Steve's Current Notes

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Sunday, January 2, 2000

It is amazing how quiet the Wakeolda computer room/office is with everything powered down. When we returned from Virginia this evening the first thing I did after helping unload the Explorer was to head downstairs and start powering up. It was strange walking into the office and hearing no whining. Every thing seems to coming back to life normally. Haven't found any Y2K bugs here at Wakeolda yet, but I am not counting my chicken before they are hatched as it were.

I have spent some time renaming the scheme in which my log files are kept. pair.com decided on the 20th of December it would make this change as it headed into 2000 and for this short time also built a virtual link to the old naming scheme. pair now gives me my logs daily in this new format www.20000101, etc.

I compress and cat my log files at the end of each month into a monthly file, so I have gone back and renamed my monthly files in the following scheme www.199902.gz, etc. Hopefully everything will still work and I will have retained the completed stat history for Wakeolda. If not, I still have the old files and can tweak my nightly cron job until I get in right. I can be persistent if nothing else.  Did you catch the couple of Unix terms here?

DURING ALL OF THE Y2M HYPE over the weekend I started to think about what I personally thought the greatest achievements of the past century have been.

I am sure you would expect me to say the computer is the greatest achievement during the past 100 years, but it is only among them. I would also point to the the automobile and airplane. These new forms of transportation allow us to now accomplish what was taking weeks and months as the last century turned. And while I sometimes argue there are too many media outlets, the television, which allowed picture news to be brought into our living rooms was another milestone. But do we have to have so many channels?

ANd of course the satellite and space exploration are up there too. How could our forefathers ever imagined how far we would progress in such a short time.

All of the talking heads on the tube over the weekend seemed to have dwelled on who the greatest person of the last century was and did pay much attention to the great achievements.  All seemed to agree that Winston Churchill was the greatest person of the last century.  Before my time.  My only recollection of Winnie was when I was just a kid I remember his funeral being broadcast on television.  Now I enjoy a Churchill cigar from time-to-time and when we vacationed in London, I visited his war room, which I found quite intriguing.

I have now personally have enough of the Y2-whatever hype. Let's get on with our lives and the hum-drum bizz of daily activities.

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Monday, January 3, 2000

I suppose I should have done a little more research yesterday when I made the assumption that the automobile was one of the greatest achievements of the last century. According to this resource the invention of the automobile really belongs to the late 1800's and Germany. The Benz patent Motor Vehicle seems to have been the first gasoline powered vehicle produced in 1886. The engine, mounted over the rear wheels produced .9 horsepower and would travel at a top speed of about 15km/h.

Most of us associate Henry Ford's Model T as the first automobile. The Model T was produced in 1909, which gives some credence to my inclusion of the automobile in my list!

This survey from Infobeat shows I wasn't completely off base in my assessment of the greatest achievements of the last century.

(InfoBeat) - The achievement of the century lasted just 12 seconds, went a distance of 120 feet and occurred a little over 97 years ago.

Nearly a third of InfoBeat readers polled (30.5%) selected the Orville and Wilbur Wright's first manned flight of a powered plane as the single most important achievement of the 20th century. For the record, Wilbur was the pilot Dec. 17, 1903 as the bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio, made history. Second place went to something you're probably using right now - the computer. Twenty-five percent of poll respondents picked the computer - UNIVAC to PC - as the century's defining invention. The culmination of the space race with Neil Armstrong's moonwalk on July 16, 1969, came in third, with 17% of the vote. In fourth, with 7.4% was the advance of medical sciences that saw everything from Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA in 1953 to Salk's polio vaccine to the eradication of smallpox in 1977.

In fifth place, with 7% of the vote, was the century's increase in freedom - from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent fall of communism to the Civil Rights and Equal Rights movements that had their roots with women's suffrage in 1920. Earning honorable mention in the poll were the Allies victory in World War II and the subsequent move into the atomic age and the creation of the transistor.

ON THE Y2M BUG: One of the fellows I worked with got himself a new Dell for the holidays. No it doesn’t have a Y2M bug, but he has requested some assistance in moving some of his data. He got everything moved from his old computer, but is having trouble importing some of his Windows on Wall Street data. I am going by this afternoon to see I can help. WOW should be able to import, but then again, nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

When he called we naturally started talking about the Y2M bug and his summation was "it seemed like it was much ado about nothing." He then went on to say the only thing he had heard was the story from Minnesota about a guy who was returning a video rental one day late and was charged something like $91,000 for the late return. The video store’s computer had apparently read the return as being 100 years late. The store ate the one day’s charges and I am sure is now checking out its software.  I am sure as America's retailers geasr back up we'll start to hear a few more of these stories, as embarrassing as they might be for the businesses who thought/assumed they were OK.

I HAVE GOTTEN SEVERAL responses to my plea for SCSI help in the usenet newsgroups, including:

From: Al Kozakiewicz [akozak@hourglass.com]

There is no Microsoft driver for SCSI printers (a pretty unusual device).

Do you have a Windows NT driver from Kodak installed? I found your question to the comp.periphs.scsi newsgroup but it wasn't clear what operating system you were running on the machine with the 1520 adapter.

I don't know how I solved my problem, bit did. I have documented this on my website http://www.wakeolda.com/notes/1999/122699.htm#Friday.

A simple recap is: I took my drive down to bare metal and reinstalled Win NT and ran service pack 5. I allowed service pack 5 to replace the aic-78xx.sys file. This is the one thing that I think I did different, allowing SP5 to replace the adaptec file. Hopefully it will continue to work.

I had tried so many different things that I finally hosed my system, thus the need for the reinstall. All along I was using the printer export module from Kodak and even had download the most recent driver from Adaptec. Maybe I was just holding my mouth right on the latest install.

To answer your question about the machine with the 1520 card, that machine runs Win 98 as an operating system and as I said before had no problem seeing the scanner and printer immediately.

Thanks for your willingness to help.

From: Igno van Wegberg [ignatius@casema.net]

I've had similar problems with my adaptec2940au when i tried to install an artec at6, my guess is that your cables are too long, the only way to solve this (i think) is to put the fastest devices closest to your card, in this case that would probably be your printer, and then your scanner.

Also try setting the speed to 5 mb/sec or use other cables, but be sure to try before you buy.

One of my original thoughts was that my cabling was too long after I had reduced the data transfer rate, however, this did not proved to be the case.

After I finally got both devices going I did learn that the printer was SCSI-0 and the scanner is SCSI-2. I have the scanner closest to the adapter and the printer at the end of the chain.

...Thanks for your suggestion and your willingness to help.

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Tuesday, January 4, 2000 

It's back to work today after an extended vacation, much of which was eaten up by working through my SCSI issues and Christmas festivities.  The kids even said yesterday how glad they were to be going back to school.  I should have marked that down.

We made great strides in getting Andrew atop his new mount.  The shiny new Huffy BMX bike, the one with the front and rear pegs was kicking his butt.   He just wasn't tall enough.  With the help of our neighbor, David Reavis, who has a couple boys of his own and a stable of bicycles and parts, we changed seats and angled the handlebars back towards the driver and Andrew was finally off on his new bike.    In the space of about five minutes he went from "I can't ride this bike" to tooling around the neighborhood.  The angled seat post was traded for a straight one and pounded down as low as it will go.  He's had some trouble adjusting to hand brakes only and in fact keeps spinning the pedals backwards, but there is no coaster brake there for him.

For about two years now, since the Sony PlayStation entered our house, Andrew has also been announcing that he wanted a snowboard.  I think this dates back to the CoolBoarders PSX video game.  He has consistently asked for a snowboard and we have blown his request off.  We hardly ever get snow and I don't think we'll be heading to any resorts anytime soon, although I'll probably eat those words.

Anyway, when we were up visiting my mother this past weekend we make our required trek to Wal-Mart.  And what did Andrew see there in the toy department but some snowboards for kids.  He immediately went into the begging/requesting mode.   And like a good father I told him I would see, but that we weren't going to be buying a snowboard today.  I had seen some other snowboards at a local sporting good store and there was no way I was going to spend >$200 on something that would pretty much be a throw-away.  At $30, I could be convinced.

My plan was to head to Wal-Mart here in Winston-Salem today pick him one up.  All Wal-Marts carry the same products don't they?  Wrong.  I did make the trip to the local Wal-Mart and there was no snowboards -- or sled for that matter -- to be found.  They don't carry snowboards or sleds because we don't get enough snow.   The same was true for the Target store.  I checked the sporting good sotre for an inexpensive variety for kids, but their version of inexpensive was cruising past $200.

I even searched the Wal-Mart and K-Mart online sites, but no snowboards were to be found.  The headed to the net and those searches also turned up the high dollar varieties.  I thought I was to be heading back to Virginia.

In the evening I went over to Bobby Masten's house to help him import his Windows on Wall Street data into his shiny new Dell computer and mentioned this saga to Bobby and his son Josh.  Josh volunteered that he had one of the cheapies at one time.  I jumped all over this, "where did you get it, I asked?"  The answer was Sears, so I immediately came home and hit the web for Sears.Com.  I didn't see much there, but did see a link for Sear's Wishbook (we used to call it that as kids, I remember) and once in their catalog a simple search for snowboard turned up just what I was looking for, two entries for kids' snowboards, price <$30.  We'll go for the Scooby-Do version.  Suzy is going to check at the local Sears store today and if no luck there, we'll hit the web and place an online order for Andrew's snowboard and hope he doesn't get to use it.

AND SPEAKING OF ANDREW.  I was in the computer room/office last night (searching for the snowboard) when he appeared at the door announcing he couldn't sleep because of his loose tooth.  I said, "let me see what you got" and he produced a tissue that he had obviously been using to wiggle a loose tooth.  I grabbed the tooth in question, out it came,  and asked, "what do you have here?"  His answer was "$10," the amount he had been asking for as a gift/loan to be merged with previous tooth fairy money for the purchase of a snowboard.  Quite the little con-artist.

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Wednesday, 

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Thursday, 

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Friday, January 7,  2000 

You can tell I had to go back to work. I've hardly had time to do anything at home. Well, I haven't had time to update this page.

For some time now I have been having trouble with Wilma, a Win 98 box with a 350 MHz Perntium II processor and 129 megs of memory. Wilma takes a notion every once i a while to lock up. When this happens it takes several reboots, including at least one stop in safe mode to get her going again. These lockups are becoming more frequent and yes, more aggravating.

I had the idea of installing Win NT 4.0 workstation on Wilma and making her a dual boot machine. I would then migrate my files over to the NT section and eventually remove Win 98. I loaded up the Workstation install and everything was going well, until....

Win NT Workstation was ready to install and then I discovered that I had aggressively formatted my hard drives on this machine in FAT32, which Win NT of course can not deal with.  I aborted the installation.  I did, however, go ahead an reinstall Win 98 over the existing installation.  We'll see if that improves things any, but I don't expect t it to.  Heck, it locked up once during installation.  Leads me to believe that I have a piece of hardware causing the problem.

I HAVE TAKEN THE PLUNGE and installed Microsoft FrontPage2000 and am in fact, making this update for 2000.  I decided to move my web folder from Wilma over to Rubble (Rubble is the IBM Intellistation).  I placed the web folders on my D:\ drive, where they are currently the only files on a 4 gig partition.  I am anxious to see how this update goes.  I will delete the files from Wilma after a month or so if all goes well in this move.

One problem I have encountered so far is the built-in spell checker is grayed-out and unavailable.  If you have been reading these pages very often, you know that is one toll I NEED.  And, you might add, should remember to use.  I'll have to check to see what's up with the spell checking.

THE T. WAYNE ROBERTSON NASCAR Winston Cup Preview is scheduled next weekend here is Winston-Salem.  This is the 11th year of the annual affair, which welcomes NASCAR Winston Cup drivers, owners, crew chiefs, media, etc. to the hometown of the series title sponsor, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.  The preview was renamed for T. Wayne Robertson last year and is the largest single-day charity event in North Carolina.  Robertson was the long-time leader of RJR's sports marketing department and instrumental in the success of the Winston Cup Series.  He was considered a close personal friend of almost everyone in the sport, including yours truly.  Wayne was killed in a freak boating accident in January of 1998 while on a duck hunting trip with other NASCAR Winston Cup sponsors in Louisiana.

I had hoped to bring home a schedule of the drivers appearing in this year's event, but there were still a few loose ends to tidy up, so our PR folks weren't ready to release it yet.  I'll put it up here next week when it's ready.  Here is a quick fact sheet.

UPDATE 09:10 AM :  A thought hit me after I said the spell checker was not available.  I had only loaded the Front Page module of 2000.  I dug out the CD and sure enough the proofing tools, which I had not loaded, included the spell checker, so I added that feature.  When I brought this page back it up it was obvious by all of the squiggly red lines the page had not been through the spell check before I moved them over to Rubble.  That's my way of saying that I was successful in getting the proofing tools added.  I also added Word while I was at it.  It will be interesting to see if this version of M$'s spell checker has a better vocabulary that the previous system.

THE CONTINUING SAGA OF the snowboard for Andrew.  The Sears variety arrived via the UPS truck today.  It had been addressed to Andrew, but I never looked at the label before I opened the box to check it out.   I seemed to be the first one home for some reason, soon to be followed by Katie.  When she saw I had opened the box she quickly announced that Andrew was supposed to open it.  She had wanted to open it herself earlier.  I quickly got a piece of packing tape and sealed the one end of the box and he got to open the package and was none the wiser of my snooping.  

This was one proud little boy as he explained to the neighbor kids, "now this is a real snowboard."  This explanation was quickly followed by his mother who reminded him this was a SNOW board and was not to be played with on the grass, driveway, carpet........  He (and the rest of us) are hoping for just a wee bit of snow so the snowboard can be christened.

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Saturday, January 8, 2000

Tomorrow is our 18th wedding Anniversary. I suppose I should pick up a little something for Suzy.  I wonder how she would feel about a spindle of blank CD-R media?

ALWAYS ON THE LOOKOUT for the possibility of getting on the fast train with ADSL or even cable modems, I found an interesting site yesterday.  2Wire.com will lookup the availability of DSL in your area, measure the distance from the address you input to the central office and come back with a table of xDSL providers available and their published tariffs.

The results of this search in my case said there were two xDSL providers available:  BellSouth and DSL.net.  While DSL.net offered several pricing plans according to the size of your pipe, BellSouth offered only one.  And it was obvious that DSL.net was aimed at the business user.  If the offer of SDSL service wasn't a giveaway (a service primarily for business) their pricing scheme was a dead ringer.  Bellsouth offers a plan including 1500 Mbps downstream and 256 upstream for $60 per month, DSL.net  wants almost $500 per month for the same service.  It's true that Bellsouth will only give you one email address and one IP address while DSL.net offers unlimited IP addresses and 10 email addresses to start off with

In my case, DSL.net said I was 28,500 feet from the telephone company's central office.  That's almost in the impossible range for xDSL.  However, as I have mentioned on these pages before there is a central office substation about one mile from my house.  I wonder if the teleco plans to equip this substation to offer xDSL to us techno geeks.  One thing that probably holds us back is that I am also less than a mile from the end of BellSouth's line.  Just down the hill from our neighborhood, a new phone company takes over the service.  The comments on Bellsouth's ADSL service from users at 2Wire are quite interesting and naturally vary by user.  Some praise their service and some have had problems.

FROM THE NEWS DESK:

ZDTV says:  China announced it will ban windows 2000 and require its country to use a Linux distribution called "Red Flag - Linux."

C|Net has the top tech predictions for 2000.  I personally like their thought of DSL dominating the high bandwidth arena.

And I wonder if this C|Net item on Mr. and Mrs. Gates' generosity is correct?