commodore

And the axe falls

Dave Farquhar Personal , , ,

I don’t talk about work very often, and usually in vague terms. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned my current employer by name here, and I very rarely mention a former employer by name, mostly because they sometimes made decisions I disagree with. I figure if I’m going to trash them, it’s better if I do it without mentioning them by name.
But something happened Friday. I was going to just ignore it, but I’m not going to accomplish anything by doing that. I might as well confront it. Read more

Recovery time.

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

Taxes. I think I’ve actually filed my taxes on time twice in my adult life. This year isn’t one of them. I filed Form 4868, so Tax Day for me is actually Aug. 15, 2002.
In theory Uncle Sam owes me money this year, so I shouldn’t owe any interest. I’ll have a professional accountant test that theory soon. Make that fairly soon, because it’d be nice to have that money, seeing as I expect to make the biggest purchase of my still-fairly-short life this year.

Some people believe filing a 4868 is advantageous. The thinking is this: Let the IRS meet its quota for audits, then file. That way, the only way you’re going to get audited is if you truly raise red flags, which I shouldn’t because I’m having a professional (and an awfully conservative one at that) figure the forms. That’s good. I’d rather not have to send a big care package off to the IRS to prove I’m not stealing from them.

Adventure. Steve DeLassus and I dove headlong into an adventure on Sunday, an adventure consisting of barbecue and Linux. I think at one point both of us were about ready to put a computer on that barbie.

We’ll talk about the barbecue first. Here’s a trick I learned from Steve: Pound your boneless chicken flat, then throw it in a bag containing 1 quart of water and 1 cup each of sugar and salt. Stick the whole shebang in the fridge while the fire’s getting ready. When the fire’s ready, take the chicken out of the bag and dry thoroughly. Since Steve’s not a Kansas Citian, he doesn’t believe in dousing the chicken in BBQ sauce before throwing it on the grill. But it was good anyway. Really good in fact.

Oh, I forgot. He did spray some olive oil on the chicken first. Whether that helps it brown or locks in moisture or both, I’m not quite sure. But olive oil contains good fats, so it’s not a health concern.

Now, Linux on cantankerous 486s may be a health concern. I replaced the motherboard in Steve’s router Sunday night, because it was a cranky 486SX/20. I was tired of dealing with the lack of a math coprocessor, and the system was just plain slow. I replaced it with a very late model 486DX2/66 board. I know a DX2/66 doesn’t have three times the performance of an SX/20, but the system sure seemed three times faster. Its math coprocessor, L2 cache, faster chipset, and much better BIOS helped. It took the new board slightly longer to boot Linux than it took the old one to finish counting and testing 8 MB of RAM.

But Debian wasn’t too impressed with Steve’s Creative 2X CD-ROM and its proprietary Panasonic interface. So we kludged in Steve’s DVD-ROM drive for the installation, and laughed at the irony. Debian installed, but the lack of memory (I scraped up 8 megs; Steve’s old memory wouldn’t work) slowed down the install considerably. But once Debian was up and running, it was fine, and in text mode, it was surprisingly peppy. We didn’t install XFree86.

It was fine until we tried to get it to act as a dialup router, that is. We never really did figure out how to get it to work reliably. It worked once or twice, then quit entirely.

This machine was once a broadband router based on Red Hat 6.1, but Red Hat installed way too much bloat so it was slow whenever we did have to log into it. And Steve moved into the boonies, where broadband isn’t available yet, so it was back to 56K dialup for him. Now we know that dialup routers seem to be much trickier to set up than dual-NIC routers.

After fighting it for nearly 8 hours, we gave up and booted it back into Freesco, which works reliably. It has the occasional glitch, but it’s certainly livable. Of course we want (or at least Steve wants) more features than Freesco can give you easily. But it looks like he’ll be living with Freesco for a while, since neither of us is looking forward to another marathon Debian session.

Nostalgia. A couple of articles on Slashdot got me thinking about the good old days, so I downloaded VICE, a program that can emulate almost every computer Commodore ever built. Then I played around with a few Commodore disk images. It’s odd what I do and don’t remember. I kind of remember the keyboard layout. I remembered LOAD “*”,8,1 loads most games (and I know why that works too, and why the harder-to-type LOAD “0:*”,8,1 is safer), but I couldn’t remember where the Commodore keyboard layout put the *.

I sure wish I could remember people’s names half as well as I remember this mesozoic computer information.

It stands on shaky legal ground, but you can go to c64.com and grab images for just about any Commodore game ever created. The stuff there is still covered by copyright law, but in many cases the copyright holder has gone out of business and/or been bought out several times over, so there’s a good possibility the true copyright holder doesn’t even realize it anymore. Some copyright holders may care. Others don’t. Others have probably placed the work in the public domain. Of course, if you own the original disks for any of the software there, there’s no problem in downloading it. There’s a good possibility you can’t read your originals anyway.

I downloaded M.U.L.E., one of the greatest games of all time. I have friends who swear I was once an ace M.U.L.E. player, something of an addict. I have absolutely no recollection of that. I started figuring out the controls after I loaded it, but nothing seemed familiar, that’s for sure. I took to it pretty quickly. The strategy is simple to learn, but difficult to master. The user interface isn’t intuitive, but in those days they rarely were. And in those days, not many people cared.

How to get my job

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

I’ve had a couple of people ask me in the past couple of weeks how to break into the computer field. It was a tough question. I literally got into fixing these things because I couldn’t find a repair shop in St. Louis that I felt I could trust. So I started trying to fix them myself. I might break it beyond repair, but one time we had a repair done that cost more than replacing the unit outright would have cost. So what did I have to lose, right?
I took my Commodore 128 apart a few times. Usually it was for an upgrade, but once it was to clean the keyboard because keys weren’t working anymore. It was an adventure, and I had to learn how to solder first. My dad’s friend Norb taught me how. He was a building inspector. No wonder I still solder like a plumber, even to this day. So I de-soldered the 6 connections I had to in order to get into the keyboard, removed the dozens of tiny screws, cleaned up the printed circuit board, put it back together, re-soldered those connections, reassembled the computer, and held my breath. It worked. Cool. It didn’t impress the girls, but it saved me at least 50 bucks.

It was my uncle’s approach. I remember riding with him to an auto parts store once, then watching him work on his truck. “I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to cars,” I said.

“I don’t let that stop me,” he said. “I just have to do it.”

His truck cost more than any computer I’ve ever owned.

Later on, I got an upgrade ROM for my Amiga 2000. So my dad came home one day to find me hovering above my Amiga, which was sprawled across his OMT table. The cover was off, the power supply was out, and the drive cage was out, and there I was, slowly prying out a chip with a screwdriver. Dad gave me a nervous look. “You gonna be able to get that thing back together?” he asked me. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t tell him how many times I’d had it apart before. So he stood there and watched me as I finished extracting the chip, popped the new one into place, and re-installed the power supply and drive cage.

Eventually I got smart and realized I shouldn’t be experimenting on computers that I cared about. XT clones cost about 20 bucks when people wouldn’t just give them to you, so I got a couple. I ripped them apart, figured out how a computer was really put together, and reassembled them. And yes, I even took parts from one and put them in the other to see what would happen. I was pretty sure it would work. It did. Eventually I did something stupid (I don’t remember what anymore) and I killed at least one of those XT clones, but it wasn’t important. I’d learned a lot from them, and I was only out 20 bucks. That’s assuming I wasn’t given the thing outright–I don’t remember that detail anymore either.

I needed that skill the next year. I was living in a fraternity house, and the power supply died in the house computer. I knew enough by then to diagnose it, and I headed off to the local computer shop for parts. They didn’t have any power supplies that would fit, and the motherboard was nonstandard. But they had a lineup of barebones systems sprawled across the floor. A bare 386 cost about $200. I knew the rest of the system worked. So I talked it over with the treasurer, then came back with a house check and bought a 25 MHz 386DX. I took it home, popped the case on the house computer, pulled out the video card and all the I/O cards, installed them in the 386, and found the computer wouldn’t recognize the hard drive. We eventually worked through that one (it turned out we had one of the very few 8-bit IDE drives ever made, and that 8-bit controller did not get along with our 386 one bit) and we got a working system up and going.

By the time I graduated there were at least half a dozen guys in that house capable of doing that job. Times changed (swapping a motherboard was much more of an endeavor in 1993 than it was in 1997, because by then so many components that had once been discrete and configured by jumpers were integrated and configurable through the BIOS Setup), and I’d like to think most of them learned at least a little something from me.

That summer, I got a job selling computers. An opportunity arose when the store technician developed a difficulty showing up for work. They never fired the guy, but since he was only there half the time, I got to be the tech the other half. When he was there, I learned a lot from him.

The next school year, I got wind of a job opportunity on campus. The journalism department had a batch of 300 new IBM PC 330s and 350s. Every last one of them needed to be unboxed and upgraded with extra memory and a NIC, then plugged into the network, where one of the more experienced techs could do a push install of OS/2. I got the job, and I learned a ton from those guys. These are guys who had seen prototypes of the IBM PS/2 Model 80, and who occasionally had to whip out a soldering gun and make a change to the motherboard with an engineer from IBM on the phone. You bet they had a lot to teach me.

That part-time job eventually grew into a full-time job when those guys recognized that I was willing to work hard and willing and able to learn.

That approach worked really well for me. But I had the advantage of being young and being able to wait for opportunities and take them as they came. I also had the advantage of growing up with the things (the schools I went to had computers and taught computer classes, all the way back to when I was in the second grade) and messing with them for the majority of my life.

Realistically, I don’t think that approach would work for an adult with minimal computer skills and a family to support. Or at least it wouldn’t work on a quick timeframe. I’ve tried to teach 24-year-olds starting from ground zero how to do this. It didn’t work very well.

It’s a lot easier to teach someone how to write.

Cult of Linux, and cheap cheap hardware

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Potpourri. I just have two little things to write about today, so that’s what I’ll do.
The Cult of Linux, and cults of computing past. In yesterday’s comments, Dave Thorarinsson brought up an interesting phenomenon. He observed, when talking about his new Linux box and losing track of time learning it, “It pretty much feels like the time I had my Amiga.”

I remember reading in the mail section of Amiga magazines, more than a decade ago, “I haven’t had this much fun since I got my C-64!” And the old Commodore magazines noted that their C-64s had a special place in their devotees’ hearts and asked, “Have you ever heard of anyone getting attached to a PC clone?”

The inferred answer is no. And that doesn’t seem to have changed. Today, the biggest PC enthusiasts replace their machines frequently, relegating their old, unbeloved machines to grunt roles, or scrapping them for parts.

The C-64, by contrast, was a simple machine. Although it only had one slot for expansion, the motherboard itself was simple enough that just about anyone with a little bit of patience could trace it out and understand it. There was some unused address space in it that you could add chips to. Common projects included speech synthesizers and an extra sound chip, so you could have six-voice, stereo sound. And it seemed like most C-64 owners had tried their hand writing at least simple programs.

The Amiga was similar. It was harder to program, and a little harder to hack, but I had a subdirectory on my Amiga’s hard drive that was called “PD Hardware,” containing makeshift schematics for stuff I could build. I wired in a PAL/NTSC switch so I could change video standards and run European software correctly. I even designed an add-on board for it myself, once, to give myself an extra ROM socket. And of course I replaced much of the operating system with replacement utilities written by hobbyists that were smaller and faster, had more features, or both.

You want to know why the Amiga and C-64 fanatics were so loyal? They knew their machines inside and out, and to a degree that just wasn’t possible with a PC clone.

With Linux, the hardware doesn’t matter anymore, but you can customize the software to whatever extent you want. The hardest-core Linux people are doing just that. At a level below that, people compile the OS from source, from scratch. At a level below that, they just replace utilities with smaller and faster or more functional ones, like I was doing with my Amiga.

The long and the short of it is tweakers have a lot more liberties with Linux than they’ll ever get out of Redmond.

People who liked my book can certainly find a lot to like with Linux. People who fancy themselves experts but don’t really want to know how their computers work and who think books like mine are a waste of time will never be tied to Linux like the fanatics are.

Cheap hardware. It’s a buyer’s market. I’m building an intranet server for my church, and they have lots of bits and pieces but not quite enough for a complete system, so I did some looking around at my favorite bottom-fishing holes. You can get an awful lot of computer for next to nothing these days.

I’ve bought things at least once from each of these vendors, and they got stuff to me reasonably fast (within a week, ground shipping) so I feel reasonably comfortable recommending them.

Slot-1 barebones systems — case, power supply, slot 1 mobo (66 MHz FSB, so you’re stuck with P2s up to 333 MHz or Celerons, and according to the manufacturer, Celerons will work), and a floppy drive. $24.50. $19.95 if you don’t mind some wear. Very nice.

At the same place, scroll down and you can pick up Tier-1 business-class P2s for under $200. If you’re lucky you can sometimes even find a dual-capable machine. They go fast, but the getting’s good. Lots of businesses are dumping these due to their 3- or 4-year upgrade cycles. For someone who just wants to do word processing and e-mail, these systems are overkill. If you want to upgrade in pieces over the course of the next couple of years, the P2s with a 100 MHz FSB are workhorses and you can add lots of cheap memory, nice video cards, and fast, cheap hard drives. Gatermann just picked up an HP Vectra P2-266, dual capable, with SCSI, for $117. It will serve him well. He plans to run Debian on it, but I don’t know if he’s thinking of it as a server or a workstation. It’d make a fabulous server.

72-pin SIMMs — if you’ve still got a system that takes them, nice deals on 4-16MB sticks, and good deals on bigger sticks.

Low-end Pentium I desktops — P75-120, 16 meg of RAM, 1 MB video, who knows what else. $29.99. Nice for a low-end Linux box, or for a Win95 system that’s going to see limited use. Put a fast hard drive in it and it’ll surprise you. After you get yours, check and see what CPUs the system will take; a P200 can be had for as little as $16 and makes a nice upgrade. It’s a pretty big step up from 75 MHz to 200 MHz.

Seagate 9-gig 5.25″ full-height SCSI HD — $12.95. If you’ve got two 5.25″ bays open and no spacer between them, here’s a cheap way to fill it with 9 gigs of storage. I know a couple of people who have these drives. They’re surprisingly quick (they hold their own next to 7200-rpm 3.5″ disks). Back up your data and buy some spares if the shipping doesn’t kill you. One of the guys I know has several of these, and he’s had one or two die on him.

FIC AZ-11 ATX mobo — $34.95. It’ll take Durons and Athlon Thunderbirds. The fastest chip I’ve put in one is a 1 GHz Duron. No ISA slots and just 5 PCI slots, but it’s a capable board. I use one in my video editing workstation, and I paid more than 35 bucks for it. Totally obsolete, but when you can get a 1 GHz Duron and fan on this board for $89, who cares? It’ll still be a good computer in three years. Trust me.

I keep seeing this board on the closeout places, so I expect even after the current supply dries up, there’ll be more.

Speaking of closeout motherboards, there’s a variety of them over at Just Deals. You can get a Soyo Socket 370 board for $28 and various Socket A boards in the $35-$40 range. If it’s Slot 1 or even Slot A you’re looking for (maybe you’ve got a CPU laying around), you can find stuff there too.

And if you need a cheap copy of Word 97, you can get the Works 99 suite for 30 bucks.

Need an operating system for that new old computer? Prices range from $25 for Win95 to $180 for WinXP Pro.

Microsoft’s temper tantrum

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

Microsoft is throwing a temper tantrum that if the states’ current proposal goes through, the company will be forced to withdraw Windows from the market.
Pay no attention, move along, there’s nothing to see here.

Remember, this is the company that didn’t sign an agreement with IBM for a Windows 95 OEM license until the day it was launched. At one point during the negotiations, Microsoft told IBM it could buy it at retail. As hard as it might be to remember now, at the time, IBM was still one of the top 5 players in the U.S. PC retail market.

This is a company that plays hardball. It says unreasonable things to get its way. And it’s used to getting its way. And even when it doesn’t get its way, it still says stupid things. Remember, in 1994 Steve Ballmer said a court’s decision against Microsoft in Stac’s favor would be reversed as soon as they found a judge with actual brains.

Reality check: Microsoft can very easily comply with the states’ demands. Or reach a compromise that will benefit everybody. Once upon a time, long long ago, when you installed Windows, you could tell it what you wanted. If you didn’t have any use for Calculator, you could click a little checkbox next to it, Windows wouldn’t install it, and you’d save about 200K of disk space. Hey, back when people were trying to run Windows on 40-meg hard drives, it was nice to have that ability. Or, if you already had a third-party calculator app that put Microsoft’s to shame and thus had no need for the one that came with Windows, you didn’t have to install it.

The same was true of DriveSpace and all the other bundled stuff. I mean, let’s get serious here: Is there any reason whatsoever to install Space Cadet Pinball on your domain controller?

But with Windows 95, Microsoft started to get unreasonable. Yes, you could uncheck that little box next to MSN, but when you did it, Windows didn’t actually seem to do anything. Regardless of whether you checked that box, when Windows was finished, you had an MSN icon on your desktop. If AOL continued to exist, Microsoft’s very existence was threatened. In order for Microsoft to survive, AOL had to die. So you got MSN whether you used it or not. (Some idiot with a journalism degree figured out how to remove it a couple of years later.)

With Windows 95B, things got more sinister. Netscape replaced AOL as the imminent threat to Microsoft’s very survival, so you got Internet Explorer whether you wanted it or not. This time, Microsoft didn’t even bother putting in a checkbox for Windows to ignore. You just got it. With Windows 95 OSR2.1 and 98, Internet Explorer became increasingly more entrenched.

Once it was evident that AOL would never die and Netscape would never rise again, RealPlayer and QuickTime became threats to Microsoft’s existence. So, with Windows 98, we got Microsoft Media Player, whether we wanted it or not. Never mind that the basic Real and QuickTime players are free and both companies would have loved for Microsoft to deliver them with Windows and it would have saved the company development costs.

Microsoft could go a long, long way towards appeasing the states if they’d just put in little checkboxes that let you decide whether Internet Explorer or MediaPlayer was installed, just like Calculator. There’s no need for 8,000 different versions of Windows, like Steve “The Embalmer” Ballmer wants people to believe. Let the consumer decide what pieces he or she wants. Does a deaf person need MediaPlayer? It’s questionable. Does a file server really need Internet Explorer? Absolutely not.

And while there are magazines and book authors who want you to believe otherwise, thousands of people have removed Internet Explorer from Windows. And guess what? The sun didn’t quit rising. The world failed to fall apart. The stock market didn’t crash. Their computers didn’t fall over. The applications they needed to run still ran. In fact, the applications ran better once they got the unnecessary machinery gone. Imagine that, a basic engineering principle applying to computers!

Microsoft execs have complained about a double standard, because Apple, IBM, and Be all shipped Web browsers with their OSs. Of course, there was a big difference. In the case of MacOS, BeOS, and OS/2, you could tell the OS not to install the browser, and it didn’t do it. The same for their other components. In the case of OS/2, you could even remove the entire Windows subsystem. You lost the ability to run Windows 3.1 programs, but you gained speed and stability. I knew people who did that. I’ve done minimalist Mac OS installations that took up less than 20 megs and were completely useless because they lacked the drivers needed to install other software. But if I want to be stupid enough to install a completely crippled OS that can’t do anything besides boot a computer and let me look at its empty hard drive, Apple’s not going to stop me.

The overwhelming majority of people will just leave things alone. But the people who like to get into the nuts and botls of things want (and deserve) the opportunity to change how their computers work. They want Microsoft to fight its battles in the marketplace, not in the memory and CPUs of their computers. I don’t blame them in the least. Of course, I’m spoiled. IBM and Commodore let me have it my way, back when I was buying my operating systems from them.

So, Microsoft has a history of threats, and a history of following through with them, even when the reasoning behind them is totally ludicrous. But in the case of IBM, they ultimately budged, albeit 45 minutes into the 11th hour, and they didn’t budge much. But you don’t just shut out the #3 or #4 PC maker in the country. At the time, Microsoft still needed IBM, and IBM needed Microsoft, as much as both companies hated to admit it.

This is no different. Microsoft can’t just pull Windows off the market. Windows is still its main source of revenue, and Windows runs on more than 90 percent of the computers on the market. Microsoft isn’t going to just give that away. Sure, they make some Mac products, but the Mac is 5 percent of the market on a good day. The cheapest and easiest replacement for Windows, in the unlikely event Microsoft pulled out, is Linux, where Microsoft is a non-player. Microsoft could still sell Windows software to the existing installed base. But it’s ludicrous. Pulling Windows off the market is corporate suicide.

I really don’t think Microsoft would have made IBM buy its copies of Windows 95 at retail. Not everyone remembers it now, but there was some resistance to Windows 95 initially, and a company the size of IBM not shipping Windows 95 on its new computers would have given way to much credence to the naysayers. Microsoft was counting on Windows 95 being big, and it wasn’t going to take any chances. It had spent way too much money on research, development, and hype. Microsoft made that threat to see just how far IBM would go. And that’s what Microsoft is doing now. It’s trying to see how much the states are going to budge.

And that’s all there is to Ballmer’s rhetoric. Nothing more. And nothing less.

How Linux could own the education market

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

How Linux could own the education market. I spent some time yesterday evening working on computers. They were contrasts to the extreme: One, a brand-spankin’ new 1 GHz AMD Duron system with 512MB of RAM and 80 GB of 7200-rpm storage (IDE, unfortunately–but for $800, what do you want?). The other was an elderly AST 486SX/25 running Windows 3.1 belonging to a local teacher who goes to my church.
She teaches kindergarten, and the AST used to be her home computer. When she bought a Compaq Presario a couple of years ago, she took the AST to school. It’s more useful there than in her basement, and there’d be no computer in her classroom if it weren’t for that.

I don’t understand why that is. As much as my sister jokes about it, we don’t exactly live in the ghetto. The school district has money, but it isn’t spending it on computers. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends on your point of view. The majority of people living in Oakville probably own home computers, so this probably isn’t contributing to the technology gap. But I wonder sometimes how things might have been if I’d been exposed to computers a few years earlier.

I was shocked how much I remembered about Windows 3.1. And I was able to figure out how to get her CD-ROM drive to play music CDs. Don’t ask me how; this was the first I’d messed with Windows 3.1 since 1994 and I’d prefer it stay that way–I was so impressed by Windows 3.1 that I’m one of the 12 people who actually went out and paid money for OS/2. I own actual, retail-box copies of OS/2 2.1, 3.0, and 4.0. And I remember distinctly thinking that her computer has enough memory to run OS/2 at least as well as it runs Windows 3.1…

I also remember distinctly thinking that my employer pays someone $15 a pound to haul better computers than hers away several times a year. We regard 486s as junk; low-end Pentiums may also go out, depending on whether the right person finds out about them beforehand. Usually they work just fine–the problem isn’t the computers, it’s people trying to run Internet Exploiter 6 and Office 2000 on them. They’d run Windows 95 and Office 95 perfectly fine.

But a lot of times we can’t give these old computers away because the licenses for the software that originally came with them are long gone. Old computers are useless without software, so no one would want them anyway.

Now, let me tell you something about kids. Kids don’t care much about the computers they use. As long as there’s software on them, they’ll use them. When I was a kid 20 years ago, I used Radio Shack TRS-80 computers at school. The next year, my family moved, and my new school had Commodore 64s. I couldn’t tell much difference. My next-door neighbor had a Radio Shack Color Computer. They were computers. The Commodores had better graphics, but from a usability standpoint, the biggest difference was where the cartridge slot was so you could change programs. Later on I took a summer class at the local junior college, learning about Apple IIs and IBM PCs. I adjusted smoothly. So did all the other kids in the class. Software was software.

Kids don’t care if the computer they’re using runs Windows or Mac OS or Linux. All they care about is whether there are cool programs to run.

So, businesses throw useless computers away, or they give useless computers to schools so they don’t have to pay someone to haul them away. And schools don’t generally know what to do with obsolete computers that lack software.

Linux won’t run fabulously on old 486s, but Debian with a lightweight window manager like IceWM will run OK. (Let’s face it, Windows 3.1 doesn’t run fabulously on them either–it crashes if you breathe wrong.) I know of a project to clone Oregon Trail on Linux. Great start. How about Sea Route to India? I remember playing that on C-64s at school. It may have been a type-in out of a magazine–I don’t remember where exactly it came from. In these violent times, Artillery might be too controversial, but it taught us early on about angles and forces. Artillery was an ancestor to games like Scorched Earth, but without the heavy-duty nukes. Close wasn’t good enough to win in Artillery. You had to be exact. And no blowing up the mountains between you and your opponents either. You had to figure out how to get over them.

But what about doing homework? By the time I was in the sixth grade, they were teaching us how to use word processors and databases and spreadsheets. AbiWord is a fabulous lightweight word processor. It gives you fonts and spell-checking and good page formatting. (I learned word processing on Bank Street Writer. AbiWord is a far, far cry from that. Frankly, I’d rather write a paper with vi than with Bank Street Writer.) Besides being feature-rich, AbiWord’s been lightning fast on every computer I’ve tried it on. Gnumeric is a nice, fast, capable spreadsheet. I don’t know of a free-form database, but I haven’t looked for one lately either. (I don’t think we need to be trying to teach our 6th graders SQL.)

But what about for younger kids? I remember a program called The Factory. The object was you combined chemicals to make monsters. Different chemicals made different monsters. I seem to remember you played around to see what chemicals would make which heads and torsos and arms. Then the computer started showing you monsters and you had to figure out what chemicals to give it to match them. I also remember a program called Snooper Troops. I don’t remember much else about it, other than it was a mystery and you went around looking for clues, and one of my classmates accidentally formatted the disk one day before any of us had managed to solve it. We couldn’t get the disk replaced, because it was out of print.

And Spinnaker had all sorts of simple titles for younger kids that let them tell stories and other stuff. It seemed cool at the time. But that was almost 20 years ago, so about all I remember was that sailboat logo and some corny theme music.

The other thing about those old days was that the majority of these programs were written in Basic. An ambitious teacher could modify them, to make them easier or harder, or improve the graphics a little. As we got older and learned to program, some of us would try our hand at making changes. You can’t do that anymore with Windows or Macintosh educational titles. Open source can bring all that back too, provided the programs are written in languages like Perl or Python. And it can give cash-strapped schools a way to get computers where kids can use them.

Now I’m wondering what it would take to write something like The Factory in Python…

Why Linux stands a chance

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , ,

Something I read on LinuxToday on Monday made me realize something. The article was a tutorial on writing Gnome apps with Python. Not too exciting, right? Not until you realize the implications. Python is a high-level, interpreted language. Gnome produces good, professional-looking applications with Windows-like functionality like toolbars and menus and drag-and-drop.
Put two and two together. Remember the early days of computing, when practically everyone who owned one knew how to program, at least a little bit? We’d program our 8-bit microcomputers in Basic, and sometimes we’d come up with something cool. You might send your creation off to a magazine in hopes of them publishing it and sending you a little money — a friend growing up and I netted a cool $350 on a little hack we wrote over spring break one year. Other times you just uploaded your creation to a BBS, hoping that people would find it useful, and maybe someone would download it and improve it a little. IBM was big and unstoppable, and Apple made the wise decision to flood the schools with cheap hardware in hopes of making it up by selling overpriced hardware to homes and businesses (which they did), but the homebrew market kept Commodore afloat for 10 years after their last good marketing decision. The cost of entry was low, and an easy-to-learn programming language was built right in, so creative minds could start playing with it without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on development tools and thousands of dollars going to class.

The results weren’t always professional, but a surprising amount of it was exceptionally high-quality. High enough to sell more machines. Today, some 20 years after the Commodore 64 was released, it still has a following. It’s insane.

I still think that was part of what killed the Amiga. There were free languages for it, but you had to fork over a few hundred bucks for the toolkit to make them work. A lot of people did, but not enough. The development community was small. Some of the best stuff I saw on that platform came from people who pirated the toolkit. But not enough people did, so the pool of people to learn and steal tricks from was tiny. Meanwhile, Microsoft was selling complete languages, with everything you needed, for less than Commodore was charging for its header files. The Amiga never stood a chance.

Linux and other open-source projects collectively give you a free operating system or five, but they also give hundreds of development tools. The end result is Web sites like Freshmeat that do nothing but track new software. There may be more graphical Linux freeware out there now than there is Windows freeware. Considering Linux has maybe 1/50 the installed base of Windows, that’s pretty impressive. Linux doesn’t have a killer app just yet, but it may come. It’s definitely not short of ideas. Just this past week, someone released a hack for the Nautilus file manager to make it read binary newsgroups. It reads them and is intelligent enough to group related binaries in subdirectories for you. It’s a file collector’s delight. Brilliant idea. I’ve never seen anything like that for any other OS, especially not Windows.

Free languages lower the bar. Free and capable high-level languages lower the bar even more. Even a non-programmer like me can have an idea, hack out something in Python, and even if it doesn’t work perfectly, it can serve as a springboard for someone else to grab and improve, either by revising the existing code or by translating it into a lower-level, faster language. The quality of the code isn’t nearly as important as the quality of the idea. And we all know programmers don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.

Maybe Linux will remain an underground, punk OS forever. But even if it does, it’s going to be an unbelievably good one. Look for it to be bigger than the Mac within two years.

Happy New Year!

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

The way the ‘Net oughta be. I finally broke down and bought a VCR yesterday. It’s hard to do video work without one, and you want to give people drafts on VHS. When it comes to consumer video, there are two companies I trust: Hitachi and Hitachi. So I went looking for a Hitachi VCR. Their low-end model, a no-frills stereo 4-head model, ran $70 at Circuit City. I ordered it online, along with 5 tapes. Total cost: 80 bucks. For “delivery,” you’ve got two options: delivery, or local pickup. I did local pickup at the store five miles from where I live. You avoid the extended warranty pitch and trying to convince someone in the store to help you, and you just walk into the store, hand the paperwork to customer service, sign for it, then go pick it up. Suddenly consumer electronics shopping is like Chinese or pizza take-out. I love it.
The VCR’s not much to look at and the $149 models are more rugged-looking and have more metal in them, but this model is made in Korea so it ought to be OK, and the playback’s great on my 17-year-old Commodore 1702 (relabeled JVC) composite monitor. For what I’ll be asking it to do, it’s fine. In my stash of Amiga cables I found an RCA y-adapter that mixes two audio outputs, which I used to connect to the monitor’s mono input.

Desktop Linux. Here are my current recommendations for people trying to replace Windows with Linux.

Web browser: Galeon. Very lightweight. Fabulous tabbed interface. I hate browsing in Windows now.
Minimalist browser: Dillo. Well under a meg in size, and if it’ll render a site, it’ll render it faster than anything else you’ll find.
FTP client: GFTP. Graphical FTP client, saves hosts and username/password combinations for you.
PDF viewer: XPDF. Smaller and faster than Acrobat Reader, though that’s available for Linux too.
Mail client/PIM: Evolution. What Outlook should have been.
Lightweight mail client: Sylpheed. Super-fast and small, reasonably featured.
File manager: Nautilus. Gorgeous and easy to use, though slow on old PCs. Since I use the command line 90% of the time, it’s fine.
Graphics viewer: GTK-See. A convincing clone of ACDSee. Easy-to-use graphics viewer with a great interface.
News reader: Pan. Automatically threads subject headers for you, and it’ll automatically decode and display uuencoded picture attachments as part of the body. Invaluable for browsing the graphics newsgroups.
File compression/decompression: I use the command-line tools. If you want something like WinZip, there’s a program out there called LnxZip. It’s available in RPM or source form; I couldn’t find a Debian package for it.
Desktop publishing: Yes, desktop publishing on Linux! Scribus isn’t as powerful as QuarkXPress, but it gives a powerful enough subset of what QuarkXPress 3.x offered that I think I would be able to duplicate everything I did in my magazine design class way back when, in 1996. It’s more than powerful enough already to serve a small business’ DTP needs. Keep a close eye on this one. I’ll be using it to meet my professional DTP needs at work, because I’m already convinced I can do more with it than with Microsoft Publisher, and more quickly.
Window manager: IceWM. Fast, lightweight, integrates nicely with GNOME, Windows-like interface.
Office suite: Tough call. KOffice is absolutely good enough for casual use. StarOffice 6/OpenOffice looks to be good enough for professional use when released next year. WordPerfect Office 2000 is more than adequate for professional use if you’re looking for a commercial package.

Editing my second video…

Dave Farquhar Video , ,

You know it’s a different kind of church when you see one making music videos. You’re probably not too surprised to hear that’s the kind of church I go to. And you’re probably not too surprised to hear I’m involved.
I spent a healthy chunk of time Monday editing video. A local radio personality recorded a version of “Mary Did You Know?” a few years back. I know, that doesn’t sound good, but his version is pretty powerful. I’ve heard several versions of it, and I think I like his best, and I’m not just saying that because I know people who know him. I’m also not just saying that because he gave us permission to use the recording. If that version wasn’t good, I’d have assembled a band to re-record it–one of the guys in my Bible study group plays guitar, and another one of them plays drums and has a recording studio in his basement.

So anyway, I’ve got a song I can legally use, and we secured permission to use a couple of different movies about Jesus so we’d have some footage to put to the video. And I gave myself a crash course in Premiere. Put the emphasis on “crash,” because I did bluescreen 2000 at one point. I muttered something about toy operating systems and got back to work. I hope Adobe eventually gets a clue about Linux–there’s plenty of proprietary, high-end video stuff out there for Linux, but nothing in the prosumer arena yet. And I do believe that if you build it, they will come.

After too many hours, I had something halfway workable. Since I was dealing with professional footage, I had a giant headstart. My partner in crime, Brad, had written up an outline that I more or less followed. There were one or two minor points where I didn’t agree with him about where the video fit, so I changed them, but I’d say I went with his outline 75% of the time, if not much more.

So I called Brad and asked him if he wanted to come over. I figured out how to get my DV500 to output to my ancient Commodore composite monitor, which was a good thing, The video was showing up much too dark on my computer screen, but when I exported to NTSC it was beautiful. I’d been playing with levels trying to get it right; I ended up just undoing all of the changes.

What I had can’t be considered finished product; the transitions are pretty lame where there are any at all, and I had a couple of gaps where I didn’t have any video that fit so I threw in a Rembrandt painting. Then I noticed that it didn’t matter what you did to the color on a Rembrandt painting; it still looked far better than any video I’ve ever seen, so I went looking for other Rembrandt paintings to put in. So the video was substantially done, but there’ll be minor changes.

It blew Brad away. I’ll admit, I learned from our first video, so the big mistakes that were in the first video aren’t in this one. And Premiere has great tools to help you avoid those mistakes–you can set the timeline to show every single frame in the video, and to show the waveform of the audio, which takes the guesswork out of transitions and lining things up.

At the end of it, Brad turned to me. “Dave, you are an artist. Do you know that?”

I’m not so sure about that one. Brad’s my ideas man. He tells me what he sees in his head, then I try to find a way to somehow put it up on the screen. And every once in a while I’ll get a better idea. Those are usually 3-4 seconds long. So then I revert back to his. And the result is something that looks decent. Plus a number of the things that happened were just accidents. I had some video of Jesus and the disciples walking through a field with some sheep in the background. I threw it in for lack of anything else to put there. Then about the 10th time I’d played through that sequence–you do a lot of playback during editing–I noticed that during the line “Did you know that your baby boy was Heaven’s perfect lamb?” Jesus happened to look down–towards a lamb walking past. I’d be pretty impressed if someone else put that subtle detail in there. But this was an accident. Or, more likely, it was God doing me a favor.

It’s been a lot of work, but a lot of fun.

And, incidentally, if you ever find yourself having to do any video production, Premiere 6 is an excellent product. I really dislike Adobe as a company, and I wish there were a better product out there than Premiere 6, but I sure haven’t found it. At $250, the Pinnacle DV200 bundled with Premiere 6 is a steal. If you’re into home movies and already have a camcorder with a firewire port (or are considering one), a DV200 and a little time will give you the snazziest home movies on the block.

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.