November 9 - 15, 1998
Previous Weeks of The View 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
For an index of the above, or at least some of one, see the New Order page, which tries to make order of chaos.
Boiler Plate: If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money. I'm making up a the mailing list. There are enough that it's a chore, which is not something to complain about. Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
If you subscribed, CLICK HERE for a Special
Request.
If you didn't and haven't, why not? If this seems a lot about paying think of it as the Subscription Drive Nag. You'll see more.
This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. The regular COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 words, will appear monthly when I get orbanized. Real Soon Now.
I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying.
For the BYTE story, click here.
Last week and the week before there was a lot about LINUX, here, on the Linux pages, and in MAIL. If you are really interested in Linux there's nothing for it, you'll have to read all those. There will be more, too. The LINUX pages are organized as the log, my queries, and your responses and advice parts one, two, three, and four. There's four pages because I try to keep download times well under a minute.
Does anyone really know about 66/300 vs. 100/300?
Do you make or sell PC-100 memory?
If you never saw David Em's pages, you should.
Monday: the day was devoured, and the night by paying bills. I also downloaded and installed the BIOS upgrade to my MSI motheroard. Thanks to reader Claud Addicott for helping me find a working MSI web site where I could get it.
See
for a view of Linux by a Windows user. Excellent.
Yesterday was mostly trying to get the STB Velocity 4400 boards to work in the AMD K6 2 with 3dNow! Machine. They are excellent boards, but they don’t like the Aladdin chip set in thee MSI board, and that combined with the AMD chip was just too much for them. If I run the motherboard at 100, I don’t even get video. That turns out to be a function of bad memory chips on the MSI board—it just won’t run at 100 unless you disable the external cache, and that’s enough performance hit that I decided to run things at 66 with a 4.5 multiplier so I have a 66/300 instead of a 100/300 system.
That may not turn out to be much of a disadvantage. At 66 all my cheap memory works; at 100 I need special PC 100 DIMMS, which are not cheap, and I only have one 64 Meg chip at the moment. I have also heard that Adaptec SCSI boards have problems at 100, but all is well at 66. I really need to find out the difference between 66/300 and 100/300; can you tell? Human perception is logarithmic, so sometimes the only way to tell performance improvements is with benchmarks. How much will you pay to have faster benchmarks?
Anyway, the system runs with an STB Velocity 1200 4 MB board, which is in fact perfectly good for anything I am about to do. I think. What I want is to know. But I spent the day without finding out. First thing was latest drivers for the 4400 boards. That works only with BIOS 1.1. A quick check showed my STB 4400 boards are BIOS 1.01 although they are fairly new. There are two versions of the BIOS (for NTSC, there are also 2 versions for European PAL). One is for AGP and the other PCI, so I downloaded both, as well as the driver updates. These are fairly large files, so I set GETRIGHT to go after them all. That makes for slow downloads, but I could then go hiking with Roberta and Sasha.
The files were all there when I got back. I used the network to move the files to Eagle 1 – the MSI board with AMD 3Dnow! chip running at 66/300, with Windows 98 – then made a copy of the OSR2 DOS boot disk I had made to start Eagle in the first place. Clearly I could have made a boot disk from Windows 98 DOS, but I already had the other, and copy is faster. Now I had a DOS disk with nothing on it but the boot record and Command.com, and which was a DOS version that understands FAT32. Put that into the A: drive. I had downloaded the BIOS upgrade exe file for the AGP board; now I ran the exe file. It wrote directly onto the A: disk. Now shut down. Put the 4400 AGP board into the machine. Turn on the machine. Follow instructions. The BIOS is now upgraded. Turn off the machine. Turn on the machine. Comes up in VGA. Windows detects the 4400 board. Install the new driver I had just downloaded. Reboot.
Machine starts. Windows splash screen. DOS screen. Windows splash only it’s all distorted. Black screen. Blue screen, exception error OD. I had that before I went through all this. Clearly AGP board 4400 is not going to work in this machine, upgrades or no.
I do all this stuff so you won’t have to. Now repeat it all for the PCI version of the 4400 board. Same result. Well, not quite. Either the AGP or the PCI version stays in a black screen and never shows the blue screen of death. Either way, it never comes up in Windows 98 with the 4400 drivers installed.
Go back to Velocity 128, which works fine. Upgrade the 128 drivers. No change so far as I can see.
The machine is fast, and smooth. Today if I ever get back home – I am stuck on more errands some rather critical – I will install the DVD player and see what that does.
And another time I’ll go buy another 100 mother board, I think an iWill this time, that doesn’t use the Aladdin chip set. Actually I’ll check with STB first and see. Then I’ll set up two machines side by side, one this one at 66/300 with STB Velocity 128, the other at 100/300 with STB Velocity 4400, and just see what the differences are. I can also put the Velocity 128 in the new machine and see how that compares. Ought to be good for a whole column. Again, I do this stuff so you won’t have to.
My friends tell me this web site is hopeless. It doesn’t look professional. It will never attract advertisements, not in big numbers, because it doesn’t look slick enough. I need a complete web redesign, presumably to make it look a lot more like the other slick ones.
Well, maybe. I suppose the first thing to do is compromise: put the daily view into a slicker format that you can see instantly on logging in, with navigation tools. Maybe that will be enough? Mostly I suspect I need to get back to writing novels and stop working so hard on this. I’d love some automated tools to make this simpler, but the fact remains that most of the value of this place, (I assume it has some or people wouldn’t hang around) is thoughts and ideas, not how pretty it is. Still, apparently there is an implicit standard on what is and is not "professional" and this place doesn’t meet it.
Well, no. That is, I am certainly not a professional web designer. I admit there could be better navigation tools, but you know, the difference between this place and, say, Jesse Berst’s is that much of what’s here has some value beyond this afternoon. If you want to set up a Linux system, I can’t think of a better place to start than by going to my Linux pages. It’s not that I am so smart as that I have collected in one place a lot of advice and many links, all things I wish I’d had before I started.
I need better indexing, and perhaps Dan Bricklin’s Trellix can provide some organization; but how do you "look professional" when the point, to me anyway, is not to have distractions from the meaning? It’s easy enough to use smoke and mirrors and a breathless style to give the illusion of immediate importance to your pronouncements, but the problem with those tricks is they wear off. Maybe what I say isn’t important either, but at least I try to let it stand on its merits.
Still, I suppose it can do no harm to have a closer look at Intellectual Capital’s web site and see if I can look more like that. Surely it’s "Professional"? And I need to think hard on advertisements, because I don’t have any mechanism for selling ads, and if I did I would need some kind of structure to separate ads from editorial—just as McGraw Hill so famously did at BYTE, and as some magazines so notoriously do not do. I sure wish we had Millicent.
And perhaps the thing to do is have a subscriber section available only by password, and give out passwords weekly through a mailing list or something? I suppose I need to give more thought to all this. I work too hard for not a lot of return, and when I find I am unprofessional looking so I won’t be getting a lot of readers it gives me pause. After all, I know how to get a million readers. Just write the right books.
For now, I’ll just have to muddle along.
Tuesday night:
Thanks for all the letters of support, but that wasn't really what I was after. I have been cruising around looking at some of the "professional" sites. They all seem to take a lot longer to download pages than mine, mostly because of the ads I guess. Most have flat rather than textured backgrounds. I do think mine would look better if there were a single space between the table border on the left and the text; jammed right against the border doesn't look so good. Other than that, I don't get it. Do people LIKE narrower lines? I can certainly arrange that by adding a blank table to the right, and put some color in it for that matter.
