Dave installs Windows XP

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

We needed an XP box at work for testing. Duty to do the dirty deed fell to me. So after ghosting the Windows 2000 station several of us share, I pulled out an XP CD. It installed surprisingly quickly–less than half an hour. The system is a P3-667 with 128 MB RAM and an IBM hard drive (I don’t know the model).
It found the network and had drivers for all the hardware in the box. That doesn’t happen very often with Microsoft OSs, so it was nice.

I booted into XP, to be greeted by a hillside that was just begging to be overrun by tanks, but instead of tanks, there was this humongo start menu. I right-clicked on the Start button, hit Properties, and picked Classic view. There. I had a Win95-like Start menu. While I was at it, I went back and picked small icons. I don’t like humongous Start menus.

I also don’t like training wheels and big, bubbly title bars. The system was dog slow, so I right-clicked on the desktop to see what I could find to turn off. I replaced the Windows XP theme with the Classic theme. Then I turned off that annoying fade effect.

Still, the system dragged. I went into Control Panel, System, Performance. Bingo. I could pick settings for best appearance (whose choices are certainly debatable–I guess they look good if you like bright colors and have a huge monitor) or best performance. Guess which I picked? Much better.

Next, I went into Networking. I saw some QoS thing. I did a search. It’s intended to improve the quality of your network, at the price of 20% of your bandwidth. Forget that. I killed it.

After I did all that stuff, XP was reasonably peppy. It logs on and off quickly. I installed Office 2000 and it worked fine. The apps loaded quickly–just a couple of seconds. That’s how it should be. If I went in and edited the shortcuts in the Start menu to turn off the splash screens, they’d load instantly.

WinXP brings up a bunch of popups that I don’t like. If I wanted unexpected popup windows, I’d run a Web browser. I couldn’t quickly figure out how to disable those.

I couldn’t run Windows Update. It froze every time I tried.

I found a Windows XP tuning guide at ExtremeTech. I suspect turning off the eye candy will help more than most of the suggestions in that article. I suspect if I dug around I’d find other things. We’ll see if I get some time.

XP isn’t as bad as I expected, I guess. But I’m still not going to buy it.

This, on the other hand, is worth a second look. And a third. You can now run MS Office on Linux. No need to wait for Lindows, no need to abandon your current fave distro (at least if your fave distro is Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, or Caldera).

It’s 55 bucks. It’s available today. It brings Office 97/2000 and Lotus Notes r5 to your Linux desktop. Other Windows apps work, but their functionality isn’t guaranteed.

You can get some screenshots at CodeWeavers. It even makes the apps look like native Linux apps.

Spontaneous system reboots

Dave Farquhar Troubleshooting , , , , ,

Steve DeLassus asked me the other day what I would do to fix a PC that was rebooting itself periodically. It’s not him who’s having the problem, he says, it’s someone he knows. He must be trying to show up someone at work or on the Web or something.
So I gave him a few things I’d check, in order of likelihood.

Static electricity. A big static shock can send a system down faster than anything else I’ve seen. Keep a humidifier in the computer room to reduce static electricity. If you’re really paranoid, put a metal strip on your desk and connect it to ground (on your electrical outlet, not on your PC) and touch it before touching your PC. Some people metalize and ground part of their mouse pad. That’s a bit extreme but it works.

Power supply. This is the big one. A failing power supply can take out other components. And even if you have an expensive, big-brand box like a PCP&C or Enermax, they can fail. So I always keep a spare ATX power supply around for testing. It doesn’t have to be an expensive one–you just want something that can run the machine for a day or two to see if the problem goes away.
Overheating. Check all your fans to make sure they’re working. An overheated system can produce all sorts of weird behavior, including reboots. The computer we produced our school newspaper on back in 1996 tended to overheat and reboot about 8 hours into our marathon QuarkXPress sessions.

Memory. It’s extremely rare, but even Crucial produces the occasional defective module. And while bad memory is more likely to produce blue screens than reboots, it’s a possibility worth checking into. Download Memtest86 to exercise your memory.

CPU. If you’re overclocking and experiencing spontaneous reboots, cut it out and see what happens. Unfortunately, by the time these reboots become common, it may be too late. That turned out to be the case with that QuarkXPress-running PC I mentioned earlier. Had we replaced the fans with more powerful units right away, we might have been fine, but we ended up having to replace the CPU. (We weren’t overclocking, but this was an early Cyrix 6×86 CPU, a chip that was notorious for running hot.) Less likely today, but still possible.

Hard drive. I’m really reaching here. If you’re using a lot of virtual memory and you have bad sectors on your hard drive and the swapfile is using one or more of those bad sectors, a lot of unpredictable things can happen. A spontaneous reboot is probably the least of those. But theoretically it could happen.

Operating system. This is truly the last resort. People frequently try to run an OS that’s either too new or too old to be ideal on a PC of a particular vintage. If the system is failing but all the hardware seems to be OK, try loading the OS that was contemporary when the system was new. That means if it’s a Pentium-133, try Win95 on it. If it’s a P4, try Windows 2000 or Windows XP on it. When you try to run a five-year-old OS on a new system, or vice-versa, you can run into problems with poorly tested device drivers or a system strapped for resources.

Another good OS-related troubleshooting trick for failing hardware is to try to load Linux. Linux will often cause suspect hardware to fail, even if the hardware can run Windows successfully, because Linux pushes the hardware more than Microsoft systems do. So if the system fails to load Linux, start swapping components and try again. Once the system is capable of loading Linux successfully, it’s likely to work right in Windows too.

Troubleshooting advice: When you suspect a bad component, particularly a power supply, always swap in a known-good component, rather than trying out the suspect component in another system to see if the problem follows it. The risks of damaging the system are too great, particularly when you try a bad power supply in another system.

And, as always, you minimize the risks of these problems by buying high-quality components, but you never completely eliminate the risk. Even the best occasionally make a defective part.

Sexual Harassment training

Dave Farquhar St. Louis

Warning: This entry is rated PG-13. No animals were harmed in the making of this post. And all other standard disclaimers apply.
On Saturday, before the hammer fell, I was out chasing trains and airplanes in a train. Gatermann hadn’t ridden Metrolink (St. Louis’ light-rail system) on the East Side yet, so we went off sightseeing. Anyone from St. Louis will know the connotations the East Side has, but those weren’t the kinds of sights we were after. We were looking for modern ruins, not scantily-clad women. And we found some modern ruins, including an abandoned Drive-In Theater that must have been at least 30 years past its prime.

We took another friend along, female. I won’t say her name because she gets mad when I write about her.

We were on the train, with me sitting at a window seat, she in the window seat behind me, and Gatermann in the window seat across the aisle from her. Suddenly she tapped me on the shoulder. “Dave, help me.” I looked back at her. She was breathing OK, and as far as I could tell there wasn’t anything physically wrong with her. She beckoned behind her. I saw a guy sitting in a seat behind her, but he was looking the other direction and seemed to be minding his own business, reading (or pretending to read) a newspaper. I asked her what she needed. She beckoned in the direction of that same guy, whose face remained buried in that paper. Seeing the bewildered look on my face, Gatermann started wondering what was up, so he came over and sat next to her. She didn’t say anything. The train pulled to a stop, and the guy she’d been beckoning towards stood up and exited, giving us a quick sideways glance before heading off on his way.

Once the train started moving, she mouthed the words, “Is he gone?”

I said yes. She started to talk.

“That guy,” she said, pointing at the seat he’d been sitting in, “He motioned towards me, then he said, ‘Hi.’ Then he mouthed the words, ‘I want to lick you.'”

Gatermann and I started snickering, because, well, this guy wasn’t even close to being in her league, but besides that, the nerve of the guy! I’m the kind of guy who has trouble walking up to a girl I don’t know even if she’s acting extremely interested, and Gatermann makes me look like an extrovert, and here’s this skuzbucket saying that kind of stuff to a girl when he doesn’t even know her name?

That kind of stuff happens to her a lot, and she asked why. It’s pretty simple. There are a lot of creeps out there looking for girls who’ll take them up on those offers, and if 99 out of 100 girls say no, he’s still happy because of the one who didn’t. Maybe he’s even happy if only 1 out of 1,000 girls say yes. By the time he was off the train he’d written her off. It’s no knock on her. He probably literally does say that to all the girls–at least all the girls he sees who aren’t wearing a ring on their left ringfinger.

What made it really ironic was that she’d been griping all morning about having to go to sexual harrassment training last week, and Gatermann and I had been amusing ourselves by looking for signs or other things she wouldn’t be able to say at work.

But I think that creepy guy came up with the most blatant violation.

And now I know why no girls I know want to ride Metrolink alone.

Personal problems.

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve got some personal problems going on right now. They’re not so much my problems as they are problems of a personal nature, and as much as I would love to get out my poison pen and machine gun a few people’s names in public, I’m not going to do that. Dragging people’s names through the mud doesn’t accomplish anything. They’ve tarnished the reputations of some of my family members by doing that to them, but I want to be above that.
That said, it’s a really good thing I don’t have that Tu-144, because I’d be buzzing someone’s house at Mach 1 right now if I did, and I doubt that would be pretty.

I don’t know what this means for anything else. Writing here helps me to focus and to take my mind off the garbage that goes on outside my front door. So I don’t expect any long hiatus or anything like that. What I intended to post right now isn’t going to happen. I’ve written a couple of paragraphs but that’s it. I might finish it tomorrow.

So that’s what’s going on. Those of you who pray, if you’d say one for my family in general, I’d appreciate it. (I don’t want to get any more specific than that. God knows the situation, and He knows it a whole lot better than I do anyway.)

I just got back from a Third Day concert

Dave Farquhar General

I just got back from a Third Day concert and I’m dead tired. I’ll say this about Third Day: they’re amazing musicians and they’re amazing men. Mac Powell was constantly reaching down to shake hands with people in front of the stage (and he let them be right up at the stage). If he didn’t have a guitar in his hands and he wasn’t singing, he was shaking someone’s hand. And at the end of the concert, all the band members handed their instruments to their techs, hugged each other, then went and spent several minutes shaking as many hands as they could.
Third Day did a live album last year, and it’s really good–I like it better than some of their studio albums–but I don’t think that album did their live shows justice. The visuals were stunning, but seeing them at work makes a big difference. They’re four guys who’ve known each other more than 10 years, and from all indications onstage, are really good friends. They all look like guys I went to college with. They’re genuine people, doing what they enjoy doing, and they have no pretentions about them, even though they are extremely good at what they do.

And “extremely good” is an understatement. You can always tell when a band sounds too good–you’ll never duplicate the studio sound onstage. But they adapted their songs for the live show and the songs didn’t sound at all compromised. I’ve seen a lot of bands live and heard even more live recordings, and these guys are the best. The two best live shows I’ve seen were U2 and The Cure, but these guys were better, although less flambouyant.

I’ll be back later today to talk about other stuff. See you in a few hours.

Linux reliability

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Linux reliability. Steve Mahaffey brought up a good point yesterday, while I was off on a consulting gig, where I learned one of the secrets of the universe–but since it’ll bore a lot of people to tears, I’ll save that for the end.
I’ve found that text-based apps and servers in Linux are extremely reliable. As David Huff’s tagline reads, “Linux: Because reboots are for upgrades.” If you’re running a server, that’s pretty much true. Unless you have to upgrade the kernel or install hardware that requires you to open the case, you can go for months or years without upgrading it.

The problem with Linux workstations is that up until very recently, the GUI apps people want to run the most have been in beta. The developers made no bones about their quality, but companies like Red Hat and Mandrake and SuSE have been shipping development versions of these apps anyway. On one hand, I don’t blame them. People want programs that will do what they’re used to doing in Windows. They want word processors that look like Word and mail clients that look like Outlook, and if they’re good enough–that is, they don’t crash much more than their Windows equivalents and they provide nearly as much functionality, or, in some cases, one or two things MS didn’t think of–they’ll put up with it. Because, let’s face it, for 50 bucks (or for nothing if you just download it off the ‘net) you’re getting something that’s capable of doing the job of Microsoft packages that would set you back at least $1,000. Even if you just use it for e-mail and Web access, you come out ahead.

The bigger bone I have to pick with Red Hat and Mandrake and, to some extent, even SuSE is where they put experimental code. I don’t mind experimental desktop apps–I’ve been running Galeon since around version 0.8 or so. But when you start using bleeding-edge versions of really low-level stuff like the C compiler and system libraries just to try to eke out some more performance, that really bothers me. There are better ways to improve performance than using experimental compilers. Not turning on every possible daemon (server) is a good start.

Compile beta-quality apps with a compiler that’s beta quality itself, and throw in every other bleeding-edge feature you can think of, and you’ll end up with a system that has the potential to rival Windows’ instability. Absolutely.

That’s one reason I like Debian. Debian releases seem to take as long as the Linux kernel does, and that’s frustrating, but reassuring. You can install the current stable Debian package, then add one or more of the more desirable apps from either the testing or unstable tree (despite the name, Debian unstable’s stability seems comparable to Mandrake) and have the best of all worlds. And when a .01 release of something comes out (which it always seems to do, and quickly) it’s two commands to upgrade to it.

It’ll be interesting to see how Lycoris (formerly Redmond Linux) pans out. Lycoris appears to take a more conservative approach, at least with the number of apps they install. If that conservatism extends to the versions of those packages they install, it’ll go a long way towards extending server Linux’s reliability to the desktop.

Debian is intimidating. I find it less intimidating than Slackware, but it does zero handholding during installation. So generally I recommend someone start with SuSE or Mandrake or Red Hat, get comfortable with how things are laid out, and get familiar with PC hardware if not already, and then, once feeling brave, tackle Debian. Debian is hard to install, but its quality is pristine and it’s exceptionally easy to maintain. Debian developers try to justify the difficulty of installing it by saying no one ever has to install it twice on the same PC, and they’re right about the second part. Eventually I expect they’ll take the installer from another distro that’s based on Debian to make it easier, but it won’t be in Debian 3.0 and it may not make it into 3.1 either.

The secret of consulting. My employer sent me off on a consulting gig yesterday. The main reason for it, I suspect, is because of my training as a journalist. It means I can ask questions, keep track of the answers, and make a PowerPoint presentation that looks decent.

Consultants get a bad rap because they’re notorious for not knowing anything. You pay lots of money to have someone who knows nothing about you and potentially nothing about your problem come in and ask questions, then come back later and give you a dog-and-pony show featuring sugar-coated versions of your answers and little else.

I won’t say who my client is, nor will I say who my employer is. What I will say is that my partner in this endeavor knows a whole lot more about the subject matter than I do. I’ll also say that the two of us are good researchers and can learn very quickly. Our regular job titles attest to that. We both have liberal arts degrees but we primarily work as systems administrators. We didn’t learn this stuff in school.

Up until Monday, I knew nothing about our client. Absolutely nothing. Up until yesterday afternoon, I knew nothing meaningful about the client. I knew its name and what its logo looked like, the name of one person who worked there, and I had a vague notion what they wanted to know.

I think that was an advantage. We both asked a lot of questions. I wrote down the answers quickly, along with whatever other information I could gleen. We left three hours later. I had six pages of typewritten notes and enough documents from them to fill a standard manilla file folder. We knew what they didn’t want, and we knew they were willing to throw money at the problem.

There’s such thing as knowing too much. One of the solutions they’re considering is overkill. The other is underkill. The difference in price between them is about 3 times our consulting fee. It took me another hour’s worth of research to find something that will give them the bare minimum of what they need for about $500 worth of additional equipment on top of the low-ball figure. When you’re talking the high-ball figure costing in excess of $40,000, that’s nothing. I found another approach that basically combines the two that will double the cost of the low-ball figure, but still save them enough to more than justify our fee.

I don’t know their internal politics or their priorities on the nice-to-have features. My job isn’t to tell them what to buy. Nor is it my job to give them my opinion on what they should buy. My job is to give them their options, based on the bare, basic facts. Whatever they buy, my feelings won’t be hurt, and there’s every possibility I’ll never see them again. They’ll make a better-informed decision than they would have if they’d never met me, and that’s the important thing to all involved.

I never thought I’d be able to justify a role as a high-priced expert on nothing relevant. But in this case at least, being an expert on absolutely nothing relevant is probably the best thing I could have brought to the table.

And since we haven’t done a whole lot of this kind of consulting before, I’ll get to establish some precedents and blaze a trail for future projects. That’s cool.

That other thing. There’s a lot of talk about the current scandal in Roman Catholicism. It’s not a new scandal; it’s been a dirty little — and not very well-kept — secret for years. There’s more to the issue than we’re reading in the papers. I’ll talk about that tomorrow. I come neither to defend nor condemn the Roman Catholic church. Its problems aren’t unique to Catholicism and they’re not unique to the Christianity either. Just ask my former Scoutmaster, whose filthy deeds earned him some hefty jail time a decade and a half ago.

Stay tuned.

Pretentious Pontifications, Part II

Dave Farquhar General

David’s off on a gig. So I get to post again.
I flew my private Tu-144 out to Hearst Castle last weekend, where I rented a room and set up sound equipment. It was a grand day. Because Hearst Castle is on the ocean, the waves beat against the castle.

I sat down to pontificate, and I found that the sentient sound of the waves didn’t sound nearly as inveigling as the sound of my voice.

I asked the audio engineer if he could filter out the sound of the waves. He said he could.

So I picked up where I left off, pontificating about whatever came to mind.

It was fabulous. I spoke with panache. I was laconic. It was completely unlike le Raunche a la Stenche’s recent bumptious platitudes, and way out of the league of most of the drivel I read on the Web.

David actually found the Tu-144 for me. After the highly-publicized Concorde crash nearly two years ago, David read a story claiming that the Concorde was the only operational supersonic airliner. In a flash of memory that almost impressed me, he said, “The Soviets had an SST. What was it called, the Tu-144? Whatever happened to that?” So he did a Web search. Then he found out the Tu-144 last flew as a jetliner in 1978. He could have found that out a lot faster if he had just asked me, but he didn’t.

But one of the pages he found listed a pair of Tu-144s for sale. His ignorance paid off, in the form of the private jet I’ve been looking for.

As for le Raunche a la Stenche’s assertions about my aviation, astute readers will note that the Tu-144 page I linked to was from the Wayback Machine. The real page is no longer available, and for good reason. I bought the plane. It would truly be an anathema if they sold my plane, after I paid a perfectly good $10 million for it. Raunche is just mad that he couldn’t schmooze his way into getting them to give the plane to him for “evaluation and review.” That didn’t work for this. This is quality hardware.

Too bad it wasn’t built by Intel.

We’ve got problems.

Dave Farquhar General , ,

It all happened two nights ago when I put a questionable disk in my Linux box that’s running a highly experimental kernel. The task crashed. OK, fine. Everything else was still happy. So I tried to close out that shell. Hello, Mr. Freeze. Well, that’s what I get for running an experimental kernel. These things happen. So I rebooted. It came up fine, except it couldn’t see the network.
Figuring I’d catch all kinds of crap about this one, I shut off the monitor and resolved to come back to it later.

Then I came home last night and figured I’d check my mail on one of my Windows boxes. It errored out immediately. So I opened a command prompt and tried to ping. The network was unreachable. What? Is this contagious? So I went to my Web server. It saw the world just fine, and the world could see it. Curious.

So my router/switch was fine. I looked under my desk. There it was, blinking away. Then I noticed something wrong down there. I glanced at my hub. No lights. No nothing.

I reached down and unplugged it. Dead. I unplugged the power cable from the power supply. Dead. I reached over to the hub’s plug and pulled it.

My Web server went dead. So much for my 270+ days of uptime. And I guess that wasn’t my hub after all.

So I traced the cable from my Windows box to the hub, and moved it to the switch. I opened a command prompt and typed ipconfig /renew. I was back in business immediately.

I tried my Linux box, but I couldn’t trace its cable. I’ll do that some other time.

And of course I needed to plug my work laptop in and VPN into the LAN to try to do a little maintenance. Every night needs to be spiced up with some adventure, you know.

I guess I’ll be finding out about Netgear’s customer service later.

CSS and XHTML and standards

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Our Unix/VMS admin popped his head over his cube the other day and asked me if I’d tried a particular site on our corporate intranet under Galeon in Linux. I hadn’t; I’d never had occasion to use the site. I was booted into Wintendo at the time, which is normal, since I’m basically an NT administrator. Personal beliefs about Windows aside, administering NT pays the bills, and computers are tools, not a religion.
But my workaday browser is K-Meleon, a lightweight browser based on the Mozilla project’s Gecko engine. It’s small, it’s fast, it’s standards-compliant, and it’s easy to tell it to ignore the JavaScript code that creates popups and popunders. So I tried visiting the site in question with K-Meleon.

Denied.

This made me mad. TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML were all intended to be cross-platform. The first graphical Web browser was written on a NeXT, for crying out loud! NeXT! How many people today even know what NeXT was?

Of course, when you use Microsoft Web servers serving up pages using Microsoft tools, all the rules change. Microsoft doesn’t even care about previous versions of its own browser. Rule #1 of Web design, which most designers have sadly forgotten, is that you test your site with several different browsers, and preferably several versions of them. It’s easy to make multiple versions of Netscape happily coexist on a machine, but Microsoft has made it next to impossible for more than one version of IE to exist on a machine without resorting to multi-booting. With IE4, IE5, IE5.5, and IE6 all in widespread use and the wretched IE3 unfortunately not extinct, that’s a burden.

A couple of days later, the site’s administrator came back with a snippy response: Use the company standard Web browser.

This, to a Unix and VMS administrator. The only time he ever runs Windows is to fill out his timesheet, since we use a Windows-only app to do it. He’s got a beat-up Micron Pentium-166 in the back of his cube for that purpose. While he could do his job with a PC running Windows and a decent Telnet client, he’s much better off running Linux. He can develop shell scripts locally before sending them up to our big Digital Unix box. Running Linux makes him more productive.

But forget him being able to do his job. He needs to run Windows and Internet Exploiter so he can log into this Web site.

While we’re at it, forget that Internet Exploiter has security holes big enough to drive a truck through. Forget that keeping IIS patches up to date is a full-time job in and of itself. Let’s be Microsoft lackeys. All hail Gates and Ballmer.

I guess the few remaining Mac users at work are going to have to get PCs so they can use this intranet site as well. While I can think of reasons to replace Macs with something else, the inability to display a Web page isn’t among them.

Want to know why it’s a really bad idea to code for just one browser?

Internet Exploiter users can’t read this paragraph, so, those of you who, like me, use a real Web browser written by someone other than an imperialistic monopolist, can share in a dirty little secret. Want to know how to sabotage inept browsers and encourage the use of standards-compliant browsers like Opera and the Mozilla family? Use the tag. Simply nest something inside and , and those who have yet to be liberated from the Evil Empire won’t be able to read it. (Remove the leading and trailing spaces–I had to put those in because some browsers don’t interpret the less-than/greater-than sequences either. Hmm…)

If you want to really be nasty, code your pages so that the only thing visible outside of those tags are the words, “This site can only be viewed with something other than Internet Explorer.” You’ll hack a lot of people off, but you’ll make your point.

Quick question: What’s the first line of the paragraph immediately preceeding this one? If your answer is, “Want to know,” you’re running a Microsoft browser. If your answer is “Internet Exploiter users can’t read this paragraph,” you’re not. There are two paragraphs here nested in non-standard tags. Browsers not made in Redmond correctly ignore this tag and display the text.

There are plenty of sites on the Web that ignore non-IE browsers for no good reason, and who could easily support everything by just following industry standards.

So, for security, what’s wrong with .htaccess files? They work, they’re easy to use, and they don’t tie you to any particular OS or browser on the client side. Especially on a corporate intranet, they’re great.

For layout, what’s wrong with sticking with standard XHTML and CSS? It’s easy to create beautiful pages that look beautiful in any modern browser (not just the one you happen to have installed on your machine), and remain perfectly readable in text browsers and ancient versions of the old standbys. Here’s a great tutorial on basic text styling, a more complete tutorial, some tips on converting existing content, and a site with several elegant layouts you can steal and adapt.

You can even do a cool trick to give your users a choice between your design and the preferences they set in browser setup.

It’s not incredbily difficult to make a layout that looks extremely good and is easy to navigate, plus is readable on all browsers, plus allows the user to gracefully resize it. The end result is files that are smaller than old-school HTML, so the pages download and render faster.

XHTML and CSS are all the rage now, with tutorials in the popular press, and with bloggers flocking to it. It goes a long way towards solving the complaints I had about HTML when I was learning it (let’s face it, when you’re used to designing in QuarkXPress, HTML 3.0 is just plain clunky) so talented designers can do some really impressive things with it.

I’m going to start moving in that direction. It’s time we all did. It’s time to take back the Web. Install Netscape 6.2 and Netscape 4.79 on your machine so you can check your pages in them. At the very least, install OffByOne to ensure your pages are viewable in a third-generation browser (it’s just 1.2 megs in size, so it won’t kill you).

XHTML and CSS are cool if you’re the artsy type, but they’re more than just cool. They’re the right thing to do. I hope I can find the time…

As as for that Intranet site at work? If using it ever becomes part of my job, I’ll re-code it and store it on an Apache server, protected by an htaccess file to show how easy it is to develop cross-platform apps on the Web. After all, it’s what it was designed for.

Not that I expect anyone to listen. It’s distressingly hard to find people who think for themselves, rather than just repeating everything that Microsoft tells them.

Overdue update on Katelyn

Dave Farquhar General

I actually saw Katelyn last night. She’s growing. She’s now about six months old. Her brother, Tommy, weighs 15 pounds, 2 ounces. Katie weighs just over 12 pounds. She’s not eating too well though.
I’ve told a couple of people privately that Katelyn has a breathing tube, but I was wrong about that. It’s a feeding tube. When I saw her, she was awake and as aware of her surroundings as you could expect any six-month-old to be. She was the center of attention and seemed to enjoy it.

I’m making a short documentary about her. I’ve got some good footage. I filmed her baptism, about five months ago, and I’ve got that. The camera at church is amazing so it looks good, and the camera was hooked in to the house audio, so the audio is perfect. I’ve got pastor’s tears and his voice quaking as he baptized her.

I’ve also got tape I shot back in January as their small-group was meeting. Mostly it looks like what it was: a room full of adults. But I got some good shots of Karin just being a mom, and the group praying for Katelyn, and I caught some stories on audio that I’ll probably clean up and use. (The acoustics in that room were awful, so I’ll have to clean up the audio).

I’ve been watching John and Karin’s home movies. There are some shots of Katie and Tommy together, some shots of them feeding Katie, lots of shots of them burping or sleeping and/or chomping on pacifiers–the things you’d expect babies to do. I found a little footage where Katie appeared to be having trouble breathing, which illustrates the severity of her situation at the time.

But if you want to talk severity, we’ve got some shots of her in the hospital with more tubes and wires coming out of her than out of most of my computers. I’ll have to do some editing on that shot. I want to convey her being in the hospital, but I don’t want to gross people out and I don’t want to make anything that’ll embarrass her when she’s older.

I’m more concerned on the latter point. I can’t watch ER because it grosses me out, and that footage didn’t bother me.

There were also a few shots of the family dogs. The best stories are about kids and dogs. But I haven’t found an excuse yet to get a dog into it. But trust me. If there’s a way, I’ll find it. If there’s a shot of Katelyn with one of the family dogs, it’s so in there.

The challenge here is that people sitting in front of the camera talking aren’t especially interesting. So you want to find some other video that somehow ties in to what they’re talking about, or, better yet, tells more of the story. But babies don’t tell much of the story, not without considerable help.

My job is to be that help.