Results tagged “computer”

I was asked the other day why I prefer real paper books over electronic books the other day and realized I’d never really posted on this subject, which I feel somewhat strongly about. I have a fundamental distrust of computers and technology. That may seem a little odd coming from a software developer, but the more I learn about software development, the more this distrust grows. When it comes to books and printed materials, I can condense this distrust into three basic problems:

1. Digital technology changes too much.
2. Digitized data is fragile and transient.
3. Digital printing is not self-sufficient.

Ever-Changing Technology

Ever tried to open a document you created 10 or 20 or 30 years ago? Did you succeed? Chances are you didn’t. Ten years ago, data was saved on 3.5” floppy disks or a CD-R if you had the money for a burner. (The USB drive didn’t come into being until 2000.) Do you even have a 3.5” floppy disk drive in your house? Is the disk or CD-R even readable anymore (since the usual half-life of such things has already past)?

Twenty years ago, you would have used a 3.5” or 5.25” disk. Have you even seen a 5.25” drive in the past 10 years?

Thirty years ago, you would have used… who knows what. I was two years old. I’d have to look at Wikipedia to even get a good guess going. Audio cassettes on your Atari? Yeah, like you have something to read one of those.

Even if you read the media, do you have a program that works anymore to read the format? Do you have something that will read whatever word processor you had then? This is possible and maybe even likely, but even so there’s the risk it won’t work or you don’t have one. Formats change. Programs must be made to read a format. If you don’t have any such program, you might be able to get it to someone who can extra something out of it, but it’s probably gone.

However, I can pick up a book from any of those eras and read them today. A notebook, a journal, a magazine, a newspaper are all quite readable with modern day technology. If you printed your document and placed it somewhere dry and clean, you can still read it.

Fragile and Transient

I already mentioned that the old media fails rather frequently, but it gets worse. Digital data is, by necessity, encoded in an unnatural way. That is, digital data is very robust and easy to process is many ways, but the way we choose to represent digital data is made up.

To demonstrate this problem, let’s consider a manuscript that someone finds in the desert from 2,000 years ago. Let’s say that it’s in a script that no one has ever seen before, will it be understood? Actually, it might be. If that script happens to be similar enough to a known script, a linguist might be able to extrapolate at least something about the contents of the document. All languages and scripts are related, even constructed languages like Esperanto.

Now, imagine the same scenario 2,000 years in the future. Someone picks up a magnetic tape that still has some good sections on it. In the future, they know something about ASCII encoding, but not some of the other encodings that were used today. This one is one of those other encodings. They’d have to use some sort of statistically analysis and hope it’s written in a language they know with text strings they can find or something. They’re going to have a much harder time of it reconstructing the data.

Digital formats add another layer of encoding upon already encoded information. Usually multiple layers of encoding are involved. This makes maintenance and upkeep much higher than for books.

A printed book’s encodings are just the script and language it’s in without the extra layers of encoding, file formats, compression, etc. Digital data has many more things to fail along the way to prevent easy reading in the future.

Self-Insufficient

This is really the most important reason I like books. I can pick one off the shelf, open it to a page, and immediately examine it’s contents. If I have a book in my computer, I have to boot the computer, load the right program for reading it, and read it. If I put it on a flash drive or SD card, I have the full contents of the text with me, but I can’t do anything with it until I get a computer or cell phone or a Kindle or something capable of showing me the data.

A book requires no translator or reader to explain it to me. It requires no special equipment to read other than my hands and eyes.

In the end, a book is something I am sure I can pass on to my children as their inheritance or share with someone else without any additional effort. I rarely have that kind of guarantee when sharing a digital file or something. The digital copy of a book gives me the ability to search or process data in it, but if I just want to read, reference, or consume the content of a book, the printed page is always better.

Cheers.

Okay, so we've all heard of and mocked the BSOD (Blue/Black Screen of Death) on our computers. Today, I'm going to deride the Blue Screen of Dumb on my Apple. I just forceably shutdown my laptop by holding down the power button for 10 seconds. Was it hung? No. My mouse was still moving, it was still taking keyboard input, and Expose (Apple's window switching effect) appeared to be working. What was the problem? My screen was blue.

When you plug an additional monitor into an Apple computer, it turns the screen a pleasant shade of soothing blue while it figures out how to add the second screen. Apple tries to protect the user from ugly screen change side-effects by covering them over with a uniform color. This way, even if your screen flickers and blinks, you won't notice it so much. It's one of the ways Apple politely pats the users on the head so they don't have to be so worried about they're computer.

The problem is that sometimes when you're in a hurry and you don't take the time to unplug the external monitor cable and wait for the blue screen to go away before closing your Apple laptop and putting it to sleep, when it comes time wake-up, the Apple sometimes leaves that pleasant Blue Screen of Dumb up. Interestingly, I can still tell where the password box is for my screen lock-out (corporate computers MUST HAVE SCREEN LOCK PASSWORDS you know) by moving the mouse around. If it moves off where the box is it turns into the pretty Apple wait pinwheel. If I move it back on, it becomes an arrow or the "I" cursor over where the text fields should be shown.

After typing my password and hitting "Enter" (which I don't recommend doing if you think you had a chat window open before you shutdown that might be active again, that burned my on my Linux workstation the day when I told all my friends in the local LUG channel on IRC what my password was), after typing my password, I can then move the mouse into the corner that actives Expose and it turns to the finger cursor normally in place for Expose. Going back to the corner, it turns back to a regular pointer. All this indicates that if it weren't for the Blue Screen of Dumb, I should be able to use my computer. In fact, I suppose if I were blind and had all the accessibility features turned on, I might not even notice since I can't see the screen anyway.

The same thing has been known to happen with the lock-out screen, particularly if I get a little too eager to enter my password. I have my Mac set to lock the computer when waking up or after the screen saver starts as per company policy. However, if I start typing before the password box shows up (which can take several seconds after waking up because of how many programs I usually have running that it has to notify of the wakeup) then sometimes when I hit enter the password box goes away but this time the Black Screen of Dumb stays in place. This one I can almost always eliminate by closing my laptop again waiting about 30 seconds and then reopening and trying again.

Now, I know the real issue here is that properly handling sleep and wakeup is hard, very hard. I don't know of anyone who's had a computer running any OS that really got it right 100% of the time. Apples (other than the two issues I mention here) have got it about as close as I've seen in my experience, which is why I rarely hesitate to close my laptop lid to sleep at any point, even when I've been using a second monitor. These problems really don't come up very often. I don't know that that's because of any particular ingenuity or good design on Apple's part so much as it is that Mac OS X doesn't run on anything but Apple hardware so there are fewer variations to test and debug.

Anyway, that's just one annoyance on my Mac, but at least it doesn't crash as often as any Windows laptop I've ever had. Furthermore, since there aren't a lot of ways to tweak things under the hood without going into questionable territory I don't attempt to break it as much as any Linux laptop I've ever had. :)

Cheers.

Wowsers. Okay, I started working for the Department of Computing and Information Science in October of 2003. At that time, I started as a student employee and had my office in Nichols 118, where Diesel currently lives. At that time, I shared my office with four machines in my office, Kirin, Saru, Kuma, and Printserv. Kirin is the department's backup server. Saru was my workstation and one time application depot and firewall for the Linux lab—when Nichols 128 had need for such things. Kuma was the Unix print server. And Printserv is the Windows print server. Kate Adams became my office mate and a fifth machine moved in, Scorpion, which was her workstation.

After working for the department about two months, Tim Bower, the bossman, got offered a position as Assistant Professor in Salina, which he subsequently took. Seeing an opening for a real job I believed I was qualified for, I applied. This was an internal search for temporary position. They offered me the job and I took it. I then moved into Tim's old office, Nichols 116, and took Saru with me.

In Nichols 116, I no longer had a human office mate, but I shared the office with Achird, Zaurak, Oracle, Remote, and Saru. Achird was Tim's old workstation, which was used frequently by a professor via SSH. Zaurak was the recently (at that point) retired web server, but was removed very shortly thereafter. Oracle is the (since rebuilt) Oracle RDBMS server. Remote is the Microsoft Windows RDP server that acted as Tim's other workstation.

I don't hold to using servers as workstations, as was the wont of the previous administration, so I rearranged the office so that Remote was no longer a workstation. Oracle was in bad shape, so I replaced Oracle with Oracle2, which was a worse machine, but worked better than Oracle. Oracle was briefly put on sabbatical, but both remained in my office. Achird stayed in my office for a few months before I grew tired of it's presence and banished it to the Tower of Not So Much Power in our server room (which is growing to Biblical proportions). Saru, I'm sorry to say, needed a face lift and became Aldebaran, the prototype Gentoo Linux workstation in our department.

Back in my old abode, Cole moved in. He, briefly, shared space with Kate until the summer when we wished her a fond farewell as she moved on to bigger and better things. (Or perhaps more mundane, but better paying and closer to her real interests, according to her description...) Anyway, during this time, another machine was added to his brood, Seer. Seer is the Nagios and MRTG machine used to monitor our network and computer systems.

In April, the search for the permanent holder of the office of Systems Coordinator was begun. The search ended with two interviews, one with myself and one with another. An epic contest ensued and the two of us battled for days on end. In the end, my foe was vanquished and I smote his ruin upon the quad. Er...maybe the staff just decided that even though I might have been a little less qualified it was better not to change administrations again. Whatever happened, I was given the honor of staying with the department.

Since then, I rebuilt both Oracle and Oracle2 to make them a super-combo. That is, the computer formerly known as Oracle is now Catera. The computer formerly known as Oracle2 is now Cougar. These two machines together form the ultimate duo: Oracle Server and Oracle Client. Cougar keeps Catera happily hidden so we no longer have to compromise the quality of our Oracle server in order to keep from compromising security—which had formerly been the bane of our Oracle servers.

In addition to this, I created the initial framework (which Cole has since rewritten) which makes our fleet of Gentoo lab computers possible. In order to prove the concept, Saru, aka Aldebaran, had it's identity altered again to become, DUM-dum-DUM-dum-DUMMMMM, Silverado. I was tired of star names, really tired, really, really, really, really, really....really tired. Therefore, I decreed that henceforth, all CIS managed Linux servers and workstations shall have American automobile names.

Recently, Cole also built another machine, Montecarlo, to replace Kuma, who's age was really beginning to show. Ultra 5's are well beyond their prime. Kuma is an Ultra 5 and due for banishment with Achird, Zaurak, and dozens (literally!) of others.

Anyway, all of this to say, "Holy crap! We have a lot of servers in our offices!" I mentioned before that I don't hold to using servers as workstations. Well, I don't hold to keeping servers in offices at all. They belong in the server laboratory with all of their parallelepiped brethren. I have had the goal, since my start in October last year to get all these freaking servers out of our offices. Today, I have finally, mostly succeeded.

There was a mass migration of servers from offices into the server room. This migration was made possible due to the retirement of several unnecessary servers during the last week. Sarin, Hadar, Izar, and Clinton were all assassinated in the last week freeing up spots to move machines out of offices. Cougar, Catera, Kirin, Remote, Montecarlo, and Seer were all moved into our server laboratory today and yesterday. Awesome!

The mass migration is incomplete because Printserv has not been moved. Unfortunately, it is tethered to the wall in such a way as to make it's migration infeasible. However, it is also in a sorry state, very sorry. We worry for it's health and are afraid it may succumb to something akin to Alzheimer's disease soon. As printing is considered fairly important, we are going to replace Printserv with a brand spankin' new 1U rackmount when it arrives in another couple weeks. When that happens, Printserv will be unceremoniously nixed and tossed with extreme prejudice onto the Tower.

Once that is done, there will be no more servers in the office of any of the systems staff. As of this time, no more servers will be built within the confines of our offices. I will not encourage the breaking of the policy that servers belong in the server room. Humans and their own faithful workstations only belong in offices. Of course, this policy should not be difficult to enforce when I have another policy that states all new servers must be rackmount units. We don't have any racks in our offices, so a rackmount is really not very appropriate in our offices.

For one of my longest blogs ever, I wanted to say, "W00T! Victory is mine!" I am going to spend the evening doing the happy dance of joy rather than sleeping tonight...hmm...maybe I'll just dream about doing the happy dance instead. Cheers.

You force your computer to have unprotected sex with other computers?! I can't believe you. That's truly awful.

Okay, a bit of hyperbole, but it's warranted. There is no reason for viruses to be as rampant as they are today. Just today, a professor in the Computer Science department sent me a Microsoft Word document. Have you lost your mind? I wouldn't open a Word document sent by the President himself, even if the NSA had certified that it was clean. That'd be like me forcing my computer to have sex with every computer that the President's computer has ever taken a Word document from. No way. This just goes to show how few people, even of those that should be in know, don't know how disgustingly dangerous such seemingly innocuous things as Word files can be.

If you are in the nasty habit of downloading and installing software from the Internet, you're crazy. I do download and install software from the Internet, but I'm pretty selective about which stuff I'll install. Anything stored at Tucows, CNET, Download.com, etc. I wouldn't touch with a full-body condom. Yuck.

Anyway, all of this to say don't exchange any Microsoft documents, they're great carriers of every computerized STD (VDs for you old timers) you can imagine. And don't download useless crap from the Internet, it's the same thing. You may think you use a condom (antivirus/anti-adware software), but nothing is going to be as safe as abstinence. So, stay clean and don't be a pimp for your computer.