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Sunday 12/31/2000
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This afternoon I installed my new Plextor 8/4/32 CD-RW drive. I knew it would work best if I put it on an IDE channel separate from the source material, so I installed it as slave on IDE2 (counting from one instead of zero, to save confusion. I've seen mobos marked IDE0/1 and others marked IDE1/2. What really stinks is when you're elbow-deep in one where the only text you can read says IDE1, and you don't know whether the other is zero or two. Expletive deleted Taiwan expletive deleted.)
So anyway, I ended up with two HDs and two CDs in the box. The first HD (8-gig Seagate) has a hidden 20-meg FAT16 DOS 6.22 partition up front (because you just never know), followed by a 2-gig FAT16 (faster than FAT32, if you can live within its limitations) Win98 SE bootable partition, with the rest set up as Linux ext2 for the next time I install Mandrake. RSN... And the first CD-ROM becomes the IDE1 slave. Then the second HD (3-plus-gig WD, 256-meg FAT16 swap partition, 128-meg Linux swap partition, almost-3-gig FAT32 data partition) becomes IDE2 master, and the Plextor CD-RW as IDE2 slave. Then into the Device Manager: for each HD and CD, Properties/Settings/Options, check the DMA box. OK, restart, badda-bing, badda-boom.
Then I installed the software that came with the Plextor, Adaptec's CD Creator et al, and Plextor's own management software. Direct CD is the utility that lets you use a CD-RW as a 640-meg floppy drive (which means formatting any CD-RW disk you want to use that way). It sits in the system tray, and every time you insert or eject a disk it pops up an annoying dialog box. There's a checkbox that tells the program not to pop the boxes up any more, but checking it only seems to last until the next restart. Very amateurish, and quite possibly annoying enough that I'll end up scrapping CD-RW for the most part because of it.
<RANT> Like most computer professionals, I have strong ideas about how things should work, and right near the top of my personal list is that when I want to do something, I should be able to minimize distractions by disabling anything that some programmer thought would be helpful for newbies. Every OS, app, and utility should have an expert mode, with no handholding. But instead, the trend seems to be to turn every computing experience into an AOL-style shmooze-fest, complete with helpful cartoon characters, a la the late, unlamented Microsoft Bob. Adaptec has plunged down this route with their latest offering, and my reaction is an atavistic longing for the command line. Guess I'm old. </RANT>
New Year's Eve. Midnight service at church. Again, very reverent and peaceful. People stood in the last few minutes before midnight to offer thanks for the blessings in their lives. Such simple, sweet prayers. Damp eyes all around.
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Monday 1/1/2001
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New Year's Day. NOW all nerds can celebrate the beginning of the 21st century, smug in the knowledge that those folks who evidently believe there was a Year Zero are dumber than us. But that's unkind. (But they are.)
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Tuesday 1/2/2001
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I spent some hours over the weekend trying to force Front Page 2000 to work the way I think it should, instead of the way the helpful kids at Microborg think it should. As usual, they won. That is to say, I tried to find a way to make this page look pretty much the way it does now, but without using tables to position the text. No joy.
And as for my HTML source code, FP2K formats it pretty much as it chooses, no matter how I wish I could use white space for readability. And it breaks the lines wherever it wants, not wherever I want, although I can set the default line length. Can't just toggle wrapping on and off, though. I know, source code is cryptic and ugly, and should be concealed as deeply as possible at all times... (sigh) C'mon little penguin...
Today I got an email from Clark Myers suggesting that I solve my little personal Arial-disaffection problem by replacing it with Verdana (and using Georgia for Times New Roman) in my style sheet. Excellent advice. Look mo bettah. Thanks, Clark.
LATER: In fact, I'm making headway on this HTML stuff, though I'll admit that my new attempt looks even worse in Netscrape. But I've scrapped the tables in this version, and tried the serif-style Georgia font for the body text here.
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Wednesday 1/3/2001
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I noticed that yesterday I had lost my little "day links" line somewhere in the shuffle. I put it in again this morning as a one-line paragraph with an absolute position. IE does fine with that, or with tables, but Netscrape seems to choke on both of those. Opera 5, on the other hand (or am I up to the gripping hand yet?), handles the positioned paragraphs fine. Practically no difference now in display between IE and Opera, but Netscrape insists on lining everything up neatly along the left edge of the page. Damn all proprietary extensions and implementations, say I. Hey, if we can't agree on something as universal as HTML/XML, what chance did Java ever have? Remember "write once, run anywhere"? It is to laugh.
Parenthetically (and tangentially), I might remark that it is SO much faster for me to update these pages via my little ftp program than using FP2K's proprietary "publish web" menu choice. I merely open FTP Explorer, log into my site, open my web folder in Windows Explorer, and drag the changed files from one window to the other. Files transfer in seconds (at work, over a fractional T1), or in well under a minute each over my grindingly slow modem connection at home. But with "publish web," there's oodles (there are oodles? there's an oodle?) of background processing, indexing, sorting, classifying, transmogrifying, and miscellaneous dilly-dallying to get through before any files get transferred. And while I haven't yet found a good way to
check this, it seems as if Microborg has even found a way to slow down the actual files transfers themselves. Probably my imagination, but it helps me inflame my passionate distaste for the Microsoft Way of doing everything. Oops, sorry; was that out loud?
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And now a word about Partition Magic: must-have. Do two words with a hyphen between them count as a word? Whatever. And a note to myself: bite the bullet and get the blankety-blank upgrade. I own version 4.0 (Pretty Good Stuff Indeed), and the latest is 6.0. What brings this to mind, though, is a minor fiasco I just endured, which I'm fantasizing I would've been spared had I been using the Latest And Greatest. In a nutshell, whenever you launch Partition Magic 4.0 from within Windows, and then do anything that affects your boot drive, the changes aren't applied to your system without a restart into real-mode DOS to run a special (in what way other than a non-standard file extension I'm not certain) batch file that
actually carries out the changes, then reboots the PC. However... under certain arcane conditions (what Dr. Pournelle calls the Critical Need Detector), the batch file hangs at some point short of completing the changes. Needless to say, when only part of a set of specified changes have been written to one's MBR and/or FAT, Bad Things May Happen. I see you nodding.
To make a long boring story a short boring story, I ended up with one HD containing Absolutely Nothing. Yes it was PM4's fault, but my success-to-failure ratio with it thus far has still been nothing short of excellent; indeed, enough so that my first thought on seeing the Bad Thing Happen was merely that I'd better bump the upgrade up a few notches on my must-buy list. Possibly even to the tippy-top. Parenthetically, I should mention that even when PM4 doesn't exit from Windows to do its dirty work, it still writes and (frequently) executes its own little batch files. And sometimes when said batch files have failed to completely execute, I've actually had success simply by restarting the process at the beginning, and executing it one step at a time, rather than building up a laundry list
of disk changes and then spewing them out in a lump. So this short boring story has two morals: 1) keep your most vital utilities up to date, and 2) every important file must exist (also up to date) in at least two places at all times. Thus do we convert disasters to speed bumps. Go and do thou likewise.
I've also been trying to get my page to comply with the W3C HTML 4 spec, to further reduce the Microborg imprint on my insignificant opus. Today I finally got rid of all the warnings generated by the previously-mentioned HTML validation page, with the exception of those generated by GeoCities' annoying "the price of a free web page" popup window, which comes from some JavaScript code they implant on all index pages. Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks? You just have to speak slowly, and be prepared to repeat yourself. So now I've put the little HTML 4.01 bitmap on my page. I know, it's kinda brown-nosed, but we certainly shouldn't be taking ourselves too seriously, should we?
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Thursday 1/4/2001
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I found yesterday on PowerQuest's website that one can download software upgrades, for a price of course. Cost for my flavor of the day, Partition Magic 6.0? About $30, comes in a ZIP file. I like that, because after I download I can immediately use WinZip's Test feature, to see if the checksums are all kosher. Any problem, download again. Sold, bay-bee! Woo-hoo! E-commerce, judiciously applied, is a Good Thing.
Then today when I actually installed the program on my work PC (generic PIII-600, 128MB, 13 GB, Win98 SE), it wouldn't quite run. First it told me that I had errors on my HD, which I had no trouble believing. It said it fixed some, but still wouldn't load all the way. Argh. So I copied the DOS version onto a floppy (suh-weet!), and tried to run it from DOS. Once again, there was no joy in Mudville. Mighty Casey had struck out. This time it gave an unpack error, telling me that its OVL file was not a Watcom product, or some such. My first reaction was that despite a good checksum, I must still have somehow gotten a mildly corrupted download. But just for grins, I unlimbered my trusty ol' PM 4.0 floppy and had at it. Well, whaddya know? That came up with no problems.
It was then that I noticed that my Mandrake installation, to which I had devoted the last 4 gigs of my HD, had packed all its various partitions into a single logical partition, rather than various primary partitions. Hmf! OK, Mandrake must die. Ensign, make it so. I blew away all the offending partitionage, and created a primary Linux swap partition, then a primary Linux ext2 partition. I used the Partition Magic menu choice to check each partition for errors, and they came up clean. So I exited to a DOS prompt and, on a whim, fired up the new and formerly offending PM6 floppy. And whaddya know some more? It ran fine. Kewl! Exit back into Windows, try the Win32 version... doggone thing works fine now. I'm really sure there's a moral there somewhere, but I'm just not 100% positive I
can put my finger on it just yet. Maybe something to do with the admirable quality of perseverance, or just being too dumb to quit. Maybe something about keeping lots of similar tools around, because sometimes one works better than another almost identical one. Or maybe I just held my mouth the right way.
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Friday 1/5/2001
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Before I started my present job, my employer had a long-standing habit of dealing with a particular local system builder, who owns a local store in the non-huge PC Warehouse franchise chain. Not bad in principle, but when I first opened up one of those boxes, I was underwhelmed. Then when I opened up more of them I was underwhelmed some more. In fact, it rapidly became apparent to me that I was needing to open up these fairly-new boxes rather too frequently. This system builder was apparently a member of the Motherboard Of The Week Club: it seemed as if he didn't use the same set of components more than one day at a time, even while assembling boxes that would be (and were) sold with identical specs. And the mobos he used were the cheapest of the cheap, with wildly varying degrees of
quality. Well... not so wildly, I guess; they tended to cluster somewhere to the left of center on any reliability bell curve. DFI, PC Chips, Shuttle, and that ilk. And the video cards were either generic, or if name-brand, of the vintage that would cause them to be referred to on manufacturers' websites as "Legacy Cards." I mean, the builder was a nice guy, and provided reasonable service (and frequent, if my experience is any guide) on the machines he sold. But gee whiz, guys. And the PCs I saw performed exactly as you would expect, given the questionable nature of their component parts.
What brings this to mind is the experience I've had with one particluar little jewel with a DFI mobo and an AMD K6II-500. El cheapo RAM that says PC100 on it, but I would bet money it ain't. This puppy has resisted everything I've thrown at it: in our short acquaintance, I've almost lost count of the number of times I've tried to tweak the BIOS settings, and FDISKed/reinstalled from scratch. Finally yesterday, after the latest reinstall, I downloaded a PDF of the manual from DFI's website, and found the jumper settings to reduce the CPU speed. I notched it back from 500 to 475 and left it running all night. So far today, it's been flawless. A 5% speed reduction isn't really noticeable, and who knows? It might even start to fly right for a while now. All this pretty much illustrates the
truism that you get what you pay for. Or more realistically, while you might not even get all you pay for, you're really not likely to get more.
BTW, if you look at the top of the page, you'll notice that I've begun using a new application to maintain this website. Highly recommended.
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Saturday 1/6/2001
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No entry.