the corner office

Tinkering done; finally booted up the old PIII 500 after it being out of commission since mid-2002.

When the machine's motherboard died, we'd quite simply forgotten about the hard drive, and so there I was, looking at The Machine That Time Forgot.

Running... Windows 98!

Two years doesn't sound like much, but man... I haven't touched Windows 98 since late 2002. It's so cute!

It's also so unstable... already had one blue screen (will our kids ever believe us?) - and I forgot how darned irritating it can be to have to reboot a machine every time you tweak a network setting. I'd forgotten about the old dreaded "win98 won't shut down" bug. Indeed, we've been spoiled with Win2k and XP.

I'm having a real stroll down memory lane. This machine had Netscape 4.7 installed! Oh. My. Gawd. I updated the virus definitions. That took a while. Over 6,000 new viruses since my last update, Norton Antivirus proudly told me. Is that all? I don't think I'll ever be needing to use the old 5.09 Domino server again, either. The machine used to dual boot SuSE 8.0, but neither Ronwen nor I can remember the root password (how's that for secure ;-), and since we never really stored any important files on the Linux partitions, they're going bye-byes as soon as we do a clean install on the machine.

In fact, I'm not quite sure whether to keep Windows 98 on this machine or to brave a slightly newer OS. I've come to realise that there's a lot to be said for 2k/XP's stability, but I suspect that this old PIII is best served with a nice fresh Win98 installation, no more, no less. With 224 megs of memory it'll be quite usable as a mail-and-spreadsheets machine for the missus, at least until the blessed day when I shell out for the AMD64 I've been coveting for months. That's currently on the losing end of the slightest sliver of "this is a luxury I can't justify" caution.

The frightening thing is that 4 short years ago, this old dog of a PIII was my primary workstation, and running 2 or 3 R5 clients running disk-crunching agents and a Designer client and an Admin client and a Domino server and various Office applications all at the same time, and it handled. I don't remember ever thinking to myself "hmm, a 64-bit AMD with 2 gigs of memory on an 800Mhz front side bus would make my life so much more productive than it is now."

Then again, there was a time when my old 200MMX felt like quite the beast. Nowadays it feels sluggish at a bash prompt. I'll drink the upgrade Kool-Aid for a while longer, methinks.

Spread Firefox is Mozilla's marketing division, so to speak. Firefox evangelists. Their goal was to drive 1 million downloads of Firefox Preview Release within 10 days. Well, think again:

In just under 100 hours, we have smashed through our one million download campaign--with 6 days still to go! This is the fastest adoption rate we have ever experienced, higher than every previous Firefox release.

Hard to believe that this has come from that crappy old Netscape browser that old Net diehards used until it was so pitifully outclassed by the then stonking Internet Explorer that not even blind loyalty could keep it going.

As I've said before (over a year ago), what also warms my heart is that Firefox is in many ways a big "in your eye" to the naysayers who complained about the slow progress the Mozilla team made in the beginning. Sure, Firefox has a long way to go before it leads in the browser war, if it ever does - but who cares? What matters is that there's a secure, stable, cross-platform, standards-compliant, and all-round rocking piece of software available for those who want it. What is equally important is that users have a high-quality piece of software that puts users, and not corporate interests, first.

So I'm doing my bit to spread the revolution: if you're still using Internet Explorer, do yourself a favour and give Firefox a try.

One of the apps I realised I'm missing the most is a free utility called Folder Size, which does exactly what you'd expect - display the total size of folders on your PC, both in tree and graph formats, colour coded 'n all. Just the thing when you're trying to see why your hard drive is filling up, or how to chop & shuffle directories to fit onto CDs and DVDs and the like. It's duly re-downloaded.

I first discovered the app back in 2001. At the time I was rather impressed (as is our wont) to note that it was written by a fellow South African named Jan Horn. His email address is in the bottom corner of Folder Size's window, and I always wanted to drop him a mail to thank him for his app. Never did, though. A few months ago, I was doing some OpenGL research and came across Jan's site again - it turns out he was a well-respected OpenGL coder who had a number of excellent OpenGL tutorials and demos on his site. I speak in the past tense because sadly, I also discovered that Jan had been killed in a car crash back in 2002. In tribute to the work he'd done, others have kept his web site going and continued to add content to the site.

His download page still has Folder Size, and a number of other utilities as well.

Reading through his site, and looking at the heaps of work he did - it's humbling to see how gifted, and prolific, he was. He seems to have been an incredibly inspiring person.

SABC is having a Tim Burton fest of sorts. Last night was "Edward Scissorhands", and tonight "Mars Attacks!"

Mars Attacks has one of my favourite movie lines, from Rod Steiger playing the trigger-happy general:

Nuke 'em! Nuke 'em now! ... Annihilate! Kill! Kill! Kill!

If memory serves, that used to be the greeting message on my cell phone aeons ago.

Also watched "Gothika" on DVD today. Which is to say, Ronwen hired it, I wasn't keen on the wailing and dying in the beginning, but when I got tired of !@#$%^& tinkering with &^%$#@ old PCs, I plonked down on the couch and watched the rest of it as well.

Basically the same old "people-think-I'm-nuts-but-the-deeeminz-iz-after-me" stuff. Entertaining but predictable. I still don't understand how the movie's name tied into the plot, though.

Hard drive crash. Normally diligent backup system less diligently applied in light of recent hardware shuffles, and my redundant copies of everything ended up on spare partitions of the same drive. Pending the arrival of a new drive, that didn't arrive soon enough, sadly.

I dropped the drive off with a data recovery crowd for a free assessment of the chances of salvaging the drive - and found out today that it just ain't happening.

So, I try to be as zen about it as I can, and realise that apart from some stuff that's fallen through the cracks, the majority of the most crucial data was already written to DVDs and CDs. That doesn't mean I haven't lost a lot of crap, but the more I think through it, the more I realise that it's exactly that - crap. Sure, I spent a lot of time accumulating some of the crap I've lost, but just as often that crap is stuff I'd never touch or think about, again.

Well, my drive died last week (hence the lack of blogging, since my Notes data dir was one of the victims, and I was holding out hoping I wouldn't need to set up a new client, replicate my blog back down again, etc etc), and by and large my world hasn't fallen apart. I'll slowly but surely start filling up the 2 new 200 gig drives I bought this week, and I'm pretty sure I'll be a busload more careful in what and how I handle backups in future, but at the end of the day, bleh. Waaay back in 1997 I moved from my Apple Powerbook to a PC. That old Powerbook still has a lot of stuff on it, and in the past 7 years I've been in no big rush to get to it. As morbed out as I feel, deep down I know it's the same thing. I've been in no rush to dig through old backup CDs to see just what I have and don't have. Nice to hoard, but not the end of the world if you don't have it.

Yes, I'm trying to put on a brave face. Humour me.

On Tuesday night I watched "Mystery, Alaska". Feel-good sports movie in the snow. I liked it. Makes me want to spend 6 months in Alaska some day, driving a snow sled to work. About 6 months should do it.

Movies last night, we saw "Man on Fire." Loooong. Gripping for the most part, it gets a bit dragged out in places. The story line starts out promising your standard uplifting themes, but soon heads for the depressing end of the pool. I'd say the movie's enjoyment is as much the experience of it, as the story. The most notable cinematrographic trick the movie uses, is subtitles all over the screen "advert-style" - ie. anywhere, anyhow. What's more, even when people are speaking perfectly understandable English, a lot of speech or "facts" are underscored by these all-over-the-show subtitles. I've never seen this before, and I can imagine that if everyone hopped on the bandwagon it could get irritating, but it works in this movie.

I call these sorts of movies 'Yentl' movies - the kind of movie you're glad to have seen, that you enjoyed, but that you have no desire to have to sit through again.

Just noting two movies from the weekend. We rented "The Sin Eater" on DVD on Saturday. Weird stuff, but a good watch. Spent the rest of the evening with that weird "imagine we live in a world of arcane and occult creatures" vibe. That doesn't happen often, me not being big on the whole spiritual world thing at the best of times.

Sunday night I watched "Her Alibi" - lawdy. When I saw it in the early 90s, I remember deciding that the Connecticut countryside (if memory serves) was somewhere I could settle someday. I'm a sucker for old house in the country type movies.

3 years already.

First visit to the gym in well over a month. Cuhreak. Hopped into the bath at about 4pm with a book and surfaced after 8, having finished it. If it wasn't for the hunger pangs, I'd have grabbed another book and stayed there for a while longer. That, and the missus wasn't that diligent in providing me with a regular supply of tea, which is an essential part of the decadence.

The book I finished was "Developing Online Games: an Insider's Guide" by Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Patrovsky. This is another of the gaming-related books I bought a while ago, and again, while I can't see myself becoming an online games developer, it was still an interesting read. I've never played any pure MMOGs but they do fascinate me. Between the local bandwidth issues and worrying about affordability and a healthy dose of "no way, I wouldn't have the time" thoughts, I've always shied away from signing up anywhere. It's way up there on the list of things I hope to do one day when I'm rich and bored, though.

The book's focus is on the practical issues of designing and rolling out and maintaining persistent-world games, from an operational perspective. I enjoyed the insights it gives into the practicalities of dealing with games that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and the dynamics and nature of the types of people who're drawn to these games. The authors know their stuff, and their confidence and experience comes through very clearly.

Yellow Tomato Causes Legal Dilemma in Germany:

Berlin - The mushy remains of a tomato thrown at a prominent member of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats has posed a legal dilemma for authorities trying to assess how to punish the thrower.

...

Had it been a soft red one, the man would have faced a lesser charge of causing malicious damage. A harder, green tomato could carry the tougher charge of bodily harm.

A yellow one is somewhere in between. "In these types of cases it has to do with the consistency (of the fruit)," said Caecilia Cramer-Krahforst, spokeswoman for the court in the eastern city of Cottbus.The mind boggles.