Television, the drug of the nation

Dave Farquhar General

I successfully edited DVD-quality video, pulled straight off a DVD, in Premeire last night. And I think I can do it again. I’ll share the secret if I succeed a second time.
I got tired of listening to my neighbors screaming–my former neighbors screamed at each other; my new neighbors, well, uh… never mind–so I went over to a friend’s house and watched the pilot episode of Quantum Leap, the last TV show I really liked. I loved the episode. He lept into a test pilot, then into a baseball player. Airplanes, baseball, and dated bad computer jokes. How could it be any better? Too bad they decided to ruin the show by trying to make it better–they tried to give it mass appeal by making him leap into lives close to celebrities. Didn’t work.

But I know I’ve been doing too much video editing. A few parts of that pilot episode were computer-rendered, and you could tell. Available technology in 1989 paled compared to today. In 1989, you couldn’t do a compelling render of a B-29 dropping an X-2 rocket, escorted by an F-86. And using the real thing was out of the question. There are a few flyable F-86s still around, but there’s only one flyable B-29 left (and they had to cobble it together from parts in the late ’60s) and the only X-2s left are in museums. And good luck finding someone who can fly an X-2.

So they used stock footage. And the stock footage didn’t go together–you could tell from the differing colors of the sky that the B-29/X-2 footage wasn’t even shot in the same part of the country as the F-86 footage they used. Well, I could tell. To an eye not looking for that kind of stuff, it’ll just look kind of wrong.

Today you could do some color correction on the video clips you used to make them match up more closely. Or you could just render the planes.

But Quantum Leap wasn’t about special effects. It was about emotion and nostalgia.

I’d say they don’t make TV shows like that anymore, but I can’t really say that. I honestly don’t know if they do or not. And I’m not sure that I want to know. It’s just a whole lot more fun for me these days to make the stuff appear on the tube than it is to watch someone else’s stuff on it.

Wrapping up a week…

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

Someone at Google has a sense of humor. See (or should I say 533?) for yourself.
Dan Bowman sent me the link. My response?

+#4+ !$ $0 k3wl! +#4nk$!

Desktop video. I still can’t get my Pinnacle DV500’s composite inputs to work right. The rest of the card seems to function just fine. As a workaround, I tried connecting a DVD-ROM drive and ripping the source video digitally, straight off the DVD. I was able to get decoded .VOB files to the drive, but the utilities to convert them into usable AVI files (Premiere won’t work with VOBs) all had an annoying tendency to crash. At one point I suspected I had a binary compiled for Intel systems, and obviously my AMD CPU won’t like those SSE instructions. So I copied a single 1-gig VOB file over to a P3-based laptop. The utility got a little further, but it still crashed.

And yes, incidentally, I did secure permission from the copyright holders to use their video. As for the legality of what I did in the DMCA era, one of the utilities looked at the DVD and said it was unprotected. It’d be hard to prosecute me for circumventing copy protection when none existed in the first place.

I was going to say we’ve come a long way since Amigas and Video Toasters, but I’m not going to say that. Amigas and Video Toasters actually worked.

Tribute. How’d I forget this? The Silent Beatle died Thursday. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you already knew that.

The radio station I listen to most often, which can’t decide whether it wants to be a retro station, a New Wave station, a hair band station, or an Adult Alternative station, stepped way outside its format and did a nice Beatles tribute Friday at lunch, playing an hour’s worth of tunes, ending with “The Long and Winding Road,” which seemed eerily appropriate.

I remember when the Beatles boxed set came out a few years ago. I was still in college, and my next-door neighbor, Chip, got it the first day. He and I watched the corresponding TV special, and I remember someone walking in and saying he didn’t know any Beatles songs. I told him he was crazy. The Beatles are so pervasive, I said, that they’re not even just part of our culture anymore. They’re part of our DNA.

So Chip reached over and turned on his CD player and flipped through a few selections. A look of recognition came over his face to most of them. Yeah, he knew some Beatles songs. He’d just never recognized them as Beatles songs. Even young whippersnappers like us knew them and loved them.

The Beatles were history years before I was born, and for that matter, by the time I was born in 1974, even their record label, Apple Records, was in shambles. I have no recollection of the day John Lennon was murdered. The earliest Beatles memory I had growing up was hearing George Harrison’s “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” on the radio and seeing the video on TV, in 1986. It was a good tune. Not as good as the best stuff he wrote, and it’s largely forgotten today, but what other songs from 1986 do people remember today? Bon Jovi? Puh-lease. It was such a bad year for music that The Police were able to remake their 1981 hit, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” and score a minor hit with it. Compared to the other choices we had that year, George Harrison scratching his nails down a blackboard for three minutes would have been cooler, just because it was George Harrison.

And he and the rest of his bandmates knew that. That was cool, because it freed them to experiment. So they had that stack of bubblegum pop hits in the early 60s that everyone remembers today, but in addition to that, they had their psychedelic period and by 1968 they had dabbled in everything else imaginable. Heavy metal? They did some of that. Industrial rock? They even did some of that. When it came to rock’n’roll, The Beatles tried everything. Everything that’s happened since has just been further exploration of territory they already covered.

George Harrison’s last few years weren’t pleasant ones, due to his battles with cancer and with deranged fans. I hope he’s happier now. I can’t imagine him doing anything else but sitting somewhere, making music with John Lennon, waiting for Paul and Ringo to show up.

Desktop Linux and the truth about forking

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Desktop Linux! I wanna talk a little more about how Linux runs on a Micron Transport LT. I chose Debian 2.2r3, the “Potato” release, because Debian installs almost no extras. I like that. What you need to know to run Linux on a Micron LT: the 3Com miniPCI NIC uses the 3C59x kernel module. The video chipset uses the ATI Mach64 X server (in XFree86 3.36; if you upgrade to 4.1 you’ll use plain old ATI). Older Debian releases gave this laptop trouble, but 2.2r3 runs fine.
I immediately updated parts of it to Debian Unstable, because I wanted to run Galeon and Nautilus and Evolution. I haven’t played with any GNOME apps in a long time. A couple of years ago when I did it, I wasn’t impressed. KDE was much more polished. I didn’t see any point in GNOME; I wished they’d just pour their efforts into making KDE better. I still wish that, and today KDE is still more polished as a whole, but GNOME has lots of cool apps. Nautilus has the most polish of any non-Mac app I’ve ever seen, and if other Linux apps rip off some of its code, Microsoft’s going to have problems. It’s not gaudy and overboard like Mac OS X is; it’s just plain elegant.

Galeon is the best Web browser I’ve ever seen. Use its tabs feature (go to File, New Tab) and see for yourself. It’s small and fast like Opera, compatible like Netscape, and has features I haven’t seen anywhere else. It also puts features like freezing GIF animation and disabling Java/JavaScript out where they belong: In a menu, easily accessible. And you can turn them off permanently, not just at that moment.

Evolution is a lot like Outlook. Its icons look a little nicer–not as nice as Nautilus, but nice–and its equivalent of Outlook Today displays news headlines and weather. Nice touch. And you can tell it what cities interest you and what publications’ headlines you want. As a mail reader, it’s very much like Outlook. I can’t tell you much about its PIM features, because I don’t use those heavily in Outlook either.

The first time I showed it to an Outlook user at work, her reaction was, “And when are we switching to that?”

If you need a newsreader, Pan does virtually everything Forte Agent or Microplanet Gravity will do, plus a few tricks they won’t. It’s slick, small, and free too.

In short, if I wanted to build–as those hip young whippersnappers say–a pimp-ass Internet computer, this would be it. Those apps, plus the Pan newsreader, give you better functionality than you’ll get for free on Windows or a Mac. For that matter, you could buy $400 worth of software on another platform and not get as much functionality.

Linux development explained. There seems to be some confusion over Linux, and the kernel forking, and all this other stuff. Here’s the real dope.

First off, the kernel has always had forks. Linus Torvalds has his branch, which at certain points in history is the official one. When Torvalds has a branch, Alan Cox almost always has his own branch. Even when Cox’s branch isn’t the official one, many Linux distributions derive their kernels from Cox’s branch. (They generally don’t use the official one either.) Now, Cox and Torvalds had a widely publicized spat over the virtual memory subsystem recently. For a while, the official branch and the -ac branch had different VMs. Words were exchanged, and misinterpreted. Both agreed the original 2.4 VM was broken. Cox tried to fix it. Torvalds replaced it with something else. Cox called Torvalds’ approach the unofficial kernel 2.5. But Torvalds won out in the end–the new VM worked well.

Now you can expect to see some other sub-branches. Noted kernel hackers like Andrea Archangeli occasionally do a release. Now that Marcelo Tosatti is maintaining the official 2.4 tree, you might even see a -ac release again occasionally. More likely, Cox and Torvalds will pour their efforts into 2.5, which should be considered alpha-quality code. Some people believe there will be no Linux 2.6; that 2.5 will eventually become Linux 3.0. It’s hard to know. But 2.5 is where the new and wonderful and experimental bits will go.

There’s more forking than just that going on though. The 2.0 and 2.2 kernels are still being maintained, largely for security reasons. But not long ago, someone even released a bugfix for an ancient 0.-something kernel. That way you can still keep your copy of Red Hat 5.2 secure and not risk breaking any low-level kernel module device drivers you might be loading (to support proprietary, closed hardware, for example). Kernels are generally upward compatible, but you don’t want to risk anything on a production server, and the kernel maintainers recognize and respect that.

As far as the end user is concerned, the kernel doesn’t do much. What 2.4 gave end users was better firewalling code and more filesystems and hopefully slightly better performance. As far as compatibility goes, the difference between an official kernel and an -ac kernel and an -aa kernel is minor. There’s more difference between Windows NT 4.0 SP2 and SP3 than there is between anyone’s Linux 2.4 kernel, and, for that matter, between 2.4 and any (as of Nov. 2001) 2.5 kernel. No one worries about Windows fragmenting, and when something Microsoft does breaks a some application, no one notices.

So recent events are much ado about nothing. The kernel will fragment, refragment, and reunite, just as it has always done, and eventually the best code will win. Maybe at some point a permanent fracture will happen, as happened in the BSD world. That won’t be an armageddon, even though Jesse Berst wants you to think it will be (he doesn’t have anything else to write about, after all, and he can’t be bothered with researching something non-Microsoft). OpenBSD and NetBSD are specialized distributions, and they know it. OpenBSD tries to be the most secure OS on the planet, period. Everything else is secondary. NetBSD tries to be the most portable OS on the planet, and everything else is secondary. If for some reason you need a Unix to run on an old router that’s no longer useful as a router and you’d like to turn it into a more general-purpose computer, NetBSD will probably run on it.

Linux will fragment if and when there is a need for a specialized fragment. And we’ll all be the better for it. Until someone comes up with a compelling reason to do so, history will just continue to repeat itself.

Back again….

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

That new job. I started my transition on Tuesday. Tuesday was my best single day at work in more than four years. For the record, I started my professional career in March 1997–so I haven’t been working much more than four years.
I picked up the laptop I’ll be using for my new job yesterday. It’s a Micron Transport LT, a short-lived lightweight. It was a good machine, but when Micron sold off its PC division, it got axed. Its replacement, the Micron Transport XT (a name that still makes me chuckle; old-timers will know why), is bigger and heavier. It has a bigger screen, which is worth the extra weight, but I like the small size of the LT. It’s a 700 MHz machine, so even though it’s about six months old, it’s no slouch.

I installed Windows 2000 and Debian 2.2 on it. Of course I quickly made Debian into a hybrid because I wanted to run packages like Galeon that aren’t available for 2.2. Yeah, so it hasn’t been deemed stable yet. The most bleeding-edge Linux distros I’ve ever seen are more stable than anything Microsoft’s ever slapped its name on, with the possible exception of MS-DOS 5.0. Even Debian-Unstable is more conservative than Mandrake, so having bits of Debian-Unstable on my PC doesn’t bother me in the least.

I got to dabble in my new position yesterday, even though I was officially doing my old job. There was a server to deploy, and I was reasonably idle, so naturally I worked on the server.

They should be ashamed of themselves. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the president of my church body, Dr. Jerry Kieschnick, and the president of the Atlantic district, Dr. David Benke, committed the unpardonable sin of praying with people who are members of church bodies other than the LCMS. They now face expulsion from the church body.

This account from a St. Louis television station is a fair summary of the events.

What that account doesn’t tell you is that the First Vice President of the LCMS, who would take office if the presidency were vacated, was widely considered a political enemy of Dr. Kieschnick before the two of them took office early this fall. Dr. Kieschnick is considered a progressive, while his would-be successor is a hard-line conservative. I don’t know anything about Oberdieck, but I do know that Lebanon, Mo. isn’t exactly a hotbed of progressivism.

KSDK oversimplified Oberdieck’s reasoning slightly. Oberdieck believes that Drs. Kieschnick and Benke’s actions imply that all religions are equal, and he objects to that implication. However, if you talk to Dr. Kieschnick, the last thing he’ll tell you is that all religions are equal. He’ll agree wholeheartedly with Oberdieck’s statement that there’s only one way to God–that’s Jesus Christ, in case you’re wondering what I’m talking about–and that it should be followed strictly. The motivation behind the two mens’ actions in NYC in September was to extend a hand, to tell people that the LCMS cares about what happens to them and wants to help them.

The overwhelming majority of Lutherans in this country know and understand that.

This is a political play, pure and simple. It’s just like what the Republicans tried to do to Clinton with Whitewater and what the Democrats tried to do with Gingrich after he became speaker.

And it may undermine the current president’s credibility. What it certainly will do is leave a bad taste in people’s mouth. In a month or two months or five years, people won’t remember these specifics anymore. What they will remember is having a bad taste in their mouth about the LCMS, or worse yet, about Christianity as a whole. The immortal Someone Else will have to work hard to overcome those feelings. Sometimes Someone Else will succeed. Inevitably, sometimes Someone Else will fail, and the hurt will continue. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s Someone Else’s problem, not theirs.

I hope Oberdieck and his allies are happy.

What I didn’t do Wednesday night…

Dave Farquhar General

Shocking. What I didn’t do Wednesday night was go see U2. It occurred to me recently, as I was talking to one of my closest collaborators, that very few songwriters who could consistently floor me with their lyrics are still alive today. Most of them lived very short lives. Depression and creativity seem to walk hand-in-hand so often; the best songwriters are the most tortured, and the brevity of their lives show it.
U2’s Bono, for whatever reason, has managed to skirt that bullet. Not everything he’s done is absolutely brilliant–they should have lost the track “New York” on the current album, and if you put Zooropa and October together, you can make one good album out of it. But I think it says a lot that U2’s The Joshua Tree is consistently ranked in the Top 10 albums of all time. And, frankly, I think Joshua Tree was only the third-best record they ever recorded. It’s a great album, no doubt, but I prefer Achtung Baby and their 1980 debut, Boy. Achtung captured the uncertainty of the times and the uncertainty of the band’s future (guitarist The Edge was going through a painful divorce) with an intensity people thought the band had lost. I know, the only tracks anyone remembers off that album were the dance hit “Mysterious Ways” and the slow, sorrowful “One,” but listen to the rest of the album in the context of Communism falling and watching your best friend’s life fall apart when there’s nothing you can do about it, and it’s a much deeper album than that.

As for Boy, consider this: Larry Mullen and David Evans were a high school graduates who couldn’t afford to go to college; Adam Clayton was a high school dropout; and Paul Hewson was an orphan who had the ambition to go to college but couldn’t get in because he couldn’t read or write Gaelic. They didn’t understand the world, and here they were, 18, no job, no job prospects, and this record was their only hope for survival. No pressure. They dove in and relished it.

I saw U2 on their Zoo TV and Popmart tours. Zoo TV was the best concert I ever saw, by a longshot.

I guess I’m not going because U2 had the unfortunate mishap of becoming associated with a chapter in my life that hasn’t ended just yet, a chapter that I wouldn’t repeat for anything. The chapter began on Sunday, Nov. 9, 1997. I had to look up the date–it’s the day after the date printed on the ticket stub. I knew what was about to happen. I went to the concert with a friend, hoping to escape it, but what happened was both of us brooded through the entire show. The next day, what I feared would happen did indeed happen.

It wasn’t U2’s fault, but when I hear those songs, that weekend comes back. And I don’t want that weekend to come back. It’s ironic, huh? The title of the current album is “All That You Can’t Leave Behind.” Sorry guys, I want to leave 1997 behind.

One line from “Beautiful Day” echoes in my mind: “What you don’t have you don’t need it now.” He’s right. And I don’t want it. But what do I want?

When I finally find what I’m looking for (groan–sorry, I had to go there), I’ll be able to go see U2 live again. Not until.

So instead, I spent some time with some friends. Good friends, all of whom I met after Nov. 1997, none of whom had anything to do with that chapter opening and probably won’t have much to do with it closing either. And I was glad I did. One of those friends–who, ironically, wasn’t born yet when U2 released its first single in Ireland–slipped me the nicest thank-you note anyone’s ever sent me.

Then I came home and listened to Achtung Baby, beginning to end, once again. That was the record that got me into the band in the first place, and you never forget your first love.

Wintendo must go…

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

Some l337 h4x0r is watching this as I type. Yeah, I got the new virus. Fortunately it doesn’t look like it’s smart enough to look at an IMAP store, so it didn’t replicate. That’ll be the last time I use Outlook at home, and maybe at work. Yes, Linux has security vulnerabilities, but they’re benign compared to this crap. Especially if you’re behind a firewall with Telnet and even SSH access turned off. A root exploit on a machine disconnected from the world doesn’t do any good.
So kiss off, Gates. You embarrassed me. Yeah, I wrote a book about your worthless OS. I know a lot more about your worthless OS than about any alternative. That’s fine. I learned Wintendo, I can learn something else.

And to the loser who’s now recording my keystrokes: I’ll rebuild the system. Enjoy what little you get. Meanwhile, get a life, OK? Get interested in girls or something.

Video insanity…

Dave Farquhar Video , , ,

The Pinnacle DV500+ is notoriously hard to install and configure. What they usually don’t tell you is that that’s only the case under Windows 9x. Under 2000, it usually just plugs in and goes.
So, when I installed the DV500+ and connected my old Amiga 1080 monitor to its composite output and it only displayed a thin vertical bar, I ripped my PC apart, started juggling cards, chasing a phantom conflict, to no avail.

Finally, I thought to go back to my stack of old equipment and grabbed a 17-year-old Commodore 1702 composite monitor. I hooked it up to a VCR (the computer was still in fragments) and turned it on. Bingo. I hooked the VCR up to the Amiga 1080 and got a thin vertical bar.

I’d have saved myself a couple of hours of effort if I’d just tried another monitor in the first place. The 1080’s longevity wasn’t very good due to a design flaw. I long ago modified it, and I thought I used it fairly regularly as recently as 1997, but maybe it didn’t survive one of my two moves since then. The 1702, on the other hand, is indestructible. It too was a great monitor for its day and was actually a relabeled JVC. I know I hadn’t used it in 6-7 years.

So now I’ve got some Commodore equipment in my computer setup. It’s kind of nice to see that name sitting on my desk again.

That means I just have to learn about Premiere and Pinnacle’s bundled toolkit and continue to develop my eye. I’ve always been just an above-average designer–in j-school I was known for giving you work that was 75% as good as someone who really knew their stuff, but I’d have it done in 1/3 to 1/2 the time–but this time it’s not like I have much competition. I’m competing against mindless, brain-numbing lowest-common-denominator TV.

I ran across this quote today from Bono, U2’s lead singer, about TV: “You just have to not fear the flaws. The flaws are what make it interesting.”

Well, that’s very true about people, and to a certain extent that’s true about machines as well. After all, aren’t the flaws what gave the Ford Edsel its appeal? But I guess I just have such a longstanding bad taste in my mouth about TV that I’m not willing to give it the same benefit of the doubt. I’ll put images to music and put them up on the screen because it’s the language people understand. But it’s still the boob tube.

Time to go see some old friends, and some not-so-old ones.

It’s Thanksgiving.

Dave Farquhar General , ,

It’s time to be thankful. And do I have a lot to be thankful for. I’ve got a Bible study group that’s made up of a couple dozen of the best people you’ll ever meet anywhere. A bunch of us are getting together on Friday just because we like hanging out. You can’t ask for better friends.
I’m thankful that my wrists are working just fine. Vitamin B6 and B complex and Omega-3s are a very good thing. Take lots. They help your wrists feel better and help you think more clearly and make you less moody. What’s better than that? I’m thankful for those, and thankful that someone pointed me to a book that pointed me to that trick. It saved my career and my livelihood.

My computer’s acting up and my Pinnacle DV500 has a mind of its own. I’m thankful that I have the means to afford a powerful computer to do the DV500 justice, the skills to troubleshoot the thing, and once it’s working, the skills to produce something with it that makes it look like I know what I’m doing (even though I honestly don’t have a clue). I’m thankful that I’m surrounded by people with great ideas.

I have to drive two hours yet tonight to see my family. I’m thankful that I have a family to go visit, and that we’re on good terms. I’m also thankful that there are dozens of people who want to know what I’m doing for Thanksgiving. I’m thankful that they care. And I’m thankful that I’ve got a reliable car to get me there, and safely. And as annoying as road construction is, I’m thankful that MODOT is working on I-70, because a year ago that highway was completely unsafe to drive on.

And speaking of unsafe to drive on, I’m thankful that my friend Emily is alive and recovering after that car accident that would have killed any lesser person.

I’m thankful that I start transitioning into a new job starting Tuesday, doing something that challenges me more and that I enjoy more.

And I’m thankful, though still a bit confused about why, people are reading this.

There’s more, but I really need to make a phone call and get packed.

I hope you’ve got as much to be thankful for as I do.

How to pad your resume while meeting chicks.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Padding your resume while meeting chicks. I got a phone call last night offering me just that. Seriously. I didn’t hang up or ask to be taken off the calling list because it was a friend. Not a male friend with a harebrained, sleazy scheme. It was Jeanne. So it was a female friend with a sleazy scheme.
I guess it helps to know Jeanne. She has the distinction of being the only female friend who’s ever offered to lend me a copy of Playboy. She said she bought it for the articles. One of those articles was an interview with some film hunk. Another article was an interview with Aimee Mann. But I think it was all a diabolical plot to see what it would take to get me to read a copy of Playboy in front of her.

This time, Jeanne’s plotting to get me to serve on a committee. She tells me there are virtually no males on the committee. “Sixty to one, Dave! With odds like those you can’t lose!” she said.

Didn’t I hear someone say that about the Red Sox earlier this year?

Let’s change the subject to something more cheerful. How about if I list my qualifications?

1. I’m a male of the species homo sapiens.
2. I’m a sucker for dogs that are smarter than my former landlords my eighth grade science teacher the creeps who dated my sister when I was in college. That’s not every dog I’ve ever seen, but it’s a sizable percentage.

Gatermann says this is the most pathetic thing Jeanne’s ever asked me to do. And yes, Gatermann was there when Jeanne conned me into reading that magazine in front of her. (Yes, I gave in. I had to know what Aimee Mann had to say about Jewel, OK? And yes, her interview was just that–an interview.)

I serve on several committees, few of which work as well as I’d like, so it’s probably a good idea for me to participate, just to see if anyone else knows how to make a committee work right. The time commitment is small, so it just makes sense. In a sick sort of way.

Or maybe you can just say I’m easily finding ways to justify padding my resume while meeting women.

Harry Connick Jr. One of my coworkers pulled out a package he’d just received from Amazon. “I ordered two Harry Connick Jr. CDs,” he said. “This is what they sent.” He whipped out two CDs. They got that much right. But the CDs he received were (drum roll) The Bee Gees and LeAnn Rhimes.

He talked about how much he likes Harry Connick Jr. and how he has two tickets to go see him in some faraway city and he’s bringing a date.

“That’s what you think those tickets are for,” I said. Then, in my best concert-announcer voice, I said, “One night only! The Bee Gees! With very special guest LeAnn Rhimes!”

He glared at me.

Speaking of annoying… I got mail from someone who claims to have invented the “compressed ramdisk” technique I’ve talked about here and in my book, said something at least mildly disparaging about Andre Moreira–one of the other Windows-in-a-ramdisk pioneers–and he says he’s patented the technique, and wants me to download a trial copy of his software and link to it off my site.

I e-mailed him and asked him to set the record straight. It sounded to me like he’s claiming to have invented the compressed ramdisk–something CP/M owners were doing way back in 1984, if not earlier–and he wants free advertising from me for his commercial product.

Now, I could be wrong about that. I was wrong about OS/2 being the next big thing, after all. But if I’ve got the story more or less right, then the answer is no.

Now how did CP/M owners do compressed ramdisks? You’d just put your must-have utilities and applications into an .LBR file, then you’d run SQ on it to compress it. Then in profile.sub–the CP/M equivalent of autoexec.bat–you copied the archive to M: (CP/M’s built-in ramdisk) and then you decompressed it. In the days when applications were smaller than 64K, you could put your OS’ crucial utilities, plus WordStar and dBASE into a ramdisk and smoke all your neighbors who were running that newfangled MS-DOS.

I rediscovered the technique on my Commodore 128 (which was capable of running CP/M) in the late 1980s and thought I was really hot stuff with my 512K ramdisk.

Anyone who thinks the compressed ramdisk was invented in 1999 or 2000 either doesn’t remember his history or is smoking crack.

SCSI! SCSI vs. IDE is a long debate, almost a religious war, and it always has been. I remember seeing SCSI/IDE debates on BBSs in the early 1990s. Few argued that IDE was better than SCSI, though some did–but when you’re using an 8 MHz bus it doesn’t really matter–but IDE generally was less expensive than SCSI. The difference wasn’t always great. I remember seeing an IDE drive sell for $10 less than the SCSI version. The controller might have cost more, but back in the days when a 40-meg drive would set you back $300, a $10 premium for SCSI was nothing. To me, that settled the argument. It didn’t for everyone.

Today, IDE is cheap. Real cheap. A 20-gig drive costs you 50 bucks. A 7200-rpm 40-gig drive is all the drive many people will ever need, and it’s 99 bucks. And for simple computers, that’s great. If it fails, so what? Buy two drives and copy your important data over. At today’s prices you can afford to do that.

SCSI isn’t cheap. It’s hard to find a controller for less than $150, whereas IDE is included free on your motherboard. And if you find a SCSI drive for less than $150, it’s a closeout special. A 20-gig SCSI drive is likely to set you back $175-$200.

Superficially, the difference is philosophy. The IDE drive is designed to be cheap. Good enough to run Word, good enough to play Quake, quiet enough to not wake the baby, cheap enough to sell them by the warehouseful.

SCSI is designed for workstations and servers, where the only things that matter are speed, reliability, speed and speed. (Kind of like spam egg spam and spam in that Monty Python skit). If it costs $1,000 and requires a wind tunnel to cool it and ear protection to use it, who cares? It’s fast! So this is where you see extreme spindle rates like 10,000 and 15,000 RPM and seek times of 4.9 or even 3.9 milliseconds and disk caches of 4, 8, or even 16 MB. It’s also not uncommon to find a 5-year warranty.

In all fairness, I put my Quantum Atlas 10K3 in a Coolermaster cooler. It’s a big bay adapter that acts like a big heatsink and has a single fan, and it also dampens the sound. The setup is no louder than some of the 5400 RPM IDE drives Quantum was manufacturing in 1996-97.

OK, so what’s the practical difference?

IDE is faithful and dumb. You give it requests, it handles them in the order received. SCSI is smart. You send a bunch of read and write requests, and SCSI will figure out the optimal order to execute them in. That’s why you can defrag a SCSI drive while running other things without interrupting the defrag process very much. (Out of order execution is also one of the main things that makes modern CPUs faster than the 486.)

And if you’re running multiple devices, only one IDE device can talk at a time. SCSI devices can talk until you run out of bandwidth. So 160 MB/sec and 320 MB/sec SCSI is actually useful, unlike 133 MB/sec IDE, which is only useful until your drive’s onboard cache empties. Who cares whether a 2-meg cache empties in 0.0303 seconds or 0.01503 seconds?

There’s another advantage to SCSI with multiple devices. With IDE devices, you get two devices per channel, one interrupt per channel. With SCSI, you can do 7 devices per channel and interrupt. Some cards may give you 14. I know a lot of us are awfully crowded for interrupts, so being able to string a ton of devices off a single channel is very appealing. IRQ conflicts are rare these days but they’re not unheard of. SCSI giving you in one interrupt what IDE gives you in four is very nice in a crowded system.

But that’s just my opinion.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Free PR advice. I see the Taliban hunted down and assassinated four journalists. Well, OK, it’s not proven that they did it, but it looks like that’s what happened. Now, I know journalists are pretty low on the slimeball scale. I have a journalism degree from the oldest school of journalism in the world, after all. But terrorists and third-world dictators are such a completely different league of low that even a journalist-turned-lawyer-turned-politican who put himself through college selling used cars wouldn’t begin to approach it.
Bad move, guys. There’s anti-war sentiment brewing in Europe, but killing four unarmed civilians will do very little to fuel that. Reminding the people that the enemy they face is irrational and unrelentless and unmerciful isn’t a good way to end wars. You lose points in the court of public opinion, and it doesn’t put you in a good negotiating position either.

But even beyond all that, you should never kill that which you can manipulate–unless you’ve lost so much belief in your cause that you’re no longer confident of being able to put the right spin on things to convince anyone else that you’re right.

So we have further evidence that our enemy is mind-numbingly stupid. We have indication that their belief in themselves, or at least in their ability to escape from this alive, is wavering–instead of feeding information to journalists they’ve resorted to suppressing information by killing them. And we have indication of growing desperation. See above.

This is no time for protesting. This is exactly the time to start squeezing harder. Much harder.

I want to believe this. I mean I really, really want to believe…

Incidentally, if Gator isn’t uninstalling for you, Ad-Aware seems to do a nice job of eradicating it.

New toys. My 10,000 RPM Quantum/Maxtor Atlas 10K3 arrived yesterday. It takes the drive a while to initialize (upwards of 30 seconds) but once it gets rolling, it’s incredible. A completely unacceptable 37 seconds passes between the time Windows 2000’s “Starting Windows” screen appears and the time the login prompt appears. The thing’s amazing. Just to be obnoxious, I defragmented the drive while other things were running. They didn’t interfere with each other much–that’s the magic of SCSI command reordering.

I installed MS Office 2000 just to see how that would run. Word launches from a dead stop in three seconds. Kill the Office Assistant and it loads in less than two.

I know SCSI drives don’t benchmark much faster than high-end IDE drives, but the difference I see between a high-end SCSI drive like this one and a fast IDE drive is significant. Everything that ever has to touch the disk runs faster. This includes Web browsers pulling data out of the local cache.

Users who don’t do much multitasking probably won’t see much difference, but for a multitasking freak like me–I’ve only got 8 windows open on this machine as I type this, and I’m wondering what’s wrong with me–it’s unbelievable. I haven’t been this overwhelmed since my days playing with an Amiga (which, come to think of it, had a SCSI drive in it).

Witness the birth of a SCSI bigot.