Back behind the camera again

Dave Farquhar General

Yesterday was interesting. I’ve been learning how to operate a video camera. I’m not talking a $399 camcorder from Best Bait-n-Switch here. Those are toys. I’m talking a real, live, camera, like you’d find in a TV studio or a sporting event. A camera that gathers up all available light possible, encodes the picture digitally on ridiculously expensive mini-DV tapes, and gives an absolutely gorgeous picture in most possible conditions, provided there’s a competent operator behind it who can find things compelling enough to shoot and keep them in focus. No autofocus here. It displays what you shoot with it, how you shoot it, whether idiotic or inspired.
I’m also afraid to take the thing anywhere because it costs half as much as my car. (No, I didn’t pay for it. And no, it’s not mine.)

I’ve shot video with it exactly four times now. One of those projects never saw the light of day. Two of the others won’t see the light of day until we get some semi-professional-grade video editing equipment. Yesterday was the first time my camera skills (or lack thereof) were on display, because I wasn’t taping–what my camera saw was projected, live, onto TV monitors throughout the building and two huge projection screens.

I hate TV, so I’m a bit surprised that I enjoy doing this. I guess it’s not video that I dislike after all–it’s how video is misused that I hate. Sticking a microphone in some distraught soul’s face after a tragedy and asking how they feel, then putting it on TV where some game show host-types can comment on it and act sad. Cheap, mindless, crude, lowest-common-denominator art.

The first thing I noticed is that the viewfinder is fine for finding yourself crudely, but under these lighting conditions it always pretty much looks in focus. I haven’t exactly developed an eye yet to tell from the viewfinder how things will look. We’ve got a little 9″ composite monitor hooked up to it to help–what you see there is roughly what you’ll see on TV. It’s a higher quality display than some cheap TVs, so if it looks good there, it’ll look good on any TV. Those projection screens are a challenge. They’re higher resolution than TV, so a slightly out-of-focus picture that still looks perfect on the monitor can look like garbage on the screens. It’s disconcerting to get what looks like a great shot, then cut to it and see it look awful on the screens. All I can do is make a quick adjustment off the screen and go.

I approach camera work from a print journalist’s perspective. When you’re recording events, you develop a gut feeling for what people find interesting, whether your medium is the printed or spoken word or still or moving pictures. That’s learned but can’t really be taught. From my design classes I know that the visual center of everything is slightly up and left of center. When you center something perfectly, it doesn’t look quite right. Also from design classes I know the rule of thirds–divide a picture into thirds, and those intersections of the lines are the points that people generally find interesting, so when you compose your shot, you want to put the important things in those areas. Once you know what you’re doing, you completely forget the rule of thirds and go with your instinct. I’m not there yet.

A lot of the camera work is a no-brainer. You find the person who’s speaking, then keep the speaker in the frame and in focus. But at one point the speaker focussed on an object, so it was pretty obvious–to me at least–what to do. Get off the speaker and focus on that object for a minute. The problem was, that object was directly behind the speaker, and huge! Switching focus smoothly from the upper three feet of the speaker to a 15-foot object a few feet above and behind him… Well, I couldn’t do it too well. I shot violently upward with the camera, and violently back, and I still didn’t have the object filling the frame. I moved a bit more smoothly back, and then somehow got it in focus. I stayed there for a minute, then I trained back on the speaker. In retrospect, I should have cut back even further, brought him into the frame, then slowly zoomed back in on him. I’ll do that next time.

But that was an inspired move, I think. The speaker wanted the audience to focus on that object. If they weren’t focusing on it before, when they saw the movement on the projection screens, I got them to pay attention to it, if only for a moment. People instinctively pay attention to things that move, particularly when they’re focussed on something else. That’s one of the reasons why animated ads on the Web are so annoying. It’s hard for us to focus on anything else when ads are blinking at us.

Maybe I’m being pretentious. I was shooting a church service. Many in my audience see 50 of them a year. A fair number of them see more than 100. But I don’t like being competent at something. I don’t even like being good at something, usually. I want to be one of the best, so I’ll try to do the things that the best do. Given the choice between looking incompetent trying to do something the very best would do and looking competent by not taking any chances, I’ll take my chances each and every time.

Building a dual-boot W2K/Mandrake 8 box

Dave Farquhar General , ,

We descended on Steve DeLassus’ place yesterday afternoon for a hair-pulling configuration adventure. Steve introduced me to two Linux gurus he knows from work, Adam and Jamin.
Steve told me once that there’s a story with Jamin’s name, but I didn’t think to ask Jamon for his version. No surprise; we had battles to fight and eventually win.

Adam’s big story is his degree. He put in his five years and completed all of his coursework, only to find that it’s necessary to file an intent to graduate. I seem to remember that where I went to school, signing up for the required classes and then showing up served as ample intent to graduate, but maybe my school wasn’t that enlightened. So, since Adam didn’t find out until it was too late that he had to file a piece of paper before he could get that piece of paper that tells people you know something, he’s enrolled in summer school, taking zero credit hours. But he filed his piece of paper, so another more expensive piece of paper should be coming his way soon.

I gave Steve’s new FIC AZ11-based Duron PC a once-over in the BIOS. I disabled all the ROM shadowing and ROM caching, since neither Windows nor Linux make use of it, and why waste cache bandwidth–even just a little bit of it–on something you’ll never use? Then I put in some more aggressive memory timings–CAS 2, turbo, FSB+33 MHz (since this is PC133 memory on a Duron).

Then, since this is a dual-boot system, we installed Windows 2000. While Steve wasn’t looking, it asked for locale settings. I decided to be nice–I could have set it to Hebrew, Arabic, or all kinds of goofy stuff. I set it to Zimbabwe English. I didn’t specify a timezone, so for whatever reason, it defaulted to Tijuana.

Steve saw it later because Windows put a locale icon in the toolbar. He hovered over it and it said “Zimbabwe English.” He said something, with some new word I’d never heard before that starts with “f,” and it appeared to be every part of speech in the sentence. I’ll have to ask him sometime what that means.

With Windows installed and properly configured for use in English-speaking Zimbabwe, we turned to Mandrake 8. All went well until the time came to configure LILO. The defaults would have worked but they seemed wrong, so we changed them. The machine booted into Windows. We booted off the Mandrake 8 CD and chose recovery mode. We spent half an hour dinking around and not really getting anywhere. So Steve and I made a boot disk with his other Mandrake box (the mkbootdisk command is your friend). Adam was adamant that we didn’t need that. We’d fixed the textfile that needed fixing (/etc/lilo.conf) but running LILO to activate it was the problem–we couldn’t mount the drive at /. Finally Adam or Jamin stumbled on the -r switch for LILO, which fixed the problem.

Ugh. I just got home.

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve been out partying. Actually, yes I have. I just got home, and I’m wondering if I’m getting too old for this. One of my best friends is moving to Colorado on Wednesday, so tonight was his going-away party. A lot of people are going to miss him.
Other stuff… What was up with yesterday? Yesterday’s positive karma of 9 has to be my record. I guess I’ll have to tell more work stories or something.

And tomorrow later today I’ll be driving up to Montana Creve Couer to visit Steve DeLassus, who just built a Duron system with minimal phone assistance from me. We’ll do some more tweaking with it, I’ll see if I can coax a little more speed out of it, and I’ll rile up his dog, seeing as the only thing I have to do to rile up Buster is, well, show up.

I wish I had some great, spectacular, wonderful content for you today, but that’s pretty much all I’ve got. And I think it’s time to crash.

Well, I thought it was time. I fell off the ‘net there for a minute. My Linksys router just decided to quit forwarding port 80 for whatever reason. I re-ran the setup and it worked fine. It was faster than cycling power, which might have worked too. But I’m understandably nervous now. Maybe I need to go back to a Linux box for routing.

Things I learn at work

Dave Farquhar General

So, Davey, what did you learn in school today?
Oh. Wait. I’m 26. Never mind. What’d I learn at work today?

My employer has four locations. I split time between the biggest and the second-smallest. I like the second-smallest, partly because at the big location, my group is segregated, and we’re a boys’ club. We’re all male, we act male–for example, my boss is the only one of us who knows what fabric softener is for (and that’s because he’s 43–he’s had more time to have that kind of knowledge shoved into his brain than the rest of us).

At the other place, there are eight of us in IT. Five of us are male. Three are women. Apparently I provide some of the comic relief. When I’m really torqued off, apparently I’m bloody hysterical. This morning, I was greeted first thing with voice mail from a remote user in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, whose hobby appears to be breaking NEC computers. Yes, I know NECs are junk (they should stick to monitors) but we’ve got 50 of the things and he’s the only one who has recurring problems with them, and we’ve sent him four different ones. And the laptops he’s been through have been just fine once we got them in the shop, re-imaged them, and sent them back into the field. So as I listened to his message, I just yelled, “No!” to every question he asked–never mind that he can’t hear me–and struggled with the voice mail system. I didn’t want to waste any time deleting the message but my voicemail didn’t want to cooperate. (I put the right person in touch with him later–the best way to get on my nerves is to call me direct when your problem is something that’s handled by another group. That’s why we have a helpdesk to route calls to the proper support person.)

Meanwhile, five or six other people were laughing until it hurt. I’m pretty sure they found what I was saying funny, but they probably also find it funny that this guy who can disassemble and reassemble a computer when he’s literally too tired to properly tie his shoes can’t figure out his voicemail.

But one of the women provides a lot more comic relief than I do. She has this old pickup that started off really nice, until one night when someone drove up and down the block with a shotgun, randomly firing in different directions. The shotgun blast holes started to rust, of course, and it was all downhill from there. Well, this truck now needs $900 worth of work to pass inspection, and I’d be surprised if it was worth 900 bucks, seeing as my 1992 Dodge Spirit, in working order, was only worth $950. I can’t remember if her name for the truck is Garbage Scout or Garbage Cow, but whatever its name is, it’s history. Too bad. Whenever someone has car trouble, she offers to loan them this truck, and then we get to hear all these great stories about it. I’ll miss that.

Her 16-year-old daughter is lobbying for its replacement to be a 1998 Ford Mustang.

“Tell her she can have one when she’s 26,” I said. “Wait. I’m 26, and I can’t have one.”

“Wait a minute. I’m 46 and I can’t have one,” she said.

“Oh, it’s easy then. Tell her she can have one when she’s older. Then she’ll go, ‘But mom, that’s what you always say. How much older?’ And then you can say, ‘I don’t know. Older than me, because I’m 46 and I don’t have one.'”

She laughed.

She saved the voicemail message her daughter left and played it for us. It started off with about 30-45 seconds’ worth of stammering. At least. And once she did finally start spitting it out, she still stammered some.

“Now if you’re going to ask me for something, what good does it do to irritate me for five minutes before you finally ask?” she asked. “She doesn’t get it and my husband doesn’t get it either.”

“Dave, remember that when you get married,” one of the other women said.

“Hey, Linda!” I said.

“What?”

“Umm, umm, hmm, well, uh, umm, umm…”

She laughed.

“So that’s what I need to remember not to do?”

“Yeah.”

So that’s why I like working in that building. I learn useful stuff there. I need to get a notebook, write “For Future Reference” on the front cover, and take notes.

One way to defeat spammers

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Ever since Brightmail closed up their free filtering service, I’ve been thinking a lot more about spam because I’ve been getting a lot more. I know where these losers are getting my e-mail address. It’s right here on my Web page. But I need to post that so people can contact me. Fortunately, I found a trick. Look at this:
dfarq@swbell.net

That’s just an e-mail link, right? It works just like any other, right? Well, here’s the HTML code for that:

mailto:dfarq@swbell.net

See what I did? I obscured the @ sign with an ASCII code (64), along with the dot (46) and a couple of other characters like the colon. Most automated e-mail address harvesters don’t decode the HTML, so their search routines, which look for things like @ signs and dot-somethings will blow right past that.

So if you run a site, obscure your e-mail address. If you don’t remember your ASCII codes, hopefully you’ve still got QBasic on one of your machines. In QBasic, the command PRINT ASC(“A”) will give you the ASCII code for the letter A. Substitute any letter you like. Or you can remember that A is 65 and lowercase a is 97. A is 65, B is 66, and so on.

When a Web site asks you for an e-mail address, you can see if it’ll let you obscure parts of it. Unfortunately, my forums flag illegal characters, but I may be able to modify that. Some Web sites aren’t that smart.

Obviously this trick won’t work in e-mail, unless you always send your mail in HTML format, which I (along with about half the world) really wish you wouldn’t–it’s annoying. And even if you obscure the mail you send, if I copy and paste your mail to my site, it’ll go up there unobscured. So this advice is mostly for webmasters.

Anyway… On to other things.

We’ve moved, if you haven’t noticed. These pages should be at least a little bit faster. The forums will be several times faster. And the forums are goofy. I haven’t figured out exactly why, but posts are missing and user files are acting up. If you’re having problems (Steve DeLassus just told me he can’t post because it tells him his .dat file can’t be accessed), go ahead and re-register. If you want your post count raised to its previous level, just let me know. I can change that. (Hmm, I wonder if Gatermann would notice if I set his post count to a negative number…?) I’d have preferred to move everything intact, of course.

Anyway. Go play in the forums. See what breaks. If I don’t know it’s broke, I sure can’t fix it. (I may not be able to if I do know, but hey, I can give it my best shot.)

Update: It’s 5:45 in the p.m., and you’re watching… Wait. That’s something else. The forums seem to be working properly now. Lack of uniformity between Linux distributions bites me again… It wasn’t the location of the files YaBB was objecting to, nor was it permissions. It was ownership. Under Mandrake, Apache runs as a user named “apache” and thus files created by CGI scripts like YaBB are owned by “apache.” Under TurboLinux, Apache runs as user “nobody,” and thus files created by CGIs are owned by “nobody.” And when you just tar up your Web site and move it to a new box like I did, those files remain owned by their old owners. Since Linux assumes you know what you’re doing, it happily handed those files over to a non-existant user. So when YaBB came knocking, Unix security kicked in and said, “Hey, nobody, you don’t own these files,” hence those error 103s everyone was getting.

The new server is live.

Dave Farquhar General

The new server is live. And much faster, I might add. We had a dead day in the forums, so I figure this was probably as good a time as any.
So, anyway, I hope everyone enjoys the improved speed that a faster CPU and mod_gzip provide. I know I can definitely get used to this. I notice the difference here.

I’ve extracted the text of the old forums here. At the moment I can’t get a search engine working on it. Sorry. I’ll work on it tomorrow.

Two chipsets from the AMD front

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday AMD formally unveiled and shipped the AMD-760MP chipset. Right now there is one and only one motherboard using it, the ritzy Tyan Thunder K7, which runs about $550 minimum. (Wholesale cost on it is rumored to be $500.) Considering its 64-bit PCI slots, two built-in 3Com NICs, onboard ATI video, onboard Adaptec SCSI, and four available DIMMs, that’s not a half-bad price. It’s obviously not a hobbyist board. This dude’s intended to go in servers.

Read more

I want to go live with the new server…

Dave Farquhar General ,

And for a few minutes last night I had it cranking. It was fast and wonderful until I got into the forums. Everything was there, but when I tried to read the messages, I got error messages. I’ve had that problem all along. At first I figured the problem was due to the files being stored somewhere else under TurboLinux, so I reconfigured Apache to store everything in /var/www like it does under Mandrake. Then I figured the :8080 in the URL was throwing it off. So I flip-flopped the two servers, so as far as YaBB knows, it hasn’t moved. All the permissions are the same on everything. But it still can’t find the files if I move it.
I’m really sick of this P-120’s speed, or lack of it, especially since I’ve got a Celeron-366 sitting under my desk in a case that once housed a Pentium-75 (how’s that for irony?) that’s fast and lovely and chomping at the bit to go.

We’ve got 149 messages on the forums at the moment. A couple of the topics are active. Nothing’s stopping me from grabbing the text of the messages and dumping them somewhere on the site where the search engine can still find them and the wisdom (or lack thereof) they contain.

Anyone have any thoughts? If there aren’t any big objections to it, I’ll make the move tomorrow night.

In the meantime, I’m not feeling so great. So I think I’ll just rev up the Farquhar Time Machine, make my server think it’s Tuesday, post, forget that there are such things as e-mail and telephones, and call it a night.

What the press doesn’t want to tell you about Kaycee

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Dan Bowman forwarded me a string of e-mail yesterday that raised a number of questions about the press. Apparently there is at least one reporter trying to find out how many people gave gifts to “Kaycee,” and that’s raising some concerns. Why? And why does the reporter want names and phone numbers? And how do you know if the guy’s legit or if he’s making some kind of sucker list?
Being a former reporter myself, Dan solicited my opinion. Maybe he figured a former reporter would recognize one of his own. And I do.

One concern was the reporter’s apparent use of a free e-mail address. This doesn’t cause me any great concern. Not all newspapers have a mail server because not every newspaper can afford to pay a mail administrator–or maybe they’re just not willing to justify keeping a full-time IT guy on hand who’d make more than the editor in chief. Plus there’s the portability issue–use a free, Web-based mail service, and you can read your mail from anywhere with Web access. No need to mess with VPNs or direct dialins or any of that nastiness.

Another concern is why does the reporter want a phone number. Practicality is one issue; a five-minute phone conversation can glean far more information than a mail conversation that takes all day. And the reporter probably wants to hear your voice; the sound of your voice tells a lot. The reporter can’t print that information, usually, but that gut feeling provides valuable guidance. Plus the reporter needs to verify that you really exist, which is something that anyone who had any contact with “Kaycee” will understand.

But if the reporter were any good, he’d be able to track you down, right? You bet he could. But that’s ruder than establishing contact via e-mail. You want the source to be as comfortable as possible. Plus it takes time to do that. In something like this, you’ll cast a wide net as painlessly as possible. If I were writing this story, my very first step would be to go to Weblogs.com, do a search on “Kaycee,” and when I find sites that mention her name a lot, I’d read the posts to get an idea of whether there was any relationship, and if I find any indication, e-mail that person. I may e-mail 100 people. But it only takes three sources to make a story.

Will the reporter honor your wishes, like not printing your full name, or your real name? Quite possibly. I know MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan knew Julie Fullbright’s identity. (Bob taught one of my journalism classes way back when, back when he was a grad student at the University of Missouri. I e-mailed him after his story hit the Web.) He didn’t publish her name–he said her identity couldn’t be confirmed at press time. A white lie? Kind of. But I know Bob didn’t knock on Julie’s door and confirm it. I don’t know whether he called her on the phone and asked if the pictures were her yet still chose to say her identity was unconfirmed. Bob said he wanted to protect her privacy, and knowing Bob, I take him at his word on that. If this was going to turn into a three-ring circus in the press, Bob didn’t want to be the ringmaster. Once her identity became common knowledge, you started seeing her mentioned by name in the news too, and not just on the Weblogging sites.

Chances are very good that the reporter(s) will talk to dozens of people and probably run the best quotes he gets from some of them. For example, I found a nugget in one of Dan Bowman’s messages: “Shelley would really like to know who ate her cookies.” Yes, on one level that’s funny. But baking cookies for someone is a fairly universal act of love, and just about all of us–even baking-challenged superbachelors–can understand the feeling of betrayal when you bake up a batch of cookies and send them to someone, then find out they never got to that person. And if that person didn’t exist at all, it hurts even more.

If you feel like you should give the reporter a piece of information but don’t want to be quoted, use the phrase “off the record.” Most reporters honor that. If you can give them someone else who’ll corroborate what you say, the reporter is even more likely to honor it. Even if that someone else wants to remain anonymous, once three people say something, a reporter can pretty much count it as fact. And since there is some danger of retribution, a reporter will honor that. Most reporters have a soft spot in their hearts for people in danger.

I know you’re nervous about talking about this with a reporter, because I was a crime reporter. Being taken for money is one thing. People don’t like to talk about that because they don’t like to think of themselves as suckers. I know that. Any reporter you’re likely to talk to knows that. But being taken for love is entirely different. People are far less likely to talk about that. Any reporter you’re likely to talk to knows that too. All too well. He or she isn’t likely to do anything to hack you off when good sources are hard to find.

Why is the press taking this angle? Well, the root word of the word “news” is “new.” This is a very old story by news standards. This is the only angle left to take, and the national media has probably stopped caring. If it turns out that more than $1,000,000 worth of gifts were sent to Kaycee, then it’ll become a national story again. If a few hundred people sent postcards and cookies and trinkets, I doubt you’ll hear about it anywhere but in Kansas and Oklahoma newspapers. But in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, anything new that comes about in this case is news.

Why can’t the reporter just read your Weblog? There’s a decent chance s/he already has. But the reporter will want to know how you feel about this now. (That “new” thing again.) And no one wants to print exactly the same quote some other paper did. If you interview the person yourself, your chances of having verbatim quotes lessen.

Is the reporter in cahoots with the FBI or local law enforcement agencies? Probably not. That would be a conflict of interest. It crosses the boundary between reporting news and creating news.

And how can you tell if a reporter is legit? Do a Web search on the reporter’s name. Chances are it’ll show up somewhere. I did a Google search on the reporter’s name in this case, and the first hit had his name, his employer’s name, his editor’s name, and his newspaper’s phone number. If worse came to worse, I could call that number and ask for him. If he’s not there, you can ask whoever answers the phone if the reporter is working on a story along those lines. There’s no guarantee that person will know, but reporters do talk to one another, and future stories do come up in newsroom meetings.

Hopefully that helps people see this thing from a reporter’s perspective. And I suspect that’s probably the last I’ll talk about Kaycee here–the story seems to be losing momentum and people seem to be moving on. And that’s a good thing.

SPAM from Macromedia regarding Flash; Neatgear NICs; Crash course

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

MAILBAG:
From: “bsprowl”
Subject: Spam ?? from Macromedia regarding Flash

I keep getting offers to down load Macromedia’s Flash. These aren’t e-mail type spam; a window pops up and asks if you want to download it.

I have find it very annoying to get these regularly. I have searched on it and find it will cost $399.00 plus tax and shipping for this web authoring tool after the trail period runs out.

Well duh, that’s expensive and I don’t want to write using it; I use Arachnophia (sp?) which is freeware, saving over $400 for the small bit of web development that I do.

There are also some security issues that I don’t want to deal with (although how a glorified text editor can cause security problems seems insane, the FAQs lead me to believe that it can happen.)

But why do I keep getting offers to download it from so many sites. The latest is weather.com, who you would think would not have ads of this type. And the ad pops up several times as I open the radar map and every time I refresh the map it pops up two or three more times.

I have tried to see if this spam is somehow tied to my computer and have used some of Steve Gibson’s tools ( grc.com ) and updated my virus definitions, etc., to eliminate or reduce it if it is hidden or my system. I found nothing.

Any suggestions?

Bob
~~~~~
I know exactly what’s going on. (My site isn’t bugging you about that, is it? If it is, Vinny and Guido will be knocking on a couple of people’s doors because off the top of my head I can’t think of anything I hate more than Flash and my site’s not *supposed* to be using it….) There’s nothing wrong with your computer. You’re getting that question because so many sites use Flash; and most sites, if they detect you don’t have the free Flash plug-in, offer to let you download it. You’d be downloading the free unlimited-use plug-in rather than some trial version of the $399 package.

But Flash animations are annoying (and mostly used by really blinky and obnoxious ads) so I don’t like installing it. I also don’t like the stupid dialog boxes (or sites that install it without asking permission, as some do). When a site offers to install Flash, I add it to the Restricted Sites zone (Tools, Internet Options, Security, then click Restricted Sites, then click Sites, then add, say, www.weather.com to the list). That shuts ’em up, unless they also use ActiveX, in which case IE will pop up a dialog box saying the page may not render properly. But at least they’ll quit bugging you about Flash.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Bob”
Subject: Re[2]: Spam ?? from Macromedia regarding Flash

Hello Dave,

Oh. Now I feel stupid for bothering you.

I never noticed Flash or Macromedia before this. I don’t really want to install it but I would like the weather maps to update automatically and also to show the past several hours.

I guess I’ll do a backup to CDW and then install it. I don’t have a lot on my system, the C: drive only has about 590 MB so it will fit on a single CD. Then if it’s a problem I can just go back to the original system.

I really am wasting that drive but then none of mine are full. I don’t download music, that’s why I have my stereo; I don’t even have a speaker plugged into my computer.

I don’t play DVDs; that’s what the VCR is for (although I haven’t used it more than once since I brought it; I don’t even know were the nearest video rental place is located.)

A year or two ago I tried to install the latest release of the Asteroids game which I though might be fun but after downloading half a dozen files from several sites (I need something called Direct X) it won’t run and neither would anything else. I tried it on several of my systems from an old 486 with DOS 6 and Window 3.11 to a system with a PII 450 and Windows 2K. I’ve never gotten a game more complex that Mahjongg to run on anything besides my old Atari, so it must be me.

I spend a lot of time reading and I like paperbacks so I don’t download books either. I do have a database of all of the books I’ve read in the last five plus years. And that is linked to my Palm so I no longer buy a book I have already read.

I find your sight to be most useful concerning computer technology and read it everyday. While most of the other daynoter’s are interesting, they are not nearly as useful. I really don’t care what they ate, etc.

Thanks again,

Bob
~~~~~
No problem, I’m sure you aren’t the first to have that question, and I’m sure others are asking, “How do I keep this #&%$ website from telling me to download Flash?” If not today, someday someone will want the answer to that question.

Most recent games do require DirectX, which you can download from here. If the DirectX version is too old, games will complain. The safest way to get a game running, if you’re willing to invest the time, is to build up a system, install Windows clean, then install the current version of DirectX, then install the game. That may be more trouble than you’re willing to go to.

I chuckled as I read the rest of your mail. About two years ago, a box of stuff showed up in my boss’s cube. Nobody knows where it came from. There was some ancient computer stuff, and there was some REALLY ancient computer stuff. One of them was a CompuServe manual, and I could tell from the logo and the hairstyles and tie widths that this thing was from 1984 at the very latest. I flipped through it and chuckled at the words that suggested 1200 baud was something new, and when my boss walked in, I held it up and said, “Now this is a relic from a time when computers were computers, and not washing machines and stereos and VCRs and TVs and fax machines and toasters.”

“You sound bitter.”

“No, just practical.”

I remember my Amiga’s simple elegance. Yes, it invented multimedia, but it knew what it was, and that was a computer, and it did a good job of being one. And I miss that.

And thanks for your compliments of the site. I try to be useful, and entertaining, and compelling. I don’t always succeed, but enough people come back that I guess I succeed often enough. I know Pournelle’s a better writer than I am, and both he and Thompson have a much deeper depth of knowledge than I do (they’ve also had more time to accumulate it). So I do the best I can, and try to make it as easy as possible here for people to find the stuff they do like.

Thanks for writing.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Steve DeLassus”
Subject: Neatgear NICs

OK, what’s the difference betwen a Netgear FA310 and an FA311? At the price mwave is hawking them, I am ready to pick up 3…
~~~~~
The FA310 uses the classic DEC Tulip chipset near and dear to all Linux
distros’ hearts. The FA311 uses a NatSemi chipset that only very recent
distros know what to do with. The FA311 should be fine with Windows boxes,
and it’s supposed to be fine with Mandrake 8.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Gordon Pullar”
Subject: Re Crash Course

Hi, I have just read your article in this months “Computer shopper” I am having trouble re-formatting my hard drive (which previously had WIN98SE on it and worked well!) I used FDISK( Got from WIN98 then WIN98SE.) to create a Primary DOS partition,using the whole disk,6.4 Gig. After that I reformated it, it now freezes at writing the FAT table,that’s if I get that far,4 times out of 5 using a boot disk,(I have tried several from differnet PC’s) It gets as far as “verifying pool data” and then freezes.I have checked the HDD drive out with Seagates own diagnostic software and all is OK.(Funny it always boots OK with the seagate software “Seatools”) Changed the IDE cable to the hard drive.I have flashed the BIOS with the latest version.

Is there anything else I could be missing??

Giga-byte GA 5AX motherboard
AMD K6 2 500 Mhz CPU
256 Mb pc100 Ram
Seagate 6.4 Gig ST36451A
HDD Generic video card

Regards

Gordon Pullar
~~~~~
First thing I’d do would be to try to get it to boot off a floppy, then type FDISK /MBR. Both of the problems you’re describing sound like a corrupted MBR, and I don’t think partitioning the drive will zero that out for you. If that doesn’t work, try zeroing out the entire MBR with the MBRwork utility (www.terabyteunlimited.com).

Failing that, I’d try using SeaTools to either low-level format or zero out the drive. Usually after doing that, a finicky drive will work just fine.