Linkfest Friday…

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

Let’s start things off with some links. Web development’s been on my mind the last few days. There’s a whole other world I’ve been wanting to explore for a couple of years, and I’ve finally collected the information that’ll let me do it.
Redirecting virus attacks — Your neighbor’s got Nimda? Here’s how to get his IIS server to quit harassing your Apache server. (Suggests redirecting to a bogus address; I’m inclined to redirect either to 127.0.0.1 or www.microsoft.com, personally.)

DJG’s help setting up MySQL. Apache, MySQL and PHP are a fabulous combination, but bootstrapping it can be a painful process. People talk about writing a sendmail.cf file as their loss of innocence, but I’ve written one of those and I’ve tried to set up the LAMP quartet. The sendmail.cf file was easier because there’s a whole lot more written about it.

Short version: Use Debian. Forget all the other distributions, because they’ll install the pieces, but rarely do they put the conduits in place for the three pieces to talk. It’s much easier to just download and compile the source. If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, use Debian and save some heartache. If you’re stuck with the distro you have, download ApacheToolbox and use it. You’ll probably have to configure your C/C++ compiler and development libraries. That’s not as bad as it sounds, but I’m biased. I’ve compiled entire distributions by hand–to the point that I’ve taken Linux From Scratch, decided I didn’t like some of the components they used because they were too bloated for me, and replaced them with slimmer alternatives. (The result mostly worked. Mostly.) You’ve gotta be a bit of a gearhead to take that approach.

Debian’s easier. Let’s follow that. Use this command sequence:

apt-get install apache
apt-get install php4-mysql
apt-get install mysql-server

Next, edit /etc/apache/httpd.conf. There’s a commented-out line in there that loads the php4 module. Uncomment that. Just search for php. It’ll be the third or fourth instance. Also, search for index.html. To that line, add the argument index.php. If you make index.php the first argument, access to PHP pages will be slightly faster. Pull out any filetypes you’re not using–if you’ll never make an index page called anything but index.html or index.php, pull the others and Apache will perform better.

Got that? Apache’s configured. Yes, the php installation could make those changes for you. It doesn’t. I’m not sure why. But trust me, this is a whole lot less painful than it is under Red Hat.

But you’re not ready to go just yet. If you try to go now, MySQL will just deny everything. Read this to get you the rest of the way.

Once you’ve got that in place, there are literally thousands of PHP and PHP/MySQL apps and applets out there. If you can imagine it, you can build it. If HTML is a 2D world, PHP and MySQL are the third and fourth dimension.

Am I going to be playing in that world? You’d better believe it. How soon? It depends on how quickly I can get my content whipped into shape for importing.

This is the holy grail. My first editing job was doing markup for the Digital Missourian, which the faculty at the University of Missouri School of Journalism believe was the first electronic newspaper (it came into being in 1986 or so). By the time I was working there in the late summer of 1995, it had been on the ‘Net for several years. About eight of us sat in a room that was originally a big storage closet, hunched in front of 486s, pulling stories off the copydesk, adding HTML markup, and FTPing them to a big Unix cluster on the MU campus. We ran a programmable word processor called DeScribe, and we worked out some macros to help speed along the markup.

No big operation works that way anymore. There aren’t enough college students in the world. You feed your content to a database, be it Oracle or IBM DB2 or Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL or PostgresSQL. Rather than coding in straight HTML, you use a scripting language–be it PHP or ASP–that queries the database, pulls the content, applies a template, and generates the HTML on the fly. The story goes from the copy editor’s desk to the Web with no human intervention.

There are distinct advantages to this approach even for a small-time operation like me. Putting the content in a database gives you much more versatility. Some people want overdesigned Web sites. Some want something middle-ground, like this one. Others want black text on a gray background like we had in 1994. You can offer selectable formats to them. You can offer printer-friendly pages. You can even generate PDFs on the fly if you want–something some sites are doing now in an effort to gain revenue. If you have content from various sources, you can slice and dice and combine it in any imaginable way.

I can’t wait.

Priorities (Or: How to spend Valentine’s night on the couch)

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire , , ,

It’s that special time of year, when a man’s thoughts turn to…
Computers. Or other gadgets. Just like they always do. Men don’t need a Hallmark holiday to think about what they really want.

Steve DeLassus called me up the other night. He wanted to talk about tape drives and CD-RWs. He wanted to know if it was safe to buy an ATAPI CD-RW drive, or if he should buy SCSI. He knew about my terrible experiences with first-generation ATAPI CD-RWs. I burned as many coasters as I did successful discs, and in those days, a coaster was an expensive mistake.

I told him where to get Plextor CD-RWs for next to nothing (Newegg.com). Steve checked yesterday morning, but they were out of them, as it turns out. So Steve looked at Hyper Microsystems and found some good prices on Plextor units. Not earth-shattering like the deal I saw at New Egg a couple of weeks ago, but good. We had initially talked about 12X units. But the 16X unit was $4 more, and the 24X unit was $20 more than that. “You can ride that train all the way up to the $179 40X burner,” I said.

Steve hasn’t responded to that as I write this. Considering what I paid for my 2X burner in 1998, that $179 Plextor 40X unit is a steal.

But there’s something else to consider: The overhead in burning a disc. It takes the computer a little time to figure out the disc layout, and that speed is dependent on the host computer (and the software it’s running), not the burner. It didn’t seem like much time in the days of 2X burners, but compared to the three minutes it takes to lay down a mountain of data on the disc with a modern burner, it’s started to look significant. Secondly, it takes some time to close a disc. I haven’t taken a stopwatch to it, but the 12X unit I use in one of my offices at work seems to take about the same amount of time to close a disc as the 2X unit I use in another office. The 12X unit doesn’t burn a disc 6 times as fast as the clunky 2X unit. And the 24X unit definitely won’t be twice as fast as a 12X.

Since I don’t have all those burners and don’t have the time to make a scientific test, I went to CDRLabs.com to get some figures. Their testbed has changed over time–they keep it constant across drive generations, but the 12x unit was tested in a different system than the 40x unit, and they overclock. Storage Review’s methodology is much better. But the numbers are good enough to illustrate the point.

Results of burning 651 MB of data, along with the cost of the drive:
12x: 6:43 ($124)
16x: 5:11 ($129)
24x: 3:54 ($149)
40x: 3:26 ($175)

Even given the advantage of a faster computer and newer software, the 40x unit still can’t double the speed of the venerable 12x unit.

Why the diminishing returns? Constant Angular Velocity. Very high-speed burners use the same technique as high-speed readers, so you don’t get a constant 40x. The 40x drive starts out at 20x and steps up to 40x as it reaches the outside of the disc. The average writing speed is closer to 30x. Obviously, the less data you burn, the less the 40x drive will help you.

I also pointed out to Steve that there’s more to this than the hard dollar cost. It’s Valentine’s Day time, and there’s the wrath of the wife to deal with. There’s always a hidden cost involved, no matter what you’re buying, and sometimes it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what you’re buying.

I could quote Proverbs 31:10 and say that a wife is a treasure and therefore you should always treat her as such, and therefore you should buy the $59 refurbished 8x drive for you, a $39 dozen roses for her, and–here’s the kicker–then spend $80 filling her car with flowers the week after Valentine’s Day, when your money buys three times as much. See? I’m a thinking man.

Then again, you can go for bragging rights and find yourself singing along with Dave:

That’s okay, hey hey hey, love songs bite anyway!

(In which case, you’ll probably find yourself spending Valentine’s night on the couch. Or on the porch. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced this, but I don’t think it would be very pleasant to be stuck out on the porch wearing something skimpy in Missouri in February.)

So, to recap, for those of you taking notes: Spending $179 on a 40x CD-RW drive for you and giving a home-made Valentine’s Day card to your wife will lead to very bad things.

Burning a CD full of sappy love songs and then bragging about how it only took four minutes to burn (the 40x drive doesn’t burn audio at full speed) won’t make it any better. Sorry.

But I seem to have gotten off the subject somehow.

As far as tape drives go, I can tell you that Quantum DLT tape drives rock because that’s all we use at work. They’re built like tanks and last forever. The tapes are cheap and take a lot of punishment. They back up at a rate of about 5 MB/sec, which makes them faster than the hard drives of 10 years ago. And they work fabulously with Seagate Backup Exec, which severely reduces headaches when people want stuff restored. Considering they start at about $3995, they’d better have something going for them.

Steve’s needs are a bit more modest. An 8-gig IDE Travan drive from the likes of Seagate is cheap. The tapes run about $30, but for the quantities of data Steve will be backing up (he and I both rely on CD-Rs for backups now) and the frequency at which he’ll be doing so, a drive and tapes designed for light duty ought to do fine. When it comes to tape drives, you can buy a cheap drive that uses expensive tapes, or an expensive drive that uses cheap tapes. A lesson most people have to learn quickly is that it’s much easier to get a cheaper drive past the glare of your wife or boss and then buy the more-costly media as you need them. Media’s an OK purchase. Hardware is bad.

That’s why Zip drives have been so successful, and why Iomega is still in business.

I think if Steve wants to spend Valentine’s night on the porch, he needs to buy a DLT drive, then take out a cash advance to make his first minimum payment.

Then he can gloat about how much money he’s saving on tapes.

Optimizing a Linux box in-place

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

Here’s the Linux bit I promised yesterday. I wrote it much earlier, so I might as well throw it out there.
Our test firewall at work is an old Pentium-200 running Red Hat Linux and a commercial firewall app. (No, I won’t disclose which one. Security, you know.) It’s a bit slow. A P200 is severe overkill for the firewall built into the Linux kernel (Steve DeLassus and I made a firewall out of the first PC he ever bought, a 486SX/20 of 1992 vintage, which, save the loss of the original power supply in an electrical storm, has never required any service), but this commercial package does a lot more than the simple firewalls built into Unixish kernels do.

It had 72 megs of RAM in it and swapped mercilessly. Its speed seemed to be OK once it was booted, but seeing as this is a testbed, it tends to get rebooted an awful lot. I needed to do something for it.

So I trekked into the PC graveyard to see what I could dig up. I found a Compaq 386DX/20. I left that alone. That’ll be useful if I ever need to pillage a pair of Compaq drive rails, which has happened before. Unfortunately those rails are worth more than the rest of the computer. I also spotted a Mac SE. That’ll be handy if I ever need a doorstop. Then I found a Pentium-75 and another Pentium of unknown speed. I opened them up. The 75 had a pair of 16-meg sticks. I opened up the unknown Pentium and looked inside. Ugh. Socket 4. That meant it was a Pentium-60, or, at best, a Pentium-66. It had a pair of 8-meg sticks.

I pulled the memory sticks out of the 75. The 60 didn’t have anything usable in it, save a pair of hard drives, both 540 megs, one a Quantum and the other a Seagate. I took the Seagate because it was easier to unbolt. I don’t have any way of knowing at this late date which of those drives was the better performer, and it probably doesn’t make much difference anymore.

The idea was to add some memory, and put in a second hard drive dedicated to virtual memory. Since the likelihood of the machine needing to read data from a drive and simultaneously hit virtual memory was fairly high, I wanted the virtual memory on its own drive. Furthermore, Linux’s partition-read
mechanism isn’t terribly efficient. This doesn’t matter for SCSI drives, which re-order I/O events, but for IDE drives it matters a lot. So getting the swap partition onto a dedicated drive was likely to improve performance a fair bit. (If this were a production system, it would probably have a SCSI
drive in it.)

So I swapped in the 16s for the 4s and found an empty bay to hold the 540, which I put on the second IDE channel as master (another performance trick), and booted Linux. The next trick is to use your favorite disk partitioning tool (I like cfdisk, but I can navigate plain old fdisk) to blow away whatever partition is on the new drive (this one was /dev/hdc) and create a single partition. I just made it the size of the drive, since 2.4 can deal with large swap partitions and Linux is smart enough to use whatever virtual memory it needs, not just automatically use all it has available. Then I set
it to type 82. Linux can do swapfiles, but a filesystemless dedicated swap partition gives better performance.

Next, I edited /etc/fstab. I found an entry for the swap partition pointing at /dev/hda2. I changed that to /dev/hdc1. That means I now have a small swap partition just sitting on the first drive unused, but that’s not a big deal to me. The system’s not using the disk space it has. While I was there, I noticed the CD-ROM drive was pointing at /dev/cdrom. I asked Charlie, our Unix/Linux guru, if Red Hat had some intelligence I didn’t know about. He said /dev/cdrom was just a symlink. I changed the entry to read /dev/hdd, which is where the CD-ROM drive ended up after my shuffle. Better to just code things directly than try to track symlinks, in my estimation.

Next, I issued the command mkswap /dev/hdc1 to initialize the swap partition. Then I rebooted and listened.

Indeed, during boot, the second drive was getting activity. I logged in and ran top, then hit shift-M to have a look at memory usage. The firewalling software was eating up a lot. But swap usage was down.

I decided to try cutting memory usage down a little more. I loaded /etc/inittab into vi. Red Hat by default gives you six virtual consoles. This machine has little need for more than two. Pulling the extras saves you a couple of megs. Near the end of the file you’ll see several lines that look something like this:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty 38400 tty1

I commented out the last four of those. Hit the i key to put vi in insert mode, scroll down to those lines, add a # to the beginning of them, then hit ESC, then hit ZZ (shift-Z twice) to rapidly save the file, no questions asked. (I know, vi ain’t friendly, but it’s there.)

Then I had a look at /etc/rc3.d to see what daemons were running. I found apmd, sendmail, and gpm running. That was a waste of a couple megs, not to mention a possible security risk. I vaguely remember all three of them having had security issues in the past, and sendmail is one of those programs that should never be running unless you need it. Yes, this machine’s just practice, but Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench found that if he got sloppy and just let wild pitches go while he was warming up pitchers, he wasn’t as sharp at blocking potential wild pitches during the game when
it counted. So he worked just as hard during practice as he did during the game. Now he’s considered the greatest catcher of all time.

So I applied the Johnny Bench principle and disabled them with the following command sequence:

mv /etc/rc3.d/S26apmd /etc/rc3.d/K26apmd
mv /etc/rc3.d/S80sendmail /etc/rc3.d/K80sendmail
mv /etc/rc3.d/S85gpm /etc/rc3.d/K85gpm

I rebooted to find memory usage down by about 4 megs and the system booted a little faster. It was also more secure.

Total downtime: About 45 minutes.

That was time well spent. I may end up having to just bite the bullet and get some memory, but the system will perform better with these changes no matter how much memory is in it. And, more importantly, performing this exercise made me notice something I hadn’t noticed before. It let me tighten up security.

Had I blindly just ordered some memory to put in the system, or a new PC, like some people unfortunately advocate, I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed that as quickly.

—
Speaking of Linux, I did finally get Apache, PHP, and MySQL all talking together on my church’s 486. I used phpWeblog, which is an awfully nice package. Pages load in an acceptable two seconds. I notice the machine is paging, so a little more memory will probably help that. It’s amazing that people are throwing away Pentium-class machines when even a 486 has enough power to be a decent intranet server.

Not everyone’s so fortunate as you and me. Give ’em to someone who can use them if you don’t want them.

Asbestos underwear time

Dave Farquhar General

Thompson’s repeated assertion that my book is a waste of time isn’t shared by everyone. I don’t think it’s necessary to point out his self-contradictions, and it’s not necessary to state that his experience with one computer is statistically insignificant compared to my experience with hundreds. That said, I’ll just post some mail and shut up. I’ve got other business to tend to tonight. Friends who need things, plans to make. I’ll be back tomorrow with some Linux stuff.
From: Dan Bowman

…and that’s a nice piece on the old machines. I think I’ll have to say something about my work P-200 and Athena here at home,

dan

You can read his bit here.

—

From: Steve DeLassus

Nice post for Monday. I have to slightly disagree that MS doesn’t believe in programming for performance. They’ll program in just enough to keep the common user hooked and not try an alternate OS. They don’t want you to think that their new OS just ate up all of the “gains” you made by purchasing a CPU with more cycles (“more cycles = faster computer, right?”). The problem here is consumer education, and most consumers relate more raw compute power to better performance, not realizing that better *system design* means better performance.

—

From: John Lowell

Dave,

About a year ago, I e-mailed you introducing myself, attempting to engage you in a dialogue about something about which you seemed quite expert at the time. I never received even the courtesy of a reply. Looking at Bob Thompson’s website today, it would seem that one would have to count silence from you as a blessing.

John

For the record, I don’t remember Mr. Lowell’s mail. But considering the volumes of mail I sometimes receive, it’s not uncommon for one to fall through the cracks.

You can’t please everyone.

—

From: dsgp

I enjoyed your commentary. I’m the MIS at a joint that would still using IBM PS2 computers if we could get them to use Office 2000.

So, we do what we do with what we have. Robert, as well as Jerry, don’t have any problems getting the free stuff; ours cost us. So we build our own units and upgrade until the motherboards burn out.

Keep up the good info.

Carl

Is Windows optimization obsolete?

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

I read a statement on Bob Thompson’s website about Windows optimization, where he basically told a reader not to bother trying to squeeze more speed out of his Pentium-200, to spend a few hundred bucks on a hardware upgrade instead.
That’s flawed thinking. One of the site’s more regular readers responded and mentioned my book (thanks, Clark E. Myers). I remember talking at work after upgrading a hard drive in one of the servers last week. I said I ought to put my 10,000-rpm SCSI hard drive in a Pentium-133, then go find someone. “You think your Pentium 4 is pretty hot stuff, huh? Wanna race? Let’s see who can load Word faster.” And I’d win by a large margin. For that matter, if I were a betting man I’d be willing to bet a Pentium-200 or 233 with that drive would be faster than a typical P4 for everything but encoding MP3 audio and MP4 video.

Granted, I’ve just played into Thompson’s argument that a hardware upgrade is the best way to get more performance. An 18-gig 10K drive will run at least $180 at Hyper Microsystems, and the cheapest SCSI controller that will do it justice will run you $110 (don’t plug it into anything less than an Ultra Wide SCSI controller or the controller will be the bottleneck), so that’s not exactly a cheap upgrade. It might be marginally cheaper than buying a new case, motherboard, CPU and memory. Marginally. And even if you do that, you’re still stuck with a cruddy old hard drive and video card (unless the board has integrated video).

On the other hand, just a couple weekends ago I ripped out a 5400-rpm drive from a friend’s GW2K P2-350 and replaced it with a $149 Maxtor 7200-rpm IDE drive and it felt like a new computer. So you can cheaply increase a computer’s performance as well, without the pain of a new motherboard.

But I completely and totally reject the hypothesis that there’s nothing you can do in software to speed up a computer.

I was working on a computer at church on Sunday, trying to quickly burn the sermon onto CD. We’re going to start recording the sermon at the 8:00 service so that people can buy a CD after the 10:45 service if they want a copy of it. Since quality CDs can be had for a buck in quantity, we’ll probably sell discs for $2, considering the inevitable wear and tear on the drives. Today was the pilot day. The gain was set too high on the audio at 8:00, so I gave it another go at 10:45.

That computer was a Pentium 4, but that Pentium 4 made my Celeron-400 look like a pretty hot machine. I’m serious. And my Celeron-400 has a three-year-old 5400-rpm hard drive in it, and a six-year-old Diamond video card of some sort, maybe with the S3 ViRGE chipset? Whatever it is, it was one of the very first cards to advertise 3D acceleration, but the card originally sold for $149. In 1996, for 149 bucks you weren’t getting much 3D acceleration. As for its 2D performance, well, it was better than the Trident card it replaced.

There’s nothing in that Celeron-400 worth bragging about. Well, maybe the 256 megs of RAM. Except all the l337 h4xx0r5 bought 1.5 gigs of memory back in the summer when they were giving away 512-meg sticks in cereal boxes because they were cheaper than mini-frisbees and baseball cards (then they wondered why Windows wouldn’t load anymore), so 256 megs makes me look pretty lame these days. Forget I mentioned it.

So. My cruddy three-year-old Celeron-400, which was the cheapest computer on the market when I bought it, was outperforming this brand-new HP Pentium 4. Hmm.

Thompson says if there were any settings you could tweak to make Windows run faster, they’d be defaults.

Bull puckey.

Microsoft doesn’t give a rip about performance. Microsoft cares about selling operating systems. It’s in Microsoft’s best interest to sell slow operating systems. People go buy the latest and worst greatest, find it runs like a 1986 Yugo on their year-old PC, so then they go buy a Pentium 4 and Microsoft sells the operating system twice. Nice, isn’t it? After doing something like that once, people just buy a new computer when Microsoft releases a new operating system. Or, more likely, they buy a new computer every second time Microsoft releases a new operating system.

Microsoft counts on this. Intel counts on this. PC makers count on this. Best Bait-n-Switch counts on this. You should have seen those guys salivating over the Windows 95 launch. (It was pretty gross, really, and I didn’t just think that because I was running OS/2 at the time and wasn’t interested in downgrading.)

I’ve never had the privilege of working for an employer who had any money. Everywhere I’ve worked, we’ve bought equipment, then run it until it breaks, then re-treaded it and run it until it breaks again. Some of the people I work with have 486s on their desks. Not many (fortunately), but there are some. I’ve had to learn how to squeeze the last drop of performance out of some computers that never really had anything to offer in the first place. And I haven’t learned much in the past since I started my professional career in Feb. 1997, but I have learned one thing.

There’s a lot you can do to increase performance without changing any hardware. Even on an old Pentium.

First things first. Clean up that root directory. You’ve probably got dozens of backup copies of autoexec.bat and config.sys there. Get them gone. If you (or someone else) saved a bunch of stuff in the root directory, move it into C:My Documents where it belongs. Then defrag the drive, so the computer gets rid of the phantom directory entries. You’ll think you’ve got a new computer. I know, it’s stupid. Microsoft doesn’t know how to write a decent filesystem, and that’s why that trick works. Cleaning up a crowded root directory has a bigger effect on system performance than anything else you can do. Including changing your motherboard.

2. Uninstall any ancient programs you’re not running. Defrag afterward.

3. Right-click your desktop. See that Active Desktop crap? Turn it off. You’ll think you’ve got a new computer.

4. I am not making this up. (This trick isn’t in the book. Bonus.) Double-click My Computer. Go to Tools, Folder Options. Go to Web View. Select “Use Windows Classic Folders.” This makes a huge difference.

5. Turn off the custom mouse pointers you’re using. They’re slowing you down. Terribly.

6. Download and run Ad Aware. Spyware DLLs kill your system stability and speed. If you’ve got some spyware (you never know until you run it), Ad Aware could speed you up considerably. I’ve seen it make no difference. And I’ve seen it make all the difference in the world. It won’t cost you anything to find out.

7. Remove Internet Explorer. It’s a security risk. It slows down your computer something fierce. It’s not even the best browser on the market. You’re much better off without it. Download IEradicator from 98lite.net. It’ll remove IE from Win95, 98, ME, NT, and 2K SP1 or lower. If you run Windows 2000, reinstall, then run IEradicator, then install SP2 (or SP3 if it’s out by the time you read this). Then install Mozilla, or the lightweight, Mozilla-based K-Meleon instead. Need a lightweight mail client to replace Outlook Express? Give these a look. Run Defrag after you remove IE. You won’t believe how much faster your computer runs. Trust me. An Infoworld article several years back found that removing IE sped up the OS by as much as 15 percent. That’s more than you gain by moving your CPU up one speed grade, folks.

8. Reinstall your OS. OSs accumulate a lot of gunk, and sometimes the best thing to do is to back up your My Documents folder, format your hard drive, and reinstall your OS and the current versions of the apps you use. Then do all this other stuff. Sure, it takes a while. But you’ll have to do it anyway if you upgrade your motherboard.

9. Get a utilities suite. Norton Speed Disk does a much better job of defragmenting your hard drive than Windows’ built-in tool. It’s worth the price of Norton Utilities. Good thing too, because 90% of the stuff Norton Utilities installs is crap. Speed Disk, properly run, increases your disk performance enough to make your head spin. (The tricks are in the book. Sorry, I can’t give away everything.)

10. Get my book. Hey, I had to plug it somewhere, didn’t I? There are 3,000 unsold copies sitting in a warehouse in Tennessee. (O’Reilly’s going to get mad at me for saying that, so I’ll say it again.) Since there are 3,000 unsold copies sitting in a warehouse in Tennessee, that means there are about 3,000 people who don’t need to buy a new computer and may not know it. I don’t like that. Will there be an updated version? If those 3,000 copies sell and I can go to a publisher and tell them there’s a market for this kind of book based on the 2002 sales figures for my last one, maybe. Yes, there are things that book doesn’t tell you. I just told you those things. There are plenty of things that book tells you that this doesn’t. It’s 260 pages long for a reason.

Recent Microsoft OSs are high on marketing and low on substance. If Microsoft can use your computing resources to promote Internet Explorer, MSN, or anything else, they’ll do it. Yes, Optimizing Windows is dated. Spyware wasn’t known to exist when I wrote it, for instance. Will it help? Absolutely. I stated in that book that no computer made in 1996 or later is truly obsolete. I stand by that statement, even though I wrote it nearly three years ago. Unless gaming is your thang, you can make any older PC run better, and probably make it adequate for the apps you want to run. Maybe even for the OS you want to run. And even if you have a brand-new PC, there’s a lot you can do.

Like I said, I’d rather use my crusty old Celeron-400 than that brand-new P4. It’s a pile of junk, but it’s the better computer. And that’s entirely because I was willing to spend an hour or two cleaning it up.

PC slumming

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Slumming. I spent a portion of the day Saturday messing around with an old 486-133. The DCE at church asked me what it would take to build an intranet. I said an old PC. So he handed me an old 486-133. I can’t shake this machine. I built this computer back in 1994 or so for a law firm. I performed several upgrades on it, including the 133 MHz upgrade (it started out as either a 33 or a 66, not sure which). Three years ago or so, when it was obsolete, the firm called me and asked me to haul it away. I asked my church if they wanted it. They did.
This 486-133 is available because it lost its old job to an old Pentium-200 I scrounged up and rebuilt. Trying to run anything more than a simple fileserver is pushing the limits of this machine. But I like pushing the limits. So I decided to see what I could do with it. I took it home and opened it up. Hmm, It had a 72-pin and 4 30-pin SIMM sockets free. I tried out an old 8-meg SIMM I had. It didn’t like it. I thought I remembered seeing some old 30-pin SIMMs laying around…. I found some. I put them in. It counted to 20. Nice.

I tried out a 420-meg HD I’d salvaged from somewhere or another. The system detected it as an 850. Curious. I disconnected the true-blue 850 in the box. It still detected the 420 as an 850. Mislabeled, perhaps? I’ve seen stranger things. So I started to install Linux. I was able to partition the drive, but then it emitted a click-o’-death when Debian tried to initialize the swap partition. So I did what I should have done in the first place. I took off the cover. Next time someone asks me how a hard drive works, I’ll be able to show them. So the 850 flew solo.

Then I added the last from a stash of old DEC Etherworks 3 NICs I had (one of my employer’s clients handed me a bag of them months ago and said, “Donate them to your cause.” I’ve been giving them away one by one ever since) and installed Debian 2.2. Debian installed a lot slower than it does on a Pentium.

I installed Squishdot. I found it could be tweaked to give a very professional look. I also found it horribly confusing because it’s so unlike any other content management tool I’ve used. I messed around with it for a long while, but it was slow. Really slow.

I tried some alternative kernels. No improvement to speak of. I added the noatime parameter to the root partition’s entry in /etc/fstab. That helped a little.

But still, it was swapping out and the CPU was topping out as well. The homepage was taking 18 seconds to load. That’s not good.

Apache serves up static Web pages just fine–no slower than any other computer. But this dynamic stuff might just be too much.

So as a last resort, I compiled a lo-fat kernel. I took 2.2.19 and basically answered no to all but the absolute essentials. Mouse? Forget it. I was half-tempted to leave out floppy support, but that would make maintenance a bit more difficult.

It’s unfortunate that I don’t have any matching pairs of SIMMs laying around. Otherwise I’d swap the board out for a Pentium-75. I’ve got a couple of ancient Socket 5 boards laying around, and at least one Pentium-75 CPU. I’ve got two mismatched 4s, but that’s asking for instability, and I’m not sure if a P75 with 8 megs is any improvement over a 486-133 with 20.

Compiles take a couple of hours. I really should have just compiled a .deb package on a faster machine and moved it over. It seems hard to believe that it wasn’t terribly long ago that a 486 was a perfectly workable computer, and now it feels like a PC/XT. But the 486’s heyday was 10 years ago now. And 20 years ago, the PC/XT wasn’t on the market yet, though its direct ancestor, the IBM PC, was. So I guess it’s not too unreasonable to regard this 486-133 as the Turbo XT of today.

A philosophy of life

Dave Farquhar General

A week or two ago, e-mail went out from one of our VMS administrators. He wanted to reboot one of our VMS systems.
Later in the day, our other VMS administrator sent out mail. He wanted to reboot one of our systems.

My boss responded to the second message:

NT guys, please find something to reboot. The VMS guys are catching up with you.

-Middle Management

A couple days later, we had to reboot one of our NT systems. We were talking about that at lunch. I looked across the table. “We’re ahead of you today,” I said.

“You’re ahead of us most days,” he laughed. Yes, NT’s not exactly the bastion of stability, while VMS is as stable as Unix.

“It’s not enough for us to win the war. We have to win every battle,” I said, punctuating every syllable of the last two words with my fist on the table.

I was being ridiculous. We all knew I was being ridiculous.

But I was talking to one of my friends tonight about something completely unrelated, and as I struggled with what we were talking about, I realized those words, and the sentiment behind them, permeate just about everything I do.

I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.

And this surprises people because…?

Dave Farquhar General

Fox News seems to be surprised at how GenX raises its kids. I’m wondering why.
Let’s look at the 60s and 70s. The ’60s were the era of free love, which turned out not to be love, and actually turned out to cost a lot more than everyone thought, and really wasn’t all that fulfilling. The ’70s saw the wide availability of birth control and the legalization of abortion. Babies, wrote Strauss and Howe in Generations, were something you took pills to prevent. Kids in the movies of the time were hellions. Kids just weren’t a priority. The Boomers were trying to figure out what they wanted, in some cases having kids just in case, and going after what they wanted in no particular order.

One day when I was trying to explain it, I blurted out, “A lot of GenXers grew up with just one parent that didn’t want them. Lucky GenXers grew up with two parents who didn’t want them.”

That’s an overstatement, but not by much.

We are a reactionary generation, so we’re reacting to the way we were raised. We’re turning to religion (or, more frequently, spirituality), waiting longer to have kids, in some cases waiting longer to get married, and if we can work at home to spend more time with our families, we do it. (So when you ask me when I’m going to write another book, the answer probably is when I have a family to stay home with.) At the very least, we make an effort to be home.

Let’s go to Strauss and Howe. Keep in mind this was written in 1990:

“Economic risk-taking and cultural alienation will drive [GenXers] to seek stability in family life. First-wavers [born in the 1960s] may continue the Boom trend toward late marriage–not out of any quest for postadolescent self-discovery, but rather out of economic necessity and unwillingness to repeat the mistakes of their early-marrying, heavily divorcing Silent parents.”

In addition to this, they predicted that the USPS might come under ruinous attack by new enterprises run by GenXers. They had no idea what it would look like (they speculated it might involve computer hackers, as one of three possibilities) but it sounds to me like e-mail was just the ticket. They also predicted GenXers would change jobs a lot, and that we’d have loud, overpaid professional athletes who’d be full of themselves. They also predicted we’d be offensive (body piercing and tattoos maybe?), and…. AND they predicted an economic crisis right about now.

They also predicted a major crisis, along the same lines of World War II or at least the Cold War, sometime between the years of 2014 and 2025.

Fox News said GenX isn’t returning to the values of its grandparents. They’re right, and we won’t. Our grandparents are a different generational profile. Look to the people born from 1982 to now to do that.

What Strauss and Howe wrote was intentionally vague, because you can only predict trends, not events, by looking at generational cycles. But they sure seem to have gotten the trends pretty much right, especially now that we can go back with hindsight and start filling in some details.

So… GenX is going to raise its families in a more traditional manner than its parents, but won’t be as traditional as its grandparents. GenX will fight this current war, and get at best grudging respect and thanks from its elders. Analysts are already saying that the generation after GenX will be the next great generation, but they’re not old enough to get us through this crisis yet.

If and when the predicted crisis of 2014 comes, GenX will have to play a role in guiding us through it. But it will need help from the generations immediately before and after. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. George Washington’s generation found itself in exactly the same situation. The secret of Washington’s success was his ability to recognize the strengths in both his elders and his youngers, as well as in his own generation, and ask for help.

If GenX can emulate Washington, history will look on us with favor, though we’re likely forever slackers in the minds of the people who saw us alive.

Back to Strauss and Howe:

“Over four centuries, Reactive generations have been assigned the thankless job of yanking American history back on a stable course–and, afterward, have gotten few rewards for their sacrifices. Will this realization prompt [GenXers] to burn out young–or will it harden a gritty self-confidence around an important generational mission?”

But our time hasn’t come. So right now we’re just trying not to repeat the mistakes we saw others make. Those of us with families are starting at home. And that’s cool.

Another entry from the Clueless Dept.

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

Someone else who needs to buy a clue. I normally don’t have a problem with John Dvorak, and frequently I actually like his stuff. He’s not as clueless as some people make him out to be. Dvorak’s not as smart as he thinks he is, but one thing I’ve noticed about his critics is that they usually aren’t as smart as they think they are either.
Dvorak’s most recent Modest Proposal is that we fire all the technology ignorami out there and then, essentially, throw away corporate standards, let end-users run anything they bloody well want, and basically make them administrators of their own machines.

I’ve got a real problem with that. Case point: One of my employer’s executives recently brought in his home PC and insisted we get it running with remote access. Only one problem with that: He has Windows XP Home. XP Home’s networking is deliberately crippled, so businesses don’t try to save money by buying it. A sleazy move, but a reality we have to live with. We got it to work somewhat, but not to his satisfaction. He’s mad, but mostly because he doesn’t have any idea what changes went on under the hood in XP and doesn’t know he’s asking the impossible. But he’s perfectly competent using Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. He’s also very comfortable ripping his CDs to MP3 format–he’s got one of the largest MP3 collections in the company. He’s competent technologically. But he has no business with admin rights on his computer.

The same goes for a lot of our users. The record I’ve found for the most spyware-related files installed on a work PC is 87. These aren’t the technical ignorami who are installing this garbage. It’s the people who know how to use their stuff, but they love shareware and freeware. Maybe some of it helps them get their work done. But these people are the first to complain when their system crashes inexplicably. And I’m expected to keep not only the corporate standard apps like M$ Office running, but I’m also expected to support RealPlayer, Webshots, Go!Zilla, Gator, WinAmp, RealJukebox, AOL, and other programs that run ripshod all over the system and frequently break one another (or the apps I’m supposed to support).

If the users were completely responsible for keeping their systems running, that would be one thing. But install all that stuff on one computer and try to keep it running. You won’t have enough time to do your job.

Dvorak argues that people like me should solely be concerned with keeping the network working. That’s fine, but what about when some Luddite decides to ditch all modern apps and bring in an IBM PS/2 running DOS 5.0 and compatible versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect and dBASE? Unless there’s already an Ethernet card in that machine, I won’t be able to network it. And the person who decides a Macintosh SE/30 running System 6.0.8 is where it’s at will have a very difficult time getting on the network and won’t be able to exchange data with anyone else either.

Those scenarios are a bit ridiculous, but I’ve had users who would have done that if they could have. And someone wanting to run XP Home absolutely is not ridiculous, nor uncommon. If my job is to network every known operating system and make those users able to work together in this anarchy, my job has just become impossible.

As much as I would love for people to use Linux in my workplace and something other than Word and Outlook, the anarchy Dvorak is proposing is completely unworkable. It’s many orders of magnitude worse than the current situation.

This is just wrong too. Yes, New Englanders, I know about heartbreak. I’m from Kansas City. At least your Red Sox have posted more than one winning record in the past 10 years.

Anyway, not only are the Royals’ glory years over, they’ve forgotten where their glory years came from. They’ve once again denied Mark Gubicza entry into their Hall of Fame. Who? In the late 1980s, Mark Gubicza was the Royals’ second-best pitcher, behind Bret Saberhagen. Injuries did him in the same as Saberhagen (only a little sooner) but he’s still among their career leaders in wins and strikeouts.

And after spending 13 seasons in a Royals’ uniform, the Royals had a chance to trade Gubicza for hard-hitting DH Chili Davis. But you don’t trade a guy who’s poured his heart and soul into the team for 13 years and stayed completely and totally loyal to it no matter how much it hurt, right? Gubicza said yes. Gubicza went to the GM and told him that if he could make the Royals a better team by trading him, to trade him.

Chili Davis hit 30 home runs for the Royals in 1997. Then he bolted for the Yankees.

Meanwhile, Gubicza blew out his arm for good and the Angels released him. He pitched two games for them.

It takes a great man to tell the team he loves that the best thing he can do for them is to get traded for someone who can help the team more. That was Mark Gubicza. They don’t make ’em like him anymore.

But even more importantly, the immortal Charley Lau was once again denied entry. Who’s he? He was a journeyman catcher who spent his entire career as a backup and whose career batting average was .255, but that was because he had about zero natural ability. He was a genius with the bat, which was how he managed to hit .255. More importantly, Lau was the Royals’ hitting coach in the early 1970s. He spotted some skinny guy who was playing third base because Paul Schaal couldn’t play third base on artificial turf and their first choice to replace him, Frank White, couldn’t play third base at all. This skinny blond fielded just fine, but he was hitting terribly. Lau asked him what he was doing over the All-Star break. The kid said he was going fishing with Buck Martinez. Lau put his foot down. He told him he was going to stay in Kansas City and learn how to hit.

“He changed my stance. I had been standing up there like Carl Yastrzemski, but the next thing I knew I looked like Joe Rudi,” the kid recalled. But he started hitting. By the end of the year, he’d pulled his average up to a very respectable .282.

Soon Lau had every player on the Royals standing at the plate like Joe Rudi, and taking the top hand off the bat after contact with the ball. And the Royals created a mini-dynasty in the American League Western Division.

What was the name of that kid, anyway?

George Brett.

If it hadn’t been for Charley Lau, George Brett would have been nothing. The Royals probably would have never won anything. And they probably wouldn’t be in Kansas City anymore either. Who puts up with 30 years of losing, besides Cubs fans?

Charley Lau belongs in their Hall of Fame. Even if nobody besides George Brett and me remembers who he was.

All in no particular order…

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

U2. I couldn’t help but notice during U2’s halftime performance yesterday how much Bono has aged. Now, granted, he’s 42 or 43 now, so he’s not going to look 22 anymore, but last night he didn’t look 42 to me. His voice didn’t seem terribly strong either, but that’s something he’s battled for more than 20 years. During their famous Sarajevo gig in 1997, Edge had to sing a few numbers (including Sunday Bloody Sunday) because Bono had lost his voice.
Above all else, it was a show. The band showed up on stage, sans Bono. He was walking through the crowd. They played one obvious song (Beautiful Day), then in a flash of showmanship, projected the names of 9/11 victims as they played an obscure song off The Unforgettable Fire, the haunting MLK (one of two tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. on that album) before segueing into Where the Streets Have No Name, with a few improvised lyrics (including a chorus from All You Need is Love, a nod to Paul McCartney).

Very typical U2. U2 fans undoubtedly loved it or at least enjoyed it; not-so-big fans probably weren’t so impressed (they sounded worse than, for instance, Mariah Carey, but a musician I work with is convinced she was lip-syncing) and U2 haters probably found something else to hate. I was impressed that they didn’t sell out by playing three songs off their current album. They played a hit from a year ago, then they played an obscure song, then they played a minor hit from 15 years ago, but it wasn’t one of the two huge hits off that album.

Heartbreak. That was what the game itself was. The Rams didn’t show up to play for the first three quarters. I have to wonder how badly Warner was hurting, because he definitely didn’t look 100% (and if I can notice a difference, there definitely is one). I have to wonder what if he hadn’t taken those hits late in the game three weeks ago against Green Bay…?

Security. I see from this story that Linux is less secure than Windows, based on counting reports at SecurityFocus.

SecurityFocus reported a total of 96 Linux vulnerabilities, versus 42 Windows NT/2000 vulnerabilityes (24 for Windows 2000 and 18 for NT4.0). Buried deeper in the article, you see that Mandrake Linux 7.2 notched up 33 vulnerabilities, Red Hat 7.0 suffered 28, Mandrake 7.1 had 27 and Debian 2.2 had 26.

So, first things first, James Middleton seems to think 2=4.

Now, math aside, those 26 Debian vulnerabilities were in all likelihood present in all the other distributions. So there’s a lot of triple- or even quadruple-counting here.

I remember a good number of those Linux vulnerabilities. Some of them were buffer overflows in utilities that would be difficult or impossible to exploit without shell access to the machine. Some of them were in daemons (services) that may or may not be running at any given time. Very few were in the kernel itself. Bottom line is, a typical Linux-based Web server sitting behind a firewall with only port 80 exposed probably didn’t have anything to worry about. The same goes for a typical Linux-based Samba server.

This isn’t like Windows, where you get the components Microsoft deems necessary, whether you want them or not, and you fear removing or disabling them because you don’t know what else will break and have no way of knowing. With Mandrake, you’ll get some services you don’t want, but you can disable them without breaking stuff. Red Hat has reformed and installs surprisingly little in its minimum installation these days. Debian installs even less.

So, the dirty little secret this article didn’t tell you: Not all the security problems affected any given Linux server. Chances are most of the security flaws affected any given Windows server.

I hate it when technology journalists blindly spit out numbers without having a clue what they mean.

I may publish again. I was mad enough to fire off a proposal to one of my former editors to see if he’d be interested in a few magazine articles. It’s time there was some stuff out there written by someone who has a clue what he’s talking about.

Useful link. For once I saw a banner ad that halfway interested me today. At LowerMyBills.com you can compare different utilities services available to you. Long-distance rates include both the interstate and intrastate rate (important if you’re like me and rarely call out-of-state). Alas, they don’t list local phone service providers, and their high-speed Internet listings aren’t complete, but it’s better than nothing. They also do listings for loans and debt relief, neither of which I need right now.

If the site’s useful to you, you’ll know.