DMS-IV???

DMS-IV???

I finished reading Battlefield Earth today. It's a pretty good sci-fi adventure novel, and no, I am not a Scientologist. In fact, Hubbard hated Psychologists and Psychiatrists, and it's very thinly veiled in his book. The evil arrogant aliens are called "Psychlos", and towards the end of the book, you find out that their planet is really controlled by a cult called the "catrists", now work real hard here, Psychlo + catrist = you get the picture. I read the book about 10 years ago, and just decided to read it again, in case I wanted to see the movie. Well, after looking over the initial votes at the IMDB, I'm not so sure I want to see the movie...

In the movie's defense, even though I haven't seen it, some of the initial reviews really slammed Travolta's acting, claiming it was over-the-top. Obviously, these reviewers never read the novel, for that's exactly how it was written...

I was watching ER last night, it was delayed locally a few days because of the recent storm. One of the doctors on the show said she was concerned about one of the other doctors possibly suffering from manic depression. She said that she'd "looked up the diagnostic criteria in the DMS-IV". Okay, now I may only have an undergraduate degree in Psychology, but I caught that mistake in about a tenth of a second, were their consultants not paying attention? In case you don't know, what she meant to say was the DSM-IV, or Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition, which is the standard reference used in Psychology and Psychiatry to treat and diagnose mental illnesses. Although, the title of Diagnostic and Manual Statistic does have an interesting ring to it...

I REALLY hate SCSI

I REALLY hate SCSI

Last night, I finally finished a computer I'd been working on for three days. This all started when a professor in Electronic Media wanted to have a SCSI hard drive put in her Gateway E-3200 so that she could capture analog video with her machine. Okay, this doesn't seem like it should be a big deal, does it? It is.

The slim E-3200 only has room for one hard drive, so I knew I was going to have to yank the 10GB IDE drive she had in favor of the IBM 7200 RPM U2W 18GB drive I was going to put in. So, I checked the termination of the drive, then installed it along with the Adaptec 29160 SCSI card my boss had ordered despite my reccomendation of the Adaptec 2940 U2W. The 29160 is a pretty big card, you can plug cables in to it at four different spots. It would only fit in one of the slots of the E-3200, but when I tried to boot the machine, I kept getting an message about a "ROM Initialization Error". I took every other card out of the machine, still got the error. I updated the BIOS on the machine, as well as that of the card, still no luck. I finally called Adaptec's tech support number (which is not a toll-free number) where I waited on hold for over 20 minutes. I reached a fairly knowlegeable guy on the other end, who said it sounded like the card just plain wouldn't work with that machine. That made me feel better, at least I wasn't doing something wrong.

So, I then decided to just swap machines with her, we had a Gateway E-4200 that had the same specs as her E-3200, so I just started migrating components to that machine. The problem is that where the E-3200 has everything on the motherboard, the E-4200 does not. I filled up all of the slots, got everything seated properly, then turned the machine on, only to get a message that said "PCI Bus Resource Error." I was out of resources for all of the cards! I finally tracked it down to the PCI sound card, a SoundBlaster/Ensoniq card. I swapped that card with an older ISA card, but that required me to swap the existing ISA network card with a PCI network card, which eventually worked.

Okay, I've got the machine happy now, it starts to boot, I pop in the Windows 98 Startup disk. It detects the CD-ROM drive and the CD-RW drive, and boots to DOS. I run fdisk. I get the message "Fixed disk error". Well, that's not helpful, but before I'd put everything back in, I'd already partitioned the disk to make sure everything was going to work. I low-level formatted the disk, no luck there. I pulled the drive out again, looked over the jumpers, tried a different SCSI ID. I started removing expansion cards again, still no luck. What had I done differently the first time??

Then, it hits me! The first time, I'd opted to not load CD-ROM drivers. I rebooted, chose that option again, and I could read the disk fine, something in those drivers screwed up accessing the hard drive. Well, I figured I could probably figure it out, but since Windows 98 was going to be a pain, I'd just install Windows 2000 on the machine.

I did a fairly typical installation of Windows 2000, and all was going well until I attempted to install the drivers for the Pinnacle/Miro DC30 capture card. The card just refused to respond. Well, since I could at least read the CD drive now, I just copied the Windows 98 .cab files to the hard drive, rebooted with the startup disk, wiped out Windows 2000 from the command line and installed Windows 98.

After another 5 hours of re-installing applications, the machine was done! This professor has nearly every program we have on her computer, all of which she had to have. She even printed me a screenshot of her desktop so I could make sure I had all the same icons there. I don't. I don't even know what some of these programs are, no one knows where she got them, so she's on her own. I got everything set up, copied back the 4GB of data I'd copied off her old computer to the server, and started the disk defragmenter running. 5 hours later, it's done! Hooray!

The moral of the story is this. SCSI is evil, and it can't be trusted! No, actually, I do like the speed and low CPU usage of SCSI, I just hate setting it all up. I hate that there are 10 different ways to connect it, meaning that I'm always going to need the type of cable I don't have. I hate that the types of SCSI are confusing, Fast-Narrow-Wide-Ultra-160-SCSI 1, 2, and 3! Why can't these things be numbered logically? SCSI v. 1.0, 1.1, 1.5, etc? I hope they do things right with USB v. 2.0.

Storm Damage

Storm Damage

I just ripped my Eddie Bauer jeans, I snagged my leg on the trim of the building as I was coming through the door. If the air conditioning hadn't kicked back in over lunch, I'd just have grabbed the scissors and made them into cut-offs! Thankfully, EB jeans aren't ridiculously expensive, only around $30 per pair.

I just drank my first can of RC Edge Cola. I guess the Ginseng and Taurine are what give it the "edge". They'll probably give me cancer too. I don't feel like I can wrestle in the WWF now, so apparently their marketing is somewhat misleading. At least it doesn't taste like something which will eat a hole in your stomach, unlike some other ginseng drinks I've tasted. I think my Penguin Mint habit has gotten my caffeine tolerance so high that I'd have to drink a case of this to feel any "edge". Apparently their webmaster does not have the "edge" because this is what half the pages on the site say:

Well, if we didn't spend all our time perfecting our product and coming up with kick-ass promotions, this page would be ready. So which would you rather have — a completed site or a drink that doesn't suck? You be the judge. Come back in a few weeks for the unveiling.

Why do I doubt that the same guy who is maintaining their web site is developing the formula for their cola? Pro Wrestling posters are not exactly a kick-ass promotion in my book. Regarding Taurine, one of the unique ingredients in the cola:

For those considering taurine supplements, taurine is known to have a calming or depressant effect on the central nervous system, and may impair short term memory.

This isn't exactly the "edge" I'm looking for!

I've stopped using the News Item feature of Manila. Why? Because I found myself not posting as much, because some random observation really wasn't worth a whole "article" in the News Items, so I'm back to this method, at least for now.

The storm caused all sorts of fun here at work this morning. I laughed when I saw John's page this morning, as I'd already looked at the Des Moines Register's web site for a story to link to regarding the storm, and was amazed not to find one! They do have this story up now though.

The rocket scientists over at ITS apparently don't put UPS systems on their hubs/switches/media converters. We bought our own to cover our college's switches, so we were okay for the most part, but networking was down all over campus this morning.

Our air conditioning has failed, which is worse than it sounds. Temperatures are approaching 90 degrees in my office, temperature alarms are starting to sound on the RAID arrays. It's not a hot day here, we've just got too much electronics to run without a cooling system, so I've powered down everything but the servers and the switches.

I got my X-Files: Season One box set last night, I wish that Paramount would release Star Trek: The Next Generation this way! It's great getting a whole season on DVD in one set, I've been getting the ST:TNG Laserdiscs slowly from eBay, and I'm not even through the first season yet!

I hate SCSI

Every few months, I get it in my head that it would be really cool to put SCSI drives in my home computer. Sure, it'd be a little expensive, but they're really nice. Days like today are what actually stop me from doing so. I'm battling with an Adaptec 29160 SCSI card and an IBM drive labeled "18GB 72000 RPM HD SCSI U2W Mac INT (18ES)" which came from LaCie. So far, I've not been able to get it to work in a Gateway E-3200, will try an E-4200 tomorrow...

When is it a patch and when is it fraud?

I saw a fellow post a message about this to the Mac Managers mailing list that I subscribe to. Apparently, Quark's avenue.quark isn't all they claim it is. Here's a blurb from the front page of eMacsoftware, where you purchase avenue.quark:

Working with QuarkXPress™ avenue.quark™ makes it easy to extract QuarkXPress content in XML format. You can also import XML content into QuarkXPress.

Okay, that's fairly straight-forward, but, if you DO actually purchase the software, you'll find this message:

At the time the avenue.quark 1.0 package was finalized, XML Import was not yet ready for distribution. As soon as it is ready, it will be made available for downloading. To download the software, go to http://www.quark.com/products/avenue/XMLImport.html.

Of course, at that site, all you'll find is:

XML Import QuarkXTensions software (part of avenue.quark 1.0) lets you import XML content into QuarkXPress documents. But it's the way it lets you import XML content that's important. XML Import lets you insert "placeholders" based on element types in an XML DTD. You can then format those placeholders as you would regular text. When you import the XML content, it arrives pre-formatted and ready to go. A preliminary version of XML Import will be posted on this page as soon as it becomes available.

So when is it a late feature, and when is it out-right lying? Advertising the ability to import XML in a product that doesn't actually have the ability seems like it should be illegal to me. This is worse than the "ship it now, patch it later" mentality that many game developers have taken lately, this is more akin to "pay us now, we may or may not provide you with the actual software later".

Shame on you Quark.