A nice Internet utility

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Another Internet utility. I found a link to Naviscope (www.naviscope.com) this week. Naviscope is a swiss army knife Internet tool, providing ad blocking, DNS caching, prefetch, logging and a few other features. As such, it can replace Proxomitron, FastNet, and Netsonic–three utilities I mention in Optimizing Windows.
I find I like it, but I really miss Proxomitron’s ability to freeze animated GIFs. I absolutely, positively detest anything that moves on Web pages, so I love that feature and find I hate living without it. You can run Naviscope through another proxy server, so I may just try running the two in conjunction with each other. Maybe one will catch ads the other won’t.

I do like the prefetch, which is much more polite than NetSonic (though you have to configure it, but it prefetches only a few links, rather than prefetching everything that links like NetSonic), and the DNS cache is great. Of course I can do that with a Linux box with BIND set up (a great use for a 386 or low-end 486, by the way), but this is easier for most people.

Fixing Win9x with bootlog.txt

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

Using bootlog.txt. I resurrected a dead Win95 box yesterday; it wouldn’t boot. Bootlog.txt to the rescue. (You can also use bootlog.prv, the log of the previous boot). Search the file for the string “fail” and note the device driver that isn’t working. Hot tip: frequently it’s a network driver. Boot into safe mode, remove the offending driver(s) from Device Manager and potentially problematic software (Anti-Virus software and RealAudio both come to mind; you can always reinstall those later after you’ve got the system back up and running), then reboot. If you boot successfully, add the drivers back in, then reinstall the software you uninstalled, and you’re back in business. Sure beats a reformat and reinstall.
Spam. And I understand some people want me to fly to a foreign country and open a bank account, deposit a large sum of their own money into the account, and at some later date they’ll come take back 2/3 of it. The remaining 1/3 is mine to keep, presumably for helping them hide their assets. Yeah. And Bill Gates wants to send me to Disney World.

I will give them credit though. This hoax was cleverly enough written that I read it in its entirety. A little entertainment to start my day.

Amiga influence on Linux

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , ,

Amiga lives! (Well, sort of). When it comes to GUIs, I’m a minimalist. Call me spoiled; the first GUI I used was on a 7.16-MHz machine with a meg of RAM, and it was fast. Sure, it wasn’t long before software bloat set in and I had to add another meg, and then another, but at a time when Windows 3.1 was running like crap on 4 megs and only decently on 8, I had 6 megs on my Amiga and didn’t really know what to do with all of it. So I left 3 megs available to the system, ran a 3-meg ramdisk, and all was well with the world. Until Commodore’s raw dead fish marketing caught up with it and pulled it and the company under.
Under Linux, KDE and GNOME look good, but they run slower than Windows on my PCs. And I like the idea of my P120 being a usable box. I can do that under Linux, but not with KDE as my Window manager. There’s IceWM, which is nice and lean, and there’s xFCE, which resembles HP’s implementation of CDE (and also resembles OS/2, bringing back fond memories for me–why is it everything I like is marketed as raw dead fish?), and now, two years after its release, I’ve discovered AmiWM.

AmiWM (http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html) is a clone of the Amiga Workbench, the Amiga’s minimalist GUI. It’s small and fast and reminds me of the good old days when computers were computers, and didn’t try to be CD players, dishwashers, toaster ovens, televisions, and the like. For an aging PC (or for a new one that you want to run as quickly as possible–hey, you must be mildly interested in that, seeing as you’re reading my site and that’s my specialty), this one’s hard to beat.

Hardware developments

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Hardware news. Lots of stuff today. We’ll take it one at a time.
AMD to hit 1.5 GHz by January. Intel intends to release a 1.5 GHz P4 in late November/early December. AMD’s a bit behind that (assuming Intel will deliver, which they’ve been having difficulty doing lately), but the 1 GHz Athlon performs similarly to a 1.4 GHz P4. Good news for us, bad news for Intel. AMD intends to release a 1.2 GHz Athlon within a month, along with an 800 MHz Duron.

In related news, the AMD 760 chipset (the SMP-enabled one) will be released this year.

The P4 problems are related to the use of PCI graphics cards and Intel has reportedly fixed the problem. Although allowing much higher clock rates, the P4 is less efficient than the P3, so a 1.4 GHz P4 is expected to give comparable performance to a 1 GHz P3. It won’t be until Intel hits 1.5 GHz and higher that the new architecture will give any performance advantage over what’s available now. Not that you can find a 1 GHz P3…

Memory prices are down. If you’re looking to buy, this is a good time. You never know when they’ll rise again, or fall for that matter.

Maxtor buys Quantum. In a consolidation of disk manufacturers, Maxtor bought the disk manufacturing wing of Quantum for $2 billion, making Maxtor the world’s biggest disk manufacturer. Quantum’s tape operations will be spun off into a new company, to be named Quantum.

Windows optimization trick

Dave Farquhar Windows

Wednesday, 10/4/00
Turn off that bloody throbber! Here’s a tip that would have made it into Optimizing Windows, had I known about it at the time. You know that annoying Windows-logo throbber that shows up in Explorer windows that blinks during disk access, bugging you and stealing precious CPU cycles? You can turn it off or on with a Registry hack. It’s too messy to describe here, but you can download a pair of regfiles from http://www.pla-netx.com/linebackn/evil/ThrobOff.zip if you want it.

The throbber is useful in IE to let you know that Web page is indeed loading, but when you’re hunting through your own hard drive, what’s the point?

Changing CPU priorities in Windows 95/98/Me

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Take charge of your CPU usage under Win9x. I talked about CPU Controller from BinaryWork in Optimizing Windows, which allows you to set a task’s priority (a la WinNT’s Task Manager). There’s a freeware app at http://www.blehq.org/pv2k.htm that has most of its functionality. Haven’t tested it yet, but I definitely will.
———-

From: “Chuck Buker”

Subject: Dual Duron/Athlon

I love my dual celeron Abit BP-6 machine, but I have been salivating over the prospect of a dual Duron machine for some time now. And with 700 mhz Durons selling below $90, I can hardly stand the wait.

Do you have any idea if or when someone is going to come out with a dual Scoket A (Duron or Athlon) motherboard and whether the Duron’s or Athlon’s support SMP?

———-

According to everything I’ve read, both the Athlon and Duron are SMP-capable. The forthcoming AMD-760 chipset has SMP support (the AMD-750 and VIA KT133 don’t). I don’t remember where I saw this anymore, but I seem to remember reading recently that AMD expects to release that chipset near the end of the year. If I had to guess, I’d say early part of next year you’ll start seeing dual socket A boards.

The big thing standing in the way right now is the lack of an SMP-capable chipset.

Mail on modems

Dave Farquhar Hardware

From: al wynn
Subject: External 56K modems

What do you think is the best external 56K modem in the market ?

———-

The best external 56K modems on the market are the 3Com/US Robotics Courier and the Zoom/Hayes Optima series, but they’re extremely pricey. The 3Com/US Robotics Sportsters and the Zoom/Hayes Accuras are nearly as good, cost about half as much, and are much easier to find. I don’t even look at other brands of modems; I stick with the big two (and give the edge to US Robotics).

Integrating Windows and Linux, fornever and ever

Dave Farquhar Writing

10/2
Integrating Windows and Linux, fornever and ever. Yes, the book that consumed much of my life and my health over the course of the past year or so since I finished Optimizing Windows has been quietly cancelled. I can’t say I’m happy about it. Actually there are a lot of things I’d like to say right now but I won’t. All rights did revert back to me, so I can find another publisher if I decide I want to finish it.

I’ve known about this for about a week, and the questions haven’t really gone away: Is this book like the ex-girlfriend I’m really better off without? Do I miss that book, or do I miss working on a book, period? Did I settle for a mediocre subject I wasn’t very comfortable with, just for the sake of writing a book?

So I’m toying with a subject I’m much more comfortable with, one that I have extremely strong opinions on, to see whether I’ve still got what it takes (mentally) to write a book. NaturallySpeaking will help with the physical part. I’ve started writing, slowly. Fortunately I have material I can dust off, clean up, and drop into place to jumpstart the project. Beyond that, I’m not going to say anything specific, except that I want to write for someone other than O’Reilly this time. I need a change of scenery. (And no one values loyalty these days anyway.)

Monotonous songwriting

Dave Farquhar Music

Dave’s not here. Well, sort of. Dave here. For a minute. Di’s taking the weekend off. I sent her a bunch of material that she’ll work in next week. I just spent a lovely day cleaning my apartment, reading a few chapters out of the book of Matthew, and catching up with friends. My ex-bandmate Will Matherly (if we ever were a band, I don’t know) called early this evening looking for lyrics. I gave him some of my old lyrics (a pop/punk number reminiscent of The Cars and a dreary, gothy tune that was trying to sound like Joy Division or The Cure but ended up sounding nothing like either), then I started rattling off some lyrics I’ve been carrying around for two years but never finished properly. I told him I’d fix some dinner, finish them as I ate, then call him back in a couple of hours. The result was a hard-driving punky number called “Not Much Like You” using a really uncreative straight-A rhyme scheme (the exception being a brief “But Wait!” interjection). For some reason, my specialty seems to be breakup songs.
“She stands erect like you / She walks upright like you / She breathes oxygen too!”

Oh well. I’m actually supposed to be trying to write a song that works in the words “Celebrate Faith.” Unfortunately, I’m most effective writing about things that hack me off. While I frequently don’t know or understand what He’s up to, God doesn’t really hack me off, so it’s hard to write songs about Him. Hey, maybe that’s my start.

Anyway. There’s a busload of musings, reader mail and replies, and an announcement sitting in an inbox in Kansas City. Seeing as it’s really late on Saturday and I’m going to be shooting pictures all day Sunday, this is probably it for the Silicon Underground for this weekend.

I’m at Notepad’s limit. See ya.

Binary file editing and hardware compatibility

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

Binary file editing. I’ve recovered many a student’s term paper from munged disks over the years using Norton Disk Edit, from the Norton Utilities (making myself a hero many times). Usually I can only recover the plain text, but that’s a lot better than nothing. Rebuilding an Excel spreadsheet or a QuarkXPress document is much harder–you have to know the file formats, which I don’t.
But at any rate, I’ve on a number of occasions had to run NDE to recover meeting minutes or other documents at work. The sheer number of times I have to do this made me adamantly opposed to widespread use of NTFS at work. Sure, the extra security and other features is nice, but try telling that to an irate user who just lost the day’s work for some reason. The “technical superiority” argument doesn’t hold any water there.

Enter WinHex (www.winhex.com). Now it doesn’t matter so much that the powers that be at work didn’t listen to my arguments. 🙂 (NDE from vanilla DOS would still be safer, since the disk will be in suspended state, but I guess you could yank the drive and put it in another PC for editing.)

For those who’ve never done this before, you can recover data using a brute force method of searching for known text strings that appeared in the file. For example, I once worked on recovering a thesis that contained the line “I walk through a valley of hands.” Chances are, if I search for that, I’m gonna find the rest of the document in close proximity. A Windows-based editor makes this kind of data recovery very nice–search for the string, keeping Notepad open, then copy and paste the strings as you find them.

Knowledge of the underlying filesystem (FAT or NTFS) is helpful but not essential, as is knowledge of the file format involved. If worse comes to worse, you can recover the strings out of the file and have the app open to re-enter it (being aware that you run the risk of overwriting the data, of course).

I found some useful links on the WinHex site detailing certain file formats.

This is a program I suspect I’ll be buying soon, since my need for it is probably more a matter of when rather than if.

———-

From: “James Cooley”

Subject: Tip for tat?

Hi Dave,

I waded through all your views (That’s where all those hits came from!) and I like your style and learned a great deal. Here’s another tip I didn’t see mentioned: in autoexec.bat, add the following: set temp=C:\temp set tmp=C:\temp set tmpdir=C:\temp

You could use the ramdisk drive you mention, of course. I don’t know if this speeds things up, but it sure helps minimize the clutter from most installs when you clean the temp directory periodically. I use C:\temp2 for those disposable downloads because some programs hate extracting into their own directory. Norton Anti-Virus comes to mind: if you run the updates from C:\temp it hangs.

I ordered _UNIX in a Nutshell_ from a recommendation on your site, but got a 500 page tome instead of the 92 pages you mentioned. If you recall the O’Rielly book I’m talking about, could you give me the exact name so I needn’t hunt it down again?

Hope your hands are healing.

Regards,

Jim

———-

Thanks. I’m glad you enjoyed it (but isn’t that an awful lot of reading?)

I’ve seen the tmpdir trick; fortunately not a whole lot of programs use it anymore but that is useful. Thanks.

And yes, as you observe it’s a good idea to use a separate dir for program installs. I try to avoid hanging it directly off the root for speed considerations (a clean root dir is a fast root dir)–I usually stick it on the Windows desktop out of laziness. That’s not the best place for it either, but it’s convenient to get to.

The 92-page book is Learning the Unix Operating System, by Jerry Peek and others. It’s about $12. The 500-page Unix in a Nutshell is useful, but more as a reference. I’ve read it almost cover-to-cover, but I really don’t like to read the big Nutshell books that way. Information overload, you know?

———-

From: “al wynn”

Subject: MAX screen resolution for Win95/98/2000

Do you know the MAXIMUM screen resolutions for Win95/98/2000 (in pixels) ? Which operating systems can support a dual-monitors setting ?

NEC 15′ MultiSync CRT monitors max out at (1280 x 1024 @ 66Hz); for 17′ CRT’s, it’s usually (1600 x 1200 @76Hz). Do you know any 15′ and 17′ models that can handle denser resolutions ? (like (1792 x 1344 @68Hz) or (1920 x 1440 @73Hz) ?

Also, which Manufacturer/Model do you prefer for flat-panel LCD’s ? Which 15′ or 17′ LCD models boast the highest resolution ?

———-

I believe Windows’ limit is determined by the video drivers. So, if a video card ships someday that supports some obnoxious resolution like 3072×2560, Windows should support it. That’s been the case in the past, usually (and not just with the Windows platform–it holds true for other systems as well).

Windows 98 and 2000 support dual monitors.

I’ve never seen a 15″ monitor that does more than 1280×1024, and never seen a 17″ that does more than 1600×1200. I find anything higher than 1024×768 on a 15″ monitor and higher than 1152×864 on a 17″ strains my eyes after a full day of staring at it.

As for flat-panels, I don’t own one so I can’t speak authoritatively. I’d probably buy an NEC or a Mitsubishi if I were going to get one. The price difference between an off-brand flat-panel and a big name is small enough (relative to price) and the price high enough that I’d want to go with someone I know knows how to make quality stuff–I’m not gonna pay $800-900 for something only to have it break after two years. I’m totally sold on NEC, since I bought a used NEC Multisync II monitor in 1990 that was built in 1988. It finally died this year.

A 15″ flat-panel typically does 1024×768, while a 17″ does 1280×1024.