SSM

As is the case with most Mondays, this will have to be a short one. Things are a little busy here at work and, of course, I have class tonight so I gotta' go.

Super Bowl Commercials

Just in case you didn't see all of the Super Bowl commercials, here's a site that has them all (see it here). Needless to say, even though I'm saying it, you will need a fast connection, or a lot of time, to view them all. Thanks to InfoWorld's Brian Livingston (see his column here) for the link.

The Need for Speed

Have Ferrari tastes but a Fiat budget? Want to do 200mph (~322kph) but can't afford the insurance, much less a car that can do that kind of speed? Well, you'll just have to get small. As in model cars. In this case, tethered model cars that supposedly can do that and also lateral accelerations of about 90Gs. See the site here. Thanks for fark.com for the link.

Texas A&M

A group of [insert the group of your choice] in a class at Texas A&M were given the assignment to measure the height of a flagpole. So they go out to the flagpole with ladders and tape measures, and they're falling off the ladders, dropping the tape measures the whole thing is just a mess.

An engineer comes along and sees what they're trying to do, walks over, pulls the flagpole out of the ground, lays it flat, measures it from end to end, gives the measurement to one of the [insert name] and walks away.

After the engineer has gone, one [insert name] turns to another and laughs. "Isn't that just like an engineer, we're looking for the height and he gives us the length."

Aloha!

Kung Hee Fat Choy! Year of the Horse - 4699

Hardware vs. Software

Interesting debate between Daynoters Robert Bruce Thompson (RBT) and Dave Farquhar recently (see RBTs column here and Farquhar's here). You need to understand that both of these guys have spent the time researching the respective subjects of their books and are experts in their fields. But each looks at the problem from their own perspective. In RBT's case, it's hardware and from Farquhar's case it's software.

As I understand it, Farquhar feels it is worth the time to tweak the software of an older PC to gain performance versus buying new hardware. Conversely, RBT is advocating that when the system seems to be slowing down, if a clean install of the software doesn't fix the problem, you should buy a new system. As in many cases, the answer lays in how much you value your time and how much money you have versus the cost of an upgrade (that old cost versus benefit analysis).

Now Farquhar says he can have a 400MHz Celeron be as responsive as a Pentium 4. Maybe. Sort of. But getting that system to be so, if it were possible, would require a lot of tinkering under the hood and only you can decide what your time is worth. Not to mention the possibility of breaking something that shouldn't be broken. I should disclose here that I paid for copies of both of the authors above. And to be honest, I had problems with some of the tweaks Farquhar has in his book.

One quick example is found on page 48, Optimizing Your Windows Directory where certain files are moved into c:\windows\command. Farquhar has a list of files that he says is safe to move. But in my installation, doing so caused Windows to become unstable, even after I copied the files back. I ended up having to re-install the entire operating system.

I'll be the first to say maybe my installation was not the standard so that is why things went tits up when I followed Farquhar's instructions. I don't know and I really don't have the time to find out.

And therein lies the rub. Time. It would be nice to be able to wring every last cycle out of a PC. But I just don't have the time. It is far faster, and for most people far easier, just to reformat their drive (after backing up whatever they need (data, mail, favorite links, etc. and making sure they have the install media for all of their programs) and start over again. Most of the defaults from a clean install, while perhaps not optimum for all of the diverse hardware and software out there, are usually Good Enough for most people.

So when I feel my PC slowing down, the most time efficient thing for me to do is reformat and start over (something I do at least twice a year). This still begs the question as to when do you upgrade? As above, there is no simple answer because you have to decide what is "too slow" and what is "too expensive". After all, it's your time and your money. So although someone could come up with a formula, that formula would still require you to fill in the variables.

For example, if you are trying to setup an after school program to teach disadvantaged children how to use computers, you may very well want to use every trick in Mr. Farquhar's book so you can stretch your limited funds by accepting donations of refurbished 486s. But if it's your own PC and you are wondering whether to retire that same 486 with 16MB of RAM, perhaps it's better to pays your money and get a faster PC (and use the 486 as Linux router/firewall).

On the other hand, having made the decision to upgrade, most people should not fall into the trap of buying the fastest CPU available. Doing so is very rarely the most cost effective way of doing things. Due to the pricing schemes of hardware manufacturers, their top-of-the-line usually has a equally top-of-the-line price. For what it's worth, unless you really have a need for the fastest CPU out there, take a look at the second or third fastest CPUs because the money you'll save is your own.

Obviously, this is a very complex subject that may require you to make complex value judgments, and to understand the context in which you will make them. But I think it points out the problems you can run into if you don't think about the underlying assumptions in any buying decision. Assumptions you should be aware of and have answers for.

Lawyers. Lawyers. Everywhere.

Speaking of RBT, he had a comment about there being too many lawyers and that the solution was to have an open hunting season on them. While I don't know if I would go that far, the analogy that he used, that of the negative effects of over population is an apt one. Before I go any further, let me re-emphasize that this is my personal opinion and does not reflect the opinion of my employer (see disclaimer).

With that said, how might some lawyers act if there were more of them than the environment they were in could support? Would you say that some, perhaps, would behave unethically, or even illegally? And could you take that a step further and say as the number of lawyers, in a given population, goes past the optimum (whatever that is), the number of violations increases at a rate faster than the number of lawyers?

The afternoon paper had an article this past weekend (see it here) that indicates Hawai'i may have the highest rate of reported and punished unethical/illegal behavior of attorneys in the US. This may or may not have a direct positive relationship to Hawai'i having, from what I understand, the highest rate of lawyers as a percentage of the population in the US (this is off the top of my head so it could be wrong. I've tried finding a source that lists the percentage by state but have not been able to find anything yet).

In either case, it would be an interesting debate question: Be it resolved that the number of attorneys in Hawai'i has reached a level at which the legal system is now the problem, not the solution.

Aloha!

Bullsh*t

I'm no Olympic figure skating judge but I have eyes and even with my glasses I can tell if someone makes a mistake and when someone doesn't. So I guess I have to agree with Canadian figure skater Jamie Sale's comment about the judging.

Having said that, perhaps it is time to admit that any event that uses a system of judges to decide a contest will be ripe for controversy and should not be called a sport. So I am proposing another entity take over the judging. I would call it the World Wide Federation or WWF for short. The WWF would setup a training facility for not only skaters, but also the judges that rate them.

I think Governor Jesse "the Bobblehead" Ventura would make a great trainer. His years of experience in that other federation, the name escapes me right now, would be invaluable in training the judges and skaters.

I would then hire heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson to teach sportsmanship, former baseball player Pete Rose to teach ethics, and the Westminster Kennel Club judges, who chose that miniature poodle as Best in Show last night, to sit on the panel to take feces samples to test for drugs.

Mandrake 8.1

I finally got around to installing the third of three distributions I've been meaning to test as a desktop replacement for Windows (the other two being SuSE 7.3 and Red Hat 7.2).

By now, you probably should know what the problems are with the current distributions and the Dell GX1 that I have at work. Namely, the sound and the MS Intellimouse. Out of the box, the embedded sound is recognized, but not correctly setup. Conversely, the mouse is not recognized nor correctly setup.

Overall, I get the impression that Mandrake is a conservative implementation of Linux. For example, Ext2 is the default file system and you have to go into expert mode to change it to Ext3 or ReiserFs. In addition, it used XFree86 3.3.6 as default but allowed me to switch to 4.1 (note, 4.1 caused all of my default fonts to change to an almost unreadable script font. I dunno why and using all of the GUI based utilities to change it back no longer work). Further, it uses the 2.4.8-26 kernel (2.4.17 being the latest stable release at kernel.org) with an upgrade to 2.4.8-34 possible (more on this below).

In either case, for being so conservative on the software, it is curious that the firewall they have defaults to off. You have to go to the Mandrake Control Center, Set Security Level, Firewall to enable it. If you aren't already behind a firewall, and are on a broadband connection, run, don't walk, to this feature and enable it.

As in SuSe and Red Hat, Mandrake has a GUI based update facility. It's called the Software Manager and once configured to access one of many ftp mirror sites, you can choose what RPMs to download and install. Herein lies a strength and a weakness. One of the updates was a move to the 2.4.8-34 kernel. I started by using the Software Manager to download all of the available updates, including said kernel.

It began the download and then installed the software for me. Upon completion, it said not all of the updates had installed correctly but did not say what and where the problems were nor how to solve them. Everything seemed okay though and I went on my merry way learning how things work in this distribution. When done, I shut down Mandrake and booted into Windows. When I was done there, I rebooted back into Linux.

Or at least I tried to. The only thing I saw on the screen was "Linux loading..." Sigh. I suspected that one of the problems was the installation of the new kernel. So I booted off of the install CD for Mandrake, hit F1 when the Mandrake opening screen came up and typed in "rescue" (without the quotes) and hit enter. This creates a Linux system running in memory and mounts your drives so you can access them and try to recover (in command line mode). It also says to do a chroot /mnt, which I did, but sorry, I don't know why I needed to do that nor what it does.

My first stop was at /etc/lilo.conf to see what was in the configuration file. As far as I could see, using less lilo.conf, it was unchanged from the original. Now, this is not optimum and is not the way Red Hat did it when I updated the kernel under that distro. The way Red Hat did it was to create a new entry, while keeping the old (and all the related software that goes with it), so that you could boot into the older kernels, if needed. Since the Mandrake update apparently did not go to completion, I can't say for sure if that's how it would have done it, all I can say is it didn't, in my case.

From there I went to /boot directory to see if vmlinuz-2.4.8-26.1mdk, which has a symlink from vmlinuz was there. Doing a ls -l to list the files indicated both were there. So I went back to /ect/lilo.conf, used vi to edit the file (vi lilo.conf), and then used /sbin/lilo to initiate the changes I made in the config file. At that point, lilo gave me an error saying something was wrong at line 13 and couldn't find vmlinuz. Hmmm. I go back to /boot and do another ls -l and it lists both vmlinuz and vmlinuz-2.4.8-26. Well, I'm just a newbie in this here parts so I decide to remove vmlinuz (rm vmlinuz) and create a new link to the new kernel that had been downloaded by the Software Manager. I do this by typing in ln -s vmlinuz-2.4.8-34.1mdk vmlinuz. I go back to /ect/lilo.conf to delete the changes I made and then do a /sbin/lilo to initiate the changes. This runs to completion without error so I am somewhat optimistic [fool that he is - ed.]. I reboot, ejecting the Install CD, and Mandrake came up fine under the new kernel [wiping the beads of sweat off of my brow).

Having confirmed that everything seemed to be running, I then reformatted and reinstalled everything just to make sure I was back to a known state. I'll be familiarizing myself more with Mandrake, but given the problems so far, I think I'll go back to Red Hat.

To sum up the general differences so far, SuSE is a relatively stable, but not very up-to-date distribution. They do not do a very good job of keeping up with new versions of software and the writers of these new software do not generally do RPMs specific to SuSE, something, due to the way files are scattered all over the place, you really should use. They also don't provide free ISO images for download for the x386, something,as far as I know, most other distributions do. I guess their business model does not include giving away their work.

Red Hat, on the other hand, makes an effort to keep relatively, but not bleeding edge, up-to-date. And of course, many software companies release their newest in default RPM format so it is fairly easy to find what you want in the format you need. The downside is Red Hat 7.2 is not very stable. There are all kinds of bugs in KDE and XFree86 which cause strange interactions. This feels very much like Windows 286 when it first came out.

And finally, Mandrake. Not very up-to-date and not very stable. Two bad marks against them. Yes, this is only my experience and what you get may and probably will be very much different from mine. But there you go. I can only write about what happened to me, if you have a different experience, feel free to let people know.

To sum up, I don't think any of the three distributions are yet ready to act as a desktop replacement for Windows. There are bugs in everything, including printing and fonts, that cause me to pause and say good try, but no cigar. At least, not yet. Perhaps in a year. Until then, I'll probably settle on Red Hat and use that to experiment with. YMMV.

Aloha!

Happy Valentines Day!

Another Phil Hough(tm) Day

Not much going on so here's some links, courtesy of the good folks over at fark.com:

Scientists try to get sharks to do it by playing Barry White really loud. See it here.

70% of Florida's new touch screen voting machines don't work. See it here.

Why buy a $99 toy R2D2 when for a mere few thousand dollars you can build a real one? See it here.

The Top 10 Worst Things You Can Say on a First Date

From brassknuckles.net

10) So let me get this straight, yes means yes, and no means tie you up, right?

9) Know anywhere to hide a body?

8) You can come back to my place once my parents go to sleep.

7) All the voices in my head agree you look beautiful.

6) Hey, you know that funny noise your sister makes when she has an orgasm?

5) If we're stopped by the cops this is your brother's car and you don't know what's in the trunk!

4) No need to buy any popcorn, I snuck this whole bucket of chicken fat into the movies so we could eat for free.

3) So which movie do you want to see? "Lord of the Rings?" I heard that was good! I'll be watching "Blackhawk Down". I'll meet you in the lobby when it's over.

2) I can't believe the car broke down. Could you walk to a service station and call a cab?

1) Do you want to get Mexican food? Tom likes Mexican food. Mexican food makes Tom fart. Why are you looking at Tom that way?

Aloha!

It's Friday!

Balded Over

One of the ways of looking at the phenomena we call the Internet is to think of it as a conversation. To the extent that it is, one wonders why you hear so few female voices speaking. I mean, while it's nice to be among the boys, talking about manly things like fast computers, cars, and women (why do I keep hearing voices singing "He a lumberjack and he's okay ...."), it's also well to get a different perspective on life.

When you get the chance, go over to Jennifer Balderama's site for a look (see it here). Some of the stuff she writes is like a kick to the chest by Bruce Lee - after you finish gasping for breath, you want to tell all your friends you've just been kicked by Bruce farking Lee!

Especially check out the right-hand side of the page where she has links to a series on her dad (Dad 1, Dad 2, and Dad 3). If what she has to say doesn't move you, then check your pulse to see if you are still among the living because she rocks.

This is what the Internet is about. Not SPAM, not get quick schemes, not sites trying to sell the latest in hair addition/removal. It's about a community. It's about communication among the members of that community. And finally, it's about being honest and sharing who you are.

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!