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Today we are gathered to honour a truly outstanding computer, Plato.

The decision was made that Tzu would do nothing else except be a file server so a new workstation was needed.  Plato was first activated in 1998, the fourth of the Original Five.  At the time he was a used Pentium 166 with 32MB of memory running Windows 98 and he lived on top of Tzu at the back of C Bench.  He was built to be a workstation and a print server.  Following the delivery of a large speaker system Plato was given an additional task, one that would define him for much of his career: jukebox.  He was upgraded to 64MB and was fitted with a new Soundblaster Live! soundcard.

When Tzu was completely rebuilt in 2001, Plato was too.  His dirty AT enclosure was replaced by an austere ATX desktop, his enclosure for the next 8 years.  His processor was upgraded to a 266MHz Pentium II with 192MB of RAM, even the drives were all changed.  The only original component left was the Soundblaster card.  The operating system was switched to Red Hat Linux; Plato would proudly run various versions of Linux as a desktop OS for the rest of his service life.  By this time Plato also had a buddy, Aristotle, the last of the Five, who took over all of the print server duties, leaving Plato to excel as a Jukebox, but also to explore many varied and interesting jobs.  Around 2004, Plato received his final upgrade up to a Pentium III 800MHz with RAM increased to 384MB.

All through the years Plato worked constantly and tirelessly.  In all his configurations, his uptime was on par with Tzu and far exceeded the rest of the computers in the shop.  He was a complicated machine.  Although many of his roles were server-related, he was also used from time to time as a workstation.  He was never fitted with a RAID array and never had more than 60GB of storage.  Unlike towering, purpose-built units like Tzu, Plato had many roles throughout his service life.  He was a BNetd server, Teamspeak server, spill-over fileserver, webdav portal, print server, scanner, serial console, recovery station and disc tester, just to name a few.  He was once used as an emergency point of sale terminal (and temporarily ran Windows XP for a week).

Most of his roles became redundant following the restructuring of the shop.  Socrates took over the Jukebox, Calvin took over printing and scanning and Plato was relegated to media intake on suspect volumes, spending most of his time sifting through thrash metal and porn.  Still, when Tzu became full, Plato took over as Calvin’s backup host for a month while Tzu was sorted out.

Now that the 640GB array is fully operational, there are no more roles left for a machine like Plato to fill in the shop.  But this might not be the end for such a reliable machine.  A customer called the other day and was thinking of installing another point of sale terminal.  I told them I might have a used machine that’s up for the job.

And the easy way is Liveusb-creator.  Forget doing it with the shell.  You tell the thing to “take this live ISO and put it on this here flash drive.”  It even kindly leaves any original files on the flash drive for you.  Stick it into a computer that can boot USB and enjoy.

Here’s the history.

I’d been meaning to try out a live USB flash drive boot for a while now.  I use bootable CDs mostly, but if I can get what I need on to a flash drive that’s one less thing I have to carry.  You can do this with XP, indeed, there is a whole little subculture out there on the Internet using PEBuilder to cram as much XP as you can on to one bootable CD or USB drive.  The problem now is a stock copy of XP SP2 does not have very good driver support any more.  Now you can fix that by slipstreaming the drivers into a new build of XP, but that’s a lot of work for something you might only ever use on one computer.

This is not a problem with Ubuntu and Fedora.  Each distro releases at least once a year.  You don’t have to slipstream anything, just get the current Live CD.  Recently released Fedora 11, for example, is now years ahead of XP in terms of driver support.  Even on leading edge hardware, you are very likely to get complete drive controller support, complete network card support and probably full video support too.

i stepped on to a scale today for the first time in around five years.

no idea how accurate it is but that bastard said i was 160 pounds.

i haven’t been that light in ten years.  probably explains why i’ve had to tighten my belt in recent months.

admittedly, i’m also out of shape and decrepit.  it’s amazing how years of not moving right can pile up.  a back that’s sore after years of improper lifting.  wrists that ache after years of using tools wrong.  or maybe too much typing.  an ankle that acts up now and again because i turned it badly years ago.  and my neck has never truly recovered from the sprain or whatever i did to it.  i don’t think i was built for what i do.

but at least i’m not fat.

Years from now, when you’ve moved on to Windows 7, you’ll look back at Windows Vista fondly.

This from an executive at Microsoft.  Like the author of the post, my first thought was, “Oh, so Windows 7 is going to suck even more!”  I haven’t gotten around to installing the beta of it yet, but the early reviews aren’t exactly inspiring.  CNet actually referred to it as a “a more advanced iteration of Windows Vista.”  Ouch.

What I do find sort of interesting is even though Vista has been out since 2007, you can still buy Windows XP.  That should tell you something right there.

Being Friday, I decided to treat myself to some Chinese food since I haven’t done that in a while.  Walk down the street to Gene’s, where the phrase ‘Dinner For One’ is really a codeword for ‘Dinner For One Plus A Friend’.  $10 and two meals worth of food and Chinese always nukes up nice the next day.

After ordering the takeout, it occurs to me I have no plates left.  What this means is I have run out of Styrofoam plates at the shop.  The last one finally bit the bucket so now I have nothing to eat my food on.  Feeling sort of spirited, I decide to solve the plate problem once and for all.  I cross the street and head into Watson’s Chelsea Bazaar, a store which sells a wide variety of china and glassware.  Stratford’s downtown is kind of cool in this way.  If I wanted to, I could also buy a kilt, a t-shirt, a book, art, coffee, shoes, chocolate and a guitar — all on the same block, all without crossing the street.

Now you would think that a place with a pompous name like Watson’s Chelsea Bazaar would be expensive, but it’s not.  I head down into the basement where they keep all of the cool kitchen stuff and there I find a sassy square china plate of the exact size I want for only $5.75.  So I buy two of them (so they don’t get lonely).

Mmm… yummy Chinese food.  I even plate it carefully on my new flatware so I might enjoy the aesthetics of my new square plates.

Later on I’m working at a client site, an upscale restaurant (also downtown).  I’m in the larder in the basement when I notice a stack of plates, bowls and glasses on the floor.

“What’s with all the plates?” I ask the prep chef.  “Not exactly a clean place to keep them.”

“Those?  Naw, they’re all wrecked.  Customers don’t like getting food on a chipped plate.  Just haven’t got around to throwing them away yet.  If you want some of them, go for it, a lot of them are still perfectly useful…”

DOH!!!

I remember long ago having to drive a buddy to the hospital because he had hit his head on the edge of a table and was bleeding like a stuck pig.  The hospital waiting area was like a Terry Gilliam movie.  People with crying children right here please.  People dying of the flu over by this wall, try not to cough.  People bleeding to death please sit here and take a number.  It took us four hours to get out of there.

Obama, being the progressive fellow that he is, is making noises about upgrading the U.S. healthcare system, possibily even nationalizing parts of it (gasp).  Predictably, the anti-Democrat types are all over this, even running ads on T.V. to try to convince the public that nationalized health care is somehow worse than the abysmal American system.  They point to the Canadian healthcare system as an example of how bad nationalized healthcare is because, as we all know, it’s very easy to blame Canada.

Well, you can watch the ad on Youtube if you like.

Their spokeperson is Shona Holmes, a Canadian, who claims the Canadian system was going to make her wait six months to see a specialist for her brain tumor, but she only had around that amount of time to live.  So she went to the Mayo Clinic in Arizona and got her problem taken care of for $97,000 dollars.  Wait times are a problem in the Canadian health care system, but when you hear a story like that it makes you feel some outrage.  Holmes herself claims to be doing this for no money and for the good of the Canadian system.

She sounds earnest, but I think she’s being played like a chump.  This from Julie Mason of the Ottawa Citizen:

Still, I found Holmes tale both compelling and troubling. So I decided to check a little further. On the Mayo Clinic’s website, Shona Holmes is a success story. But it’s somewhat different story than all the headlines might have implied. Holmes’ “brain tumour” was actually a Rathke’s Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland. To quote an American source, the John Wayne Cancer Center, “Rathke’s Cleft Cysts are not true tumors or neoplasms; instead they are benign cysts.”

There’s no doubt Holmes had a problem that needed treatment, and she was given appointments with the appropriate specialists in Ontario. She chose not to wait the few months to see them. But it’s a far cry from the life-or-death picture portrayed by Holmes on the TV ads or by McConnell in his attacks.

Now, I have no way of being sure if Holmes’ story is any more accurate than this news article, but it does make one ponder.  Was her condition really that bad, or did she think it was that bad?  My friend in the hospital thought his condition was really bad, but in reality it was not, which is very likely what the triage nurse told the attending doctors.  By the time they got to him, the gash on his head had stopped bleeding on its own.  They stitched him up anyway, gave him drugs and sent us on our way.

So my question to Shona Holmes is, “How did you know you were going to die in six months?”  Did a doctor in Canada actually say this to you, or did you just reckon this on your own?

I know a couple who were with each other for a while, but now live on opposite sides of the planet.  They’re together to this day, just not physically.  Kind of like humanity’s relationship with the moon.  You can talk to her every night if you want to, but never be with her, until you find a way back …

Today was the day, in 1969, when humans landed on a different world for the first time.  The Apollo Program was quite possibly the greatest technological achievement in human history.  Not only were dozens of new technologies spawned as a result of the space program in general, it has been a source of inspiration to millions around the world, including me.

That’s the happy part.  The unhappy part is it took place 40 years ago.  In fact, the last lunar landing took place in 1972, a year before I was even born.  We’ve never been back since and can’t go back any time soon, even if we wanted to.  On paper, sure, we’ve got the tech, but the sad reality is:

• The Ares V, the only launch vehicle big enough to get us to the moon, isn’t expected to fly until 2018
• The Orion, the only spacecraft being designed to get us there, isn’t expected to be human-rated until 2015
• The Altair, the only spacecraft being designed to land on the moon, is still in the ‘concept’ phase.
• The whole Constellation Program is now being questioned as too costly.

It’s sad because we did all this four decades ago.  Perhaps saddest of all, is when you look at the components of the Constellation Program, they look remarkably like their Apollo counterparts, only slightly bigger.  It makes you wonder why they didn’t just brush off the old designs and put them back into service.  We know they worked.  Maybe upgrade the computers, put in some new seats…

It’s not a tech thing.  If people with 1960’s kit can get to the moon, 21st century humans should be able to.  It’s a willpower thing, which sadly, is something the world seems to lacking these days.

In a related vein, the Guardian has a good article on the astronaut everyone forgets: Michael Collins, the Command Module Pilot of Apollo 11.  Unlike Armstrong and Aldrin, he never went down to the surface of the moon.  Like many astronauts, he knew the LEM was a largely untested hack and he was worried his buddies would die down there because of it.  He was terrified of having to return to the Earth alone.

I found an interesting website which lists all the various things that have been spun off of the American space program.  It’s not just freeze-dried ice cream — a lot of things from microcomputers to the Dustbuster have been developed from technology NASA has used over the years to blast people into space.

Bios does not find proper hardware configuration — please check your system.

Such was a strange message one of my file servers gave me after I had cleaned it.  The message is actually being generated by a Promise SATA300 TX4 Serial ATA card, not the system BIOS.  It’s very annoying because not only does it not find any drives, the system will not go any further, meaning I can’t even boot up any diagnostic software.

Solution
The Promise card was grumpy because I had taken it and the network card out to clean around them and accidentally put them back into each other’s PCI socket.  It was probably unhappy with its IRQ assignment in the new slot and this was its way of telling me.  Switched around the two cards and it was happy as a clam.

Key system features:

• Pentium 3 500MHz
• Abit BF6 mainboard
• 256MB PC-100 SDRAM
• Promise SATA300 TX4 Serial ATA controller
• 3x Western Digital WD3200KS 320GB SATA hard drives
• one old 20GB Quantum Fireball PATA hard drive
• ATI Rage iiC AGP 8MB
• Dlink DFE530TX-A1
• LG DVDROM
• Fedora Core Linux

As a desktop it’s mostly useless.  As a fileserver, it works pretty well.

This hack is very cool: sampling tiny electrical fluctuations in the ground wires to determine what keys on a keyboard are being struck.

I had always wondered if you could glean information like that from the grounds, but had always dismissed it as impossible.  I was mistaken.  It’s a cool hack because you can inspect your computer all day for keyloggers and you’ll never find it unless you start to pull apart your wall outlets too.

If you think that’s evil, the second half of the article discusses how they can sample keystrokes at range with a laser.