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Information that I am (or want to be) compiling or updating
My commentary or public notes
| When |
Topic |
Rant |
| 2008-02-01 |
Personal |
I'm getting married! |
| 2005-02-28 |
This Site |
Three of my photographs were used by the Columbia Chronicle. I'm planning to be taking pictures at this year's rally on March 19. |
| 2004-05-29 |
Windows |
For future reference: SysInfo and Black Viper have some good info on cleaning up Windows crap. |
| 2004-03-12 |
Plug |
My friend Stephan Wanger will ride his bicycle 25,000 miles to support many good causes. Check out Aspire To Inspire, featuring the Continental Pedal for more information. |
| 2004-01-19 |
Windows |
For future reference: if you try to print a file in MS Office 2000, and instead of seeing a print dialog box the application's title bar flashes, then you've encountered a bug in Norton Antivirus and its MS Office plugin. Another symptom of this is Office documents (Word, Excel, etc) take longer than normal to open. Not sure if this problem has been fixed by newer version of Office or NAV 2002. |
| 2004-01-18 |
EV1 Servers |
Time for a new adventure in hosting, as I move to EV1 (formerly RackShack). They are offering a RHEL 3.0 install for the same price as 9.0, which sweetened the deal considerably (Red Hat 9.0 support ends soon). |
| 2003-10-29 |
Plug |
The New England Jazz Ensemble has a new CD available for purchase online. Ordered my copy today. |
| 2003-08-05 |
SCO |
SCO wants a Linux license fee of $699 per CPU, increasing to $1,399 by October. I will simply continue to use Linux (and in fact increase my reliance upon Linux) and NOT PAY. |
| 2003-04-10 |
Hmm |
What I want to know is: have coalition forces found Iraq's stash of PlayStations yet? |
| 2003-04-02 |
Marx Motivation |
I spoke too soon. They're back! I started a Marx Motivation page just for this subject. Update 04-03: they are revealed! |
| 2003-03-30 |
Humor |
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't. |
| 2003-03-28 |
ProHosters |
Switchover in progress. Only $59/year for a basic site, quick setup; however, their control panel is useless since you have to submit a support ticket even to create a POP account. Oh well, don't have to setup accounts often on samswett.com. |
| 2003-03-28 |
QWK.net |
Nuts! I liked QWK.net, but according to this page I need to move to another host if having my site available is critical. So I'll try ProHosters.... Update: jinxed indeed! QWK.net got a new server and it immediately suffered from some sort of disk failure! Setting up over at ProHosters now. Looks like QWK.net is back up and running, but it's too late for me. |
| 2003-03-20 |
Marx Motivation |
Got an email from somone else who was getting calls from Marx Motivation and wondered if I had any more info on it, but alas, I do not. They've stopped calling me for now.... |
| 2003-03-12 |
JohnCompanies |
Update: I'm satisfied enough to stay with JohnCompanies for now, even though they recently had a power outage lasting two hours. Meanwhile, an enterprising chap from Bytemark wrote to offer an alternative option, so kudos to them! |
| 2003-01-29 |
JohnCompanies |
One week and two days after my request to be moved to a different, non-problematic server, nothing has been done. Meanwhile, the server I am on was down again for 8 hours or so last weekend. I have to say that I am not impressed with JohnCompanies. It only took a little while to set up a brand new account, so I don't understand why it's taking so long to do it again, unless John is purposely stalling in hopes that I'll stay on the shitty server he has me on now. WTF? |
| 2003-01-18 |
JohnCompanies |
Yes, that's right, I really did jinx another ISP. The server that hosts my account failed around Christmas and was down on and off for a few days until a replacement server could be obtained (see outburst from 2003-01-01.) It then went down yesterday, and was down for a catastrophic 36 hours while they replaced - are you ready for this? - a hard drive. Never knew it could take that long; it certainly should take much less time, and furthermore it's preventable by a) using RAID and b) having a spare disk or even a spare server standing by. Some of the time was taken restoring data from the failed drive, instead of restoring from backup, Then the RAID needed to be rebuilt, although I don't see why they bother with RAID if a single disk failure will take the system down (and no, they don't use striping (Level 0)). Although JohnCompanies sees it as a remarkable coincidence that a server that died and was replaced would then again fail, I do not, since new hardware is most likely to fail within the first 30 days of operation. Simple lack of preparation. JohnCompanies is absolutely terrible about responding to emails asking about system status, and this made the problem much worse for me. They apparently are not accustomed to the response that they will get if a customer system dies, which is both good and bad. They are also poor at estimating ETRs. For the last 18 hours of downtime, the system was always one to two hours from being back up, according to estimates. JohnCompanies has one hope of keeping me as a customer, and that is to give me a one-month credit for my trouble, and to expeditiously move me to a different physical server on their net. |
| 2003-01-07 |
Hmm |
Why do I keep getting calls from "Marx Motivation" at 773-632-0002? |
| 2003-01-07 |
Mac |
New PowerBooks. Gimme! |
| 2003-01-01 |
Digital Audio |
Looks like the Edirol UA-1D is the ticket if you want to go all-digital from your computer to your receiver. This unit handles digital co-ax and digital optical input and output (though not simulatenously). It connects to the computer via USB. I still haven't decided whether the sound quality improvement might be worth $80 purchase price, and thus I don't have one.... |
| 2003-01-01 |
XNet |
Since I'm playing with ISP accounts, I decided to finally drop my XNet.com account which I've had for about 7 years. I've been transitioning to samswett.com for about 6 months in earnest, and it's time to let go of XNet. There are one or two people who can't seem to update their address books despite repeated warnings, so they will have to go back and re-read those warnings when they see XNet emails bouncing. I won't miss the 15 slices of spam I was getting every day there either. |
| 2003-01-01 |
JohnCompanies |
Hmm, I seem to have jinxed JohnCompanies. Sorry -- all I did was switch over to them and they went down! Actually their hardware died and they are replacing it. Hopefully this will end my ISP troubles for a while, that is, assuming they can get the new server up soon. |
| 2003-01-01 |
2 0 0 3 |
Happy New Year! |
| 2002-12-17 |
QWK.net |
On top of bandwidth problems, I now see this notice from qwk.net: December 15, 2002 11:30 AM MST / Update: December 16, 2002 0710 AM MST / At approximately 6:45 AM MST today, power to the facility in which our servers are currently housed failed. The UPS systems failed to operate properly, causing all servers to shut down in a manner which is unsafe. / December 16 Update: the problem has recurred. We are working with the facilities managers to isolate the cause of the problem. / This caused numerous operational problems with many machines, as UNIX servers are very sensitive to improper shutdown. We have most problems resolved at this time. If you are experiencing any outage condition, please call our outage report line at 877-571-3495. / We apologize for the inconvenience. More information will be posted as available. |
| 2002-12-15 |
NcFTPd/Mike Gleason |
It's Saturday night, around 7PM Central. I send a tech support question to NcFTPd's support email. In less than five minutes, I have a response from the software's author, Mike Gleason. Not only is he an expert in matters of FTP (having written both a server and client), but wow, does he ever resond quickly, and I am actually honored to be talking to him. If this new server works out, I will be buying another license for NcFTPd. After a little back-and-forth, including Mike sending me a pre-release of a future version of NcFTPd, he has the problem solved. About the problem: the NcFTPd server did not feel like sending binary files. It would only send text files. (This is on the JohnCompanies server). The solution is to add "sendfile-io=no" to the general.cf configuration file. http://www.ncftpd.com/ncftpd/doc/config/g/sendfile-io.html |
| 2002-12-14 |
JohnCompanies |
I have provisioned a "Linux colo" server over at JohnCompanies.com. $75/month gets you 40GB of xfer, and 4GB of disk on your own virtual machine; the term "colo" is overloaded here to mean something like colocation, even though it really isn't (their website perhaps explains this better, if tersely). Setup took them less than 24 hours (even into a Saturday). It appears to be a RedHat 7.3 system (according to /etc/redhat-release), but with a customized 2.4.16 kernel. You have access to lots of stock software that doesn't live in your disk space, so you really do have about 4GB free disk space to start with. I have not been seeing the overly amazing tech support response times that I've read about elsewhere, but I have no compaints. I had one issue with NcFTPd not liking something about this setup, which I've written about in the next outburst. |
| 2002-12-14 |
QWK.net |
An event unrelated to my Windows hosting lameness: I have found QWK.net's service to be lacking in one respect. I will preface the complaint by saying that QWK.net is where samswett.com is hosted, and I'm happy with the service that I've received at the $7.50/month level. Uptime is great, and the admin control panel (HSphere) is OK. Last week, I upgraded to the $29/month Developer account, which gives you a great value (1GB disk, 25GB monthly xfer, 4 MySQL databases, lots of email accounts, and three domains.) However, I've determined that QWK.net's outgoing bandwidth is totally slammed all the time. While FTPing, I get bursts of 50-100K/second, and then a pause. The effective speed is about 35K/s. Uploading is not a problem, as I have seen 450-500K/s. Their outbound bandwidth does not behave as if intentionally throttled, since that technique results in a steady but slow stream of data. It is possible that packet loss is occurring on their end due to heavy utilization, or maybe there's just very little overhead left, and your data needs to "push" someone else's out of the way in order to get through. Unrelated to that, I will note one other interesting fact: extra bandwidth usage above 25GB/month is an incredible $6/GB, and extra disk space is $0.10/MB, or $100/GB!! (Even pre-paid). You definitely won't want to exceed your resource limits. |
| 2002-12-04 |
easyCGI |
Now I've found the ISP easycgi.com to be responsive; they were even able to show me output from phpinfo() to prove that the MSSQL functions were enabled before I signed up. Not only that, but the account was created and the database server readied in under two hours this morning. |
| 2002-12-04 |
T3Link/WebhostingEtc |
The continuing saga of trying to find a reasonable ISP has left another ISP in disfavor with me. T3Link.com (now webhostingetc.com) actually claimed in writing that they supported what I needed to do, and utterly failed to make any progress on it. Their Windows support guy couldn't get PHP configured and claimed it was a bug in PHP. I selflessly gave him weeks to get it working, but after plenty of ignored emails and other responses like, "Oh, it will be working in a few hours," I gave up and got a refund. The refund was processed immediately -- the highlight of the experience. |
| 2002-12-04 |
Customer Service |
Update: New Aeron chair arrived and I picked it up recently, and got back the old, broken chair as well. A happy ending! |
| 2002-11-14 |
Nerdiness |
Finally, someone acknowledges this: when you're doing a speed comparo of a single-CPU vs. a dual-CPU system, you MUST do real world testing -- the dual-CPU system will FEEL much snappier in the real world, and you can get more done. The foreground application may not be much faster on the duallie, but background tasks can progress much faster, which lets you have more things going on at once, even if no SINGLE task is faster. Macworld's comparison of a single 933 to a dual 1GHz PowerMac concluded that the 933 was a steal based on single-app benchmarks. I couldn't find that review online though, they only have it in condensed form. Anyway, Tom's Hardware Guide says: "One important conclusion for all hardware test magazines is that everyone must re-think test methodologies. Running just a single-threaded benchmark on its own does not represent real-world behavior anymore. THG has started working on this issue already...." Now, would it be too greedy to ask for 4 CPUs in my PowerMac? |
| 2002-11-14 |
This Site |
Thanks to Steve for pointing out that Google finally added the plex.us to its index. |
| 2002-11-12 |
Interland |
I'm now a former Interland customer! The horror, the horror! WTF was I thinking? Well, here it is.... I wanted to set up an account to use for development -- specifically using PHP and Microsoft SQL Server. No, not ASP. No, not MySQL. I also wanted it to be hosted at a large generic ISP, so if it ever went down, I could cover my ass and say "Look, they're huge, don't blame me!" Plus I just thought with 400,000 customers Interland would have their shit together. Like, this was a no-brainer. I even signed up for the blueHALO b200 plan, which is supposedly hosted on a cluster of dual-CPU machines. I ordered the account on Friday and it was activated on Monday. On Tuesday, less than 24 hours after activation, I had cancelled it. Interland couldn't provide the one service I needed that the original sales guy said they could. How? The problem started Monday two hours after activation when I found I couldn't log in to Interland's support site. My assigned domain name and the password I chose wouldn't let me in. Phoned Interland. They opened a ticket; it was escalated to someone who closed it saying basically, "blueHALO is new - Interland's support site login page was created before blueHALO so therefore it won't work." Fine. In the meantime, looked at the results of phpinfo() which shows how PHP is setup on the server. Looked good. Dual CPUs, hehe. Let's try a mssql_connect(). Uh oh: "Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mssql_pconnect()". Yup, PHP is not configured to talk to M$ SQL. New ticket time! Two tickets in the first four hours of Interland experience. Tuesday morning arrives and I go to check my phpinfo page - and I get a 404! No PHP pages are available for a good hour. But the files are still there. I hope this didn't affect all cluster users! I figured they were working on getting M$ SQL working. But, no, eventually a systems engineer from the blueHALO Design Team closes my ticket saying that he tested the required changes to make M$ SQL work, but the web server just wouldn't work with it. Case closed, account cancelled. Time to try another generic ISP. |
| 2002-11-10 |
Customer Service |
This time, a non-technical item. My two-year-old Herman Miller Aeron chair's tilt limiter broke. "Aw, poor baby with his Aeron chair," you say. Uhm, I don't want your pity, I have a *story*. The chair leans back half way no matter what position you set the tilt limiter to. And the steel cable that goes from the tilt lever to the "works" (underneath the seat) was distended from the lever itself. Conclusion: a long, annoying repair process is the likely outcome, and the warrantee is the only ray of hope. I went to Herman Miller's website to try to find repair information, only to conclude that it's impossible to tell what kind of services are truly offered by each reseller in one's area. So I called. They tell me: "You want Interior Investments in Lincolnshire [Illinois]." They were correct! In short, I have received the best possible service from Interior Investments and by extension, Herman Miller. The only disadvantage for me is that it's in Lincolnshire which means a 45-minute drive. I explained my problem to Irene at Interior Investments, and she gave me two options: a) to have the repair parts and instructions sent to me, or b) to take the chair to I.I. and have them repair it. All at no charge of course, thanks to the 12-year parts and labor warrantee. I opted to have them handle it. So parts were ordered and I was given an estimated parts arrival time of about 10 days, at which point I'd have to bring the chair to Interior Investments. Irene is very good at followup and let me know in advance of parts arrival, and so last Thursday I brought the chair to Lincolnshire. Later on Thursday I got a message from Irene saying that they couldn't repair the chair (for reasons I'm still not clear on) and so instead they would just get a new chair from Herman Miller. My jaw dropped at this point. So would I like to come back and get my old chair in the meantime, or would I like to pick up BOTH when the new one arrived? What? Yes, I get to keep the new and the old chairs. This is crazy service! In a good way! Estimated arrival on the new chair is about 12 days, and I'll post an update then. |
| 2002-11-10 |
Mac |
My installation of MacOS X 10.2 "Jaguar" was starting to have problems. I had upgraded it from what was a clean 10.1 install, but it had kernel panicked twice recently and I could see it was time for another re-install. Also, I only allocated 4GB to my boot partition and it turns out that's pushing it when the system is heavily used, since that's my swap partition as well. Using NetNewsWire, I quickly consumed about 700MB of disk space, and before I could react to kill NetNewsWire, it had basically swamped the machine - it was doing nothing but paging to/from disk - to the point where it could have taken hours to recover gracefully. I know this because it happened once before with Virtual PC when I ran Windows ME, 2000, and XP at the same time. (More on the NetNewsWire bugs some other time). I was able to recover after about three hours that day, an amount of time I obviously didn't mind waiting since I was bored enough to toy with Windows, and three versions at that. So back to the 10.2 re-install. I wanted more disk space and speed as well, so I also got an Acard 6880M IDE RAID card and slapped together a bootable striped RAID using two 5400rpm 80GB Maxtors. Totally the way to go! It's much snappier, and those Maxtors are silent compared to the Apple-supplied 60GB that came with my PMG4. Long story short, I now have 150GB free on my boot volume - bring it on, NetNewsWire! Oh yes, and migrating all my settings from the old install was quite easy - about the same as it used to work in OS 9 or before. Just traverse the /Library and your user directory and move the appropriate files. |
| 2002-11-03 |
This Site |
Enjoy the new look for Fall 2002, now that fall is almost over. Ignore this if you're not in the Northern Hemisphere and in a temperate zone. Visitors from outer space, please contact me for more information. |
| 2002-10-27 |
Technology |
Any data that are not already on current storage systems are in imminent danger of being lost forever. |
| 2002-10-25 |
This Site |
Enjoy the new look and Happy Halloween. |
| 2002-10-23 |
Mac |
Path Finder is the new name for SNAX. Luckily, the good things from SNAX are all in place, with several important bugfixes (esp for Jaguar). |
| 2002-10-17 |
Mac |
Apple's turn to be boneheaded today, as they pull out of Macworld Expo. Can only speculate that it got "Steved." |
| 2002-10-14 |
M$ |
The dread disease "M$" has struck again, though again has failed in its ill-conceived attempt to get a free ride from Apple's Switch ad campaign. |
| 2002-10-11 |
News |
Critical flaw in Outlook for Windows allows anyone to take over your computer. More news after the game. |
| 2002-10-07 |
Mac |
There are certain cache directories in Jaguar that you might want to know about. These may cause problems booting, logging in, or running apps. Interesting directories are: "~/Library/Caches" "/Library/Caches" "/System/Library/Caches".... A program called Jaguar Cache Cleaner puts a GUI on this, but this won't help if the machine won't boot! See also Apple KBase article 106464. |
| 2002-10-07 |
Internet2 |
I haven't been paying too much attention to the Internet2 project, which has been underway for some time now. But I am impressed not only with the project, but also with the amount of information that's made available about the large-scale network known as Abilene. Normally you'd have to be on the "inside" to get a network administrator's view such as that available at Abilene's NOC. You can view tons of MRTG graphs (love the IPv6 traffic), syslog entries, various reports, and even view traffic usage on the whole network using generated-on-demand GIF maps. |
| 2002-10-03 |
Thought |
I like to think that I don't support terrorism, so I'll try to make one distinction between suicide bombings and U.S. policy/actions in places like Afghanistan and Iraq: we are going after what we consider to be military targets. "The terrorists" want to hit anything, which often means malls or public gathering places, not to mention buildings. U.S. terrorists like McVeigh did this as well. If we are to try to eliminate important military targets, we of course sometimes miss, making the whole exercise look bad. And suicide bombers do go after our military "targets" as well (USS Cole, Pentagon, bases). It's a fine line, and quite possibly the debate here is just academic. |
| 2002-10-03 |
Mac |
I just contacted the author of SNAX yesterday and learned that a new version is indeed in development (beta testing now). If the list of changes is to be believed, it will address all the problems with version 1.2.8 under Jaguar (and even 10.1.5 and below). It also adds some new features, which sound nice but will have to be evaluated when the product ships. Most exciting of the new features are that SNAX will no longer call the Finder to perform any task except getting info-window comments, and that SNAX makes better use of multi-threading so it won't block on, for example, volumes mounted via slow network connections. Oh, and the name may be changing... more to come. |
| 2002-10-03 |
News |
This just in to the news desk: a malicious worm that infects only Microsoft Windows machines was discovered today. Film at 11. |
| 2002-09-30 |
Mac |
How to disable Rendezvous in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. Open the Directory Access utility (/Applications/Utilities/) and uncheck Rendezvous in the enabled list. |
| 2002-09-27 |
This Site |
Now it's here, I wonder if I'll really ever update it very much. It's so easy to do, but hard to get started writing. |
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