OFF TOPIC blog

Special offer from the Geeks. Debranded HP computer for under $200! The thing comes with a 250gig SATA drive, 1gig memory, Lightscribe DVD burner, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 2.2 ghz 4200+ processor and motherboard with integrated video and lan plus 3 pci slots and one pci express slot.

Wow! just what I need at a price I can afford. Or so I thought.

First problem; no operating system. Normally that would not stop a computer guru, but this thing needs a 64 bit operating system. Some Linux software will support 64 bit hardware for cheap but if we want to use windows it will have to be Vista. XP will not work and Vista is not ready for prime time. Some hardware will support 32 bit as well as 64 bit but this is not one of those.

Second problem; drivers may be hard to find. That translates to mean that the integrated video and lan may not work due to missing software. No drivers, no workee.

Third problem; Lightscribe DVD burner. I was eager to get into using a lightscribe burner. Lightscribe is a system that uses the laser to label the disk. Trouble is lightscribe capable disks are about twice as expensive as normal disks. Oh well, can’t use the burner anyway. Don’t have drivers for it!

Now I understand what debranded means, junk.

Sometimes my PC problems seem as large as whales. Over time (generally about six months to a year) my new, high speed, computer slows down, reminding me of the performance of my old CPM system running a 4mhz Z-80 and 16K of ram. Never mind that it is a pentium 4, with 1.5 gig clock and 2 gig of ram. If it runs a Microsft operating system of any kind and has access to the internet, it will collect all sorts of garbage data and develop hooks into the system that defy explanation or reason.

No, you don’t restore normal operation by running Microsoft utilities or third party ‘fix-it’ software. The only sure way to restore performance is to delete the partition, wipe the hard disk completely, and start over with a fresh installation. Hence the term ‘Nuke the Whales’.

Over time this process has become easier and easier. Now with hard disk drive cloning software and very reasonably priced hard drives, it has become a trivial and less time consuming task. No longer is each application painfully reloaded and configured. We only have to do that once, then clone the disk drive. Later, when the working drive becomes ill, we just pull out the cloned drive, delete the sick drives partition, and clone the previously sick drive from data on the spare clone drive.

Yes we use a firewall. We also use Tine Personal Firewall, a program that alerts us to software trying to call home. Nowdays it is not just Microsoft who has a sometimes unjustified interest in a users computer and activities. I don’t mind software that checks for updates as long as it asks permission. Software that just takes over the computer and tries to do its own thing usually gets disabled and sometimes deleted. Vendors that pull that kind of privacy abuse are not above other abuse and cannot be trusted. Surprise, surprise, seems that Microsoft is one of the most frequent privacy abusers. Maybe they can play with your machine but I don’t let them into mine if I can help it.

As far as I am concerned Web Mail is the only way to do email. I use google web mail.

Normal email is ISP specific. You set it up with an email client program, fuss with setting POP and SMTP addresses, and other stuff including getting the program to learn the difference between spam and desirable email if the software has such function.

Once you have completed the standard setup your contacts list, emails that have been down loaded, and any other email specific information is stored on your computers hard drive on the computer you used to install the email software. You now have to be physically present at that particular computer or you will not be able to use the email feature to full advantage. Not only that but you are also tied to the ISP. Change ISPs and you also need to change your email address and let everyone know about the change. That is normal, standard email.

Web Mail takes all the email stuff you normally store on your local machine and stores it for you on a server provided for that purpose. Google provides the server at no charge to you for storing up to 6gig of email data. Now it no longer matters where you are or what computer you are using. You can use any computer anywhere in the world at any time. All you need is an internet connection and you have full access to your email system.

I have been using web mail for the better part of a year now. I particularly like the way google provides spam filtering. It works well and has completely eliminated any spam.

The system here is fully implemented with its own domain name and a few special features provided through google.

As it stands the system will support 100 email addresses and provide complete control over those addresses. You can activate, delete, or suspend any and all of the 100 addresses in your system. This feature becomes more important if and when you should start attracting spam. Normally spam is handled by the web mail software without need for any attention from the user. However sometimes an address will attract spam for whatever reason. You can ignore it but it will not go away. To make it go away you have to suspend the offending address and let it run open like that for a week or more.

An email address in suspension will result in bounced messages. Every email sent to the bad address will be sent back to the originator with a note declaring the address to be unreachable. Spammers will eventually remove such notes along with the addresses causing such action. Once all your spammers get the message, you will no longer be receiving any spam.

Now, if you wish, you can restore the emal address and its account.

Recently it came time to once again take a look at finding a use for some old computers. Several pentium II, pentium III, and better machines were gathering dust. They are worth more to me than anyone is willing to pay, so I keep them in hopes of finding a use for them.

Last week I decided to set them up with Debian Etch, Apache2, Mysql, PHP5, and Wordpress.

That was the start of an unexpected learning curve. I have been working with computers since the mid 1970’s. I thought I knew what I was doing.

The first problem was getting networking to work with Debian Etch. Every Linux installation I had previously done activated networking on boot. Once installed Debian Etch requires a user to activate networking after boot by selecting it on the GUI. This meant I would not be able to go with a headless, power-on to boot and activate system if I settled for the default installation.

Turns out the problem is due to a new bit of software called Network Manager. Intentions were good but results were bad. I would welcome anything that really does make networking easier but Network Manager just adds an additional level of un-needed and (in my case) unwanted complexity.

I un-installed the problematic Network Manager and returned my computer to sane operation. It now enables networking on boot without need for user intervention.

I read a flowery endorsement of the ‘New Opera Browser’ about a month ago. It was supposed to be the fastest browser around and the Opera programmers had learned their lesson regarding the low regard users have for adware and spyware. This new version of Opera was touted to be the best thing available. Adware and spyware free. So I tried it.

I use several desk top computers and one laptop. The laptop is an ibook so it was not effected by this browser fiasco. My desktops run XP, win98, and various versions of Linux. Only the XP and win98 desktops were effected. Primarily the win98 machines.

After I began using Opera on the win98 machines, these computers had trouble shutting down. There always seemed to be an undisclosed program running in the background that prevented a clean exit. I eventually discovered that I could restore these win98 systems to function normally by removing the Opera browser from the system. Evidently the Opera browser was initiating more than just a browser on startup.

The Opera people have had a long history of pushing adware and spyware onto the unsuspecting. I suspect that characteristic is in their genes and still as virulent as ever.

In retrospect one has to wonder what is in 4megs of software that a clean fast browser would need. That is 4 megs compressed.

Its back to Firefox for me. It might not be as fast or fancy or have a share of flowery endorsements but it does not hang up my win98 machines when I decide to shut them down.

Microsoft (and other software vendors) have been able to redeem themselves (somewhat) by offering free and automatic updates to their buggy software products. Errors and omissions can be corrected without having to go to the local computer emporium and buy additional software packages to correct the sins and omissions of programmers gone wild.

While this seemed to be a magnaminous gesture by vendors initially, it is becoming a royal pain in the ass to have a software vendor take control of your computer first thing after you turn it on in the morning. I could understand such activity if I were running a beta version of the software for evaluation, but the operating system is a full blown, officially released version of highly touted software that commanded a premium price when I bought it. At time of purchase there were no warnings about the vendor becoming a near dependent requiring the use of my computer. Had I know that in advance, I would have opted for something less demanding and more reliable.

Regular and frequent updates to officially released software products say volumes about the competence of the vendor. Sometimes I suspect that the convenience of the update mechanism encourages even less future competence since it is so easy to correct mistakes and omissions. Then there are the updates with suspicious titles like ‘Malicious software removal tool’. What Malicious software? Your buggy operating system is not exactly user friendly either! How ‘malicious’ does the software have to be before it qualifies for removal?

I also own an Apple laptop. Been a proud owner of the Apple for several years. Runs OS X. Apple updates their operating systems too. The last update occured over six months ago. Nothing since then. I guess they are not as concientious as Microsoft. Microsoft seems to offer updates on a daily basis.

Why bother to back up your software? If you have to ask that question, you probably have never lost any data to operator error or equipment failure. Hard drives have become inexpensive and reliable when compared to drives of twenty years ago, but they are still mechanical devices and prone to catastrophic failure.

We do our backups using Acronis True Image Home disk utilities. We prefer using the drive cloning utility exclusively. This requires the use of an extra hard drive, the cloned drive, but delivers the ultimate in backup reliablity and flexability.

Here is a condensed summary of the procedure. The main drive is cloned (exactly duplicated) using the drive utility. The target drive can be installed as the slave of the primary controller or as either master or slave of the secondary controller. Cloning takes about 30 mins for a 5gig partition. Once completed the cloned drive can be jumpered as the master in the primary controller. (The original primary master will need to be removed.) Then the system can be booted from the clone drive and function exactly as it did before off the original master drive. Note: When cloning ensure that the cloning mode selected preserves the data on the source drive.

Hard drive manipulation is made easy by the use of plug-in hard drive trays for each hard drive. This allows reconfiguration, replacement, installation and removal of both hard drives attached to a single controller without need to open the computer case.

Once the cloning process is completed, both drives are verfied for operation and the cloned drive is stored away for use in case of primary drive failure.

The drive to be cloned needs to be of sufficient capacity to receive the data from the main working drive. For instance if the main working drive has a capacity of 80gig but only holds 10gig of data, that data can be cloned to a 10gig drive. Of course if normal usage will cause the size of the data to grow, the size requirements of the target drive will grow as well. It is a good idea to use a cloned drive that is either the same size as the drive to be cloned or larger.

The main working drive is normally identified as drive C: or hda0: or drive 0 in the bios and is jumpered to be the master drive in a two drive IDE system. The target drive is identified as the slave drive if it is running off the same IDE controller as the main working drive. The target drive can be either master or slave if it is running off the secondary IDE controller.

Backups are done to preserve data that, once lost, needs to be reconstructed in the same way it was accumulated originally. In the past, when data storage was expensive, it was considered adequate to backup only the data. Operating systems, application programs, preference files, could all be reloaded from their distribution disks or reconstructed with little effort. This may have been true when operating systems were distributed on a couple of floppies and applications were single floppy affairs. Nowdays we have operating systems and applications requiring gigabytes of hard drive space taking many man hours for reinstallation and configuration. Today it makes sense to backup everything, even the operating system and applications programs.

Current backup software allows backups to be generated by file to file copy, creation of image files of entire partitions, and cloning the entire hard drive. Some backup schemes suggest creating an image file and storing it on a special partition of the drive being backed up. Such action is justified by the convenience afforded in the recovery mode. Should data be corrupted through operator error, a restore can be accomplished merely by reloading the image file as though it were a simple, large, data file. Similar convenience is had in creating the backup image file in the first place and the entire backup process can be easily automated and executed without any operator intervention or physical moving or reconfiguring of hard drives. However, such a scheme does not protect against mechanical hard drive failure. Since the backup may be housed on the primary drive, it is subject to loss in the event of a mechanical hard drive failure. Obviously, the backup could be stored to a second hard drive to reduce the risk of loss, but that drive will have to be energized continuously along with the main drive for this backup scheme to work. Drives that are run continuously are much more likely to fail than drives that are cloned and stored in reserve.

That is why we are using drive cloning to create backups.

Junk messages welcoming you to an unknown service which you did not join. Inviting you to log on to an IP address and set up your personal password etc.

It may be legit. Could be someone is using your email address. Just to be safe I have blacklisted all the IPs involved.

VOIP stands for voice over Internet Protocol and the capability has been around as long as the internet. In its basic form VOIP allows you to ‘talk’ over the internet. All that is required is a sound card equipped with speaker and microphone. Free software such as Skype takes care of the interface in the computer and all a user needs is the IP address of the person he wishes to contact. Of course, both parties need to be similarly equipped and using Skype.

Skype is a very basic VOIP software and has very limited application to normal telephone communications or telephone numbers. However, with additional effort VOIP can replace normal telephone service.

DSL is a broadband application that normally requires a telephone line. The DSL broadband connection operates independent of normal telephone use. You may use the telephone normally while using DSL at the same time. DSL is fast enough to support VOIP but since you need basic telephone service in order the get DSL, there is no need to have basic telephone service in addition to VOIP.

VOIP is more attractive than normal telephone service in that it can be far more economical. Basic telephone service averages about $30 a month as compared to basic VOIP service at about $20 a month. VOIP is cheaper but it is also more capable. All those extra features that the phone company likes to sell as optional extras are included in the basic VOIP setup. Also included in basic VOIP is domestic long distance. No extra charges for long distance calls made to locations in the continental U.S. So, assuming you need lots of optional extras and are a heavy user of long distance calls, the VOIP compares very favorably against a normal monthly telephone fee as high as $50.

However the real savings is obtained by using VOIP and CABLE to replace normal telephone service and DSL. When you consider basic DSL at $30 a month, combine that with basic telephone at $30 a month, it compares on par with basic cable modem at $40 a month combined with VOIP at $20 a month. The costs are about the same unless you add in another $20 a month for VOIP over DSL in the first example.

Never mind that you get additional functionality with VOIP regardless of where it is used, would you rather pay $80 a month for DSL, Phone, and VOIP or $60 a month for CABLE and VOIP. Both solutions offer the same features but the DSL, VOIP solution is $20 a month more expensive.

Both solutions will save on long distance charges but why throw away an additional $20 a month?

Imagine my surprise when a well known ISP began to bundle DSL and VOIP services. Evidently they are betting that most consumers are not smart enough to avoid throwing away $20 a month.

I like variety. The header pictures on this site rotate randomly among pictures of ham gear, vacations, and some of the QTH.

The rotator is PHP code that I found on the internet. The pictures are formed using Paint Shop Pro.

The header has a 720 by 200 format (give or take a pixel or two). You will want to preserve that aspect ratio to minimize distorting the picture.

You need to save a copy of the normal Kubrick header. Plain blue background is fine. I found my header among the files of the Kubrick theme. I was also able to get a header template by trying to use kubrickr. Kubrickr is a web based header creation utility. It requires you to upload pictures to flickr, set the tags and license data properly, then select the picture, crop the section of interest, and save the result which should be a kubrick header. This would not work for me reliably. I kept getting a blank (black) header image. It works fine for a template to be used by Paint Shop. The Paint Shop solution is faster and everything is done locally on your computer.

Call up Paint Shop and browse to the directory containing your pictures. Select a picture and crop it to the 720 by 200 aspect ratio. Save the cropped portion by going to EDIT and selecting COPY.

Now open the file containing the copy of the Kubrick header you saved earlier. Select the magic wand from the menu at the left of the screen. Move the cursor to the area inside the header and click the mouse. A dashed line should appear around the active area of the header.

With the dashed line flashing, go to the EDIT function and select PASTE, further select PASTE INTO SELECTION. Wait until the picture appears in the header. It might take a couple of seconds.

Now save the new header to a file using SAVE AS. Give it a unique name.

That is it. New header picture is ready for upload to the server.

There are probably other ways of doing this. Maybe even better ways of doing this. The method described here works for me and is easy.

I am not sure what caused the problem. I am not even sure what was done to ‘fix’ it. I am just glad to be out of plug-in hell.

A couple of weeks ago the blog got updated to new wordpress software. Everything seemed to survive the upgrade except the image rotator.

Some time ago I decided to incorporate a header image rotator in my basic Kubrick theme. Something to spice up the bland theme and make it more interesting. It worked great.

As time went on I added a few other plug-ins that seemed to work and cause no problem.

The problems did not start until the wordpress upgrade.

Now, four weeks later, I finally got the image rotator working thanks to the intervention of a skillful hacker. Seems the CSS template was being overwritten by some thumbnail plug-in. Seems also that the WP-Cache plug-in was preventing HTML updates. Not sure which was the real correction or why those things did not seem to be issues under the old wordpress. I am just glad things are back to normal.

The lesson learned here is that if you don’t have time to fool with things that don’t really matter, then stick with an unmodified theme.

You use plug-ins at great risk. They are risky because they are not managed and are probably not even written by programmers. Any fool can write code that works but it takes someone with knowledge and programming skills to write code that works under all conditions. When you have a multitude of people all writing code the others are not aware of, you have a tower of bable situation.

The knowledgeable elite among us will say, ‘Well, you should look at the code in a plug-in before using it’. If I knew the code well enough to find problems, I would be writing my own and not have to use a plug-in.

So, you see, the elite recommendation is not just worthless but an affront to everyone who receives it. It is like telling people that the way to avoid an accident is to make sure they are not there when it happens.

Not sure how this happened but for some reason I disabled the cookie function in my browser last night.

Today I found that I could not log on to my blog. I entered the user name and password but instead of allowing me access, I got the login page again with blank user name and blank password.

Took a while to figure out what was going on. Had I not remembered disabling the cookie function I might still be fussing with the thing.

Now I need to see what it was that made me decide to disable cookies in the first place. Must have had something to do with unwanted ads.

I remember when I considered myself lucky to own a 100mb hard drive. I just can’t remember exactly what year that was but I definately recall that it was NOT FREE.

I just redeemed a card for a FREE 1GIG USB Stick at the Micro Center. One Gigabyte!!!! That is 1000 mb or ten times the size of my 100mb hard drive.

It is hard to understand how they can stuff that much memory into such a small space. The thing is about two inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide. I just hope none of those bytes fall out. I would never be able to stuff them back in again.

It even works on my old win98 machine. Formated out to 967mb. I don’t even feel cheated that it did not format out the full 1gig.

My very first hard drive was in an IBM PC. It was only 10mb worth of storage and cost over $300. It was also the size of a small shoe box and took up a full sized 5-1/4 inch drive bay. That was around 1980.

Had someone told me then that I would be getting a free 1000mb USB memory stick that could fit in my pocket, be portable, and work like a hard drive but not have any moving parts, I would have thought they were nuts.

I have a number of computers all tied to a local area network with all of them capable of accessing the internet. Most recently this included my best computer an Athlon +1800.

I use the Athlon for my ham radio activities and it serves as a digital mode interface as well as a TV receiver and multimedia machine.

To make it work as well as possible as a multimedia machine I was finally forced to install XP.

XP must open a huge conglomeration of useless servers because a simple installation including SP1 and SP2 results in 21 processes hard at work trying to use all the cpu cycles my machine can provide. They are useless because I don’t know what they do and Microsoft is not willing to tell me. My guess is that most of them are data miners that have no business being there.

Recently I discovered that the ham radio computer does not need to have internet access. Furthermore, It does not need access to the LAN. It can do its job very well as a stand alone ham radio dedicated machine. File sharing is done with a portable WD Passport.

So, after doing a clean re-installation of XP I now have it running as a stand alone. The only way it can access the outside world it through the radio.

That prevents me from getting automatic updates on application and systems software, but I never felt comfortable allowing folk of questionable trustworthiness unrestricted access to my computer with no questions asked.

Some may say that is a bad idea. It will not allow security updates and may make the system less secure. Not so. I have no need to protect this system from a security standpoint because it is not connected to the internet.

Besides, folk who sell faulty software demonstrate a complete disregard for their customers. Would you allow such people unlimited and unsupervised access to anything you own?

My guess is that I now own the most secure XP system in the entire world without need for updates automatic or otherwise.

If you are sufficiently computer literate to get on the internet, you probably already know what firewalls are supposed to do and why they are called firewalls. However you may not understand how they are best installed and used.

I often hear the computer novice claim that his router has a firewall that is fully operational and protects his computer. It is not until he answers a few questions about how it got installed that he discovers he is not as well protected as he thought.

When you consider firewall installation and setup, the novice nearly always is daunted by the need for a list of all the IP addresses and services that should be blocked. This is a backwards approach. You don’t block unwanted IPs and unneeded services. You block everything. Then you enable IPs and services on an ‘as-needed’ basis. How can you tell something is needed? Well, one way is to launch your program that needs external access. If it works, all is well (maybe). If it does not work, then it may require an address or port be allowed to pass through the firewall.

Even that is a rather tough way to set up your firewall. It is better than researching for all the addresses and services that need to be blocked, but it requires a good knowledge of your application software and its requirements to create access through the firewall for a specific purpose.

It would be nice to have a program that identifies application software seeking external access. I use Tiny Personal Firewall to do that.

Tiny Personal Firewall is a program that runs in the background under windows and identifies and alerts when application programs attempt to gain external access. There are other programs like Tiny Personal Firewall that provide a similar function but I am only familiar with Tiny.

As with all good firewall installations, the Tiny installation blocks everything initially. Then, as applications make themselves known, the firewall allows you to grant access either one time or permanent and allows you to customize the access as well.

I consider programs like Tiny Personal Firewall to be an important part of a complete firewall. They take care of programs that try to call home.

I would also recommend the use of Ad-Aware to clean out software that is adware.

More good information on firewalls and firewall testing can be found here

It was working so well too.

I have been using Debian Etch now for a number of weeks. Recently I decided to load it onto an additional two computers. I used the same netinstall CD I had used for a prior install but the install failed. The failure was an Xwindows server problem. Actually, there were several Xwindows server problems. The mouse and kbd modules could not be found and the sim links to the font files lead to never land.

I figured it was something having to do with the stuff that was downloaded after the base system was installed. Either the Xwindow package got hosed or the installation program got hosed. I was more interested in installing Debian on the new computers than I was interested in troubleshooting something that broke for no reason. So I downloaded the first full .iso file for CD number 1 and burned a disk. Then used that disk to start a new installation.

That worked. I still don’t know why it worked or why the netinstall failed. At least now I have an installation disk that can’t be screwed with.

Several months ago my son-in-law presented me with a 128mb flash memory device. The idea is to plug it in to a usb port and instantly get 128mb of quick, removeable, storage.

128mb is not really large enough to serve as a system device , but it is plenty to turn a marginal 64mb, memory limited machine into something useful.

Just use the usb flash as memory by assigning it the windows swap file location or make it the swap partition in a Linux application.

Works well and is just as good as adding an additional 128mb of ram.

Hard go believe it is a new year again. I guess it is actually the first day of the first month of a new year.

Got to hope this year will be different but I have a feeling it will be much like most years before it. The same people making fools of themselves, the same militants seeking to destroy the opposition, the same criminally insane claiming God speaks to them, in short SSDD. Or in this case SSDY.

Ah but there is a silver lining to those dark clouds. I got lots of toys for Christmas. Carrying bags for the iBook, a nice robe, a nice red cap that has a Durango label across the top, a nice pullover that appears to be made of fleece, an assortment of used hard drives varying from 8gig to 60gig in size, lots of fine lesser gifts, and a Western Digital Passport.

I have been cursing XP for so long I have forgotten that it can be a very nice chunk of software at times. Passport installation was a matter of plugging it into one of the USB 2.0 ports and booting the computer. After logging on I got a balloon message telling me windows found new hardware. Some time later, I got another balloon message telling me that windows had installed the new hardware.

No problems at all and no need to find drivers, or load software, or howl at the full moon. My first thought was that XP is not so bad after all. After reflecting on that for a few seconds it suddenly became clearer to me why I dislike most Microsoft stuff.

Balloon messages are not only childish, they are also worthless. Hence they have no redeeming features or rights to exist.  I find it troubling  that Microsoft continues to waste my time and computer resources on useless triviality while apparently forgetting to tell me about things that matter.   I did not need the computer to tell me it found new hardware. After all, I was the one who installed it. Then, if it was going to automatically load the required drivers why tell me about it. I got better things to do than watch a computer pat itself on the back.

This is the sort of annoying, needy, activity one often finds in people who are so hopelessly incompetent that they have to take out full page ads in the paper to let the world know when they stumble across something they have done correctly.

At least that is my take on the situation.

Now the Passport is quite a different story. It looks to be built around a 2.5 inch drive and I have no idea where they put those 120gig of data. Having had mixed results when using Western Digital products in the past, I just hope the thing lasts long enough for me to be able to fill the drive more than once.

I finally got Windows XP Professional. Tested it out on a 1.5 gig Athlon and a 6gig hard drive. The objective was to get a windows based media computer with PVR capabilities but mainly be a DVD processor. Use of a more capable operating system was also an objective. I was getting tired of having to search for programs that did not depend on the capabilities of XP. Although there is lots of stuff that will run under win98, most of the really neat stuff requires XP.
XP installs as quickly as previous versions of windows but a fresh install with default security settings is not usable by people who connect to the internet. Took an additional couple of hours to secure things and get the right look and feel. I like the classic windows 98 look and feel. The default XP stuff looks childish to me.

I saw the warning about allowing sufficient disk drive space and I promptly ignored it. To make matters worse, I ended up moving a bunch of stuff to the XP drive and forgot about it. Over 2gig of space ended up being occupied by video files. So when I opted to save previous configuration before installing SP1a, I quickly ran out of disk space.

Time to find a large disk drive. I suppose I could have made the 6gig work but I did want this thing to be a media machine. By this time I had decided that XP was going to be run on everything that would run it. That included three computers in a network of seven. The Dell in the front room came with XP home and was now running win98 and using two hard drives, a 10gig and a 20 gig. I decided to clear out the data from the 20 gig and use it as the XP media machine drive.

By 2am I had everything installed and working. Things ran at a good speed indicating there were no hangups to speak of. No programs waiting on a hung serial or ethernet connection. Right after I finished installing the latest updates to Nero 6.0, the network quit working.

My network is as crufty as my software. It all limps along at 10meg and sometimes it stumbles. The next morning I did the various resetting of routers and switches and pulled on cables and such. All to no avail. Then I unplugged the network cable (still using rg58 thin net) from one of the unused desktop machines. Network came right up. That has happened before but the cable got plugged in again and forgotten. Things were fine until last night.

I have no idea what is causing this. Could be invisible gremlins. Most likely it is a bad or flakey network card.

Shades of Gomer Pile.

I too was surprized today. No, not pleasently. At least I was not please when I was surprized.

I just love those email clients that squelch spam.

I use Thunderbird and so far it has done a fair job in eliminating stuff I did not request.

Today I decided to check up on some free blogs I started on the WordPress site. About a month ago, I got creative and created over a dozen free blogs on the free hosting Wordpress site. Sort of let my creativity pig out. Sorry, wordpress folk, I just could not resist. Since then I have come to my senses and realise that if these child blogs are to have any reasonable future, I need to invest in some more domain names and add them to the server this thing uses.

It had been about a month since I had any activity on these sites. That is far too much time for my memory cells. I had no idea what the password was and had not written it down. That is probably good because as I understand it, you are not suppose to write down passwords.

So I had to use the ‘recover password’ feature that WordPress allows. Having spent the last week with Gallery2 I figured that WordPress also would allow changing passwords on-line. No, it don’t work that way and there is nothing documented to tell you otherwise. You figure that a user flakey enough to loose his password also qualifies for special newbie treatment. No, you are just dumped into the dark to fend for yourself.

The password was recovered. Well actually, the password was changed and the change was deliver in the form of an email which my email client decided was spam, so I never got to see it.

It was not until I brought up a new Debian-Etch machine, installed an mail client on it, and tried, once again to get onto my ‘free’ wordpress accounts that I realized what was happening.

Okay, okay, I know, it is all my fault for being stupid. I still think there are things that could be done externally to keep us from being so stupid.

Like making the ‘turn on cookies’ request on the login screen go away after cookies are turned on. Or informing the user that there will be two emails. One to validate and the other containing the new password.

One of these days I am going to leave well enough alone. Today I am going to bed early. For the past four evenings I got into the biggest mess yet with the Gallery installations.

I have three Gallery2 ver 2.1.2 installations. Two on the LAN and one on this server. All three of them got screwed up before I figured out how to fix them.

It all started when I decided I wanted bigger thumbnails spaced closer together than what the default would allow. Seemed easy enough to do but somewhere along the line the WPG2 widget quit displaying thubnails.

The next few nights were spent recreating thumbnails for nearly 1000 pictures over, and over and over……I think you get the idea.

I never did figuire out what I did wrong or didnt do right. I could not figure out how to get back to where I started by fiddling with configurations. Guess, maybe it would have been a good idea to save the working configuration before tweaking it. I ended up deleting everything and starting over.

I still dont know what caused the problem. Most likely playing with stuff I did not fully understand. The fix was to re-install and not mess with the default setup.

All three WordPress/Gallery2 installations are now working. I am not looking forward to any ugrading anytime soon.

Trying to upgrade this combination on the production server was the pits. I finally just uploaded a new, virgin copy of Gallery2 into a seperate Gallery2 folder and started from there.

Afraid to do any tweaking now for fear of loosing the thumbnails again. WPG2 without thumbnails is the pits. Although I know you can run it that way. I can’t imagine why anyone would run it without thumbnails.

Now I need to see about backing up the Gallery2 database containing the photos. I can see how loosing that would be a big deal.

This has got to be as neat as WordPress. Gallery is a picture or photo gallery equivalent of blog software. At least that is what it appears to be to me. Uses php and mysql.

I just recently got it running on a LAN using my favorite ’sandbox’ machine on the local network. I also have an earlier version of Gallery installed on this host. If you are curious, you can access it at http://www.k5dkz.com/gallery . There are some baby pictures there right now. Soon there will be some ham radio related files. Scans of past magazine articles that I have permission to post. Manuals for some of the more popular boatanchors. None of this stuff is in competition with other sources. I am doing this mainly as a convenience for myself. If others find it convenient as well, so much the better.

I need to update the gallery software on the server to gallery2 so that I can use the WordPress plugin that allows selection and inclusion of pictures from gallery2 into posts (like this) and pages under WordPress.

Spending time on the sandbox with new software is very helpful in determining how to use new stuff and helps prevent messing up the on-line site.

So far here is what a newcomer (me) to gallery has surmized (learned), and experienced.

It probably is a good idea to password protect the main gallery.

It is a good idea to have more than one user registered. Maybe even have more than one user with admin priviledges.

Forget using the network (samba shares) to upload and download. I have several win98 machines and several debian machines on the network here. Samba shares works, sometimes. Other times I get into permission and password problems. Then, the fact that my host is not on an LAN samba share pretty much indicates I should be using ftp.

So that is what I did. Use ftp and make sure you can log onto the target computer or computers. (I have two ’sandbox’ gallery installations on two debian machines.)

Also use ftp to upload photos. You don’t have to do it that way. You can also upload photos via browser by browsing for file names on your computer, but that is a very slow and tedious way of uploading because you have to select each and every file individually. You can zip all those files and upload one zip. That is a little faster but you still have to zip the files.

The best way I have found is to process the photo files and put them in an upload directory on the local machine. Here you can view them. Make sure they are what you want. Edit where needed. Massage everything to look like what you need the new album to be. Then upload the entire directory via ftp to a specially defined directory on the gallery server. That specially defined directory can be specified on the admin general setup page. The directory and path must first exist on the server.

Once that has been accomplished, merely select ‘from local server’ when you get to the point where you are adding items to an album. That term ‘local server’ is a little misleading. It has to do with references. In this case ‘Local’ refers to the locale and machine that is running the gallery software as a server. It does NOT refer to your locale. So, you see, the ‘local server’ could be in a galaxy far, far, away as long as you can communicate with it and ftp to it.

So, you have selected the ‘from local server’ option. Now select ‘find files’. It will list all the files in the directory that you have defined. This is your last chance to make sure these are the files you want. Scroll down to the bottom of the list and you can select all the files in the list by checking one box. Then select ‘add files’ and wait. Or come back later.

If you do mess it up, you can always erase any individual files that got uploaded by mistake. You can also erase (delete for good) complete albums, sub-albums, or the entire gallery. So be careful.

Setting up mysql for wordpress.

I have a local area network in my house. There are several computers on this LAN, one of them runs Debian-Etch and serves as a sandbox. A sandbox is a term used for many things. In this case it is a LAN blog based on wordpress.

The machine running this sandbox is also capable of being used as a standalone blog machine. It can be removed from the LAN and the blog can be viewed, maintained, and used through a browser working into the blog machine under Linux.

Here is a sequence of commands required to setup a fresh installation of mysql to work with the wordpress software.

First we make sure that mysql is running. If you don’t get the results below, it may not be running. In that case try:

/sbin/chkconfig mysqld on

or

/sbin/service mysqld start

Now set up the root password for mysql

mysql -u root mysql

mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD(’root_pwd’) WHERE user=’root’;

note: root_pwd should be the password you want to use. Also, don’t forget the ‘ marks and the ; at the end.

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

mysql> quit

The password is now set. In the example above it is root_pwd.

Now log back on and create a wordpress database.

mysql -u root -p
password=root_pwd

mysql> create database wordpress;
mysql> show databases;

Make sure that the wordpress database is displayed.

mysql> grant all on wordpress.* to ‘root’@'localhost’ identified by ‘root_pwd’;

If mysql does not accept the commands, it could be you left off the ; at the end of the command. The ; identifies the expression as a command. Also, don’t forget the ‘. The ‘ is the character below the ” and is located on that same key of the keyboard.

After having absolutely no problems running any version of Debian it was about time that something went south.

On installing Debian-Etch on an old Cyrix 266mhz, 198meg ram, computer with a Sceptre monitor and A50 graphics card, I had trouble getting the xserver to work correctly.

This computer and monitor combination works just fine under win98se with the A50 drivers and the monitor forced as a SuperVGA 1280×1024.

The Debian-Etch installer does much to automatically identify hardware. There was no way it was going to identify the Sceptre monitor. Even I have not been able to do that conclusively. However, I would have thought that it would be able to identify the A50 card as being a sis6326 type graphics card. It did that but it turns out that does not work. What it needed was a manual selection of the VESA driver instead.

After several hours of installation we finally got to see if the xserver was going to work. When it failed, we were left with a messed up screen and no clean way to fix it. So we powered down, rebooted and came up in single user maintenance mode.

We had to use the root password to log in.

Once in we issued the following command - dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.

After defaulting to nearly everything we manually selected the graphics card as being a VESA type and manually selected the monitor as being a supervga 1024×768 and defaulted to the maximum resolution possible.

That worked.

I have been using Debian Sarge, the latest stable release, for some time now on two computers. It has been stable. At least I have not experienced any incidences that I would consider unstable.

Still, I have always been wanting to upgrade to the 2.6 kernel. Debian Sarge uses the 2.4 kernel. The 2.6 kernel has some nice features that are missing from the 2.4 kernel.

So, I decided to investigate what it would take to upgrade. Forget it. Too much effort for an upgrade. Which is a real disappointment because I was so happy to find such a nice net installation for Sarge.

Well, there is also a nice net installation for Etch, the 2.6 version of the kernel. The best way (for me) to upgrade was to nuke everything in the 2.4 version and start over by installing Etch. That was easy for me to do since I did not have much invested. I did have mysql, apache2 and wordpress installed but those things are easy to reinstall. Much easier that it would have been to try and upgrade from the 2.4 kernel.

This is more of a why-to than a how-to about using Mythtv and FC5 to build a PVR. Personal Video Recorder.

For those who dont know, let me explain. It all started with TIVO. TIVO is a digital recording device that can be programmed to record multimedia content off TV and radio. Programming is as simple as selecting material from a graphical presentation and deciding if single or multiple episodes should be recorded.

A PVR is also a digital recording device but not as intelligent as a TIVO.

Linux is a Unix like operating system that can be used to build a TIVO like system using Mythtv. Linux and Mythtv are free software. TIVO and PVR are expensive to own or rent. A Linux/Mythtv system is much more affordable and can do more that even the TIVO. It can automatically skip commercials while acting like a TIVO.

Regardless of which system is used, it is nice to be able to service both broadcast and cable TV. In most cases this is a mute point because cable includes local broadcast stations, but what if it does’nt. That is my situation.

My PVR is running on an Athlon 1800 with 256meg ram, 80gig hard drive, and Hauppage PVR-250 card.

It takes input from my old TV antenna, decodes the signals, and allows me to choose which programs to record and/or watch. That is it. Nothing more.

I already have a dish network setup using a PVR they supply and that setup handles all the cable stuff. I dont have the local channels included in the cable setup because I could not justify paying for something I already had and putting up with a second dish just for local channels.

My original intent was to use the Linux/PVR to replace the rented PVR but it turned out that was not a viable option. First, 80gig is not a large enough hard drive. Then there was the problem of controling channels. I do have an rf remote to handle the cable stuff but the Linux/PVR is in a seperate room and is IR. No problem, I just run a cable with an IR led on the end to the front of the dish network box and let the computer handle the channel select. The dish network box will respond to IR as well as RF remote control.

I never got that far. Mainly because I only had 80 gig of storage on the hard drive. To make an overall system work, I would need at least 200gig and a couple of 250gig drives would have been ideal.

That probably won’t happen anytime soon, so I am using the Linux/PVR system for local programing only.

Does it work? Yes, indeed! Works great. It also allows me to move media content from the PVR to the Linux system so that I can make DVDs and recordings of the cable programing.

However, if I had to do it again, I would go for a faster computer and most definately shoot for at least 300gig of total hard drive storage as well as invest in a dual channel TV receiver card.

Then, I could get rid of the DishNetwork PVR which I am still renting for 5 bucks a month.

I have always wanted a laptop. Now through the generosity of a productive son-in-law I am the proud owner of a well cared for, optimized, and updated iBook complete with brand new battery, power pack and wireless networking.

My last exposure to Apple was decades ago when I became the not-so-proud owner of an Apple II. Back then the only serious personal computer was an IBM. Even though the IBM PC was not really more capable than the Apple II, there was lots more business software available for it. Apple II was considered more of a toy or games machine.

Over the many years between then and now Apple did some major growing up. Apple grew up nearly as much as IBM PCs aged ungracefully.

When you consider that the iBook is over five years old and still offers features only found on the priciest of laptops offered by ‘the other guys’, you have to admit that Apple is serious about being in the computer business.

My five year old iBook runs the new OS X operating system without ANY changes to the hardware. No hardware upgrades at all. That is something unheard of in the competitions products. Sometimes even minor upgrades in hardware require accompanying upgrades in software at extra cost. Also, there has never been an operating system upgrade made available by the competition that did not also require pricey new hardware. Not upgrades but entirely different hardware.

I have to admit that Apple has certainly evolved into a technology leader from the ‘me too’ position it held with the Apple II. Its lead includes software as well as hardware. The newer Apple products are a complete computer solution. They also appear to be designed with the user in mind. Any flashiness is on the screen or in the capabilities, not in fadish physical design features that later become outdated eyesores.

There is something just intuitively right about having one outfit manage both hardware and software development to a specific set of goals and specifications. You put the hardware and software people together in one room and don’t let them out until they have a solution. No blame game, no finger pointing, no conflicts of interest or playing one against the other for undeserved profit.

The end result is a loyal satisfied customer base who knows that their interests are better served by a complete solution. Customers who do not mind paying a premium up front because they know it will pay dividends in the long run with planned obsolecence less of a factor. No wonder Apple stock has had a consistently upward growth trend which will probably continue.

My first impresssion of the iBook is ‘Wow, now I see what it is like to work with a real computer!’

The iBook is the first machine that I would trust to work for me instead of the other way around.

Those commercials touting Apples’ ‘ready-out-of-the-box’ feature are not an overly optimistic view of the product. When I think of all the hours wasted over the years playing games with device drivers for bleeding edge hardware, resolving undocumented incompatibilities, and enduring seemingly endless security hole plugging updates, I really regret not having given Apple a second chance until now.

I dont work for Apple or have any relationship to the company. Besides, you don’t know me from Adam, so my endorsement would be meaningless. However, if you are ready to stop rendering aid to a needy collection of sometimes poorly documented computer hardware and software, try an Apple product. They work for me. I bet they would work for you too.

Three lines of code, a flickr account, user_id, and tags, all stuffed between a couple of iframe tags and you have a slide show of selected pictures.

The actual program that does all the work is at the flicker site. This code merely uploads some variables and provides a local iframe.

It makes a call to www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=xxxxxxxx@N00&tags=yyy

All iframe options are available. Width and Height being the more significant.

I suppose you could use someone else’s user_id and tags. I am a little reluctant to try that. Certainly not without permission.

The header is working really well now. Got too many header pictures. Probably need to select a few that are more specific to the blog and rotate between a maximum of half a dozen or so.

Everytime a new post is loaded the header is updated. Try it. Reload this page and see what happens. If nothing happened, try it again. Sometimes it reloads the same header or maybe does not load anything at all. I have not figured out which is at work here, but it does bring up a new header between log-ons.

Turns out that functions.php is just header related. Before functions.php was disabled there was an additional option under ‘Presentation’ that dealt with changing header top and bottom colors. Those options don’t appear anymore now that functions.php has been disabled.

Also added a contact form. It is shown below. It sends me an email with the information you typed in as well as your IP address.

I have been playing with this thing for days now. Not because it is fun but because I don’t want to have to admit that the computer is smarter than me.

Well, of course! I googled everything I could think of regarding the header and I got lots of information. Unfortunately it was all for a previous version of WordPress.

I tried taking my graphic image (720×200) and renaming it kubrickheader.jpg. I also was careful to make sure it really was a .jpg file. When the header came up I could see bits of the new graphic behind the big blue screen that still came up in front of the graphic. Okay, some more investigating and I discovered that all I really needed to do was name it personalheader.jpg. That did not work either.

Then I found out about Kubrickr. A neat tool that makes graphic headers. That did not work either because I had a display problem, not a graphics creation problem. Oh, I got a nicely formated header graphic for Kubrick but it still hid behind the original blue header. I got distracted with flickr trying to figure out why my own flickr pictures would not get displayed.

I finally got my flickr problem resolved, uploaded a bunch of pictures, then started making header graphics using Kubrickr. Most of them turned out a nice shade of black. I have not figured it out completely yet but it has something to do with the size of the image. The image has to be larger than what ends up appearing in the nicely framed Kubrick header graphic else it gets replaced with a big black banner to replace the blue one.

Just for fun I uploaded a 400kb+ file to my server, a closeup of a red rose. That displayed okay except for being wider than the blog page by just a little on each side. It also took forever and year to load.

I finally discovered a Wordpress Tutorial:Replace Header Graphic Kubrick Template.

Toward the end of that tutorial under PROLBEMS: (no, that is the they way they spelled it ) it was suggested to delete the functions.php file from my wp-content/themes/default/ directory on the server.

Not being one to throw anything away, I renamed the file to functions.php.tst. I reloaded everything and behold!, the graphic displayed as expected. Only problem was it had the title of the blog across it.

Reading a little further, I discovered that I could get rid of the unwanted verbage by adding ‘display:none;’ at the beginning of h1 and #header .description{ sections of the style.css file.

So now I have a page that has no header except for the graphic that is loaded. All the nice border and fancy formatting is gone. The place where the header was is now just a blank part of the page except for the graphic. That is okay. I suspect all the fancy stuff was part of the default graphic anyway and it can be restored with a little creative manipulation of my new graphic.

My only concern is the disabling of functions.php. The name implies it was doing more than just preventing me from displaying a custom header.

Those folks at www.siteoodles.com may not know how to spell ‘problems’ , but they do know how to solve problems. At least I am closer now than I have been all week to making my custom header work.

Now to see if I can get rotator.php to do its magic and display a new graphic in the header each time the page is reloaded.

Got that done too. Everything is easy when you know how. I found the details for the code changes at the WordPress Codex Site.

As usual, when everything else fails, read the instructions. In this case the WordPress Docs.

A very recent experience I had with on-line site map generators may be of interest to others.

What is a site map? It is a list of text links to pages within a website. Sort of like the ‘contents’ section at the begining of a book. It will closely resemble the outline you used to construct your website. Each link goes to a page. If that page has links to additional content, they are also listed in the map. In short, a site map is an overview of the content made available on a website.

Take a look at this webpage. It is my RF Amplifier page. The links located in the right hand, yellow sidebar above the ads are my site map.

A site map does not have to be fancy but the link descriptions need to be as informative and accurate as possible. Coming up with informative and accurate descriptions is the job of the webmaster, presumably you. Site map generators only read what they find at the URL you give them.

It is hard to imagine a website that does not have a site map. It would be like investigating an unsolved game of Zork.

Even so there are those who would have you think that a site map is something special. Special enough for them to offer ‘free’ on-line services capable of generating your special site map code upon submission of some data.

I tried one of these services last night. The resulting code was an ordered list of all my text links to content pages. Imagine that! How utterly surprising!

I brought the code up with a browser and discovered what made this particular site map so special. It contained a claim to copy rights on behalf of the people providing the site map generating software!

On closer inspection of the source code I found a comment declaring that I was not allowed to remove their copyright claim.

I am not sure if their copyright only covered the code that they generated or lay claim to my entire website content now and forever, but I was taking no chances.

I guess they were not aware that claiming copyrights to material generated by others amounts to stealing.

So, if you are considering having a site map generated by one of these on-line site map generating services, take a very close look at the code that is generated. That generous offer to help you create your site map may be just an invitation to allow them to steal your content by laying copyright claims to it.

I recently had an old 233mhz, win98se, computer go belly up. The hard drive developed a problem and the thing would not boot properly. I replaced the drive after salvaging some data off the old drive. Then began the job of restoring software to the new drive.

I had everything I needed except the sound card driver. No big deal. I usually mute the speaker icon anyway because I prefer a computer that does not beep or speak. It is very annoying to log onto a slow loading website only to find out that the time they wasted was used to load an audio message you did not want to hear.

Even more annoying is having hardware in the computer that does not work. So I began to look for a driver for my old OPTi 16 sound card.

I must have over 20gig of archived software programs, drivers, and utilities for a variety of cards, motherboards, and systems. The OPTi driver was not to be found in any of that stash.

So I started surfing the web. Lots of sites claiming to have the driver and nearly all of them requiring registration, payment, or participation in some kind of scam. A bunch of third party low lifes trying to make money on someone elses labors.

I finally found the ‘official’ OPTi website. They had some drivers but not the one I needed. I guess they thought they were being helpful in recommending purchase of a new PCI sound card. They are only 20 or 30 dollars. I was not in a buying mood to begin with and their advice just made me mad. I put OPTi on my blacklist as companies that have no real product support. I wont be buying anymore OPTi products anytime soon.

It probably cost me more than 20 or 30 dollars in time to search some more and come up with what appeared to be an honest and free site allowing download of drivers. DriverRequest.com. No Scams, Just Free.

So, if you are in need of a driver for obsolete hardware, give them a try.

One word of caution, the site has been heavily mined with links that are actually ads. So be careful what you click on or you might find yourself at one of those driver scamers that we are trying to avoid.

I will sleep better tonight if I get this off my chest.

Yesterday I got an email from someone I dont know about something that needed my reply.

I replied.

Shortly thereafter I received a robot generated message from his ISP asking me to fill out a form to verify that my reply was not spam.

As I understand it, this is called whitelisting. At least some folk would like to think so. I call it being a pain in the ass ISP trying to get involved in things that dont concern ISPs.

I consider anything coming in that is not expected to be spam. I do not take kindly to some nutcase ISP spamming me about blocking spam.

ISPs need to do what they get paid for, Internet Service Providing. That is it. Spam blocking, phishing protection, adult material blocking, I dont need the ISP to do that. Those things are up to the user, not the ISP.

Take a look at the ISP version of the mission statement and compare it to the users mission statement. They may not be diametrically opposed but I bet they get close.

I dont trust ISPs to manage content and neither should you.

Besides, whitelisting needs to be done by the fellow receiving the email, not the guy sending it. If you allow the sender to fiddle with your whitelist, you are sure to get stuff you dont want or need. This is sort of like letting the IRS fill out your tax return. How many of you do that?

Resurecting an old PC-XT

I wanted to bring my old PC-XT into operating condition to be able to use it instead of trashing it or letting it sit on the shelf just taking up space.

Most of the hardware was operational. Software was available as well with plenty of spare boards and parts. It seemed a shame not to bring it all together and make it operational again. There was enough hardware to end up with a delux PC-XT configuration. Monochrome and color graphics, two monitors, a full 640k of ram, 50meg hard drive (configured as 30meg for C and 20meg for D), basica in rom, two serial ports, two parallel ports, real-time clock and a couple of 360kb 5.25 inch floppy drives all running at 4.7mhz on an 8088 processor.

A 1980 dream machine. Easily worth nearly $10,000 in 1980. Of course that was 25 years ago. Even ten years is an eternity in computer development years.

I finally found a standard MFM controller card and was able to properly install an old Tandon 10meg hard drive. The RLL cards did not work with the old MFM drives. I tried five of them and all drives failed to boot after an initial boot.

So what can you do with a 1980 dream machine? Whatever you do, it is very slow. Lotus2, Wordstar, a few games, Wordperfect, all running under DRDOS5 and the hard drive is already half full with only 5 meg of free space left.

Programs are installed using 360kb 5 inch floppies. Communications are through the serial ports. Modem and Laplink crossover cable to a second computer.

All programs are single applications and single user. There are some TSR programs but using them just eats up memory. With only 640k ram, programs have to be fairly small to run well. Even then the 4.77mhz speed is painfully slow.

All features other than the basics require .SYS files be loaded in memory at boot. These include any CDrom drivers, mouse drivers, joystick drivers, special floppy drive drivers, and ansi drivers. It is not unusual to eat up several hundred k of memory on the drivers alone. This risks leaving insufficient memory to run applications that require these drivers. It is almost always these driver hungry applications that also require the most memory to run.

The main features going missing are networking, good fast graphics, and high speed execution of programs. There are considerable lag times for any disk access including hard drive. No email or internet browsing. Outside communications are limited to serial modem dial-up services and small efficient terminal programs. No fancy color graphics or modern browsers.

The speed can be improved somewhat by using a turbo board running at 8mhz, but that is still very slow divided by two. There are also some software incompatibilities when using a turbo board.

The good news is that all those old basic programs work very well. Basica, GWbasic, and other versions are available to run and easily create all kinds of programs.

Where do we go from here. Well, the computer industry thought that the 286 was a natural improvement. Going from 8 bits to 16 bits is an immediate X2 speed improvement. 286 machines were also capapble of higher clock speeds with some of them going as high as 20mhz. So you got twice the computing power by going to 16 bits and up to five times that by multiplying the clock speed by five. That would get you a computer almost 10 times faster than an 8088 XT and it was also possible to add extended memory.

I have a 286 motherboard with coprocessor, and 1meg on-board memory. I also have a 2meg ems memory expansion board. Clock speed on this processor is 16meg and it will help solve the speed problem but it will still be a single user, single application computer.

It needs a case, power supply, cmos backup battery, and a some configuration work.

True multitasking and useful extended memory was not possible until the 386 processor. I have one 386 board and one 486 board. Both of these would build a computer far more capable than the 286.

It may be useful to build a 286 into the old, large, 286 computer case. At least that would provide the case and power supply.

Although there is ELKS linux which claims to work on a 286 processor, Linux is really better suited for 386 processors and better, with at least 16meg of ram. Linux solves the network problem and the more capable processors solve the speed and ram limitations.

The easiest solution to the networking problem is to use win95, win98 or Linux. Smaller and older versions of Linux can run on as small as a 100meg hard drive. Puppy Linux requires at least 250meg of fat32 hard drive space on a windows partition. This is not normally a problem because the minimum sized hard drive space required to create a fat32 partition is 520meg. Win95, and Win98 will need at least 250meg of hard drive space. All of these operating systems also require a CDrom drive and a 3.5 inch floppy drive. Windows also needs at least 32meg of ram and a minimum of 65meg of free hard drive space for a swap file. So, although windows can be installed on a 250meg hard drive, you need at least twice that to build a usable system.

Solving the file support problem for a non-networked computer, like the PC-XT, is best handled by having other computers that support the PC-XT floppy disk format. The PC-XT has two 360k floppy drives (one of these may soon be removed, only need one). The NONE computer now has a 1.2 meg 5.25 inch floppy drive which is accessible over the network. The SPEEDY computer now has a 360kb 5.25 inch floppy drive which is accessible over the network. Software can now be downloaded on any of the networked machines from the internet. That software can be shared over the network and written to either 1.44meg 3.5 inch, 1.2meg 5.25 inch, or 360kb 5.25 inch floppy disks. The 360kb disks can be read directly by the PC-XT. Also have software tha will split files between disks. So if there is a file too large to fit a single 360kb floppy, it can be split between two or more disks.

All three floppy formats can be read and written from any of the networked computers. Floppies can only be formatted on the machines where the drives are installed. Care must be taken to ensure that there is a floppy in the drive before network access can be accomplished.

Just spent far too much time on an old 486DX-66 motherboard. The memory was bad. This board is a good candidate for another router/firewall.

Internet Service Providers (ISP) are numberous and plentiful in most metropolitan areas. The services offered range from basic dial-up to dedicated T-1 lines and range in monthly fees from $10 to over $300.

Before getting into specifics, here are some capsule definitions of technical terms.

ISP - Internet Service Provider

DIAL-UP - Works on a normal phone line at audio rates. Limited to about 56k (upload and download). You can use the line for voice or modem communications but not both at the same time.

UPLOAD - The speed at which digital data is sent to the internet from your computer.

DOWNLOAD - The speed at which digital data is sent to your computer from the internet.

DSL - High speed connections that work on qualified phone lines at faster than audio rates. You can use the phone line for voice and modem communications at the same time.

CABLE - High speed connections that work on a dedicated cable TV line. In some cases an existing cable TV line may be used to provide modem service and cable TV service on the same line.

SATELLITE - Similar to cable at reduced speed. Can be added to an existing Satellite TV system with the modem service usually on a seperate LNA.

T1 - A professional quality, super high speed connection on a dedicated line.

FIREWALL - Software (sometimes implememted as firmware in routers) that limits access to your computer from the internet. It can also limit your computers access TO the internet.

Speed claims have been purposely avoided because ISPs do not guarantee upper limits on speed available. Some do guarantee the lowest speed available but these speeds are not normally found in their advertisements. You find out about them by reading the contract.

With regard to speed, dial-up is slowest at no more than 56k. Everything else is at least 8 times faster.

Speed kills the bank account. Dial-up costs from $10 to $30 a month. Broadband (cable, DSL, or Satellite) will run from $40 to $80 a month. We will ignore the T-1 lines because they are faster than most of us need and cost more than most of us can pay.

Which service is right for you depends on what is available in your area, how much money you can spend on it, and if you can justify the expense. A higher cost broadband connection is easier to justify when it is used as a business tool where your clients can help offset the cost. There is also the question of how much speed is really needed.

Dial-up works fine for e-mail text and non-graphics browsers. Most browsers can be configured to run in non-graphics mode by refusing to load pictures.

Low speed video streaming requires at least 150k download speed. High speed video streaming requires at least 300k download speed. CD quality audio streaming requires at least 192k download speed. High-speed, multiplayer games will run well at 200k. If you need two-way streaming, like would be needed in a video phone application or high speed multiplayer games, you will need the upload speed to equal the download speed. The fastest cable or DSL connection will come close to 1.5meg download (some of the time) but your best upload will only be about 300k. Most broadband services will run about 500k download and 128k upload. There is no guarantee that an $80 a month service will be significantly faster than a $40 a month service. It all depends on the ISP. Most ISPs limit upload bandwidth and many put caps on the download speed. There are no limits on Dial-up speed, probably because it is so slow.

Buying service.

Don’t sign up for service based on advertisements. Call them. Find out what the actual monthly charges will be. Determine initial connection fees, early cancellation fees, and equipment costs (if any).
Get and read a copy of the contract.

Since dial-up is the least desirable, we will get it out of the way first. Dial-up ISPs are being squeesed from the top by lower cost broadband. Broadband is still more expensive than dial-up but many people will dig deeper in their pockets to come up with a $10 differential to go to cheap broadband and discontinue the $30 dial-up.
Dial-up ISPs are also being squeezed from the bottom by very inexpensive dial-up offers starting at around $10 a month.

In my area there is one dial-up ISP which advertises a $10 per month service with no contracts. The ads claim $10 per month on a monthly basis with no penalties upon discontinuing service. I called them. The $10 per month charge was actually $11 per month and there was a $30 connection fee. That is $41 for the first month of service which falls to $11 a month thereafter. To be fair, this is still only $13 a month when taken over a 12 month period, but they do not have the $10 per month service being advertized.

The marketing tactics do not improve among the broadband ISPs. These tactics make price comparisons difficult.

Beware of bundled packages and free offers. Free firewalls like ZoneAlarm are free regardless of ISP involvement. Contact ZoneAlarm directly if you want their free firewall. Pop-up blockers and e-mail virus protection are also marketing hype of little value. Most browsers can block Pop-ups merely by disabling Java-script. E-mail viruses are propogated through attachments and HTML code. Don’t open attachments from unknown sources and configure your e-mail software to block HTML.

I have seen one broadband package that includes hundreds of LAN IP addresses at no extra charge. This may seem like a good deal to the uninitiated, but most of us already know that we have hundreds of private LAN IP addresses available at no extra charge regardless of ISP. These private IP addresses are reserved for LAN use and cannot be used as external addresses on the internet. Don’t pay for something you already have. All it takes is a NAT capable firewall. NAT capable firewalls are included as standard in most routers at under $70. You can also build your own NAT firewall by installing Linux on an old, otherwise worthless, PC which will turn it into a router firewall appliance.

When making price comparisons, concentrate only on the internet service, monthly charges, connection fees, early cancellation fees, and equipment charges. If there are equipment charges, make sure you end up with legal ownership of the equipment involved. Make sure you are not charged rental on equipment you purchased.

DSL is the ‘in’ thing today. It does provide broadband service at reasonable rates but it also has some disadvantages that might not become evident until after you have signed a 12 month contract with $250 early cancellation penalty. Here are some of those possible disadvantages.

DSL will only work on copper telephone lines that are in good condition. If your telephone connection to the central office includes any fibre optic links, DSL will not work at all. There is usually a long waiting period for DSL service while ‘they’ condition your phone line. The ‘they’ in this case is the phone company. Unless you opt to obtain DSL through the phone company, you may not have to deal with them, but you never know. The wait for DSL can be one week to one month. After that wait, you may find that ‘they’ cannot provide the service you bought. Make sure you don’t pay for anything until the service is operating to your satisfaction. Most ISPs will offer a 30 day moneyback guarantee, but it is usually better not to have to ask for your money back.

Once your phone line is conditioned for DSL, you may need re-conditioning if you decide to change your long distance carrier. You may even loose the DSL conditioning depending on what the phone company decides to do to the lines in your area. When that happens, there is a good chance that the ISP and phone company may get into a finger-pointing contest while you are being charged for a service that does not work.

DSL speed depends on your distance from the central office. If you are too far, DSL will not work at all. If you are at the distance limit, you may experience poor performance.

Cable service may be less of a potential hassle than DSL but it has its potential problems as well. On the positive side, it has the best speed for the cost. Cable is on par with good DSL service but cable can vary more in speed and may be slightly less reliable. There is no line conditioning because cable runs on its own, dedicated line (cable).

Cable service is really just a high speed ethernet. As with any ethernet network speed becomes a function of use. Heavy use with many users result in reduced speeds. It is common to see cable service speeds decline during the evening hours when more people come on-line.

I have used cable service for over five years now. It started with TCI@home. They went bust and were taken over by ATTBI. Then ATTBI was taken over by Comcast. Service has been mostly good with some outages. My e-mail addresses changed when the system went to ATTBI. Looks like they will change again when Comcast takes over completely. I just hope the rates don’t go up.

Satellite service may be a good thing but only if dial-up will not do the job and DSL and Cable are not available. It is the ISP of last resort because of equipment cost and performance. My last inquiry into Satellite service required a $600 equipment cost plus a heafty installation fee. If you want satellite TV service as well, there may be some ‘deals’ to get both, but they were not offering any ‘deals’ when I inquired. This service my be something to track because I doubt they will be too sucessful unless they drop their prices. Download speed here seems limited to about 400k with an upload of 128k, and service is interupted when it rains.

Once you have arranged for service do not hook into it without some sort of firewall. Even the free version of ZoneAlarm is better than nothing. You may want to get a copy of ZoneAlarm and learn to use it before hooking up to any Internet Service Provider.

If you are connecting the modem to a Local Area Network (LAN) you MUST have a NAT capable firewall. A router such as the Linksys NR041 will provide this function. My preference would be an LRP router, software solution using Linux, installed on an old PC.