As most of my readers know, I am a long-time videogamer.  I’m also a gamer with a (low) budget;  I have to make my gaming work within the same budget I use for my professional development equipment.  That means I have the same ten-year old yellowing case for my workstation, rather than a cool gamers’ case.  I do have a decent monitor and the X-Box controller I talked about before.  And I have Steam, GOG and a multitude of independent developers to keep me in games in exchange for relatively little cash.

PC gaming, left for dead by the console industry, has settled into a decent niche that is still very much alive.  Independent developers have created a lot of good, and successful games.  Steam, the online game store/environment/host/social network, has made box and disc purchases all but obsolete, just as GOG has done for the bargain oldies bin at CompUSA.

As I promised before, I’ve gone through my back collection of games and I’m going to write about some of them.   

Video games have been around long enough for us to see the same tropes and themes, in old games and in new.  I can’t help but compare my older games to my newer games and see how games have changed and how they haven’t.  What old games do I still love to play?  What new games haven’t I played once I took them out of the box (or the zip or the download)?  What themes do I see over and over?  What interesting tropes are there in old games that I have never seen in new games?

I’m going to cover one game at a time, one old, and one new.  I’ll provide compatibility information—all games I cover have been tested on Windows 7 (and soon Windows 8)—and availability, if the game is still on the market.  (Acquiring  “abandonware” is beyond the scope of my series.)

All games I write about are installed or downloaded “full” client software installations;  I won’t get into browser-hosted games.  I seldom play multiplayer, so my perspective is that of the single player environment.

(“Old games” and “new games” terms need clarification.  Most gamers define “old games” to be “last month’s releases.” Technologically, I consider the dividing line to be the mid-2000’s when most games stopped targeting Windows 9x, when Windows XP and its runtime environment predominated, and when GPU technology became inexpensive and mainstream, making PC gaming technology more homologized than it ever had been.  I’m going to be very fluid and arbitrary in my distinctions between new and old.)

Screenshots are generated by FRAPS unless stated otherwise. 

Today’s old game is Dethkarz, published in 1998 by Melbourne House.  Dethkarz is a futuristic cyberpunk racing game.  You choose a racing team, and compete on urban, coastal, futuristic and off-world tracks with a car that races on an elevated course.

And your car has lasers and missiles.  Dethkarz falls into the combat racing game genre.

I’ve fired on the guy in front.  As you may see, I’m about to gain a position!  Too bad about that DNF.

You get missiles and other abilities through convenient power-ups located on the track:

You get powerups for extra offense, shields and free energy to repair your car.  You recharge your car by driving through an energy field about where pit road would be on a conventional race track, on the left hand turn in this screenshot.

The signs and billboards are striking. They are right out of the cyberpunk culture we first saw in Blade Runner.   A few years ago, the Wachowski brothers dipped into this same well to make a movie version of a popular 1960’s Japanese animated series that was also about a futuristic race car and its driver.  Look familiar?

If Speed Racer were made into a game (and it will be or already has been or will be again, that’s a certainty), it might look like the movie.  Melbourne House may have had Speed Racer in mind anyway, from this screenshot:

When I saw this sign, I could not help but think of Racer X, that enigmatic, mysterious, driver that figured so much into the career and life of Speed Racer in the series.

Dethkarz was a good game for its time.  The 3D models are “blocky”, which was common in 1998, as GPU hardware was expensive and texture mapping not as well developed as it is today.  The track and scene design is relatively simple and doesn’t exhibit the “pop-up” syndrome we see in many games (modern games, even) where textures just suddenly pop in as you’re racing through the environment changing your viewpoint.

(If you play old games, particularly old racing games, note how many environments seem to be foggy places, whether weather conditions are simulated or not.  You don’t have to render distant objects in a fogbank, Carmageddon being the best example.  No wonder you can’t see jaywalkers before you run into them!  There’s nothing like being pushed into a fog bank by another car only to realize you’re going off a cliff that has just been revealed beyond your control.)

The game works fine with my XBox controller with the default control bindings.  Steering is overly sensitive, so you need to be very light with control or else you’ll be dumped off the course over and over again;  this was a fault of the game even in its time when I used a traditional controller.

I ran the game at 1280×960 with no performance problems.  (I am not obsessed with FPS figures, unless the game is running at 0 FPS and it’s crashed.)   The game installed right from the CD with no compatibility shims applied. 

Dethkarz will run in Windows as a standard user with UAC enabled, though it will need to be elevated to install.

Dethkarz is not currently available for purchase or download.

Next up, a brand new “experimental” racing game inspired by the 1980’s.

Four years ago, the last time the Patriots were in the Superbowl, I invented a real-life example of the Network Pizza Model originally attributed to David Lawrence Nicol.  I wanted to update my pizza model to reflect new networking standards, many of which I have applied to our network at SATV, which has been much changed in the four years since the original pizza model.

The original Network Pizza model went like this, based on the well-worn OSI 7-layer model:

• Level 7: Meal layer. Hungry humans get nourished and revitalized.
• Level 6: Presentation layer. Do you use a plate? Forks? Napkins?
• Level 5: Session layer. Was level 4 prompt? Do you tip two dollars or three?
• Level 4: Transport layer. Some poor shmoe has to find your cul-de-sac.
• Level 3: Network layer. You call your Pizza service provider on the phone and have a synchronous negotiation regarding aspects of levels 2 and 4.
• Level 2: Sauce and toppings, as specified in Level 3.
• Level 1: Physical crust layer. The bread on which the entire pizza is
  constructed.

My innovation this year is to add VLAN technology to the network pizza.  It is now possible for individual client diners to enjoy the advantages of segmented networks.   We have deployed a small VLAN at SATV to make our public WiFi network easier to manage by setting it apart from our primary network.  My network pizza will, by the same token (groan), also be easier to consume.  Here are the planning, preparation and deployment details:

Layer 1 Physical Crust Layer

My recipe is based on a bubble-bread pizza I found on the net.  The ingredients are based on the pizza recipe I usually use.

• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar 
• 1-1/4 cup water
• 3 cups bread flour
• 1/4 tsp oregano
• 2 tsp active dry yeast

Layer 2 Sauce and toppings

• Pizza sauce (I use the jar type; I’m not strong on sauces so make your own…)
• Fancy blended shredded cheese (any pizza combo or make your own combo)
• Pepperoni
• Peppers

Layer 1 Construction

Mix oil, salt, half of the water (1 cup worth), cheese, and flour. Stir until combined, cover and let stand for 20 minutes. Continue mixing until the dough ball forms and is tacky (not too dry or wet.) Add water if dry. Mix in yeast. Once you have a good dough ball, cover the mixing bowl and let stand for 45 minutes to rise.

Bread machine instructions: Put machine in dough cycle and add all ingredients. If you’re using a machine, you probably know enough to check the dough wetness as the machine runs.

Layer 2-5 Construction

This is where I diverge from a standard pizza model.  Remove the dough and put it in a covered container and let rise for 45 minutes.

Get or find a 14” cake pan, preferably the springiform type that has a removable band to enclose the batter.  Coat it with olive oil.

Divide the dough into 6-8 pieces, and roll them each into a ball.  In this instance, I used half of the dough I made and saved the other half for later.  This is a good option for small networks;  large networks will require you to use all the dough.

Place the dough pieces in the pan like so:

Flatten the dough pieces so that they resemble small pizzas.  Coat the dough liberally with olive oil.

Add the layers:

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.  Slide the pan into the oven and let it bake for 20-25 minutes.

As you can see in the opening picture, you now have a network pizza with VLAN, suitable for all home—and office—applications.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get to implement VLAN tagging or VLAN security;  I’d suggest that some (larger) clients at your site could implement Network Access Control with an outthrust arm or a well-aimed shoulder.

I have no clue how to implement VLAN tagging or filtering, unless you use these same Network Access Control clients to bar the door.

Otherwise, the VLAN Network Pizza is an excellent, tasty implementation.  Nom, nom, nom!

A post of mine two years ago has gotten by far the most comments of any I’ve ever made in any of my blogs.  A lot of people loved reading “The Force is With Me! TIE Fighter 95 on Windows 7 x64”, but had trouble getting the compatibility shim to work.

I’ve found out a few things:  The original SDB file on LucasFiles was written for an older version of the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT).  I don’t remember which version I had originally used to read the file, but this file cannot be opened on it.  The 32-bit ACT Compatibility Administrator will report that it cannot open an x64 compatibility shim, but if you run the 64-bit version, it will say it can’t open a x86 compatibility shim.  I don’t use this tool very often and I’m not sure just how Microsoft deals with upgrades, but the original file was not going to be openable.

I used a utility called sdb2xml to extract the original SDB file to XML and read the settings.  I then recreated these settings in a new SDB file, uninstalled the old SDB file using Windows’ built-in sdbinst command and reinstalled the new SDB file.

I’ve made it available on my website.  Download xwtie95v2.zip.  Unzip the file into a temporary folder and run the batch file therein.  All that does is execute sdbinst xwtie95v2.sdb to bring the shim into the Windows compatibility database.

You don’t need to have the ACT installed to use the shim.   If you do have the ACT, you can open the shim with Compatibility Administrator (x86), not the x64 version!  (The 64-bit version of Compatibility Administrator is for fixing 64-bit applications.  Unless you were running 64-bit apps on Windows Server 2003 x64 or even XP Pro x64, you will almost never use this version.)

If you’re installing the game on 32-bit Windows (Vista or 7), the original installers should work.  If you’re on 64-bit Windows, the installer shims can be had from http://www.markusegger.at/Software/Games.aspx.  You’ll copy the original game discs and use those to make a slipstream copy with a 64-bit-compatible installer.

The other Star Wars games, X-Wing Alliance, X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter, and Rouge Squadron, don’t need shims.

I’ve played a few missions in TIE Fighter with my shims and it appears to work.  The screenshot is from X-Wing because I could not remember for the life of me what the keystroke for screen capture is in either game, and I had X-Wing screenshots lying around.

Since TIE Fighter is such an old game, many of the websites devoted to it have disappeared;  finding information on old games is as much a challenge as is playing them!  But I found a few sites:

• X-Wing Alliance
• TIE Fighter (stanislavs.tripod.com)
• Allen’s TIE Fighter Page

Allen’s site has a collection of homemade missions, which I have not tried yet.

I hope this works for those still having problems.  Happy gaming!

A regular ritual of mine around this time of year is Embedded Systems Conference.  This conference and trade show is held every fall in Boston.  I’ve been going for years, including last year, and the year before that.  I love going.  I’ve always had a side interest in electronics and I’m a ham radio operator (N1KGH), and I seldom get many chances to see and work with electronics on a regular basis.

This year, scopes were everywhere!  I attended Rohde & Schwarz’s lab, and got to use the scope you see in the (too blurry!) photo above.  I didn’t get to spend a lot of time on it, but I did get to try the lab myself after my fellow attendees finished their session on the machine.

The lab involved inspecting a digital waveform with some deliberate glitches put in it by the demo board on the table.  (All the test & measurement vendors have boards like these.)  I had to define a mask on the screen, sort of a box, that would make the scope trigger if a “bad” waveform is detected.  I got through that OK after briefly chatting with the lab instructor.  The scope you see here has a touchscreen and it runs Windows 7 Embedded (no joke!  I watched someone open up Windows dialogs and menus on the thing as if it were their laptop.)

At about $17,000, I won’t be having one any time soon, but I had no trouble using it considering I’d had only a few minutes to learn it.

I didn’t want to be in a dark room all day so I went to the show floor and tried out another scope lab, this one by Tektronix:

(My Kodak Zi8 really isn’t that great at run-and-gun shooting.  Sorry.)

This lab was similar to the Rohde & Schwarz lab except there was a good-sized line to be seated.  The Tek instructor had me do a different exercise:  Their scope was connected to a board with a microcontroller and a 2.4 GHz WiFi module and I had to use the scope to answer questions like, what is the exact frequency of the LO in the module, how long does it take to receive a command, start transmitting and settle down, and so forth.

Their scope, like many digital scopes, is “mixed signal”, and has not only the traditional scope probes (4 channels) but also a digital interface, a bunch of clips connected to a ribbon cable like in a logic analyzer.  The scope I used had a serial interface trigger (to connect to SPI or I2C, two very-common serial standards you probably never heard of) and an FFT module to measure frequency.  It being a digital scope, it had cursors you could place on the start and end of waveforms and measure time.  Like most demos, the exercises are always a little contrived and nudged to show the specific advantages of the product, but I still appreciated turning the knobs.

Tek was handing out a beautiful retro T-shirt:

That is Tektronix’s original logo.  I would be lying if I said that I never used or owned a scope with that logo.  (I once owned three tube-powered Tek scopes.)

Elsewhere on the show floor, I took advantage of an offer Texas Instruments was promoting:  If you turned in a competitor’s development board, you could get one of TI’s dev boards in return.  I turned in an old Zilog Z8 Encore board that I had bought at a past show in 2001, but never really used.  (Most of my dev hardware is TI nowadays, plus a Netduino that I will write about if I ever make the time to play with it.)

I got a watch in return:

From the TI wiki:

The eZ430-Chronos is a highly integrated, wearable wireless development system that comes in a sports watch. It may be used as a reference platform for watch systems, a personal display for personal area networks, as a wireless sensor node for remote data collection, or simply as a watch.

It’s quite a device.  It has a wireless interface to send data back and forth;  the intended application is a sports watch;  it has an accelerometer and an interface to an optional heart-rate monitor, and a USB wireless dongle to send workout data to a PC to be compiled.

I probably won’t use it for exercise but the wireless feature would be great for automatic time synchronization with the NTP server I run at home.  Also, it’s the biggest watch display for its size that I’ve ever used.  It will be a very functional watch, at least when I’m not reprogramming it.

Oh, the XJTAG booth babes were here, again:

And someone called Smart Bear:

That’s it for 2011.  Perhaps next year I’ll remember to look at the complimentary coupons in the bag they give to every attendee.  There was an offer for yet another dev board and I missed it!  (And I can’t even remember the vendor.)

There are always silly articles when a new version of Windows is leaked or becomes available for preview.  Windows was once supposed to have a chartreuse screen of death when Vista was released.  This is the “new” BSOD, at least so far.

It’s perhaps too cute to make the release, but it’s functional, considering that in most instances I am troubleshooting from the crash dump or the event log so it’s not as important that I have the specific bugcheck code on the screen.

Unfortunately, some vendor’s drivers will make this screen harder to diagnose from;  Intel provides the storage drivers for virtually all of their desktop boards, including our Dells at SATV and my laptop.  When that driver crashes the machine, it does so with a bugcheck code of 0×8086.  Which is a “vendor defined” code that is nowhere to be found in a search.   It means you need to bug Intel for a driver fix.  I’m not sure if that code will present itself in this blue screen.

I have a suggestion for a new blue screen design:

As I write this, it’s been a year and a quarter since SATV hatched our idea for internet broadcasting.  We still had a few things to pick up.

Over the spring, I bought a GPS module for myself, for experimentation.  With some open-source software, I found that it would make an excellent, cheap time reference.  For less than $200, we could keep our facility timekeeping—our on-air timekeeping—to within 1/1000’s of one second.  Sal agreed, and we got a GPS module of our own.  I’m planning a  guide on cheap GPS timing in a future series of posts.

We’ve long been worried about our server storage.  We now have several terabytes of video at SATV.  We need a backup and data recovery plan for off-site.  While we figure out that, we got our first SAN, a Drobo B800i.  It’s loaded up with 14 TB worth of storage.  We plan on using it to backup both our video servers, plus our SBS machine and the backup DC it is paired with.

I’m well aware that we need something more for offsite.  I plan on talking with our city’s IT director (who, in an irony, was once my boss—I interned for her the summer after I graduated from Salem State College (now University)) to see what resources she may be able to bear on our problem.  She was the one who first asked about airing government meetings over the internet!

As a member of the Salem Commission on Disabilities, I’ve known for a long time how important TV coverage is to us as we conduct our business. Government transparency has been cited so often that the expression is clichéd now. But I have seen first hand how important it is and when Sal wanted to implement video-on-demand I jumped in with both hands and feet. 

We got a nice hat tip from the Salem Gazette for our efforts. 

This whole project has been a labor of love for me, and while I want to give Sal Russo the credit for our overall leadership, I’ve worked in the background to give us the IT experiences and resources that we all accept without a second’s thought.  Now, a thought about the future.

SATV receives its funding through a contract with our cable provider, Comcast, and a franchise agreement that our city has negotiated every 10 years for nearly 30 years.  In Massachusetts, at any given time, one of our neighboring communities will either be going through the franchise negotiations, completing the franchise negotiations or just starting discussion.

When I started this project a year and a quarter ago, Sal and I had been discussing the last of our payments from Comcast in our current contract period, and we decided on the strategy and spending that I’ve just described in the past three posts.

We are about to think about our future as an organization.   It’ll be a challenging and intensive process;  I was involved in our planning for the current agreement and it was a stressful time.  With our economic and political situation, I have not enjoyed thinking much about the future.

But it is here nonetheless.

I’m already planning replacements for several big-budget items, including our impossible-to-fix Inscriber.  I am well aware of Microsoft’s roadmap, and the fact that Windows XP will be completely out of support in 2014.  Not long ago, we needed two huge road cases to broadcast in the field.  They’re obsolete now.  We’ are thinking of a suitcase and a laptop.  If that.  Years ago I could not hope to have my own personal camcorder, but today I have a camera I can hold in my hand that shoots excellent HD video.  It cost me just $100.

Those are the realities that SATV and I have to adjust to.  I normally love working with technology—it really has been a labor of love for me—but it could be difficult and dispiriting for a while.

But we can’t argue with the results so far.  I hope we can be just as relevant tomorrow as we are today.

In my last post I talked about the new video-on-demand system we got at SATV.  Recapping, this is a rack-mount Windows Server 2008R2 system that runs IIS and Windows Media Services in a custom system that will handle all the programming playback and ingest needs for a small public-access cable facility.  It also transcodes programming for on-demand playback  through the built in WMS.

This past May we introduced this capability to the community of Salem, Massachusetts.  How was it received?

It was all WIN!

This past spring, Salem lost our former mayor Sam Zoll.  He was only our mayor for a few years in the early 1970’s before being appointed to the bench, but he was a much-beloved individual with the foresight to stage-manage his own memorial service.  It was filmed and broadcast on SATV, but on a Friday afternoon not long afterwards, we had our VOD server transcode the file and we published the link on our web site.

In the screenshot above is a capture of my internal reporting tool (using PowerShell and Log Analyzer) that runs once a month and gives us stats on what people are watching.   It shows that Zoll’s memorial service was accessed over 270 times, and had a total viewing time of over 26 hours!

It was only overshadowed by Salem Now, which featured a very popular Salem band, The Extras Band, giving an excellent performance that was easily in the realm of American Bandstand of my youth.  That show had over 500 accesses!

In a time where organizations like SATV’s must take advantage of new social media, our new system was very fortuitous indeed!

Now that we had the system working, I needed to make it as reliable as could be.   We had been having glitches with the network in our cablecast plant for quite some time.  We had an 8-port gigabit switch and an 8-port Cat 6 patch panel, both of which were overloaded.

We purchased a Dell 2824 24 port managed gigabit switch to replace the old switch, but I found a problem with our patch panel:

When I first designed and built our Cat 6 network a few years back, I used a Leviton 12-port panel in this and a few other rooms in the facility.  This panel was designed to be oriented just as you see it.  Note that the RJ45 tab is on the side as are the contacts.  Note the broken contacts on jack #6.

The jack was stressed and was destined to fail.  $150 later—and a reorientation—that problem was fixed:

And this is our network switch:

We still weren’t done.  Following a very visible power failure in our facility last year, Sal and I were determined to not have that happen again, or at least, we wanted to ride out any power transients in a much smoother way than before.

We purchased two Eaton 5130 1500 VA UPS units, each with an SNMP/web network card and an external battery.   We can access these directly from the network without needing a PC to control them.  We use Spiceworks to manage our IT and that app has UPS support for our units.  A happy day!

We redistributed our older Powerware 5125 units to power our server, and perhaps more importantly, part of our control room from which our studio shows are produced.  We have a total of 4 managed Eaton/Powerware units, 1 unmanaged APC and one unmanaged TrippLite.  During a summer in downtown Salem that saw National Grid trucks on the street every day, and a 5-hour blackout at my own apartment building one Sunday afternoon, this new hardware is most welcome.

We were finally getting closer to perfection. 

In my final post, I talk about the last few things we’ve bought, but more importantly. I talk about our future and what it means.

I haven’t posted for a long time.  During the past year at SATV, we have made a number of improvements to our IT that have given us new capabilities to serve the city of Salem and its communities.

Earlier this year, we got a new video server from Tightrope Media Systems;  We have been running their media system for years and have been running their SX-4 video server for several years.   It has two channels of encoder input and four channels of encoder output;  three of the four channels normally feed each of our three cable channels, 3 for public access, 15 for education and 16 for government.  The extra playback channel is used as a spare.  The two input encoders are used to capture analog video for playback.

Our plant was originally built to ingest (input for broadcasting) VHS, DV and DVD video content, but after several years almost all of our on-air content comes from MPEG-2 files that are served by our SX-4.  DVD’s are transcoded and demultiplexed with a utility provided by TRMS, so our DVD players have been getting less and less use.

Over the past few years, the Internet has continued to encompass more and more everyday activities as time goes on.  Many public access TV facilities have been offering their content online.  Also, the City of Salem has wanted and needed to have government meeting coverage available online and on-demand.

Last year, I worked with Sal Russo and the staff to plan the implementation of a VOD (video-on-demand) system at SATV.  The new VOD server would require a number of changes to our network configuration and an upgrade to our level of service from Comcast, from which we purchase Internet and phone service.

The first challenge I needed to confront was our firewall.  Once upon a time we had Microsoft SBS 2003 which included ISA Server.  It was an excellent firewall and I still miss it.  However, most of the SBS community didn’t share my enthusiasm for this product so Microsoft elected to remove ISA.  After we migrated to SBS 2008, we had no firewall.  We were left with the NAT features that were in our cable modem, an SMC 8014 used by Comcast.

This was barely tolerable at the time we installed it because we did not have very many incoming connections;  our schedule web page accessed our SX-4 directly and that was it, not counting the occasional VPN connection from home.  A VOD service would make us serve a lot more connections and much more traffic.  That was why we needed to move up to (and pay for) the next tier of service from Comcast.

And we needed a firewall.  I chose a Zyxel USG firewall appliance.

What I liked about this firewall were the seven ports that could be configured to be in multiple zones, with forwarding rules for each.  I used this to put our public WiFi access points on their own separate network, routed via a VLAN on our core managed switch.  This was a very nice side benefit that worked great.

This past February we got the VOD installed, and about six weeks later, we started playing programming on-demand over the internet.

How did it go?

That’s for my next installment.

An old joke in the computer and electronics technical communities is the idea of “magic smoke”.  The joke is, electronic components have magic smoke in them.  Overheat and let out the smoke and the component (and usually the device!) doesn’t work anymore.

I was working on a friend’s computer.  My diagnosis on his only two-year-old HP system was that the motherboard and power supply was defective;  I was certain the motherboard was bad, and could not rule out the PS, so I made arrangements to get new parts.

Motherboard for his gently-used computer:  $350.  So much for that.  We (his sister and I) arranged to get a new machine from Staples and I would migrate the data from his old hard drive.

Until that moment, I had been running his old hard drive on my laptop using a USB to SATA adapter that is often used by hardware techs and there was no hint whatsoever of any problems.  I had no reason to think the HD was defective—I could bring it up and read his files whenever I felt like it.

That changed when I provisioned his new machine, put everything the way he expected it, put his copy of Norton 360 on it, and so forth.  Hindsight says I should have copied his files while the HD was on my laptop but I was thinking “look but not touch!”  I just wanted to ascertain that the HD hardware was good, and the SMART data was fine (it was)—I wasn’t going to tinker with his disk if I didn’t have to.

I spun up the drive with my adaptor and plugged it into his machine.  OK, I smell something hot—the drive is in the palm of my hand because of how my SATA adapter works.  It’s not spinning—another reason I like to (carefully!) have my hand on an HD is because I can feel it spin up, or fail to spin up, or grind the heads.

No activity.  It’s still hot.

My friend and I both notice the smoke.  (“Whoa, Dave, what’s that!”)

I unplugged the disk and put everything away.

This is what it looked like on my workbench:

In the opening image to this post, you’ll notice two surface-mount zener diodes on a working Samsung hard drive.  These are widely used in computer power supplies and major components such as motherboards.  They are the basis for voltage regulation upon which we all depend on in nearly every electronic gadget.

This hard drive was also a Samsung, which made it easy to compare this drive to one of my good ones.

What happened to the diode in the 2nd picture??

There is solder on the pads where the diode would normally go, so the component was definitely intended to be there.  It was there.

I’ve smoked various broken devices and homemade projects on my workbench at home.  Way back in the days when people first made their own computers in the ‘70s, a popular way to learn how ROMs (Read Only Memories) worked was build your own out of these little glass 1N4148 diodes.  The diodes, when connected, were all “1’s”.  You got “0’s” in your ROM by putting a heavy-duty power supply across the diode in reverse, which would kill it.  You’d see a nice flash of light.  People still call it “blowing ROM’s”.

I’ve never seen components just disappear in a puff of smoke!

But my friend and I just did.

Eventually, my friend got his data from an online backup he paid for when he got the Norton product.   Samsung’s disk business has been bought by Seagate so I may not see another dead drive from them again.

I’ve tried getting an RMA for this drive but Samsung insists it was bought out of market, likely to discourage gray market use.  And discourage me from buying HP, permanently, but that’s another post.  I usually offer the platters from any HD that is out of warranty or cannot be returned to SATV staffers and other people I work for.

My friend will get some platters to use as paperweights or coasters.

There are some IT tropes that have been around for so long one takes them for granted.  There is a belief that Unix machines, including Linux, BSD and Mac OS X, are better than anything.  Not only is Unix better than Windows, a fact taken as a given in IT, but those who manage them are also better, smarter and more logical than Windows admins.  Not to mention more “pure”  than other admins.  (Richard Stallman is perhaps the leading avatar for this belief, whether he believes it or not.)

InfoWorld, apart from Bob Lewis, has meant IT yellow journalism for quite some time, ever since their Save XP campaign and Randall Kennedy’s supposed revelations last year.

Now, Paul Venezia is telling us about “Nine Traits Of The Veteran Unix Admin”.  I thought immediately of that Dilbert strip with the bearded Unix guy (and he is almost always male) who gives him a nickel and tells him to “buy a better computer!”

His points can only make sense if he is tongue-in-cheek, or else he has never done any IT for anyone.  Going down some of them:

Veteran Unix admin trait No. 2: We use vi, not emacs, and definitely not pico or nano
While we know that emacs is near and dear to the hearts of many Unix admins, it really is the Unix equivalent of Microsoft Word. Vi — and explicitly vim — is the true tool for veteran Unix geeks who need to get things done and not muck about with the extraneous nonsense that comes with emacs. Emacs has a built-in game of Tetris, for crying out loud.

I’ll grudgingly admit that the bells and whistles in vim such as code folding and syntax highlighting might be considered fluff, but at the end of the day, real Unix work blends extremely well with vi’s modal editing concepts. In addition, its svelte size and universal portability make it the One True Editor. Thanks Bill, thanks Bram.

I’ve used a lot of different editors in nearly 30 years of IT, on many different systems. 

I’ve used some very primitive line editors;  many of you may remember EDLIN in MS-DOS, but editors like it were also common on mainframes such as the CDC Cyber 170 I used in college.  I remember using TECO, Emacs’ predecessor, on the PDP-11 machines I had access to, and was delighted to use the full-screen version that was available for the VT-52.

When I got my first Net access via a Unix shell, I learned Emacs and that’s all there was to it;  no arguing, no fuss.  If I had to learn Unix to be on the net, then there it was.  On our Amigas at SATV, Memacs, the Amiga port of this editor, was the one to use.   Other Linux distros I have used have had vi, vim, nano, and pico, to say nothing of whatever GUI editors came with Gnome, XFCE or KDE, which are all a blur to me.

I didn’t care what editor I needed to use just as long as I could get it to edit whatever config file I needed edited at the moment.

You care that much about vi to make that strong a point?   Get a life.

Veteran Unix admin trait No. 3: We wield regular expressions like weapons
To the uninitiated, even the most innocuous regex looks like the result of nauseous keyboard. To us, however, it’s pure poetry. The power represented in the complexity of pcre (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) cannot be matched by any other known tool. If you need to replace every third character in a 100,000-line file, except when it’s followed by the numeral 4, regular expressions aren’t just a tool for the job — they’re the only tool for the job. Those that shrink from learning regex do themselves and their colleagues a disservice on a daily basis. In just about every Unix shop of reasonable size, you’ll find one or two guys regex savants. These poor folks constantly get string snippets in their email accompanied by plaintive requests for a regex to parse them, usually followed by a promise of a round of drinks that never materializes.

Regexs have been a part of Windows from at least VBScript, and are fully included in .Net and PowerShell. Just to say, although I know it is not supposed to count.  It’s worth noting that I studied compiler design in college in 1987 and regexs are one of the first topics covered in the Dragon Book.  

I can’t imagine what specific problem is so simple that you can change every third character in a 100,000 line file except when followed by four and not run into problems with that scale, regardless of what the solution is programmed in.  Regex or not, how would you verify the output?

But, derrrp, I stupid Windows guy.  I no know regexs!

Veteran Unix admin trait No. 4: We’re inherently lazy
When given a problem that appears to involve lots of manual, repetitive work, we old-school Unix types will always opt to write code to take care of it. This usually takes less time than the manual option, but not always. Regardless, we’d rather spend those minutes and hours constructing an effort that can be referenced or used later, rather than simply fixing the immediate problem. Usually, this comes back to us in spades when a few years later we encounter a similar problem and can yank a few hundred lines of Perl from a file in our home directory, solve the problem in a matter of minutes, and go back to analyzing other code for possible streamlining. Or playing Angry Birds.

I consider myself lazy in that way too.  Funny though, that it’s a virtue.  You’d never know it reading Slashdot.  To hear some tell it, when Unix guys are lazy they’re brilliant—even when they’re bad lazy with planning—when Windows guys are good lazy (time-saving strategic laziness), they’re stupid.

Veteran Unix admin trait No. 6: We generally assume the problem is with whomever is asking the question
To reach a certain level of Unix enlightenment is to be extremely confident in your foundational knowledge. It also means we never think that a problem exists until we can see it for ourselves. Telling a veteran Unix admin that a file “vanished” will get you a snort of derision. Prove to him that it really happened and he’ll dive into the problem tirelessly until a suitable, sensible cause and solution are found. Many think that this is a sign of hubris or arrogance. It definitely is — but we’ve earned it.

Snort!  I think that is a trademark in the Linux community, WorksForMe!   Now, when a Unix admin (like Mr. Venezia?) finds something genuinely wrong, does he go to the user who raised the original question and apologize?  Naw, he’s always right;  it’s everybody else who’s antisocial!

Veteran Unix admin trait No. 7: We have more in common with medical examiners than doctors
When dealing with a massive problem, we’ll spend far more time in the postmortem than the actual problem resolution. Unless the workload allows us absolutely no time to investigate, we need to know the absolute cause of the problem. There is no magic in the work of a hard-core Unix admin; every situation must stem from a logical point and be traceable along the proper lines. In short, there’s a reason for everything, and we’ll leave no stone unturned until we find it.

To us, it’s easy to stop the bleeding by HUPping a process or changing permissions on a file or directory to 777, but that’s not the half of it. Why did the process need to be restarted? That shouldn’t have been necessary, and we need to know why.

Naw, that Windows I use is made by pixies, and is even run by pixies.  As I’m writing this, some pixie is messing around with one of my GPO’s at SATV and I have only spent a few hours trying to get down to said cause which is driving me nuts right now.  Hur hur I derrrrrrrr!

Veteran Unix admin trait No. 8: We know more about Windows than we’ll ever let on
Though we may not run Windows on our personal machines or appear to care a whit about Windows servers, we’re generally quite capable at diagnosing and fixing Windows problems. This is because we’ve had to deal with these problems when they bleed over into our territory. However, we do not like to acknowledge this fact, because most times Windows doesn’t subscribe to the same deeply logical foundations as Unix, and that bothers us. See traits No. 5 and 6 above.

Facepalm.  ROFLOL!

The Unix-Haters Handbook is very old, but sadly, it is not much less relevant than it was in the day.  It’s pointless to  go over it in length, but it does have something important to say still:  Systems like Unix, like Windows, like everything, are designed with assumptions and use-cases.  Unix has escaped its research origins and has far surpassed its original reach, yet its practitioners are still stuck in the 1970’s, when they thought it was God’s gift to computing. 

It was.

Then.

As if there weren’t other systems out there long before Bill Gates used his first computer.  As if I’m going to spend hours in awk picking apart some CSV file or process list when I have built-in objects in Powershell that can give me way more discoverable information than bash could even provide on a good day.  I once used a very nice source-level debugger on the Cyber that could handle multiple languages including assembly.  30 years ago! It was something I have  never seen on PC’s until very recently.  It wasn’t on Unix at the time, either. 

From what I’ve seen in passing in Slashdot, most Slashdotters, who seem also to overlap the Unix admins that Mr. Venezia talks about, are rather incurious about Microsoft.  Except when the next security exploit comes out, in which case they know everything there is to know about Microsoft and security (supposed to be an oxymoron, right?)

Otherwise, the Unix administrator who really does know Microsoft, and knows the flaws of his own application software too well, might not be so arrogant.

But Unix admins wouldn’t be real admins if they weren’t arrogant alpha-hotels who hated the people they worked for, would they?

I say that tongue-in-cheek, Paul.  Really.