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Week of 3 January 2000 Sunday, 09 January 2000 09:48 A (mostly) daily journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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wpoison
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Monday, 3 January 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Yuck. What a way to start the New Year. I have some sort of bug that has disgusting symptoms. I'd intended to get a lot done this weekend, but ended up lying around most of the time. I have a Plextor 8/4/32 ATAPI CD burner that I'm itching to get installed, but I didn't have time. Next weekend, perhaps. I ended up spending quite a bit of time trying to resolve a problem with IE, which may or may not be Y2M related. Probably not, though. IE5 is strange enough all by itself. I clicked on a link on my links page, and Windows NT locked up completely. I mean, so completely that I couldn't even bring up Task Manager to kill the process. IE5 was showing an hourglass, but nothing else was happening. I let it sit for a minute or two, hoping for the best. Nothing. I powered down the modem, hoping that the loss of IP connectivity would cause IE to die. Nothing. I finally turned off the system. When I brought the system back up, all of my IE history information was gone and the cache was behaving very strangely. I finally cleared the cache and history, shut down the computer properly, and restarted. Everything appears to be normal now. Barbara is off this morning playing golf with her father, leaving me with the kids. Early reports seem to indicate that all of the resources devoted to fixing the Y2M problems have paid off, at least in larger organizations. It remains to be seen how badly small businesses will be affected, but it seems likely that many will have severe problems. It's not over yet, and won't be for some months, but we seem to have dodged the bullet. Now we can forget about it until the Y10M problem raises its ugly head. All my neat old stuff is gone. There's nothing left on the floor. My office is clean, alas.
The architect of the Terror. Barbara ruthlessly cleaning my office. She sucked Malcolm up the hose at one point, but the filter caught him.
Even my closet was not exempt. This is it after Barbara has put back all the stuff that wasn't thrown out. It used to be literally packed solid with priceless stuff like dead monitors, XT motherboards, 5.25" floppies, and mono video cards. That's a 486/80 on top, and a 386/33 on the bottom. I can't bear to throw out the 386. I paid $3,000 for it in 1991. There are a couple of 486 tower systems on the far right, with part of the pedestal of one just visible. * * * * *
Thanks. I figured it was something like that. * * * * *
You may be right, but consider this: Intel has really been
selling only one processor for the last several years, with minor
variations in packaging, L2 cache, FSB speed, supplementary instruction
set, and so on. The Pentium II was essentially a re-packaged Pentium Pro;
The Celeron is a Pentium II with a smaller L2 cache that runs at full CPU
speed; the Pentium III is a Pentium II with SSE instructions added and
some other minor changes. The problems with and cost of RDRAM and the new
Intel chipsets mean that the ramp-up of the
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Tuesday, 4 January 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Yesterday was a wash-out. I felt terrible in the morning and spent most of the afternoon sleeping. This morning was eaten by piranhas. We had an early appointment at the vet for Kerry. Barbara wants to build a desk like mine, using a 36" wide solid-core door, so when we got home from the vet we spent some time measuring everything. We'll pick up the door tomorrow, along with 2X4s and other miscellany needed to get the thing mounted solidly. Barbara wants to stain the door and give it two or three coats of polyurethane, so it'll probably be this weekend before we actually get it built. I also have a bunch of projects I need to get to, and I desperately want to finish another chapter this week. So it's off to work for me. * * * * *
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Thanks. I'll keep that in mind. * * * * *
To the best of my knowledge, Copy2PC disappeared when Symantec bought out Central Point Software, which must be nearly ten years ago. I used to have Copy2PC, but I'm pretty sure it only handled 360 KB 5.25" floppies, so it might not do you any good anyway. Copy2PC was a separate program, and was not bundled with PC Tools. I'll post your letter so that if any of my readers have any ideas that might help they can mail you directly. It seems to me that the more you bother the software company, the better. Perhaps they'll get the idea that copy protection is not just an annoyance for the users, but for them as well. I long ago made it a rule never to use any software that was copy protected in any form. On heavy iron, that's usually not an option, but on PCs there's nearly always an equivalent program that is not copy protected. I'll choose an inferior program that is not copy-protected over a superior program that is. Copy protected programs are almost never worth the hassle. I must confess that I'm surprised that the military would even consider using copy-protected software. But then, I've seen hospitals, police departments, and other organizations that deal with life and death also use copy-protected software. It makes no sense to me.
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Wednesday, 5 January 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I tackled one of those projects yesterday that I'd been putting off for too long. Getting our fax modem connected and working again. In the process of cleaning up my office, I'd found an old US Robotic 28.8 faxmodem and a serial cable. I put them on top of kiwi, intending to hook up fax as soon as possible. I started using Microsoft Personal Fax for NT4 soon after it shipped in 1996, and continued using it until about a year ago. It wasn't exactly feature-laden, but it did everything I wanted to do, including saving incoming faxes to a directory and delivering them to my Outlook mail box. It ran as an NT service, and was rock-solid. I was a bit concerned about installing a program with a 1996 date on my spanking new NT4 box, which runs SP5, but there wasn't much alternative if I wanted to use Microsoft Personal Fax. Microsoft used to have this program posted in their NT4 Workstation files area, but removed it a year or more ago. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with it, so I'm not sure what motivated that decision. At any rate, I still had it stored in my install directory, so I went ahead and installed the USR modem and then Microsoft Personal Fax. I tested by picking up the phone and dialing the fax number. The fax modem answered properly, so I assumed all was well. That turned out not to be the case. Microsoft Personal Fax and the USR Sportster don't get along very well. It may be that it's a fundamental incompatibility, or it may be that the USR simply needs a different setup string than what Personal Fax is supplying. In years gone by, I'd've been in there with ProComm or something configuring the modem with AT commands and storing the settings. No more. I don't have a terminal program installed, and I couldn't remember how to configure a modem manually if my life depended on it. The USR modem was behaving very oddly. Once it answered the phone once, it would never do so again until it was powered down and restarted. Hmm. Enough of that. Fortunately, there was an easy solution. In the past, I'd run Personal Fax on a Practical Peripherals PM144MT II modem, of which I have two. It's only a 14.4 modem, and pretty useless for anything but fax, but fax doesn't run any faster than 14,400 anyway. Also, I knew that Personal Fax used to work with this modem, so it was worth a shot. I uninstalled the USR and connected the PP. First problem was that NT4 didn't detect the PP modem. I chose that modem from a list, but NT4 wanted to know which port, 1 or 2. This box has two serial ports, but one of them exists only as header pins on the motherboard. I wasn't sure whether the 9-pin serial port on the back was com1 or com2, so I compromised and told NT to install the PP modem on both ports, figuring it would be easy enough to kill the modem on the wrong port later. There's no way to change modems in Personal Fax short of uninstalling and re-installing it, so I did that. Sure enough, PF found the fax modem on com1. I deleted the modem on com2 and proceeded to configure PF. Everything appeared to be set up properly, so I tried calling the fax modem from my regular phone. It answered the call, and disconnected properly when I hung up. It did the same thing several times, so I assumed the problem was fixed. I called my friend Robin Weiner and asked her if she'd send me a test fax. From her end, everything completed normally. She even got a message confirming that the fax had been sent and received correctly. Not so on my end. I was looking at a fatal error on the fax status screen, and the incoming fax was nowhere to be found. To make a long story short, I had two problems. First, Personal Fax crashes and dies when I attempt to store incoming faxes to a directory on a network drive. Second, although I was able to have incoming faxes sent to my Outlook inbox under Outlook 97 (and, I think, under Outlook 98), this doesn't work under Outlook 2000. So I told Personal Fax not to send copies to my inbox and to store inbound faxes in a directory on the C: drive. That appears to have fixed the problems, and I can now receive faxes normally. Or so I think. Time will tell. * * * * *
Arghhh. Bitten by Y2M. And speaking of bites, I just went to pay some bills yesterday with my corporate checkbook. I notice that all my checks have the "199_" part thoughtfully pre-printed. I'm thinking of dating checks something like "4 January 199A" to see if my bank has a sense of humor. Probably not. * * * * *
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Thursday, 6 January 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Barbara and I went to Lowes yesterday to buy a solid-core slab door, some 2X4s, and other stuff to make her new desk. We're building it into a corner of her office. We'll determine how high she wants the surface to be, and then mount 2X4 ledger strips on the two walls, screwed to the studs with 3.5" screws. We'll then mount 2X2s flush with the top edge of the 2X4s and drive 2.5" mounting screws up through the 2X2s into the bottom of the door. That takes care of two sides, leaving only the one free-standing corner to be supported. For my desk, I used a two-drawer filing cabinet to support the free corner, but that results in a work surface that's way too high for Barbara. I considered building a diagonal brace to support the front corner, but finally decided just to make do with a vertical leg. I was hoping to find some kind of box that would secure the top of a 2X2 or 2X4 to the desk, but the only remotely similar thing that Lowes carried was designed for building fences. As I was dithering, Barbara walked over to me with a pre-built table leg and said, "what about this?" Duh. The leg is nicely turned and has about 3/8" or so of 1/4 X 20 bolt sticking out of the top of it. In the other hand, she had a mounting plate threaded to receive the bolt, and with four screw holes for securing it to the bottom of the desk. We can trim the bottom to whatever length is necessary. Total damage: $44.00 for the 3'-0" X 6'8" solid core slab door and about $12 for two 8' 2X4s and the pre-built leg and mounting plate. With tax, about $60. We already had the 2X2s. Not bad for the materials needed to build twenty square feet of rock-solid work surface. Barbara has already put the first coat of stain on the door, leg, and mounting lumber. We'll probably build the thing next weekend. I watched Left Wing on NBC last night with Barbara. She's been watching it since it premiered. It's been acclaimed by many as the best new show of the season, so I decided to give it a try. I'd actually more-or-less seen several earlier episodes, but I was generally reading a book while it was on. Last night I decided to give it my full attention. It's not a bad show, if you can stomach the statist agenda. Well-written and well-acted, with quite a few likeable characters. It's not something I'd remember to watch if Barbara was absent, but I don't mind being there while she watches it. I post the following without comment:
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Thanks. I seem to have Microsoft Personal Fax working now, but I'll keep that in mind. Incidentally, if you want to try Microsoft Personal Fax, you can't get it on the Microsoft web site any more. But it is still available on numerous public ftp servers. Search for the filename fax_i386.exe.
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Friday, 7 January 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Yesterday was my first pure writing day in a long time. Other than reading and responding to email, checking my usual web sites, and writing a short update for this site in the morning, I wrote all day long. No building systems, no testing hardware. Just writing. More of that today, I hope. The new Plextor IDE CD burner seems to be making quite a stir, and that's understandable. Plextor has always been the Rolls-Royce of optical drives, and this is their first venture into IDE. I have a Plextor 8/4/32 IDE burner sitting on my desk. When I get a little free time I'll install it and see what I can find out. * * * * *
I'm not a Win9X guy, but I believe that generally when Win9X refuses to load DMA drivers that means that either the ATA interface or an attached device is not DMA-capable. Do you have another connected device that may not support DMA, or were you successfully running DMA before installing the Plextor? Actually, speed is probably the least important reason to run DMA. PIO-4 is more than fast enough to saturate any optical drive made. Where DMA really pays off is in reduced CPU utilization. The last time I did exhaustive tests, I ran a Maxtor hard disk in PIO-4 and DMA modes. In PIO-4, the drive when running flat out was sucking 80% of the CPU. When I enabled DMA, that dropped to about 1.6%, or 1/50 the CPU utilization. High CPU utilization is one of the reasons why it's so much easier to burn coasters on an ATAPI burner, so having DMA enabled can greatly reduce the number of coasters you make. * * * * *
Make sure that all sources are on a different channel than that burner. That is, if you're going to burn both direct from your DVD-ROM drive and from disk images on your hard drive, make the hard disk Primary Master, the DVD-ROM drive Primary Slave, and the Plextor CD burner Secondary Master. That ensures that whatever the source, it will always be on a different ATA channel than the burner. It's safe to put a tape drive as Secondary Slave. For that matter, it's safe to put a second hard disk on the Secondary channel, so long as you're careful never to burn with that second hard disk as the source. I don't know if NT will show higher throughput than 98 or not. When I get a moment, hopefully this weekend, I plan to install the Plextor 8/4/32 drive in my test-bed system. That system triple boots Windows 98, Windows NT4, and Windows 2000, so I'll be able to play around some. More likely, the way things are going, it may be the following weekend before I get to it, though.
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Saturday, 8 January 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Today is devoted to installing the mountings for Barbara's new desk and to building the new 2000-model IDE test-bed system. I may have more on this later today, but it's more likely to be tomorrow or Monday. We're off now to take Kerry to the vet for his continuing series of shots, which we hope will ameliorate his hip dysplasia problem. * * * * *
Thanks for the kind words. I've been meaning to get to that project, but a combination of missing components and no time has kept me from it. I agree that that product looks intriguing.
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[Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] We never did get around to installing the mountings for Barbara's new desk yesterday. They needed another coat of stain, and I think she wanted to put at least one coat of polyurethane on them. So we've deferred working on that until tomorrow. I spent most of the day building my new IDE test-bed system. Actually building the hardware took a measured 26 minutes from start to finish. The system is built around an Intel CA810EAL motherboard, which has embedded video, sound, and LAN adapters, and a Socket 370 FC/PGA Pentium III/550E. I also installed the Plextor 8/4/32A CD-RW drive and the Hitachi GF-1000 DVD-RAM rewritable DVD drive. The hardware went together with no problems, and booted perfectly the first time. Windows 98 installed with no problems. Then I installed Windows NT 4 Workstation. Everything worked properly until I installed the Intel Desktop Board utilities, when I started getting bluescreen errors at boot, telling me that there was a checksum error on wow32.dll. I'm not sure what's causing it, but I think it might have been IE4 (which was included in the Intel utilities) or Norton AntiVirus. Installing SP6a didn't help. After much experimenting, I upgraded to IE5, which may have solved the problem. It's hard to say for sure, because the bluescreens don't occur every time. Now, if I can find the Windows 2000 Professional Gold CD, I'm going to install it in the third partition.
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