02/09/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Mailbag:

Fatal Exception Error

Ahem. Dan Bowman decided to rile me up yesterday by sending me this link.  What is it? An allegation that the press kisses up to the likes of Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, and my all-time favorites, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They put them on the front page at least once a year and don’t call them on their lies because then they wouldn’t pose for photographers.

There’s a big difference between journalism and PR. Journalism reports the facts. PR casts personalities in the best possible light. What Dave Winer was describing yesterday isn’t journalism, it’s PR. And that’s why I read a lot fewer newspapers and magazines than some people might think a professional writer would.

I interviewed a few people in my days as a newspaper writer. (That photo up in the left corner is the photograph of a 21-year-old crime reporter for the Columbia Missourian newspaper. I scanned it off my press pass.) You’d better believe I hacked some people off. Did I give a rip what the county prosecutor thought of me, or the things I wrote? No. He had to talk to me. Sure, there was a competing newspaper in town (that’s a long story why a town the size of Columbia, Mo., has two papers), but he felt like he had to talk to me anyway. If I cast him in an unfair light, well, that was what the editor was for. Or he’d go tell my rival at the other paper how unfair I was. He’d listen.

I didn’t kiss up to RPs either. (That’s jargon. It means “real people.”) Once I covered the story of a separatist who was living about 15 miles north of Columbia. Now, this guy was one of the biggest looney tunes I ever talked to, but he did have a couple of good points. Everyone does. Even Steve Jobs. (He’s right when he says Microsoft doesn’t innovate, for instance.) But this guy was a criminal, convicted of a DWI. His solution rather than to pay the fine was to withdraw from the union, declare himself sovereign, and declare war on the United States. Really. He also placed liens on the property of everyone he didn’t like–city officials, judges… I believe he demanded payment in gold. He made a lot of people really nervous. He didn’t like me or the story I printed all that much, so he never talked to me again after that. He did get one of his cronies to call me up at the newsroom and threaten me with bodily injury though. (I guess he decided it wasn’t worth it to place a lien on my 1992 Dodge Spirit, or maybe he couldn’t track down that piece of personal property.) So I told my editor, carried around a can of mace for the next few months, and reminded myself that the guy could barely move, whereas I was 21 and still in decent enough shape to play softball well, and the cops all knew me and they knew him.

Oh, and when we did need to get a quote from him after that, I just grabbed the best-looking girl in the newsroom at the given time, asked her to turn the charm on, call him, and talk to him in as soothing and polite a voice as possible. They’d usually be good for about a one-minute conversation, which was enough to say we had talked to the man. By that time, I’d talked to him enough and talked to enough of his separatist allies to know how he thought and put what little we could get out of him in context. Plus I still had my notes from our original interview. It’s amazing how you can milk multiple stories out of a single interview when you have to.

We couldn’t get that separatist to pose for pictures either, needless to say. So we’d find out when he was scheduled to be in court, and one of our photographers would camp out on the courthouse steps and shoot half a roll of film as he walked past. Plus we maintained file photos for just those occasions when someone wouldn’t talk to us, or we couldn’t arrange to have a fresh shot taken due to the lack of a photographer’s availability.

I handled elected officials the same way. I wrote an extremely unflattering story about then-Gov. Mel Carnahan in early 1994. Carnahan wouldn’t talk to me; one of his aides denied the entire story, but I had half a dozen sources from both political parties who gladly talked to me. And a story that I wrote about former Rep. Harold Volkmer (D-Mo.) in 1996 undoubtedly hacked off more than a few Republicans.

So you hack off Bill Gates or another Silicon Valley personality. Big fat hairy deal. There’s a solution to that problem. Show up at the next speech he gives. Snap three rolls’ worth of pictures during his speech, each in the middle of saying a word. In half or even two thirds of the shots you get, he’ll look like the world’s biggest idiot. Find the least flattering picture, then run it really big. That’ll make him even madder. But remember, he can’t win. The press never loses. Freedom of the press is for those who own one, and, well, most of those guys don’t. Those who do don’t have as big an audience.

Or, if you’re not quite that mad (or your editor isn’t), run a file photo. Run a nice-looking one if you’re somewhat interested in making peace. Run one from the 1970s if you’re less so.

If the press quits kissing Bill Gates’ butt (and those of his sworn mortal enemies), they’ll lose a few interviews and photo ops. But what else will happen is the papers who quit will gain some credibility. Not all will fall into line, at least not at first. But those papers’ reputations as just a cog in the Microsoft PR machine will grow, and it will cost them. So slowly they will fall into line. And Gates will eventually realize that he has to talk to the press, even those he doesn’t like, because that’s the only way you have any control at all over what goes into the press. If you don’t talk, the press has total control.

In journalism school, one of the things they taught me was your integrity is far too high a price to pay for an interview. Your ultimate loyalty isn’t to your sources, but rather, your readers. But not everyone went where I went, and not everyone paid attention in class. But if the computer press would take that advice to heart, eventually we might start seeing less gum-flapping and more action. And that can only mean better products.

Mailbag:

Fatal Exception Error

02/08/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Real keyboards. I’ve written a lot about keyboards in the past. I’m picky. I’m a good typist, or at least used to be before my wrists went the way of Bo Jackson’s hip (with all due respect to Bo Jackson; that’s not to say I could type like Bo Jackson could run or throw or hit a baseball), and the majority of keyboards are absolutely abominable. Maybe that’s because I learned to type on manual typewriters–no, I’m not that old, my high school was just that far behind–but I need some feedback from my keyboard. The first computer keyboard I could touch type on was the old-fashioned IBM PS/2 keyboard. I eventually learned how to handle the abominable cheap oatmeal pieces of junk, but I never learned to like them.

IBM’s buckling spring keyswitches evoked strong emotions; people either loved them or hated them. Other highly regarded keyboards generally used keyswitches made by Alps Electric; they were a little quieter and a little softer but still gave some feedback.

Those who managed to get them swear by their Northgates, or the present-day Northgate clones, the Creative Vision Avant Stellar and the Ortek MCK-142, both of whom boast of their Alps keyswitches and claim the true Northgate legacy. I understand their feel is just slightly softer than the IBM. I had a keyboard with that kind of feel; I believe it probably used Alps keyswitches. I didn’t like it as much. My sister took a liking to it so I let her keep it. I just kept buying used IBM PS/2 keyboards, the older the better. The older ones are theoretically less reliable because of potential heavier use, but they feel better. But two of my IBM keyboards are acting up now, so what to do? Do I really want to buy more used ones that are prone to go south all too soon? An original unused Northgate OmniKey sells for an Imsai price these days; they’re almost priceless. (I see some used OmniKeys on eBay right now for $50; even used ones rarely end up selling for that.) A clone will set you back $130. I’m willing to pay a fair sum for a good keyboard, but I’m a little wary of spending 10-12 times the cost of a normal keyboard on something I haven’t ever used before. I suspect I know their feel; IBM lightened up their feel towards the end, just before they stooped to everyone else’s level and started bundling $12 keyboards with their systems. I suspect the Northgate clones feel like those late-model IBMs, and I want something a little firmer.

Zeos used to sell highly regarded keyboards (from what I’ve gathered, they were actually made by a Taiwanese company called Nan Tan, who’s still in business but seems more interested in making commodity $12 keyboards these days), but Micron bought Zeos years ago and jettisoned the keyboards. Nobody talks about Zeos keyboards anymore. I only used one of those once, and I don’t remember it being the bomb, but I remember it being a lot better than, say, a run-of-the-mill NMB keyboard. Supposedly they used Alps keyswitches as well, so the feel was probably a lot like a Northgate.

I was learning far more about keyboards than I ever wanted to know, but I still couldn’t find anyone who would sell me a decent keyboard for a two-figure price. Then I stumbled across www.pckeyboard.com . That’s Unicomp, a small company out of Lexington, Kentucky. The significance? IBM made keyboards there. They spun off Lexmark, and Lexmark made keyboards there. Real keyboards come from Lexington, Kentucky, just like real baseball bats come from Louisville, Kentucky. I don’t know what springs to mind when anyone else hears the word Kentucky, but those are the two things I think of.

In 1996, Lexmark quietly sold their keyboard technology to these guys, who quietly sell IBM lookalike/feelalike keyboards for about 50 bucks. They sell both the so-called “enhanced” models (no thanks) and models with the old-fashioned, loud, patented buckling springs that go clackety clack. They also fix IBM keyboards. I like this. For half the price of an MCK-142, I can have what I really want. They even claim to have a 104-key model with Windows keys, which would be really nice, but I can’t find it on the Web site. I’ll have to call. I’d buy two or three 104-key buckling spring keyboards in a heartbeat because I constantly use the Windows-M and Windows-R keyboard shortcuts. I usually redefine one of the ALT keys as a Windows key using Microsoft’s Kernel Toys, but that doesn’t help you in NT, and it’s good to have two ALT keys. The ALT-arrow key combinations get awkward if you redefine the right ALT key, but ALT-F4 gets awkward if you redefine the left ALT key.

They apparently also had a programmable IBM feelalike in the past, but I can’t seem to find pricing on that one either. Programmable macros along with the IBM feel would be true luxury. I’d probably willingly pay $150 for that, as frequently as I re-key certain strings of characters.

It looks like I need to make some friends in Lexington.

02/07/2001

Dave Farquhar General

I’m tired of picking apart terrible reviews, so here’s a pair of pretty good ones, one from an old favorite site.

A review of Plextor’s new 16X burner. http://www.cdrinfo.com/hardware/plextor1610a/index.shtml

A good, honest, comprehensive look at the current state of the art. Their conclusion: it’s the best drive of its type out there but not perfect. The 16X burners all have flaws, and this one doesn’t bury the competition but when all’s said and done it comes out on top overall.

I can’t really find fault with this review, especially seeing as it documents an undocumented setting to enable UDMA mode and get more out of the drive. They document their methodology, disclose the test bed, and perform thorough analysis.

Dan’s Data reviews a great-looking case. http://www.dansdata.com/pc70.htm

Too bad this case seems to be hard to find here in the States. Let’s face it: this is a case review. It’s hard to mess up. But this guy’s a fun read regardless of the topic.

02/06/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

Shopping. I went to Wal-Mart yesterday intending to pick up shampoo and vitamins. On a whim, I wandered over to the electronics section, and found some surprises. I knew they sold HP computers, but I didn’t realize they’d branched into the types of product that require you to pop the hood to install. I guess PCs really have gone mainstream. Power splitters, four bucks. Keyboard adapters, four bucks. Creative 52X CD-ROM drives, 58 bucks. You can get the same thing, only the white box version, from Mwave.com for $36, but shipping will eat half the price difference and if you need a CD-ROM drive at 3 a.m. for some reason, well, you can get it. The same goes for a keyboard or a mouse. Don’t laugh–I was visiting a friend one weekend several years ago, and about 8:30 p.m. Friday he decides it’s time to build his new PC. So we piled into his car and barreled off to CompUSA, and arrived in the parking lot at 9:05. Too late. So I know someone who’d appreciate being able to get components at odd hours.

More interesting was a special phone cord made of LAN-grade CAT5 cable. Pricey at $8, but it’ll improve your modem connection slightly, if you’re still cursed with a dialup connection. They had network cables too, at $8 for a 10-footer and $12 for a 15-footer. That’s about the same price as CompUSA, but Wal-Mart is probably closer and it’s open longer hours.

I didn’t end up buying any of that stuff. I did find a rotating CD tower with a 112-disc capacity for 10 bucks. I snapped that up. I’ve got about 1/4 that many data CDs laying around, but the way those things breed, I’ll fill it. You’ll frequently pay that price for a 25-disc tower. I also found a disk box for $2. Nothing fancy at all–it looks like a recipe box–but who needs something fancy to hold disks? I remember I used to pay $8 for beige disk boxes with see-through tops that held 50 disks. This costs 1/4 as much and holds more. The plastic’s thinner and you can’t see through the top, but these stack better. And the price was right. So I grabbed one. I thought about getting a second, but I figured no, I probably only have about 50 stray disks laying around, so a second box would just be extra clutter, and I just spent all weekend trying to get rid of extra clutter. I got home, herded up all the stray floppies I could find, and filled the box. Then I spotted another stack of floppies laying forgotten under a pile of papers. Rats. I should have grabbed a second box. Next time I’m out I’ll grab another one.

O’Reilly revisited. Frank McPherson had some interesting observations yesterday about O’Reilly in general and Optimizing Windows in particular. He said he didn’t like the title. I never liked it either; I thought it was cumbersome, limiting, and meaningless (which is why I usually just call it Optimizing Windows). Games is too limiting, graphics is too limiting, and multimedia is a buzzword that’s lost all meaning. The book title on the contract read “Essential Windows 9x Optimization.” I’m not sure if that was the title on the proposal or where that working title came from. I remember giving O’Reilly a list of about 10 possible titles, but they kept coming back to Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia. I cited gamers in the proposal as one potential audience for the book, they ran with it.

Frank also brought up pricing and book length. It’s much harder to write a short book; had I skipped the self-editing process Optimizing Windows probably would have been closer to 330 pages instead of 290. I didn’t see that adding filler would add any value to the book, and I really wanted to stay under 300 pages so the book wouldn’t look intimidating. But people expect computer books to be thick. I remember seeing a picture of someone’s Apollo workstation, and he included a picture of his Apollo manuals. They would have nearly filled one of my 6-foot bookshelves. It was a ridiculous mass of 3-ring binders. But people seem to expect computer books to be 900 pages, just like they expect a CD to play for an hour.

I think Frank hit the nail on the head when he talked about layout. He cited bigger print and more whitespace and more use of graphics. Indeed, those things sell. I remember doing newsletter layouts with my ex-girlfriend. I’d lay the elements on the page, then she’d add tons of whitespace. A lot less fit on the page, but it looked a lot better and read much more quickly that way. She also added a lot of unnecessary flourishes. A hardcore computer geek would dismiss that as bravado, but it makes the pages look a lot better. People notice those things when they flip through the book or magazine in the store.

My editors at Computer Shopper UK asked me to provide them with more screenshots than I have been lately. I sent them 14, which I thought was a ridiculous number. I just got a PDF proof of my next article, for the April issue. They used 11 of them, and there’s no denying it looks great.

Pricing’s tougher. I suspect O’Reilly uses higher-quality paper than some of the other publishers, and that quickly adds cost. But if I didn’t have a degree in magazine publishing I probably wouldn’t notice the difference. I know Joe Consumer doesn’t notice and would rather pay $5 less. Some people would buy the book printed on newsprint if they could save 10 bucks. I’ve forgotten almost everything I ever knew about binding, but my O’Reilly books are bound better than some of the other computer books I have. I don’t think that matters much either though; I have a lot of comb-bound computer books too and I don’t think less of them because of it.

02/05/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Mailbag:

Windows 98 in a Ram Disk

Defeating Web ads. I’ve read enough talk of ads on the ‘net recently that I think it’s time I share a little secret. This is from an upcoming Shopper UK article, but seeing as it probably won’t hit the streets until May, why not talk about it now?

A lot of sites are putting policies in place to ban ad-blocking software. I think that’s a bit ridiculous. I didn’t used to have a problem with ads online. They were small and unobtrusive. Then people started using animation to get more out of the tiny space. I thought that was clever. Then the animations started speeding up immensely, and that was when I started getting annoyed. I don’t like movement on Web pages. Movement is inherently distracting. We naturally pay attention to movement, because way back when, movement meant lunch. Or it meant something thought we were lunch. So we instinctively give the moving priority over the static.

I don’t have a philosophical problem with advertising, but when you force me to look at blinky stuff while I’m trying to read text, it starts to bug me. Blinky stuff that’s also sexually suggestive really gets on my nerves. No wonder guys think about sex 72 times a day–it’s flashed in front of our faces constantly! So I normally block ads, using one of the many great ad-blocking programs out there.

But IE has a feature that makes ad-blocking less necessary. If it’s just the blinky stuff that bugs you, turn off GIF animation. Go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, then scroll down to Multimedia and clear the checkbox labeled Play Animations. That’ll tone down the GIF-based ads. Java and Javascript-based ads will still get through, but you can disable those there as well. Unfortunately there’s not much you can do about Flash, though if you right-click on some Flash ads, there’s an option that comes up called Play. Clear that checkmark, and the ad stops. It doesn’t always work but it does sometimes.

O’Reilly online. Frank McPherson noted the existance of O’Reilly books online.  Yes, they launched a subscription e-book service this summer. Authors are supposed to get unlimited access to the library (they never got around to sending me account information… big surprise), and we do get a very small royalty. Basically if someone subscribes to one of our e-books for a full year, we’ll get about the same amount as we would have if the subscriber had bought a paper copy. I know Optimizing Windows was available for a while as an e-book; one quarter its e-book sales actually outsold the paper copy by a pretty wide margin.

I really don’t expect this initiative to succeed long-term, but maybe I’ll be surprised.

Frank noted a conspicuous absence of Windows titles in the e-books selection. O’Reilly’s trying to de-emphasize their Windows books, and they may pull their Windows lines altogether due to slow sales. I talked to a marketing wizard I know about this. Books aren’t his thing. Food packaging, banks, and churches are–odd combination, I know, but this guy is one of those people who never meets expectations, but rather, exceeds them beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, so I listen to him. I took him a copy of Optimizing Windows one day and asked him if he had any idea why it didn’t sell. He gave it a really funny look, so I explained to him what the book’s about.

He said it sounded like an outstanding product. He said he had an aging PC at home and his kids were bugging him for a new one, but he’d rather wait another year. I told him that’s probably feasible–the machine’s only a couple of years old. He said there must be a million people in his boat, so why can’t you tell that this product is a solution to that problem by looking at the cover? I explained O’Reilly’s history as a publisher of Unix books and how they came to put animals on the cover. “So you’re telling me they’re selling this like a Unix book. But this isn’t a Unix book. Is your target audience Unix guys, or is it people like me? I wouldn’t buy this book because I have no way of knowing what’s in it. And Unix guys won’t either, because it’s not a Unix book. It just looks like one.”

I thought about that observation for a long, long time. Animals on the cover of Unix books works, partly because there’s such a dearth of good Unix books. O’Reilly could have come along when it was getting started and printed plain brown covers with the word “BIND” or “Sendmail” or “Perl” in block letters on the cover and spine and it would have sold. All you have to do to succeed in the Unix market is exist with a halfway readable and halfway correct product, and you’ll own it (that’s harder to do than it sounds). Plus, animals on the covers of Unix books appeal to the warped sense of humor of the Unix sysadmin.

But Windows is a different audience for the most part, and should be a different product line with a different approach. It’s consumer-driven. It’s pop. Sure, pop’s less sophisticated than AOR, but pop potentially makes you more money. “Your cover should have, I don’t know, two window washers cleaning a computer monitor.” Or the great new logo that Shopper UK came up with for my “Optimise Your PC” series for next month–what looks like a bottle of glass cleaner with the words “Maximum optimisation” sprawled on the label. Brilliant. It gives you the same “what the heck is this?” reaction that the animals on the cover of a Unix book give, but require less thought to figure out what it means. You see the glass cleaner, then suddenly it hits you: “Oh, this is how I clean up my PC!”

I told him about those great designs that Shopper UK comes up with. “Can’t you get one of those guys to design you a new cover for your book?” he asked me.

I told him that wouldn’t be the O’Reilly Way.

Mailbag:

Windows 98 in a Ram Disk

02/04/2001

Dave Farquhar General

Hey, hey, give ’em what they want
If lust and hate is the candy
If blood and love taste so sweet
Then we
We give ’em what they want

–10,000 Maniacs, “Candy (Everybody Wants)” from Our Time In Eden, 1992

What’s the matter here? (Warning: mature subject matter.) My mom asked me a disturbing question yesterday. She went to a high school play last night. The storyline went something like this: a young lady with no self-esteem meets a young man. His attention turns her around. They have an affair. She continues the affair, but decides to have one-night stands with whoever comes along, just for fun. In the meantime, the guy meets another girl, who’s a lesbian but admits being attracted to him. He’s devastated when he finds out his girlfriend is sleeping around, then becomes enraged, so he rapes and kills the lesbian, then commits suicide.

My mom’s question was this: Was this subject matter inappropriate for high school students?

My answer was absolutely. Were this storyline made into a movie, it would probably get at least an R rating right off the top because of the subject matter alone, regardless of language or nudity. In high school, there are people aged 13 in attendance–unless it happens to be a 3-year high school (I don’t remember if high school starts at 9th or 10th grade there). At any rate, this isn’t appropriate subject matter for 14-year-olds.

For another, it’s one thing to talk about rape for instructional purposes–here’s the definition, here’s why it’s bad, here’s how to avoid it. Sure, a 14-year-old needs to be aware of that. So I should probably clarify. This isn’t an appropriate form of entertainment for 14-year-olds. Not to mention younger, pre-high school siblings who might be in the audience for whatever reason. A high school production needs to be appropriate for general audiences, or at least rated PG–particularly in a day and age when school newspapers are censored. Though I suspect the objectionable material in many school newspapers is not of social issues, but rather calling the administration into question (that was the case when I was editing my high school paper some 5 years after the Kuhlmeier v. Hazelwood decision ). But the courts have decided high schools don’t have freedom of the press, so appropriate editorial material continues to be why chewing gum in class or running in the halls is bad. Meanwhile rape and murder are appropriate forms of entertainment in school plays, because that’s not journalism. It’s art. (Supposedly. Though as I read Kuhlmeier v. Hazelwood, the case applies because the play, like a newspaper, is a school-sponsored activity.)

But legalities aside, what I’d like to know is why anyone would choose this subject matter for entertainment, period. It’s sick. But then again, so is our society.

But just because we have loose politicians and loose civic leaders and we’re losing our sense of morality, does that mean we have to use the combination of rape, murder and suicide as forms of entertainment? Give me a break. If someone were to record a rock album telling this story, Tipper Gore would be up in arms. If a mainstream movie or TV show were to take this subject matter, there’d be protests on both the left and the right. I believe in art and free expression as much as the next guy (I’m a professional journalist, after all, and I’ve dabbled in fiction writing and songwriting as hobbies) but I also believe in observing the boundaries of good taste and age appropriateness.

But what do I know? I’m just an old-fashioned Christian with a sense of decency, whatever that means, who understands insecure people because he’s been one himself, who fails to understand the purpose of parading the story of two very insecure and unstable people plus a confused lesbian in front of a bunch of teenagers, many of whom are probably insecure and confused themselves (because isn’t that the definition of teenager? It was when I was that age, and that wasn’t all that long ago–the song I quoted was a popular song when I was 17).

You know what? I don’t think I want to understand.

02/03/2001

Dave Farquhar General , ,

I’m starting to think I’ve got a defective board. I cracked out one of the Soyo SY-7SBB motherboards yesterday (the $29 wonder) and couldn’t get it to work, regardless of what mount holes I grounded. I’ve never seen a board this sensitive to grounding before, so I’m really starting to wonder about it. (Most modern boards don’t mind being grounded in all possible spots; most ATX cases do just that and that’s what most people use. And I can’t think of a time when I built a system and it objected to being grounded in only one place either. Most boards just aren’t all that picky.)

So, since I’ve had an otherwise identical board running, I’m inclined to suspect the board itself.

I’ve had the other one running briefly, outside of a case, so I’ll try the second one and I’ll probably have to exchange the first.

It just dawned on me that how I came to this conclusion is probably useful information. First, I tried a different power supply, and got the same result. I connected the PC speaker and tried powering up with no memory present. With a system with an Award BIOS (or just about any other system), that should have resulted in beep codes. Motherboards don’t like to boot without a video card or RAM, so you can do a quick-and-dirty test for life by trying to make it boot without one or the other of those.

No response. So I cleared CMOS (check the manual; the way you do this varies). Still no response. I tried yet another power supply. Nothing. I knew the CPU was good because I pulled it from a working system. Same for the memory, though if the memory were bad I should get a beep code. I put the board in three different cases. Nothing.

And yes, I did check for shorts each time I put the board in a case. Loose bits hanging around inside the case are very detrimental to a board’s health.

It’s kind of a drag; I’d have liked to have one of the systems up and going by now. But this isn’t mission-critical; for mission critical stuff I buy Asus boards and now I remember why. I had good luck with Soyo a few years back, but I haven’t found anyone who matches Asus’ track record overall.

Reviews. I found several reviews yesterday, none of which were remarkably good or remarkably bad. I’ll put together a roundup for tomorrow I think.

Apologies to all of those who’ve sent e-mail. Hopefully I’ll catch up this weekend. Between cleaning my place up, working slightly longer-than-usual hours, a couple of meetings in the evenings, and writing another article for Shopper UK I haven’t been responding to mail very promptly this week.

One last thing: the story of a true hero. One of my heroes got a writeup in the Kansas City Star this morning. His name is Jim Eisenreich. Eisenreich was a promising young outfielder who battled (and beat) Tourette’s Syndrome. He made his comeback in Kansas City, then went on to win a World Series in Philadelphia. I don’t know how long the story will be online at the Star, but it’s worth a read even if you’re not a baseball fan. He’s another never-give-up story, but you can’t have too many of those.

02/02/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

Linksys revisited. Thanks for the corrections on the Linksys router. Yes indeed, with recent firmware you can change the MAC address. It’s buried, but that’s good–you shouldn’t routinely do that anyway.

Reviews of reviews again. Time to get back in the saddle. Yee-hah.

Pentium 4 systems (THG)

In this roundup, Tom Pabst complained bitterly about PC makers’ exploiting public ignorance, selling high-clock speed systems with shoddy peripherals in order to drive down the cost. So he built systems roughly equivalent to four PCs–a low-end P4 and similarly priced Athlon, and a high-end P4 and the top-of-the-line Athlon. Then he pitted them against each other. The P4s came up sorely lacking.

Performance of the real McCoy could vary significantly (no one thinks about the power supply in performance equations, but it plays a role), so this test is anything but conclusive, but it does finally and authoritatively point out the differences good components make. People who’ve read Computer Shopper (US) religiously and seen system shootouts know this–Shopper always printed system configurations, and occasionally an overachiever would show up, with great components, and blow away supposedly higher-end systems. This article on THG examines this phenomenon and does it well, I think.

Pabst does seem to forget that businesses aren’t in business to care about consumers though–they’re in business to make money. I’d like to think the marketplace rewards straight-shooters, but considering my book sales, I know that’s not always the case. As long as Dell thinks it’s good for profits to stay in bed with Intel, Dell will be in bed with Intel, no matter what it does to consumers.

MSI MS-6339 P4 motherboard (Sharky Extreme)

This is a good look at a fairly competitive P4 board, which explains the ins and outs of this board and why Intel changed the ATX standard. It points out this board’s quirks, and benchmarks it against an Intel and an Asus board. It does a good job of pointing out the reasons why you probably don’t want to buy a P4 at this time. I found it interesting that this benchmark didn’t mention Quake 3, which is one of the few things the P4 is really good at. Refreshing (I couldn’t care less about Quake scores, and I know I’m not alone on that) but ironic.

Congratulations to a fellow Missourian. I don’t like to talk politics much here, but… My fellow Missourian John Ashcroft is the new attorney general. Appropriately, the supposed racist was sworn in by Clarence Thomas.

As for the “Missouri fired him” rhetoric, here’s the truth on that: John Ashcroft and Mel Carnahan were the two most popular governors of recent memory. Were it not for term limits, Ashcroft would probably still be governor. Ashcroft and Carnahan were locked in a too-close-to-call race up until the point when Carnahan died in a plane crash. Carnahan then attained sainthood and won the election on a sympathy vote. Possible voter fraud in the city of St. Louis didn’t help matters any. But Ashcroft is a class act, so he didn’t contest the election, either on grounds of fraud or on grounds that a senator must be a citizen, and a dead man can’t be a citizen. Carnahan’s widow was then appointed to the Senate.

Teddy Kennedy threatened to filibuster Ashcroft, because he didn’t like Ashcroft’s conservatism. Never mind Ashcroft knows what the law is, and one of the tenets of his so-objectionable religion is that you obey and you uphold your government’s laws–no government exists without God’s allowing it to exist, according to John Ashcroft’s religion and mine. John Ashcroft is responsible to God to do his job, and to do it properly. His job is not to do Congress’ job. John Ashcroft knows this.

John Ashcroft, unlike most of his predecessors, has actually been an attorney general before. It was the post he held in Missouri before he was elected governor. John Ashcroft will do no less to uphold the law than his predecessor Janet Reno. If ever there was an honest and decent man, it’s John Ashcroft.

Jean Carnahan voted against Ashcroft. She said it was a matter of conscience. Really, what she was saying was John Ashcroft is too different politically from her dead husband.

John Ashcroft’s very different from her dead husband in another way too.

John Ashcroft suspended campaigning when his opponent, Mel Carnahan, was killed. It was a matter of conscience. It cost him the election. At the time he suspended campaigning, he said he didn’t care, whatever the cost–it was the right thing to do. That’s the kind of man John Ashcroft is. He does the right thing, whatever the cost.

John Ashcroft was good for Missouri. Now he’ll be good for the United States.

02/01/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , ,

I don’t like to do “this is what I did yesterday” messages but that’s all I’ve got. Mostly I re-imaged some Macs. I did get to put an HP optical drive in a Compaq Proliant server we bought used for pennies on the dollar from a failed dot-com. But no one had any drive rails. Luckily, I had a Compaq 386 sitting under my desk. I opened it up, pulled the 5.25″ drive, walked over to the Proliant, and it slid right in. Perfect. I unbolted the drive, bolted the rails to the optical drive (I had to find different screws), and put the drive right in. And the guy who normally handles the servers asked how I did it so fast. Hey, I did tech review on a book about PC hardware. I know how to work on these things… And I worked on far too many Compaqs my first two years of college. (And far too many IBMs my last two years of college.)

Hot tip: Compaq drive rails cost something like $30 from Compaq. Compaq 386s are free, when you can find them. Or they’re cheap. Or someone pays you 15 bucks to haul them away. Or, there’s eBay. I just found 12 people selling them there, with zero bids on them. Asking price: $4.99-$9.99.

I also parted out a Pentium-75 that no longer works. This is the only dead Micron PC I’ve seen, honestly. And I suspect the problem is the third-party memory in it (the memory there isn’t Micron, which tells me the original stuff was pilfered at some point). Since it’s useless, it’s either part it out and discard the stuff that can’t be used, or pay someone to haul it off. Well, I’m having a hard time getting my Soyo SY-7SBB motherboards running. Outside the case, they’re fine. Put them in one of my AT cases, and they don’t work. I suspect not enough grounding, or grounding in places it doesn’t want it. This Micron case is much more configurable than any of the AT cases I have, so it’ll help me solve the mystery. (I won’t go modifying my IBM PC/AT case until I figure out, with the Micron case’s help, where I need ground points. Then I’ll Dremel out the existing caseworks and put in spacers where I need them to be. Ah, the troubles I’ll go to for a chance to see someone’s face when they see something unexpected…

Last night after church, one of our seminary students was cleaning off his car. (We got some ice last night.) He had this dinky little plastic ice scraper that would probably fit in your shirt pocket. I was waiting for my car to warm up, noticed him struggling with that thing, so I pulled out my heavy-duty scraper, with its long metal handle and big brush, and walked over to his car. “I can tell you’re from Texas,” I said. Boom, boom, boom, and in 30 seconds I had all the remaining ice off his windshield. He watched me with huge eyes. I just laughed as I brushed off his windshield.

Heavy-duty ice scrapers are your friend. One day last week I had a half-inch layer of solid ice on my car. With this scraper, it still took me 10 minutes to clean it off. With a hand-size scraper, my only choice would have been to let the car run for 30 minutes with the defroster going full force.

And what’s this? I had 317 page reads at 3 p.m. yesterday. On a so-so DAY I get 317 reads. (I can get 600 on a good day; about 260 on a bad day.) That can’t be one person, because one person reading, if they spend two minutes per post, will get 30 in an hour. Maybe it was someone looking for something. I hope they found it. Or maybe a speed reader really really really likes my stuff.

And this from Gatermann. I got mail from a reader asking about getting a modem running under Linux. I noticed he used Southwestern Bell and suggested that was probably the problem, not his modem or Linux. I suggested he contact tech support and ask if Linux works. Gatermann piped in. They won’t even know what Linux is, he said. Remember, these are the people who couldn’t understand why they couldn’t ping me when I couldn’t get an IP address. (Yeah, I rolled my eyes too the first time Tom told me that story.)

But I suspect everyone there has heard of Linux. Heck, my ex-girlfriends know about Linux. The one I talked about taking me to the state capital and eating doughnuts on the steps (hey, if there are any Mizzou alumni out there and you know anything about this tradition, would you please e-mail me about it? Thanks in advance), one night we were sitting out there, and she brought up Linux. SHE did. At the time, I hated Linux because all I’d seen was Slackware. Another girl I dated briefly brought up Linux as much as she could because she knew I was writing a book about Linux at the time. Heck, people walk up to me at church and ask me if I know anything about Linux!

So Southwestern Bell employees have probably heard of Linux. But Tom’s right, they probably can’t say anything meaningful about it.

01/31/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , ,

Mailbag:

Music, HD, Linux modem

Sick. Something you’ll (hopefully) never see: DefragCam. I can blame one of my twisted coworkers for that idea.

A sad referrer showed up in my logs yesterday. It was a search request, from Hotbot, on the string, “I’ve never had a girlfriend.” I’m pretty sure that phrase appears as part of a sentence in Are we talking about more than just sunsets? but as part of a phrase. I seem to remember writing, “I’ve never had a girlfriend outside the winter months,” or something like that. I have no way of knowing where that request came from. Probably a bored, lonely teenager. More people have never had a girlfriend than anyone’s willing to admit. Including a majority of teenagers.

It’s only a problem if you let it be one. Unfortunately a lot of people do, and that makes them vulnerable to all sorts of scum, like advertisers and fringe religious fanatics and seedy individuals, all promising things they can’t or won’t deliver.

Not that I’m much of an advice-giver (unless you’ve got a slow computer, then I’m pretty good), but the best suggestion I’ve got is to find something you’re good at. Lose yourself in that. If you’re not good at anything, find something you enjoy and lose yourself in it. You’ll get good at it. That alleviates the boredom, and it builds confidence, which makes you good at other things. Does it make girls notice you? Only indirectly. But it’s better to be a winner who only occasionally has girlfriends (and remember, ideally you should only be in a successful relationship once anyway) than to be a loser who always has a girl.

I hate to sound callous, but given the choice between having a book published to my name, or having any of my ex-girlfriends back, I’d choose the book. I wouldn’t even hesitate. When I find a girl who’s cooler than writing magazine articles, and she thinks I’m pretty cool too, then I’ll know it’s time to settle down.

I guess that’s the other good thing about losing yourself in other interests. If a girl starts hanging around who’s more interesting than those things, great. If she’s not, that’s your subconscious mind’s way of telling you to keep looking.

A new way to benchmark. Finally, there’s a multitasking-oriented benchmark, available from www.csaresearch.com . Keep an eye on these guys. I didn’t use any benchmarks in Optimizing Windows, because they don’t reflect real-world performance and they generally test your hardware, not the operating system as it stands on your machine. This benchmark uses new methods that try to take multitasking into account, so it will do a better job of reflecting how a system feels. It was like I was telling my sister yesterday. If I put two computers in front of her, she doesn’t care which one puts up better numbers. She knows which one’s faster. But with a lot of the benchmarks today, the faster machine doesn’t put up the best numbers. Or a PC might put up numbers that appear to kill another, but when you sit down to use the two, you can’t tell a difference.

Time for a review. I’ve been so critical of reviews lately I decided to try my hand at writing one myself, to see if I’ve still got what it takes.

Linksys Etherfast Cable/DSL Router

Broadband Internet connections are increasingly common, and it’s hard for a single PC to use up all the available bandwidth. Plus, more and more homes have multiple PCs, and it’s a shame to spend $50 a month for Internet access and limit its use to a single PC. A number of third-party programs for sharing an Internet connection exist, and recenolution. These devices are about the size of a hub, plug into your cable/DSL modem, have a built-in firewall, and include one or more ports. You can plug your PCs into these ports and/or plug in a hub or switch so you can support a larger number of PCs. Another advantage of a standalone router is additional security against hackers. A Unix box can be very secure, but if a hacker does get into it, he can do a lot of unpleasant things, to you or to someone else (but make it look like you’re the one doing it). A hacker can’t do much to a router besides mess up its configuration. You can reset it and reconfigure it in five minutes. So the security of one of these devices is very tough to beat.

One of the most popular standalone cable/DSL routers is the Linksys BEFSR41, also known simply as the EtherFast Cable/DSL Router. It’s widely available for around $150. The best price I could find on it was $131. I tested the 4-port version. A 1-port and 8-port version is also available. The 1-port version is less expensive but requires a separate hub or switch. If you already have one of those, you can save some money, but the 4- or 8-port version is ideal since it includes a built-in switch. I have an 8-port dual 10/100 hub; the Linksys router therefore gives me three additional higher-speed network ports, since switches are faster than hubs. Most people will probably want the 4- or 8-port version, because it’s easy to get spoiled really quickly by a 100-megabit switched Ethernet LAN.

Configuration is wickedly easy. Plug it into your cable/DSL modem, plug a computer into it, turn all of it on, configure the PC for DHCP if it isn’t already, then open a Web browser and go to http://192.168.1.1 . Feed it the factory password (which is undoubtedly documented all over the Web, but I won’t document it here as well), then make the changes you need. Most people won’t have to do any configuration other than changing the configuration password. If you want to put it on a different subnet, do it, then run winipcfg, push the release all button, then the renew all button, reconnect to the router, and make other changes if need be.

Administration is easy too. Just connect to the router via its Web interface, and click on the Status tab. You instantly get your network status. If your ISP drops your connection, hit the Release, then the Renew button. From the DHCP tab, you can tell the router how many clients to support. You can go to the advanced tab to configure port forwarding or a DMZ if you want such a thing–most of us won’t.

The only thing I had difficulty doing was upgrading the firmware from the browser interface. The router must not have liked the version of IE I was using. However, nothing stops you from downloading and running the firmware upgrade directly–as long as you’ve got a Windows box handy. Mac and Linux users may have problems there. Firmware updates seem to come every couple of months.

The firewall built into the router is unable to pass Steve Gibson’s LeakTest, but all hardware routers have this weakness–it’s virtually impossible for a hardware router to tell the difference between innocent traffic and malicious traffic caused by a Trojan Horse. However, the router passes ShieldsUp! ( www.grc.com ) with flying colors.

The speed of the connection is certainly acceptable; with me running a caching nameserver on the Linux box it replaced that machine should be able to outperform any standalone router any time. Of course this is purely subjective; the speed of the Internet changes constantly. Nothing stops me from running a caching nameserver behind this router, which will help performance significantly. Local network performance on the built-in 10/100 switch is outstanding.

Appearance-wise, it’s a solid product, made of two-tone blue and black plastic but it’s not cheap plastic. Styling is modern but tasteful–no wild colors or translucent parts. It has indicator lights up front, a reset switch up front, and ports in the back. It also has built-in legs, so presumably it’s stackable with other Linksys hardware (I don’t have any Linksys switches or hubs, so I can’t check that).

The only flaw I can really find with this router is that the MAC address can’t be changed. Some ISPs authenticate against the card’s MAC address, which allows them to control how you connect to them. It also prevents you from using this type of device. Some competing routers allow you to change their MAC address, so they can spoof that card and get around the limitation.

I read of problems using it with services that use PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet). My service doesn’t, so I can’t test this. Buyer beware.

I was disappointed that the 45-page manual didn’t have an index, but it had a lot of nice information in it, such as pinouts for Ethernet cables. It’s written in clear, plain and straightforward English. Manuals of this length and quality are rare these days.

I think it’s a decent product, but for my purposes I want something else. I don’t want something so easy to reset to factory defaults and configure. Why? It’s getting corporate use, and I want it to be complex enough to scare people away. I want the user interface of an HP LaserJet printer control panel. It’s a pain to configure, so therefore end-users don’t mess with it. I’m not sure if I’ll find such a beast, but you bet I’ll look for it.

Mailbag:

Music, HD, Linux modem