03/29/2001

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Where’ve you been all my life? Yes, I say that to every program I find that I like. But this time I think I might really mean it.

My biggest beef with disk optimizers is that I never found one with an intelligent directory sort routine. You see, the most important files in the directory should appear first for best performance on a FAT or FAT32 volume. Norton Utilities doesn’t offer a foolproof method to get the most important files up top every time. Neither does Fix-It. Nuts & Bolts (now McAfee Utilities) had the best method, but seeing as talking about McAfee Utilities is a violation of the license agreement, I can’t tell you if McAfee Utilities still has the feature, if it’s improved, if it’s worth having, or anything of the sort. Frankly I don’t want to know, unless the answer is no. I refuse adamantly to do business with any company that thinks it’s above the First Amendment. Even Microsoft isn’t that despicable. Apple’s not that despicable. Hell, Apple and Microsoft put together, with ultimate crybaby baseball players Gary Sheffield and Frank Thomas thrown in for good measure, aren’t HALF that despicable.

So who cares if McAfee Utilities is any good? You don’t want it anywhere near your computer no matter what it does. (And I suspect it’ll do a royal job of breaking it, based on my experience with Nuts & Bolts, which was a versatile suite but dangerous if used improperly. And every other McAfee product I looked at before they instituted that license agreement sucked. I mean really sucked. And it’s easier to try to stop freedom of speech than it is to improve your products.)

So… You’ve got the powerful Norton Utilities, with lots of selectable options but a couple of options that should be there that aren’t. And you’ve got Fix-It, which is a lot easier to use but not very configurable at all, so it’s better than Defrag and Scandisk but far from perfect. What to do? Buy one of them. Then download lfnsort .

LFNsort allows you to sort directories intelligently. Using multiple criteria. Fabulous. Download it, then run it (preferably you should exit all running programs first). Here’s the syntax I use:

lfnsort -a-s c: /s

This sorts your directory entries by access date, or, if no access date is available, by size (the next-best indication of importance). In the root directory I think I’d want to go with a manual sort (on my machine, the c:windows and c:program files entries get buried deeper than I’d like) but otherwise LFNsort seems to work really well.

So if you want the fastest computer possible, get a utilities suite, then download this, test it, and if you like the results, register it.

03/28/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

Mailbag:

CS Article; Programs; DOS Utilities; Ads

Ugh. I caught up on mail, had a long conversation with Steve DeLassus (a longtime friend and tech reviewer for Optimizing Windows), and otherwise didn’t get much done last night.

Resumes 101. The one thing I did do last night was look at two different people’s resumes. I’m not sure when the last time was someone asked me for resume advice. But I do see a resume every once in a while as part of my job. Sometimes my boss will flip a resume my direction and ask what I think. The really scary thing is, spelling everything correctly and using proper punctuation impresses me. I don’t see that very often. I was taught that kind of thing was expected. I guess not anymore.

Fonts 101. I guess the other thing that comes to mind is that if you want to make a resume stand out, don’t run it in Arial or Times New Roman. If you’ve got a reasonably conservative-looking font that isn’t bundled with Windows, that’d be an excellent choice. Bookman and Garamond are classy and easy to read, and they’ve been used for centuries. Book Antiqua, which comes with MS Office, is a good-looking font whose origins I’m not familiar with. One of my former editors got me hooked on News Gothic as a substitute for Arial, but that’s not a terribly common font. Century Gothic and Futura are good-looking sans-serif fonts, and even though they were intended by their designers to be ultra-modern fonts, there are ancient Roman engravings that look very much like Futura.

The general rule is that a font with serifs, like Times, gives you a traditional look while a sans-serif font, like Arial, gives you a more modern look. The problem is that Times and Arial (or Helvetica–Arial is just a Helvetica knock-off), while excellent designs, are so commonly used that they’re cliche. You can make yourself stand out subtly by using a different font. And the older the font, the better. People have been designing fonts for centuries; what worked then will still work now.

Display fonts like Comic Sans (and most people’s computers have plenty of wild fonts that make Comic Sans look conservative) have no place in resumes. They’re best reserved for greeting cards or other informal projects.

Usage of cutting-edge fonts and display fonts is hard to teach. Either you’ve got an eye for their use or you don’t. A good teacher can help you develop your eye a bit, but since design wasn’t my specialty, I can’t really explain proper usage of them other than to say experiment. And read lots of British magazines because they’re generally bolder than most American magazines, surprisingly.

I once had a font called Bloody that was exactly what it sounds like. When I was editing a student paper at Mizzou, one week we were all feeling a bit feisty in the editorial office, so we did a cover story of a blood drive, ran a big magazine-style picture of someone giving blood on the cover, and, taking a swipe at our rival paper, we overlaid the text “If it bleeds, it leads,” in Bloody of course. The main designer and I had a running joke that I wouldn’t let her use that font. So when one of the other editors had the idea, I of course jumped at it and told her. And I also let her think it was my idea.

Needless to say, that cover didn’t end up going in any of our portfolios. But it was fun, and let us get a laugh at our rivals’ expense, which is always a good thing.

Mailbag:

CS Article; Programs; DOS Utilities; Ads

A free memory tester and a Linux tip

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

I lost my notes for today somehow, and I’ve been home a grand total of 14 hours the past 48 hours (I think), so you’ll have to excuse this quickie.

Free memory tester. I found this over the weekend:

www.memtest86.com

It’s a memory test disk. Self-booting, about 74K in memory, builds from DOS, Windows, or Linux (and possibly others too). I use and recommend RAM Stress Test, by Ultra-X Inc. ( www.uxd.com ), but this seems nearly as good and it’s free. If you’ve got frequent bluescreens, download this and try it on your PC. A lot of problems are caused by bad memory, and the power-on memory test usually won’t find it. Neither will most DOS-based memory utilities.

MemTest is still no substitute for buying brand-name memory, though I’d never let commodity memory sit on the same table with my hardware without testing it first. About 1 in 1,000 brand-name sticks are bad, as opposed to about 1 in 12 commodity sticks, in my extensive experience. One of the first things I do when faced with an unstable system is test the memory overnight, just in case.

Linux (and Unix) tip of the day. If you vaguely remember a command but can’t completely recall it, type the part you remember, then hit tab. A list of possibilities will appear. Hopefully the command you’re looking for is among them.

And if any of the possibilities sound interesting, type man command. The online documentation will come up and explain usage.

Don’t let anyone fool you. You never master this OS. You just learn how to find what you need to get a job done quickly. And hopefully you develop a long memory.

Outta here. And if you’ve mailed me over the last couple of days, my apologies. I’ll get back to you tonight after work.

The battle against the blinky Web

Dave Farquhar General

The battle against the blinky Web continues. Regular readers of this site will know there’s virtually nothing I hate more than blinky Internet content. You know, stuff that moves for no good reason. Our natural instinct is to pay the most attention to the things that move the most, so if we’re reading static text and there’s some annoying Flash ad running, we’ll pay more attention to the blinky Flash ad.

Read more

03/25/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

A dose of my own medicine. I was plugging away on my Celeron-400 yesterday and it was feeling sluggish. I mean it was bad. At times, barely usable. I started wondering what I’d pay for a Duron-700 these days, though I’d really rather put off any more hardware upgrades seeing as I just got around to ordering a new 19″ NEC FE950 monitor.

After I rebooted and Windows started booting really slowly (Linux never gives me this kind of trouble), a number of questions started running through my head. Is the hard drive going out? Are my backups current? Hmm. It froze, so I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart it, picked Windows off my boot menu (against my better judgment, because Linux, even a really old distribution, is miles better than anything Microsoft has ever made, especially if you invest a little time learning its command line), and watched it boot in something resembling its normal time. Probably the system’s memory had just become totally blitzed and needed a harder reboot than my usual pick-the-restart-option-while-holding-shift procedure.

So I ran Norton Disk Doctor, found Outlook Express had blitzed the dates on a number of its files–typical Microsoft–and let it fix it. I looked in my system tray and noticed a couple of parasite programs (but I won’t mention any names, Real Networks) had reinstated their startup status. So I ran MSConfig and killed those. Then it occurred to me that I probably hadn’t run Speed Disk in a long time. I launched Speed Disk and found a huge mess. Before letting it proceed, I checked the options and noticed, adding insult to injury, that when I last ran it I hadn’t used the optimal settings either (the settings to use are in Optimizing Windows). Before letting it run, I did a little more cleanup (some manual directory optimization, also described in Optimizing Windows, or in the DOS 5 manual if you happen to still have it). Then I had Speed Disk rescan the drive and let it rip.

And after about 25 minutes, I had a fast computer again. That’s a whole lot nicer than spending $200 on system upgrades. Besides, if I’d paired that drive up with that motherboard without a totally clean reformat and reinstall, it wouldn’t have performed all that much better anyway. Better to make the computer work smarter instead of harder.

Micron’s departure from the PC business. I’m not sure why I didn’t comment on this yesterday. I really like Micron PCs, at least their Client Pro line. The Millenia line is basically consumer-grade, no worse than anyone else’s consumer-grade stuff and in some cases better, but still consumer-grade nonetheless. Although with the tighter and tighter integration of motherboards that probably makes less difference now than it did a couple of years ago.

I found the quality of Micron Client Pros to be much higher than Gateway, and frankly, usually better than Dell. Their service is first-rate. Now granted, I’m approaching this from a corporate perspective–my employer owns about 700 of the things, so it gets better support than a home user might. Generally they use the same Intel motherboards Dell and Gateway use. They’ve always tended to come up with combinations of video and sound cards that work better than Gateway’s combinations do. (Gateways can develop weird problems with their video and sound drivers that I’ve never seen on other PCs.) They were less stingy with the quality of power supplies they used. I didn’t always care for their hard drive choices, but then again, most PC makers just buy hard drives from whoever can deliver the quantities they need at the best price at any given moment. Unless you custom-build, you’re not likely to get cream-of-the-crop drives.

I’m afraid Micron’s departure from direct sales will mean the same thing Dell’s departure from retail did. When Dell left retail, there was a noticeable decline in the quality of PCs sold at retail. AST’s quality decreased, Acer’s quality decreased, Compaq and IBM’s quality didn’t change much but they didn’t seem nearly as inclined to keep their prices competitive anymore.

Since everyone’s using basically the same Intel motherboards with a different BIOS these days, I imagine the impact on quality won’t be tremendous (though Gateway’s love affair with 145W power supplies will probably continue indefinitely), but it will probably have an impact on price. Micron always undercut Dell, and frequently undercut Gateway. Dell probably won’t be so eager to cut prices with Micron gone.

Micron makes it sound like they have a buyer lined up for the division and it’ll continue to operate. I hope that’s the case, but I’m not too optimistic. Gateway’s having problems, Dell’s not happy with its recent results, and I can’t imagine a group of investors new to the industry will do better than Michael Dell and Ted Waitt.

Micron’s PC business shouldn’t be confused with their memory business. Micron the memory chip company is the parent company. Crucial, the manufacturer of memory modules, is a subsidiary. Micron Electronics Inc., a.k.a. micronpc.com, is another subsidiary. Micron Electronics’ two big businesses were PC building and Web hosting. So the Micron name won’t disappear off this mortal coil.

Secrets about hard drive recovery and wiping

Dave Farquhar Hardware ,

Recovery. I found this link while messing around: 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive. I’ve used some of these methods myself in the past. I imagine I’ll get to use more of them in the future.

Wiping. I needed a program yesterday to securely wipe out a hard drive. I was just going to low-level format it, but Western Digital’s drive suite, whatever it’s called, refused to do anything to the drive because it was returning an error code of 0207. The drive still worked, but according to my Web search, an 0207 means imminent failure. Hey, that’s why I needed to low-level the drive–we got a replacement for it and had to send this one back, but the drive was in an executive’s computer and probably had sensitive data on it.

Incidentally, if you’re getting an 0207 and you’re here because you want to know what to do about it, back up your data immediately and get it replaced under warranty. No, it’s not practical to fix it. If it’s out of warranty, I’m sorry. Sadly, it happens.

But I digress. How do you wipe the drive to ensure no one’s reading your sensitive data? I found some DOS freeware to do it at my usual sources, but one of them wouldn’t run under Win9x’s DOS, and the drive is too big to be recognized under 6.22. Another one wouldn’t handle drives bigger than 2 gig. Another one seemed to work, but seemed awfully fast.

Disk wiping isn’t a terribly complicated thing, so maybe I should just write a program myself to do it. It’s been forever since I programmed, and I do kind of enjoy doing that… once a year. Or every couple of years.

03/23/2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

I’m looking for inspiration and having a terrible time finding any. That’s what happens when you only do one or two things all week. I’ve beaten Squid to death. There seems to be no incantation I can recite to make Office 4.2.1 run under Mac OS 9. And that pretty much sums up my week.

AMD released 1.3 and 1.33 GHz Athlons this week. They’re priced at around $320 and $350. For software development they’d be great. For video editing they’d be great. For emulating Amigas at wicked speed they’d be great. But what else would you do with that kind of processing power?

For me, the best thing about this chip is it means fewer people will want 800 MHz CPUs, so I’ll be able to get an 800 cheaper. That’s still insanely fast.

Reactions on the hardware sites are mostly predictable. The biggest surprise I saw was Tom Pabst over at Tom’s Hardware, once the most outspoken critic of the P4, is now calling it “certainly no bad product whatsoever.” Last year he made it sound like the spawn of Satan. But he still likes the 1.33 GHz Athlon better.

One nice thing about the hardware sites: when they overclock, you get a nice preview of what future CPU speeds will give you. The Athlon at 1.466 GHz severely outperforms the 1.5 GHz P4, not that most people will be able to tell a difference.

Apple releases OS X tomorrow. It will get mixed reviews. Finally there’s an Apple OS that has a prayer of being stable. Software compatibility is likely to be lousy. There are capabilities that are missing, such as DVD support–and wasn’t Apple the one who’s been saying DVD is so important all along that they made it next to impossible to buy a Mac without a DVD drive?

Chances are I’ll end up running it on a machine at work, and I’m sure I’ll like it better than OS 9. Whether I’ll like it better than Windows NT or Linux, I have no idea.

Historically, it’s always been better to wait for Apple’s dot-one releases. System 7 was an atrocity, while 7.1 was actually a decent OS for its day. OS 8 was promising but buggy, while 8.1 is probably the best version of the old-style Mac OS ever released. I never found anything to like about OS 9. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with 9.1 yet–we’ve still got a lot of machines running 8.6 at work because there wasn’t ever any reason to move them, and once I managed to get 9 working decently the last thing I wanted to do was go back in and change things.

I suspect OS X won’t come into its own until the dot-one release, or possibly even dot-five. This is a much, much bigger change than System 7 or OS 8 were.

Playing with Squid

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

Mandrake Squid. To turn a Mandrake server install into a Squid server, here’s all you have to do. Issue the command squid -NCd1 to build the cache directory structure. Then, issue the command mv /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/K25squid /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S25squid so that Squid runs at startup (assuming your server’s set to run in text mode, as servers should be–why waste all that memory and CPU cycles keeping a GUI running when those resources can be dedicated to server tasks?). If it you boot and run GUI mode automatically, (maybe you want to run Squid on your workstation), add the command mv /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K25squid /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S25squid to the mix.

Now to start Squid, you can do one of two things. You can reboot, which is the Windows way of doing things, or you can just start the daemon, which is the Unix way of doing things. I like the Unix way. Run Squid’s startup script manually by issuing the command /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S25squid restart. (There are other ways to do it too of course but I like this way.)

Single-floppy Squid. And just in case you haven’t seen everything yet, you can get a single-floppy FreeBSD-based Squid server. Head over to www.ryuchi.org/~ilovefd/1fdsquid/1fdsquidus.shtml for the goods. It uses the system’s hard drive for storage. You want a semi-powerful CPU (a Pentium-133 is sufficient for a small workgroup) and a fair bit of memory (I’m thinking 64 megs is the minimum). That’s less power than you need for a Windows workstation these days, but considering you can do a light-duty Unix-based fileserver with a 33 MHz 486, it’s a comparatively powerful machine.

03/21/2001

Dave Farquhar General ,

I accomplished two things yesterday. The first was to set up an experimental Squid Web cache at work. Then I left to go edit video. How nice of me. I hope it held up all day, but I suspect it didn’t have any problems. Linux is awfully reliable.

Mandrake makes it really nice. Basically you do a server install, then once it’s up and going, issue three commands and you’ve got a Web cache. I guess I ought to document what those three commands are, huh? I think they’re written down at work.

The system requirements are steep; you need lots of memory and lots of disk space

And now that I’ve had one, I want another one in my other office. There’s a 133 MHz Power Mac sitting over there with a big disk and a ton of RAM. It’s not useful for running Mac apps because it’s too slow. I think I’ll grab a PowerPC distribution of Linux, install it, grab Squid and compile it, and set it up for over there. Squid needs memory and a good disk subsystem much more than it needs CPU power, and this Mac has both. And I understand Linux loves RISC, so I suspect this’ll make a nice Squid server.

I also spent 7 hours learning how to edit video. This after a half-day at work. I’m emerging from the zone–I’m very difficult to work with because I’ll zone in, forget about my surroundings, and totally lose track of time and other things like food, drink, and rest. It’s almost totally like my body shuts down and it’s just my mind and my hands. Now I’m back, and it’s catching up with me, and sooner than I expected. It must mean I’m getting old.

At any rate… What I learned is that editing video with modern equipment is very easy. Stringing video clips together is as easy as stringing words together. After about four hours’ instruction, I was good enough to put together video that looks outstanding to the untrained eye. Making it look good to the trained eye will take another seven hours’ training and years of experience. I can get the training pretty easily.

Raw skills can be taught, and I guess I had some of them already. I already knew the Mac and I knew page layout, and video layout uses a lot of the same concepts (not to mention keystrokes). Some things have to be developed, and some things you’re pretty much born with. It’s too soon to know how much I lack is developmental and how much is innate.

I think it says something that I don’t even know what equipment we were using–I just ignored everything but the key commands used for stringing together video. I think that’s part of the secret. Pay no attention to the things you don’t need now. You can always learn them when you need them. Master the things you need now. Better to be A-plus at what you need to know now than C-plus at everything, including things you’ll never use and the things you need now. So what if you don’t know much? At least you know something.

And I know this: I want to do this on a PC.

Experiments running old Mac software on a new Mac

Dave Farquhar Macintosh , , , ,

Mailbag:

Compressed ramdisk; partitioned HDD; ram limitations

Mac adventures. Nothing fun. Take my advice: Don’t bother trying to get MS Office 4.2.1b running under MacOS 9. Not that most people would try to run software that’s two versions back on a new system, but… I guess these guys didn’t have money left in their budget to upgrade their old software after paying too much for an iMac.

Now, on a PC, the answer’s simple. Multiboot an older copy of Windows. (But Office 4.21 runs just fine under newer Windows, but humor me.) I can run DOS 1.0 on a Pentium IV if I want to for some insane reason, to get the ultimate in backward compatibility. If there’s some CP/M-86 app I want to run for some odd reason, I can run CP/M-86 on a P4 too–it’ new machines is software that tries to access the IBM PC’s ROM Basic. Very few programs did. The compatibility problem you’re most likely to run into is due to programs not handling very high CPU speeds well, but that’s curable with slowdown.

Older Mac software is very hit and miss with newer versions of the OS, and you can’t do backlevel OSs on new Macs. Whatever the current OS was at the time of a model’s introduction is generally the oldest OS you can run. There’s no booting into System 7.5.5 on your G4 for optimum compatibility with a legacy app you need that hasn’t been updated.

I almost resorted to trying to run it in the vMac Mac Plus emulator , but I found the hard disk files too cumbersome to deal with–getting files into them is really a chore, and besides, vMac didn’t seem too interested in mounting a hard disk image–only floppies. It’s a real shame the excellent Basilisk Mac II emulator hasn’t been ported to the PowerMac.  I’ve used it to run 68040- software on Windows PCs in a pinch numerous times, and fast PCs emulate the 040 much faster than the real thing. A Mac Basilisk port would be a very workable solution for running finicky older software on newer machines.

Later, I spent a couple of hours trying to get an Epson Stylus 850 printer working on another iMac with a USB-to-parallel adapter. Usually it works flawlessly. This one doesn’t want to play. I got rid of the “port is in use” error I had been getting by uninstalling and reinstalling the driver (my last resort, after trashing the printer preferences, AppleTalk preferences, and everything else I could think of in the Preferences folder, then zapping the PRAM by holding down Cmd-Option-P-R at boot time and letting it chime seven times), but then Chooser asked whether the printer was connected to the printer or modem port. Answer: neither. It’s an iMac. It’s connected to USB. I humored it by trying both phantom ports, but neither setting worked. Then I downloaded a patch from Epson’s Web site and installed it. The port-in-use errors came back. Lovely. I gave up for the day. Macs are supposed to be easier? Hardly. Maybe they’re a little easier to use (I doubt it) but they sure are a lot harder to fix.

Along the way I found this useful list of extensions and control panels though . So something good came of all this.

Mailbag:

Compressed ramdisk; partitioned HDD; ram limitations