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.

Coming out of my cave

Dave Farquhar General

OK, I finally did it. I finally came out of my cave and saw Shrek. Everyone was right. It was hilarious. Essentially, it’s a parody on fairy tales, with enough humor to keep adults interested too.
But of course the main reason I had to see it was because everyone told me I was in it. Lord Farquaad. All anyone would tell me about him was that he was the bad guy. And he was short. Hmm. I’m short. Hopefully most people don’t consider me the bad guy.

Good movie, lots of great jokes at Lord Farquaad’s expense, good animation. A hint of political correctness at the end–I won’t elaborate because it’ll give away the plot–but I’ve come to expect that in movies. I rather like it anyway. Being the cynical type, I’d have done the ending differently, but this is a kids’ film. The world doesn’t need me writing material for children. I’d scar them too much.

If I had a DVD player, I’d probably buy this at some point. It’d have to wait in line behind Peter Sellers’ Being There (the most criminally overlooked movie in history, but that’s just my opinion), Field of Dreams, Dead Poets Society, Braveheart, and possibly others. But it takes a lot for me to even think about seeing it again, let alone one day owning it.

This isn’t my clan’s first appearance in the movies. I spotted my clan’s plaid in the movie Braveheart. They were fighting on the side of the Scottish king, who was fighting on the side of the British. It figures. But since most people don’t recognize the Farquharson plaid, no one’s ever asked me about that.

Home again…

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve lived in St. Louis for a total of 10 years now (in two shifts), which is far longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere else. I lived in a town 60 miles south of St. Louis for another five. I lived in Kansas City for the first 9 months or so of my life. But when I graduated college, on the form I filled out there was a spot to list your hometown. I wrote “Kansas City, Mo.” in the blank. I still feel that way.
Part of it’s because I have so much family here. Part of it’s because I was born here. Part of it is because four years ago when I was royally screwed up, I came to Kansas City to straighten myself out.

I rolled into Kansas City last night around 11. So I about an hour last night hanging with my sister. I told some stories about people in St. Louis that she knows. We talked about deep subjects like gray hair and toenail clippings and ways to keep cats from drinking out of the toilet. We ripped on each other for living in the ghetto. It was a blast.

She asked me what time I wanted to get up in the morning. “Four,” I said. She knows darn well that I don’t get up before 8 if I have any say whatsoever in the matter. “Well, you just set your alarm then,” she said.

“I’ll put the alarm clock in your room,” I said. That’s a tactic both of us use. We put the alarm clock in another room so we have to get up to turn it off–the thinking is, once you’re up, you’ll stay up. In practice, what it means is I either ignore it, or I get up, hit snooze, then go back to bed for 10 minutes. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Truth of the matter is, it doesn’t matter what time I set the alarm for. I get up whenever I feel like getting up, and not a minute earlier.

She knows the drill. She does it too.

“No you most certainly will not,” she said.

Brother and sister. If you’re not me or her, you probably don’t understand. But if you have a brother or sister, you have stories or subjects only you understand. So I guess in a roundabout way, by not understanding, you understand completely.

Next up for my dining room… A TV studio.

Dave Farquhar General ,

I did it. I finally did it. I’ve been threatening for a long time to do it. I’ve finally, completely, totally gone off the deep end. And I like it.
I just ordered an 18-gig, 10,000-RPM Maxtor (formerly Quantum) Atlas III hard drive. I ordered an Adaptec Ultra160 host adapter to go with it, since this drive would pretty much saturate my old Adaptec 2940UW. And of course since I’m spending this obnoxious amount of money on a drive–around $200, when a mainstream drive of this size would go for 50 bucks–I’m protecting the investment with a $25 drive cooler. The cooler also deadens the drive’s sound, which is good. I’m a bit nervous about having a 10,000-rpm helicopter in my dining room-turned-office. Hey, where else was I going to put my desk?

I didn’t just get this drive so I could play Civ 3 or compile Linux kernels at blazing speed. I had another reason for this purchase. I also bought a Pinnacle DV500+ video capture/editing card. It’s not a cheap toy, but considering the capabilities it gives you, it’s a steal for the money. I could edit full-length movies with this thing. Well, I could with a capable hard drive. It needs a 25 MB/sec stream to spit out video, and, well, the fastest drive I have won’t do that. Ramdisks? Nice idea, but you can assume a minute of video will chew up a gig of disk, so I’d need 4 GB RAM for most of the projects I have in mind. None of my motherboards will take that much memory.

So my Duron-750 is going to become a video editing workstation. I’ll have to buy or scrounge a bit more memory–Pinnacle recommends 256 MB; I might as well do them a little better and go 384–but then I’ll have the ability to edit video in my dining room. A Duron-750 isn’t much CPU by today’s standards, but Pinnacle lists a P3-500 as the minimum, and the reviews I’ve read do fine with a 500 or 550 MHz CPU. You can assume a Duron runs at a similar speed to a P3 or an Athlon that runs 100 MHz slower, so my Duron-750 should perform like a P3-650. If that proves inadequate, hey, a 1.1 GHz Duron runs $89 these days.

The DV500+ is supposed to be a real bear to set up. We’ll see how it likes my FIC AZ11. I’ve made tricky hardware play before, so I’m not too afraid of this. Every review I’ve read complained about the setup, but once the reviewer got it running, each raved about its abilities.

I can’t wait.

Odds and ends

Dave Farquhar General

Way too heavy for me to deal with at the end of this fine Wednesday night. Bo Leuf sent me this link, which tries to explain emotions. From what I could gather, this is from the “programming emotions” standpoint–and I don’t mean willfully controlling your emotions. I mean programming a machine to feel.
I would never want to inflict what I feel on anything, even a machine. But I’m not everybody else either. I remember arguing this in a philosophy class. I was in the minority opinion that you couldn’t program a machine to feel. Strangely enough, I was the only one in the class with any CS background. Oh well.

I suspect it makes for an interesting read. I’ll add it to my to-do list.