I was wondering around a superstore the other evening when the black Windows Vista box caught my eye... It says there, right under where "Windows Vista Ultimate" is written, "The most complete Windows ever" or something like that.
What I would like to know is.... Why would anyone want an incomplete operating system? I don't care if it is the "most complete". I want an operating system which is "complete".
Still, I have to admit that the most expensive software purchases I have personally paid for in the past couple of years has been 2 retail boxes of Windows XP Professional. Of all the people I know personally who have tried Windows Vista (usually bundled with their computers), almost all of them have either purchased Windows XP or have somehow acquired a DVD. One person even considers installing XP Home an upgrade over the bundled Vista Home Premium. For all of Windows XP's flaws, it never drove people to install Windows ME. I have to confess that I haven't actually used Vista long enough to be as frustrated with it as those people but to be perfectly frank, Windows XP Pro does everything I need out of an OS when I need to use it.
There are a few new pieces of software which I will purchase in the near future when they are released: Mac OS 10.5 which I will probably buy the family pack and the expensive one: eComStation 2.0 - partly for nostalgia's sake but I also have a unopened, still in shrink wrap, Hopkins FBI for OS/2 which I have been thinking about trying for the past couple of years.

It looks like Kingston Technology is serious about their Lifetime Warranty on their products. A little under a week has passed since I had sent them the memory which had gone faulty - and it didn't cost me a penny. They paid for the FedEx shipping both ways. The replacement module looks a little different than the returned and the new modules I had purchased immediately after the failure: They all had identical track layout unlike the replacements. It all seems to work though. The machine has correctly identified the modules and so now it has 4.5G RAM.
On a little side note - I tried to post this message earlier today but the Google Blogger site appeared to be down for maintenance.

Yay, the new memory arrived. I am glad that I didn't splash out and only paid for the standard delivery - it arrived next day. The machine was getting a little slow without the memory even with a lighter workload than normal - the swap had grown to 1.5Gb after a day's use. I still need to get a RMA for the old memory so I can send it back for replacement...

Oh Joy.... The past few days, my Mac started crashing randomly, usually just applications or a MySQL test run would show that the server SIGSEGV. Quite annoying. Today, it locked up complely. Not even the mouse cursor could move and it didn't even show the MacOS kernel panic message. So enough was enough. I found the MacOS install CD and started the Apple Hardware Test. Kicked off the extended test and wandered away to do other stuff. When I came back, I was greeted with a message that the memory was faulty:

2MEM/1/4:DIMM3/J7000

It's well beyond the Fry's 30day replacement but definitely less than a year... so I will have to call Kingston on Monday for a RMA number for it. Meanwhile, I'll order some replacement memory so that the machine won't be crippled for too long... besides which, when the replacement memory comes back, I will have a bit more memory to do stuff with.

Yay! The new motherboard, CPU, RAM and PSU are npw installed into my home fileserver. Booting up and running straight after the major upgrade without a hitch, very nice how seamless FreeBSD makes the transition but there again, I expected that to be problem free. Sitting on my desk is the old motherboard, an Intel OR840 with a Pentium 3 800MHz processor: A real oddity by todays standards as the CPU is a Slot-A module and the RAM is RamBus 800 modules. There is a spare slot for a second CPU which is only populated by the termination card... as are half the RAM slots. Tempting to try to find a second CPU and perhaps I will splurge and buy eComStation to run on this odd motherboard. At least now, I will be able to update FreeBSD on the fileserver without worrying about carefully reapplying patches to allow FreeBSD to work without problems on the OR840.

Just when I was somewhat enthusiastic about swapping over my fileserver motherboard, I discover that my power supply is too ancient to support the new motherboard. Ho hum. So I have ordered a new PSU and it should arrive on the 5th. I was hoping to be able to do the swap during a day-off so theres minimal interruption.

Server upgrade imminent. I have purchased a new motherboard, CPU and RAM to replace the aging Pentium 3 + OR840 combo with 128MB RamBus RAM I am currently using in the server. The new motherboard is a SuperMicro PDSGE and will have a Pentium 4 650 and 1Gb of RAM. I am probably not going to use the new motherboard's on-board gigabit ethernet adaptor because of concerns about Intel's AMT technologies.... Heck, I may just place the AMD PC/Net PCI adaptor for the outward facing interface (Yes, that is the same adaptor I 'cloned' when I wrote my AMD PC/Net PCI emulation for QEmu which is incidentially also used by Xen when performing machine emulation). I may just use the on-board gigabit NIC for a direct crossover link to the Mac for fast jumbo frames. Meanwhile, I just have to make sure that I have everything - Likely to need a new PSU to power the motherboard. Will probably need a few new case fan, good practice to replace them anyways for a machine which practically stays on 24 hours a day.

Every now and again, I have to have a large sigh...


*** sighs ***


With the recent release from Perdue detailing a computer simulation of the 9/11 WTC attack, the fierce debates that it spawns as to the "It's an inside job" vs. "No it's not," camps and their arguments miss the point of the simulation.
I have looked at the short video clip and I would say that it seems plausible: I could imagine a aeroplane causing that kind of damage. It is also clear to me that the damage rendered to the core columns is inadequate to cause a complete structural failure of the whole building, especially considering that the aeroplanes hit quite high up on the building. There was relatively little load being supported by the core columns at that level.
Of course, the "Terrorists hate us" camp would trot out the argument that steel only needs to be heated up to half it's melting temperature in order to begin to warp and fail. Given that the buildings were hit some 400m above ground level, assuming that there was enough fuel burning to heat the core columns via radiation, and assuming that 100% of the radiation was absorbed with no radiative losses... for that heat to propagate down the core columns such that all the columns were heated sufficiently that a cascade "pancake" collapse would occur, hmm... after some scribblings on a back of a napkin.... assuming a rather light core column at an average cross section of .34 sq m per column... it would take as much energy as released in 18 million pounds of TNT to raise all the core columns to 800 degrees Celsius... Or expressed as a speed of a 747 aeroplane if translated into kinetic energy - about the same as if it was traveling at around 10,000 miles per hour.

Pretty fast, innit?

Oh well... People never let facts bother their perception of the world. Unfortunately, they let any idiot vote nowadays.

This is amusing... Ok, perhaps ironic, also prophetic... But quite definitely amusing.
Apologies to all those people who have seen it in March but here is the link:
George Orwell's former house surrounded by 32 CCTV cameras, all within 200 yards.

Delayed posting, originally for Monday 16 April, 2007

So much has happened during th past week but due to the happenings, I have not been able to post any news.
Easter Sunday at around 3:30am, my mother in law suffered a severe heart attack. She passed away early on Tuesday at about 4:30am. These events were completly unexpected due to the full exam she had a month ago and of her mere hours before the heart attack. We held her funeral and burial on Friday. There was quite a good turnout.

Now that Google has migrated Blogger to some new-fangled system, I can no longer write blog entries in my comfortable way - on my Palm organizer using Plogit whilst offline.
Pah!

Morons from Saturn... Sounds like a B film title but it is the reality of the total idiots at a certain car dealership in Cerritos. I would wager that the employees of their service department are completely unable to tell their ass from their elbows without the aid of a working diagnostic computer... Except that they are unable o READ or THINK in order to plug the wires in. As people would say in England... What a load of Plonkers.

Just realized that I haven't posted anything to the blog in a while and I had an old unposted entry in my Palm. This morning, I am having to bring the car to its service.

Funny how the optimism of what airlines tell their customers know no bounds. Here I am writing this entry and its already 6 minutes past the ticketed boarding time and there is still no aeroplane at the gate, yet they have only just changed status from 'on time' to 'delayed 20 minutes'. This is dispite the fact that the aeroplane is still in the air with passengers on its way here.
Kind of like trains in the UK.

Stuck in rainy Seattle. Yes, it did rain for a while earlier. I listened to it hitting the roof and windows. I still hear a few spots now.
I am returning back to Los Angeles today. It was nice to work and chat with Bran but I do miss Katie... and the messed up cat Sweety.
Here is a random thought which just struck me: Freedom is having a wide range of choices available and not having to make a decision.

It is somewhat facinating that Americans will debate the British origins of many English phrases without ever consulting an Englishman.
A case in point: The debate on the origin of the phase "Rule of Thumb" which people parrot as being a part of British Common Law permitting husbands to beat their wives, which is then used as an explanation as to why it is not written down. A few problems: English Common Law is written down as it utilises past precedent and that the earlist reference to "Rule of Thumb" as an defense for beating a wife in a case near the beginning of the 20th century. The best explanation is this: The phrase has its origins in the textile industry as a way to measure fabrics. Half the circumference of the thumb does approximate an inch. It was well established as a phrase when the English went to the New World. In the Americas, some pious preacher then invented the concept that it was ok to discpline an errant wife whereupon it entered into American folklore. That concept was then exported back to Britian at the turn of the 20th century through literature and by US servicemen who served in Europe.
Another thing which does irk me some is the ancient nursery rhyme which Americans know as "Ring around a Rosie". Here is the version I learnt as a child:

Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies,
ah-tishoo, ah-tishoo (like sneezing)
We all fall down

It is popular to attribute this rhyme as related to the Black Plague... However another interpretation which is not concidered much is the ancient pre-Christian practice of dancing around the maypole, which is an ancient fertility ritual.
Isn't history so much fun?

I was browsing cnet's news and I noticed that they posted some photos of the Collosus rebuild project. In the blurb, they failed to mention that the British had built several more of them for redundancy and increase throughput... and of course each later one carried improvements from the previous. If you're ever near Milton Keynes, it is worth spending a day at Bletchley Park. There is a computer museum there which has many working old computers, including an IBM PC model 5150, similar to the first PC that I owned. The Sinclair ZX-81 doesn't count as that belonged to my dad.

What a wonderful quote from Siân Berry of the Green Party (UK) on 29th Jan 2007:

"There will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards and whole computers ... Future archaeologists will be able to identify a 'Vista upgrade layer' when they go through our landfill sites."

Such insight! That is assuming that Vista is a consumer hit with existing computer owners...

So many projects I am iching to do, so little free time. I still believe my idea or a MySQL storage engine is viable. My ideas for an alternative computing platform. The OS/2 clone system. So little time.

Yet another root canal... Hopefully the last. This didn't go too badly but that is hindsight: I hate injections and the sounds and smell of metal cutting in to teeth completely fails to fill me with joy. I have a couple more check-ups in the future: With luck, they should now be uneventful.