I changed the way I deal with my web page. I got tired of having terrible HTML generated and switched to Adobe's GoLive-5.0. GoLive isn't as easy to deal with as FrontPage 2000 but it gives you a lot more choices. The bottom of the page is a link to Adobe's GoLive web site. It is a really cool product.
Dealing with the "Power Led" connector that is used to indicate power is turned on sneaked into 2nd place. I had three new motherboards that only had two pins for the power led and all of my wires had three pin connectors on them. I was playing with some spare wires and was looking at them under my "circle light with the magnifying lens in the center". I had tried a number of things such as pressing down on the pin. It looked like there was a spring loaded piece of metal that was holding the connection in the socket. I understood the mechanism but not the real relationship. There is a little plastic strip that holds the connector in place. You can gently raise the strip and pull the connector out of the 3rd position and moved it into the 2nd position. The problem with all of this is that I can not hold the case under the circle light and my reading glasses are not setup to read at the distance you need to be at to do all of this in a KISS manner. It required a little work but worked out just fine in the end.
I have been interested in computers since I first reported to work at Hanford in 1963 and encountered an IBM 7090. It had 32k words (192KB) of memory and a 2+ microsecond clock. The last big iron that I worked on was a Cray X/MP with an 8+ ns (nanosecond) clock. It was installed with 128MB of memory and 20GB of disk. The disks were CDC-Hydra's, which were capable of 9.6MB/second continuous and 20MB/sec continuous when they were striped like we used them. I have also used a Y/MP and a Cray 2 with a 4 ns clock. The X/MP got old and slow in a hurry. When I was retired by Siemens Power Corporation, they were using 3 DEC Alphas that would fit along side of a desk and each of them was faster for the type of calculations that they were doing than the Cray. My story is that Seymour Cray wasn't so much of an innovator as he was a better plumber. He would push the circuit technology envelope, the circuits would heat up and he uniquely cooled them so they were reliable.
The dual Intel 866 coppermine system died processing an image of my brother. He has a new Intel cam and he sent me a copy of him sitting at the keyboard of his computer. I loaded it into Adobe Photoshop and it broke my computer. It would no longer run Windows (2000 or XP). You might ask if I really think it broke my computer and the answer is no but can you imagine letting him off of the hook on something like this. I could make it run but I had to pull one of the cpus. That wasn't acceptable and I replaced it with an AMD-1600+ XP installed in a Elitegroup K7S5A with 256-512MB of DDR-2100 memory. The first seti workunit was processed in 14462 seconds, which is pretty fast for version 3.03. My typical FreeBSD buildworld times are running 25-30 minutes. On one of the systems, I have the system HD on the K7S5A primary IDE controller and the other two drives are on a Promise Ultra 100 TX2. I actually ordered two of each but the second XP cpu was backordered.
Getting FreeBSD to run with the new cpus was a snap because all I had to do was build a kernel with SMP turned off. The first system paniced on the first attempt but that was because the system didn't have an apic system, i.e., it wasn't a SMP motherboard. I booted the system using kernel.GENERIC, commented out the SMP options in the kernel, did a make and make install, and rebooted the system. Re-installing Windows 2000 Pro was a different matter. We are well beyond the 900MHz cpu speed where the shutdown can corrupt a system. The only real problem was installing something before upgrading to service pack 2. So far, only two application would not install properly the first one I encountered was Adobe's Acrobat Reader 5.0. The uninstaller would not initialize properly. The second was Ahead Software's application called "Incd". If I install Incd, Windows Explorer dies within a matter of minutes.
I have three systems running AMD's now. Two of them are 1600+ XP's and the third is an Thunderbird 900. All of the motherboards support the XP core and I can see three 1600+ XP cpus or higher in my cluster. I have a Durlon 750 that is kept around for testing. It is sitting in a ECS-K7S5A motherboard and it will run as it sits. If something doesn't work, is it the cpu or something else. If you don't have a spare cpu, you have two tear one apart to get the cpu and you could always damage it. I will use the XP cores because they have added two more pipelines that can be used to load and store data from the cpu. I think this is something that Intel has totally misunderstood. This is one of the reasons the Motorola cpus are so potent. The XP is pretty close to an AMD version of the G4 but using the Intel command set. I have a Abit VP6 with an 866 coppermine sitting in it. The Durlon could be the slowest machine. I will have to see how this develops.
What does an AMD cluster do for you? For starters, you can build applications like KDE-2.2.1 in less than three hours. This changes with KDE-2.2.2 because every machine you install it on had to compile kdebase-2.2.2. One of the port people commented that a build time of 6 hours for KDE is considered impressive. The only reason it takes that long is that you have to build and install kdelibs-2.2.x first. You can then install it on all of the computers that will be used to build the meta-port. The rest fall like domino's. I run a ssh session into them from a W2K machine and fire up the next build as soon as one completes. The only reason it takes three hours is that I don't sit at the keyboard the whole time.
The AMD was not fast enough. The typical buildworld is around 42 minutes. There were also problems with the ATA-100 controller and some HD's. It was eventually replaced by a mother board based on the SiS-735 chipset. I finally went back and tried a dual processor system. What I selected was a dual Intel 866 MHz coppermine based system. The motherboard is a Abit VP6, which also has a HPT-370 raid controller. The goal was a half hour buildworld in FreeBSD. When I use the -j8 option on the make, the buildworld requires 29+ minutes. A complete build of userland and the kernel can be done in less than 45 minutes. I have a script that will build everything but I haven't been comfortable using it. It was also obvious from this exercise that the cpu's are starved for I/O. Turning the write cache back on was the difference between a 42 minute build and a 29 minute build. This demonstrates what we learned with our benchmarks on the Cray X/MP, i.e., the write behind caching was half of the throughput. I'm not seeing that; however, in order to improve on what I have, I would have to go to U2W and lvd Ultra-160 scsi HD's. The same disk space using the Ultra-160 HD's would run $1,500 to $2,000, which is more than I currently have invested in this system. I tried the raid+0 option and it ran significantly slower than the 3 HD's on separate controllers. In addition, Windows 2000 and FreeBSD didn't like sharing the raid+0 array.
I have a K7 Athlon Thunderbird 900 MHz that I am setting up to use for development projects. It was started as an Micron Millennia P-166. It was upgraded at some point to an Overdrive 200. I tore out the Adaptec SCSI card, HD's, and PCI video card and added them into the K7 system. I ordered an OEM Diamond AGP Multimedia Video card but it was temporarily out of stock. For operating systems, it has FreeBSD 4.3-Stable, Windows Me and Windows 2000 on it. If there is something involving a beta OS, it also goes on this computer. The primary boot is Win 2000 Professional, which is their workstation system. FreeBSD 4-Stable has also been installed. I use the term 4-stable because it will track the CVSup tag RELENG_4 until it becomes 5-Release. I only run Windows Me when I have to use Bank America's "Banker Online" software. My banking no longer depends on dialing in and Window Me may be removed. There isn't any real need of it on that system. The primary system will be FreeBSD 4.3 when it is fully setup. There are gigabytes of software that need to be installed. It has 256MB of PC-133 memory and 100 GB of disk. The disk started out being the hang up. They were too small and too old of hard drives for a modern system were replaced with a large UDMA-100 HD. When this is all accomplished, the primary boot will be switched to FreeBSD. This system will be used primarily to develop and test FreeBSD. It isn't helpful to have to wait two hours to see if a user build world error is a user problem or a real problem. I want to be able to upgrade FreeBSD to the latest 4-stable in less than an hour. Performance wise, the ratio of processing Seti work units is running really close to 15.5 times faster.
Just in case you think I will have a surplus computer, the Micron is still not being discarded. It became my gateway and firewall. You can't, or at least don't permit, nfs_mounting drives on a firewall and it will be single purpose and be my link to the outside world. I had to move my web files onto it and then plug it into my DSL line. It doesn't even have a monitor or keyboard on it. There are three computers that sit side by side and they all share a KVM switch. If I need to run x-windows while an Windows program is running, I can run a xterm from one of the other computer.
The Micron Millennia became to slow like I knew would happen when I built the P-II 400. The price dropped a little bit and I add a second P-II 400. The 2nd P-II 400 is an Abit BX6-rev 2 motherboard with a Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Video Card. This system has most of my Microsoft Developer stuff on it. The word processor on this system is MS Office. I used to be a WordPerfect bigot. I hated WordPerfect and had a not WordPerfect button that I kept around the office. I still have the button but no longer consider it appropriate. I have Corel WordPerfect Office 2002 and that is my main word processor for documenting computer programs. It is all a matter of the fonts and the easy of setting the defaults. The smallest font I could use with MS Word was an 8 point type and I have down to 6 point type with WordPerfect. The magic number is 7 because you can list most computer programs if you use 7 point type. With 8 point type, you get a number of lines wrapping, which makes a listing look terrible and readabilit y disappears.
When I finished building the first P-II, was when I discovered that I had enough spare PC parts that I could almost build a system and decided to join the FreeBSD revolution. The only new piece of hardware that I had to purchase was a 1.44MB floppy. I had a couple of 5.25" floppies but they no longer count. The resulting computer was a Pentium 166Mhz on a Super Micro P5STE motherboard with 96MB of memory and 6.2GB of disk. It is networked at 100Mbs. It even has my ancient Brother HL8e LaserJet printer as its local printer. I jumped from the Brother to one of the HP InkJets and retired the Brother. The Brother hadn't been turned on for several years and when I turned it on, the fan was noisy and I replaced it with a spare that I had purchased when it was my main printer. My story about LaserJet II emulation is based on the Brother. Back when I purchased the Brother, a lot of the non-HP LaserJet's advertised LJII compatibility (usually 100%). What I found that they didn't tell you is that there probably are some commands that they won't do. Their printer's are 100% compatible for the commands they would do. One of the missing commands on the Brother turned out to be very important when you print an envelope. The system rev after mine would print envelopes properly but I purchased mine too early. At any rate, I cussed and moaned every time I had to set the printer up to print envelopes. Later this carried over to every time I printed an envelope. I knew from experience that the HP Inkjet would print envelopes right out of the box and the irritation would be gone. Eventually I found that a LaserJet is much cheaper to use because a sheet costs on the order of $0.01 where a sheet typically costs $.03 on the inkjets. The basis is strictly how many sheets of paper you can print per ink or toner cartridge. I needed to cheaply print documentation from FreeBSD and off the shelf came the Brother Laser. I just don't try to print envelopes on it.
It wasn't too long until I ordered a Asus P2B-B with an Intel Celeron 433 and 64MB of PC66 memory. The video card and network cards were also upgraded. It was a really simple swap. From the time I shut the system down until I had it running again was around 1.5 hours. It was an amazing upgrade because everything just ran faster, much faster. A system build now takes 2100 user seconds. I can rebuild everything and do an install in around an hours time. I had needed around four hours before. The original setup was running FreeBSD 3.2-Stable and it was interesting to compare the speed with this system and one running NT. I use the command line version of setiathome on both and the through put is the ratio of the memory speeds. This means that it is mostly memory bound on the motherboard with PC66 memory. The P-III 450 on Nomad out performed the P-II 400, which then out performed the Celeron 433 by a factor of almost exactly 1.5 (100/66) times. I have been told that the 433 really doesn't overclock and I will just wait until something newer and faster comes out. This also means that using two Celeron's in a SMP setting isn't really effective because two P-II 400's will out perform two Celeron 433's by a factor of as much as 1.5 to 1. When the Celeron 500 with a front side bus of 100Mhz is released, that will not be true but until then it isn't very cost effective. I eventually gave up waiting and around November 1999, I switched from a Celeron 433a to a 300a and raised the FSB to 100MHz. It now runs setiathome at around the same speed as the P-III 450 does. It ended up having cooling problems after about 6 months. It started being erratic and then completely died. It had melted the thermal tape between the heatsink and the cpu.
In August 1999, I finally replaced the Tyan motherboard in the NT Server I call Nomad with a Tyan 1830 and a P-III 450 with 256MB of memory. It had been a Tyan 1563D with a pair of P133 Pentiums. This was a real step up. I had been swapping a bit when I would run something like SQL Server 6.5. There is plenty of memory to do what I want and be able to make judgments on performance that are real.
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I used to like to read Science Fiction but I started getting tired of the new stories. Then I got into reading post-apocalypse stories such as the Horseclan series by Robert Adams. The stories would start out after an exchange of missiles and societies total disintegration. Adam's dominant subject originated in the 19th or 20th century and was immortal and telepathic. They rode horses and fought with bows and arrows, spears, and swords. Their partners in battle were their horses and some huge cats. I waited for each new story and enjoyed most. He had some diversions that I didn't like but the diversion didn't occupy the entire book.
Adams died in 1990 and left a number of people with out his yearly books. I'm not the only one because web searches on the Horseclans are finding this page and now I know there are other fans out there having the same problem. So, if you have duplicates let me know and perhaps we can get some interchanging going.
I have found some interesting web pages on (Franklin) Robert Adams. The first is on a series of SciFan Web pages for Robert Adams. There is also a link on that page to The Horseclans Page by John VanSickle. John has an interesting timeline that explains where the stories fit in time. He also explains some of the terms and people encountered in the Horseclans books. There is also a bibliography on Robert Adams at Fantastic Fiction.
A much more interesting web page on the Horseclans is being developed by Adam France. He has done an extensive analysis of the Horseclans. He also has some interesting ideas for future stories, which I found really interesting. I have been going back and reading the old stories. There was always something that bugged me in all of the later stories. I liked the stories in the "Friends of The Horseclans" better than Adam's full length stories. They were all short and sweet, so there wasn't the development that could setup in a full length novel. This kept what I thought was filler material from being added at the same time. I read several Gor books by Norman and thought he had filler paragraphs that he would indiscriminately add to a story. It was always the same old junk. Adams would go off on a tangent at some point in the book but even at his worst moments, he was never as bad as Norman in his books. Adams was some what ahead of his time because everyone was adept with a weapon and could fight back when pushed.
On 29 April 2005, CBS closed my delemia with what show I would watch on Friday night. They solved the problem by terminating the show JAG. When they moved the show to Friday night, they moved it to a night that had shows of higher interest. For example, I would watch a good "Stargate SG-1" show any night over JAG. Then the SciFi channel on my satelite started broadcasting "Battlestar Galactica" and I started recording each show on my DVR. I can't change channels with the DVR, so, JAG fell into a black hole. The only reason I watched the end of the series was because SG-1 and Battlestart Galactica were in between seasons. I used to watch CBS for around 6 hours a week When they played with Survivor, I lost interest and dropped below 1 hour per week.
I really only have one prime time network TV show that I watch and that is JAG. It is usually broadcast on the local CBS TV station at 8 pm on Tuesday. There are times when they don't know where they are. For example, in the Navy Hardware section on their web page they have the USS Nimitz (Note: I used to have a URL here but they have so many errors on their web page that I was embarrassed to forward anyone) based in Bremerton, WV. Ask anyone from Washington State where Bremerton is located and they can tell you where you have to get on the ferry boat to get there. Bremerton is located on the eastern edge of the Olympic Peninsula and is almost straight west of Seattle. It used to be the home of the Battleship USS Missouri. You can probably cut them some slack because neither place is correct. The Nimitz finished getting its 30 year overhaul and is back on station and based in San Diego, California. In the history section of the Nimitz's web page, they talk about the home port being Bremerton, Washington. I first encountered the Nimitz in a movie called "Final Countdown". In the movie, they pass through a storm that looks straight out of the movie the "Black Hole". It is a little bit of Hollywood writer's trying to understand something physical and over doing it. You just have to ignore it. The storm passes and suddenly they have passed back in time to December 6, 1941. The satellite links are down and there is only some HF radio. You have to imagine a more PC environment suddenly encountering Jack Benny and Rochester. You could see a common military expression on the faces of the sailor's :). There are a couple of scenes where F-14's in a tight turn pull sufficient g's to create enough of a vacuum above the wings to flash the water vapor into fog. I liked the movie just to watch the Tomcat's fly.
JAG is mil_speak for the Judge Advocate Generals office, which is the justice arm of the Navy. Their interest is "truth" comes first. The primary player's that I watch are Mac (a Marine Corp. Lt. Col. played by Catherine Bell) and Harm (a Navy Lt. Cmdr. played by David James Elliott). You can visit Catherine's web site and see why I think she is an incredibly beautiful lady. Make sure you use Microsoft's Internet Explorer otherwise there are 95% spots where you can't see the last 5% of a scrolled section. There is a lot of body language that goes on between these two. They admit that it has added to the number of people watching the show. They also joke about him being the "brains" and she is the "brawn". That isn't too far off because she has been kick boxing for 10 years and like to drive fast motorcycles. I haven't seen a big, fast motorcycle that will not go faster in a blink of the eye than I ever drove in the Camaro. I tell people that it accelerated through 125 mph (200 kph) faster than my Pontiac Fiero went through 20 mph in first gear.
Getting back to Mac and Harm, for a long time they were not personally involved but they easily could be. She is doing a dance around him so he doesn't get that close. In a recent show, she spaced out and admitted to the new African American actor that she was in love with Harm. She got this "Oh my God!" look on her face and made him promise to not tell anyone.
The closing show for the first season I watched had Harm getting his night vision back, which had forced him to chose something besides flying a Tomcat. Now he is at a decision point because all he ever wanted to do is be a fighter pilot and now he can see at night. I would really lose interest in the show if either Harm or Mac left. They have gotten into and out of trouble in most civilized countries from America to Russia. They go overboard at times because Harm, who can't read or speak Russian, gets into a Mig-29 and steals it. He ends up being a hero because they stop a bad guy from selling special Russian missile war heads to other bad guys. The middle east is the only place where being physically there was dangerous. The variety of the problems they deal with keeps the show interesting. Even watching reruns is interesting.
A recent show (20 February 2001) has Harm being approached by Alex, the Russian Officer, that helped him track down his step-brother. Alex is trying to find out what we know about the Russian submarine that exploded and sank, losing approximately 110 lives. The story ends up with Mac on one of the US fast attacks trailing a Russian submarine. Harm just happens to be on the sub. They are giving the US and British a tour of their current submarines. For a demonstration, the Russian Skipper is going to fire the new rocket powered torpedo. Harm, in a classified briefing, was told that the sub Murmansk had fired on at a target but just before it got there, it turned and headed for the Murmansk. When it hit and exploded, the Murmansk was sunk. They argue with the Russian skipper but he is insistant on firing the torpedo. Then, science fiction gets into the act, and the US sonar operator tells the US skipper about the conversation on the Russian sub. The American skipper makes a noise and tells the Russian skipper over a sonar phone that the rocket torpedo had sank the Murmansk. He doesn't believe him. The American Skipper tells him that he was there, in the Murmansk's baffles when it fired the torpedo and was sunk, which he doesn't believe. Mac gets on the sonar phone and mentions something on of the Officers says to the Russian skipper. The Russian skipper want to know how she knows and Mac can't tell him that they are listening to the conversation. So, Mac tells him that the Russian subs have all been bugged for many years and the American subs can all listen in to the conversations in the control room.
The arguments are to no avail and the Russian skipper fires the torpedo, which heads for the target. The American skipper goes to full power and starts to turn away. When he is off to the side, he fires a noise maker, which the Russian skipper thinks is a torpedo fired at him. Harm convinces him that if he had wanted to do that, he would have done it without letting them know they were there. When the rocket torpedo is almost to the target it turns and heads back to the Russian sub at close to 200 mph. When it is almost there, it veers towards the loud noise maker the American sub had fired and when it is close, it explodes and leaves both subs with sparks flying but still intact. It was one of the better Jag shows. If you are into Techo-Thrillers like I am, it had drama, suspense, and results, i.e., technology won the day. Everyone survived but you can imagine the Russians tearing apart their subs looking for the non-existant bug. It would be sort of getting even for bugging the new consulate building in Moscow as they were building it many, many years ago.
The part about Techo-Thrillers is they take something that exists and then add fiction to its capabilities. In this case, the Russian torpedo exists. Did it sink the Murmansk? I don't have any idea but the concept makes for an interesting exchange between two very competitive skippers. Can we listen into to conversations on the Russian subs? I doubt it but it was something that made the show interesting. In the end, both sides had a technology advantage that resulted in the suspense and eventually saved people. It is some what like Tom Clancy thrillers. The USSR used to be the enemy but human elements were present. In the Cardinal of the Kremlin, the head of the KGB could have shot Ryan. He had a pistol to his head but let him go. In the latest story, Clancy has China invading Russia and it is President Ryan sending US Armor to help Russia. The circle is complete because it is the head of the KGB that could have shot Ryan who is the Russian President that is now being helped by Ryan.
Let see, JAG, Final Countdown, and Top Gun all involve F-14's, hmmm. :-). The only plane I think is more special is the SR-71 and it can't turn that tight. We used to have sonic booms locally that our local newspaper reported as being caused by supersonic over flights by SR-71's on training missions. They would start turning at Mach 2-3+ in Oregon and would finish the turn over Montana. The long turn radius is sort of one of those who cares things. The F-14 pilot would feel like the "Mitsubishi A6M" pilots in Final Countdown. The F-14 wouldn't really see one pulling up on them and once it passed them, they couldn't catch it unless it was cooling off to land. The F-22 is lurking and will replace the F-14 as the coolest fighter in my mind. Supersonic flight without using an afterburner is a technology jump in the F-22.
My current, watch every new episode show is Showtime's, "Stargate SG-1". It is on Showtime on Friday night. They have started running back to back episodes. The first show is this season and the second show seems to be from last season. It also just happens that DirecTV has an Eastern version and a Western version. I can watch them twice. One of the episodes for 1999-2000 was called "A Hundred Days". It hit my best show yet meter. They found a planet with the mineral used in the Stargate's While they were there, they went out on a hill to watch the "fire rain", which turns out to be an asteroid belt that is just about to drop car sized boulders on the planet. They send some of the people through the Stargate and find one of the lead characters boy and his girl friend are missing. Jack and the mother race to find them and are in a cave when an asteroid strikes, burying the Stargate. The rest of the show is spent with Jack coping with being stranded. He thinks it is forever but the SG-1 team knows that the Stargate is still functional and are trying to rescue him. The 100 days from the title is the time required to figure out how to make it back through the Stargate.
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