retired in the 1980s and is now in the Hall of Fame is gay. The same source cited another player, not of the same caliber but who played during the same time period, as gay. He’s dropped hints in interviews, but never come out and said he is.
Don’t bother asking me who these players are. I have no reason to out them. I also don’t have three sources, which is the semi-unwritten rule that separates gossip from fact.
We’ve come a long, long way since 1984, when a magazine published an article titled “Reggie Jackson speaks out about his sex life,” and Mike Royko pointed out the absurdity. He’d never thought about Reggie Jackson’s sex life, so he went around asking other people if they’d ever thought of it. One guy asked if he wore his uniform and fielder’s mitt. A woman said no, then asked if he wanted to ask her about Ryne Sandberg. And Royko eventually came to the conclusion that Reggie Jackson’s personal life was Reggie Jackson’s business, and if anyone else cared, well, that was just pathetic.
Brendan Lemon, editor of Out magazine, sparked Piazza rumor by claiming last summer that he was having an affair with a pro baseball player who played on the east coast. He knew when he wrote it that people would think of Piazza, because everyone thinks anyone with his looks and his money ought to be married by now, and if he’s not, it must be because he’s gay.
Has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe Piazza just doesn’t want to be married?
Rumors about my sexuality have followed me my entire life. Well, since puberty. It came to a head in seventh grade. The playground talk that year was at least as bad as anything on South Park and frankly, it bordered on sexual harassment. I was in a combined 7th and 8th grade class, and there was one 8th grader who was as bad as the rest of ’em all put together, but collectively, to these guys, a girl was a collection of pleasure-bearing receptacles. That’s it. Well, that and a pretty decoration to be seen around, hopefully.
I didn’t participate in that. Yeah, I thought about sex as much as the next guy… probably. But someone, somewhere along the way, taught me to keep those thoughts to myself. But since I didn’t hit on or at least gawk at every reasonably attractive female carbon-based being that walked upright and was capable of verbal communication, I didn’t talk about what I wanted to do to them in bed, and since I didn’t boast of having a huge collection of Playboy and Penthouse and Hustler magazines at home, there was only one logical conclusion: Dave’s gay.
(And you thought I was going to say I was the nicest guy in my class. You’re so silly.)
One day the talk turned to one of the prettiest girls in the class. She was a year older than me, blonde, and the object of that biggest loudmouth’s every desire. Actually I think he would have died happy if she’d ever said more than two words to him. Rumor was that she had a thing for me. I’ve never really given any thought to the idea of whether she did or not. Looking back now, maybe she started the rumor just to make the jerk mad, because he hated me more than Roger Clemens hates Mike Piazza. Who knows. But I didn’t give any thought to it. I wasn’t interested. Why? Lots of reasons.
“You’re missing out on a chance of a lifetime,” one of the 8th graders said.
“A chance of a lifetime would be to buy IBM,” I said. (Scout’s honor. That was how I thought in those days. It didn’t make me popular.)
No, I didn’t see it as a chance of a lifetime. And yeah, she was really cute, but not really my type. I had a thing about girls who were taller than me. I got over it, about 10 years later. And she was blonde. I’ve always preferred dark hair and a past. So her hair was the wrong color and she wasn’t old enough to have a past. But even if she’d been the 5’1″ brunette of my dreams, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to date her, because I wasn’t about to date anyone from that town. I knew I was moving that summer, and I didn’t want to miss her.
If those former classmates get together on Friday nights and drink beer and talk about old times, they probably still think I’m gay.
In high school I was supposedly gay. The truth was, I hadn’t figured out how to talk to girls yet. By the time I was 17, I had started to figure out that you’re not supposed to talk to girls, you’re supposed to listen to them. So I dated a little as a senior. But mostly I was interested in getting out of there with as many accolades as I could so I could get into the college I wanted. One of my coworkers told me I could have girls then, or I could go to college and then get a real job and get rich and then have one of the girls really worth having. And he told me he respected my priorities.
Within a couple of months he was in prison but I took what he said to heart anyway. It sounded good. Just because he did all the wrong things didn’t mean he didn’t know what the right things were.
In college I forgot about that whole listen-to-girls thing, and the result was I had a whole lot more success getting my ramblings published than I had getting dates. There were girls I was interested in. Usually the feeling wasn’t mutual. There were girls who were interested in me. It wasn’t until after I’d graduated that I figured out what they were trying to tell me. Not that it mattered. I don’t think I would have known how to respond anyway. I knew a lot more about writing than I knew about starting relationships with girls.
I know at least once someone questioned whether I was gay during that timeframe, but that was a guy who thought The X-Files was a true story, so I didn’t let that bother me.
I’ve had a couple of post-college relationships. It’s been a while since the last of those. I don’t always understand women. I do understand guys. I understand them really well. I understand them so well that I know one thing for certain: I’ll never live with another guy for any extended length of time, unless that guy happens to be my son.
I live alone right now. A longtime friend who I don’t see very often anymore came to visit back in January, and he observed that I was content with that, but he questioned whether I was happy. He was right on both counts. But I’m picky about women. I don’t want another relationship like either of the last two. So I’m deliberately being a lot more picky this time around. And if the rumors want to fly, let them fly. I doubt they will.
So, what’s this have to do with Mike Piazza?
Well, there are a few differences between Mike Piazza and me. Mike Piazza hits a baseball a lot better than I do. I’m nowhere near as big of a crybaby about my annual salary as Mike Piazza was earlier in his career. But the biggest difference between Mike Piazza and me, as far as today’s headlines are concerned, is that gay activists don’t really have anything to gain by having me wear their badge. Yeah, I can write a little, but there are lots of gay guys who know how to write. Mike Piazza has money and notoriety and prestige.
But having walked one of the same roads Piazza walks, I have to offer up another, far less chic possibility or series of possibilities.
Maybe Mike Piazza knows a lot more about hitting a baseball than he knows about maintaining lasting, serious relationships with women.
Maybe Mike Piazza doesn’t want the distraction of a lasting, serious relationship with a woman while he’s trying to concentrate on hitting baseballs and winning a World Series and getting into the Hall of Fame. Like him or hate him, you have to admit Piazza has a lot of drive. And–gasp–some guys’ drive for success is stronger than their sex drive.
Or maybe Mike Piazza’s just being picky. All too many people marry the first person they suspect will say yes. And often, the result of that is that at some point after saying “I do,” they have to take those words back and get lawyers involved and it gets really messy. It affects every aspect of your life and turns you upside down. It would happen a whole lot less frequently if people would just be more picky.
I’ll tell you something else. None of what I’ve written about me was anybody’s business until I decided to write about it.
Likewise, none of what goes on in Mike Piazza’s relationships is anybody’s business until he decides to talk about it. And there’s every possibility that he never will.
A stupid BIND trick
My head’s still swimming from my crash course in BIND. I knew enough BIND to be dangerous–I’ve known how to set up a caching nameserver for years, and even stumbling through creating a master server for someone with a fixed IP address who wanted to host a domain wasn’t beyond me. Creating BIND servers for an enterprise isn’t too big of a deal, but creating one right can be.
After reading a lot, I set to the task.
Here’s a hint: If you’re migrating your servers from another OS to some Unixish OS and BIND, you can avoid re-keying all those zone files. (We’ve got more than 60 of the blasted things; our external server alone is 404K worth of configuration files. I didn’t bother to check the internal files.) Set your server to be a slave server to your current server. Be sure to comment out your allow-updates line; BIND 9 will complain if you mention slave servers and updates in the same breath. Now restart BIND (/etc/init.d/bind9 restart in Debian 3.0; the command may be /etc/init.d/named restart or /etc/init.d/bind restart in other distros) and wait. In my case, the files started appearing within seconds, and within a couple of minutes, my server had downloaded all of them. Reset your server to master status, then find a few people to change their TCP/IP configuration to use it. Give it a day or two, and when you’re convinced that all is well, turn off DNS on the old server and put the new server in production.
Yes, my Linux box was perfectly capable of pulling DNS records from an NT-based DNS. This is good. If you’re running DNS on NT currently, I wholeheartedly recommend you migrate away from it. Don’t waste clock cycles and network bandwidth on an expensive NT server. Grab a server-grade machine that’s too old to be a useful NT server and load Linux or some BSD variant on it. I know a company that ran BIND on some old 25 MHz DEC VAX workstations for years. That’s a too low-end to be comfortable, but if you’ve got server-grade 486-66s kicking around in a dusty corner somewhere, they’ll be adequate. A Pentium-133 will treat you a little bit better. A good rule of thumb: If the machine ever ran NT Server with any competence at all (even if it was in 1996), it’s got enough oomph to run BIND.
The nice thing about machines like that is that you usually have more than one of them and it doesn’t cost you anything to keep a hot spare. If one fails, unplug it and boot up the spare. Yes, DNS is mission-critical, but by definition it’s also redundant.
I’m shocked that there isn’t a single-floppy Linux distro that’s basically just Linux and BIND. Here’s a challenge for some sicko: Make a mini-distro incorporating BIND and Linux 1.09 so the minimum requirements will be a 386sx/16 with 2 megs of RAM and an NE2000 NIC.
I believe there are other slick BIND tricks, but I think I’ll wait and see if they work before I go touting a bunch of stuff that might not work.
I was wrong, but I wasn’t alone!
I thought the meeting was at 6. I hurried. I really did. But traffic was horrible, and the journey that can take as little as 7 minutes took closer to 15. Despite my best efforts, it was 6:05 when I pulled into the parking lot.
I noticed there weren’t very many cars there. Good–I wasn’t the only one who got stuck in the unusually thick traffic. There’s nothing worse than being the last one to arrive at a meeting. I know. I do it a lot.
Jamie, a girl of about 19, smiled as I walked in. We chitchatted, I don’t remember about what, but at some point she asked, “The meeting’s at 6, right?” I said yes, as far as I knew. “I don’t know where everybody is,” she said.
It was 6:30 before the next person arrived. Jamie asked her when the meeting was. She said 7. A guy arrived five minutes later. Jamie asked him the same question and got the same answer. It was starting to look like we were wrong.
“Well, at least if we’re going to be idiots, it’s not just one of us,” Jamie fumed, trying to make herself feel better. It didn’t work very well.
“Actually I think this is kinda cool,” I said. “When I’m wrong in a group, it’s usually a group of guys.”
She missed the joke. Or maybe she just didn’t think it was funny. I can never make sense of the mind of a woman.
“I’m gonna quit asking people,” Jamie said.
She asked the next five people who showed. They all said the meeting was at 7. I watched Jamie getting madder and madder.
Meanwhile, I tried to remember the last time I’d been 55 minutes early for anything. I couldn’t remember. I was late to my own high school graduation. I couldn’t help but chuckle. I tried to go serious whenever Jamie looked my direction. I didn’t want to make her feel worse, after all.
Finally, our fearless leader arrived at about 6:50. Jamie gave Brent a talking-to. If you’re a guy, you’ve had those. Many times.
Finally, in desperation, Jamie pointed at me. “He thought it was at 6 too!” She may have been outnumbered, but at least she wasn’t alone.
Brent brushed it off and as Jamie stormed away, he gave me the do-I-owe-you-an-apology? look. I just shrugged my shoulders.
“I’m male,” I said. “I’m used to being wrong.”
Analysis of the Apple Mac Xserver
Given my positive reaction to the Compaq Proliant DL320, Svenson e-mailed and asked me what I thought of Apple’s Xserver.
In truest Slashdot fashion, I’m going to present strong opinions about something I’ve never seen. Well, not necessarily the strong opinions compared to some of what you’re used to seeing from my direction. But still…
Short answer: I like the idea. The PPC is a fine chip, and I’ve got a couple of old Macs at work (a 7300 and a 7500) running Debian. One of them keeps an eye on the DHCP servers and mails out daily reports (DHCP on Windows NT is really awful; I didn’t think it was possible to mess it up but Microsoft found a way) and acts as a backup listserver (we make changes on it and see if it breaks before we break the production server). The other one is currently acting as an IMAP/Webmail server that served as an outstanding proof of concept for our next big project. I don’t know that the machines are really any faster than a comparable Pentium-class CPU would be, but they’re robust and solid machines. I wouldn’t hesitate to press them into mission-critical duty if the need arose. For example, if the door opened, I’d be falling all over myself to make those two machines handle DHCP, WINS, and caching DNS for our two remote sites.
So… Apples running Linux are a fine thing. A 1U rack-mount unit with a pair of fast PPC chips in it and capable of running Linux is certainly a fine thing. It’ll suck down less CPU power than an equivalent Intel-based system would, which is an important consideration for densely-packed data centers. I wouldn’t run Mac OS X Server on it because I’d want all of its CPU power to go towards real work, rather than putting pretty pictures on a non-existent screen. Real servers are administered via telnet or dumb terminal.
What I don’t like about the Xserver is the price. As usual, you get more bang for the buck from an x86-based product. The entry-level Xserver has a single 1 GHz PowerPC, 256 megs of RAM, and a 60-gig IDE disk. It’ll set you back a cool 3 grand. We just paid just over $1300 for a Proliant DL320 with a 1.13 GHz P3 CPU, 128 megs of RAM, and a 40-gig IDE disk. Adding 256 megs of RAM is a hundred bucks, and the price difference between a 40- and a 60-gig drive is trivial. Now, granted, Apple’s price includes a server license, and I’m assuming you’ll run Linux or FreeBSD or OpenBSD on the Intel-based system. But Linux and BSD are hardly unproven; you can easily expect them to give you the same reliability as OS X Server and possibly better performance.
But the other thing that makes me uncomfortable is Apple’s experience making and selling and supporting servers, or rather its lack thereof. Compaq is used to making servers that sit in the datacenter and run 24/7. Big businesses have been running their businesses on Compaq servers for more than a decade. Compaq knows how to give businesses what they need. (So does HP, which is a good thing considering HP now owns Compaq.) If anything ever goes wrong with an Apple product, don’t bother calling Apple customer service. If you want to hear a more pleasant, helpful, and unsuspicious voice on the other end, call the IRS. You might even get better advice on how to fix your Mac from the IRS. (Apple will just tell you to remove the third-party memory in the machine. You’ll respond that you have no third-party memory, and they’ll repeat the demand. There. I just saved you a phone call. You don’t have to thank me.)
I know Apple makes good iron that’s capable of running a long time, assuming it has a quality OS on it. I’ve also been around long enough to know that hardware failures happen, regardless of how good the iron is, so you want someone to stand behind it. Compaq knows that IBM and Dell are constantly sitting on the fence like vultures, wanting to grab its business if it messes up, and it acts accordingly. That’s the beauty of competition.
So, what of the Xserver? It’ll be very interesting to see how much less electricity it uses than a comparable Intel-based system. It’ll be very interesting to see whether Apple’s experiment with IDE disks in the enterprise works out. It’ll be even more interesting to see how Apple adjusts to meeting the demands of the enterprise.
It sounds like a great job for Somebody Else.
I’ll be watching that guy’s experience closely.