Gosh all those Microsoft products all work so damn well together don’t they?  And as a software developer I can say for a fact that Microsoft development tools are not only among the very best there are, but are amazingly well integrated with their business suite of applications, including Office and SQL Server and IIS.   It’s all just one big happy smooth seamless whole.

Of course those tools only work on Microsoft platforms, and you can only take full advantage of them if you confine your applications to Microsoft platforms, but if you agree to wear Redmond’s golden chains, it is almost embarrassingly simple and straightforward for a software developer to build some very impressive custom business applications.  You can be fantastically productive while wearing Redmond’s golden chains.

But the thing to remember about Redmond’s golden chains, isn’t that they’re golden…

Microsoft Turns Up The Heat On Windows 2000 Users

With the recent release of Microsoft’s newest potential cash cows, Windows Vista and Office 2007, the company is expecting a wave of upgrades from users seeking the latest functionality. But what if you’re not looking for new bells and whistles? What if you want to keep your old operating systems, such as Windows 2000, running as long as possible?

Microsoft isn’t making it easy for you. Office 2007 and the software for the company’s much-hyped Zune music player won’t install on Windows 2000. As other new products emerge from Microsoft in 2007 and beyond, more and more of them are likely to leave Windows 2000 out of the party.

Which of these installation restrictions are caused by a real lack of capabilities in Windows 2000, however? Are any of them merely a "squeeze play" by Microsoft to convince buyers that it’s necessary to immediately upgrade all PCs to Vista and all servers to Server 2003 or the forthcoming Longhorn Server?

One example of this conundrum is Microsoft’s Windows Defender program. This antispyware program can be downloaded for free, but it will only install on Windows XP, Server 2003, and higher. The application won’t install on Windows 2000, according to Microsoft’s own product documentation.

Users have reported, however, that this is simply an artificial rule built into the Installshield package that copies Defender files to disk.

Surprise, surprise.  The article goes on to discuss the upcoming legislative changes in how daylight savings time is calculated.  Operating systems will need to be patched accordingly, and Microsoft already has a patch out there for XP and Vista.  But not…surprise, surprise, Windows 2000.  And their position is, they aren’t going to either.  Computer not keeping time correctly?  Oh…you need our 300 dollar software upgrade, and a two-thousand dollar hardware upgrade, to run the software upgrade…

It’s good to be king.

Originally (1947) EDSAC boasted [sic] 512 words of main memory stored in 16 ultrasonic mercury-delay-line tanks, cleverly known as "long" tanks because they were longer then the short tanks used for registers.  On the bright side, as we used to quip, each of the 512 words was 18 bits!  Forget the word count, feel the width!  Alas, for technical reasons, only 17 of the 18 bits were accessible.  By 1952, the number of long tanks had doubled, providing a dizzy total of 1-KB words.  Input/output was via five-track paper tape, which therefore also served as mass [sic] storage.  Subject only to global timber production, one might see this as virtually unlimited mass storage…

-Stan Kelly-Bootle, writing in the current issue of the ACM Queue, Will The Real Bots Please Stand Up?

The web page that was inserted onto Nell Dominique’s site is being routinely updated it seems, by the crooks who hacked her site. I guess since I (and who knows how many other people) notified SIAS that their web site was hacked, they took steps to fix the problem and now the crooks are simply using another web site and apparently are able to update the redirect information on any of these other feeder web sites they’ve managed to hack.   The page on Nell’s site now re-directs to opifexmundi.org, a site that seems to be otherwise dead.  And whois gives rather strange contact information for the Registrant and Admin there.

If someone knows a French, can you please tell this lady that her website has been hacked?  I’d really appreciate it.  This kinda really pisses me off.  Nell is another artist just trying to use the web to get her stuff out there where it can be seen and appreciated.

[Update…] As of December 12 the Phisher link on Nell’s page was gone.  So her web admin either discovered it, or someone clued them in.  Now if the cops could just get their hands on the lout who put it there…

…I’d like to strangle them all.

So I get Yet Another bogus email from Bank of America in my mailbox a little while ago, and as I will do for kicks and grins and laughs, I open it up using the View Source function in my mail client (Mozilla Thunderbird), and look for the deceptive link…

Your primary e-mail address for Bank of America Online Banking has been changed.  Want to confirm this email is from Bank of America? Log in to Online Banking, select Manage Alerts and Alerts History to view all alerts sent from Bank of America. Your Alerts History is updated every 2 hours.

Use the link below to go to you online account:

The email is, naturally, full of all sorts of links to the actual Bank of America website, from which it gets the actual Bank of America logos and such.  But the Manage Your Account link, again naturally, goes elsewhere.  This is how phishers operate.  So just for kicks and grims I go look it up…

…and what I discover is that this particular phisher isn’t operating from some hit and run domain, but from a Belgian Artist’s website, a lady named Nell Dominique apparently, because I can’t read the French her website is written in.  So I dig a little more.  I wget the page the phish mail is linked to…

All that page is, is a simple re-direct to another page.  That other page lives on the website of the Securities Investors Association of Singapore.  So they’ve been hacked too.  And the page the hacker(s) have inserted there seems to be a copy of the actual Bank of America login page.  I can’t tell at a glance where they’ve made their devious little substitutions, but at a quick guess it seems like they’re running some servlets on the SIAS web site they’ve hacked, that substitute for the servlets that would be running on the BOA website, were that the actual BOA website, and not somebody else’s web site.  But that’s just a guess.  I don’t have time to dig that deeply into that code.

So…  Some unsuspecting person opens up this email that seems to have come from their bank.  It says their email has been changed.  They panic and think that someone is trying to break into their online account.  They click the handy link, and get routed to the website of a Belgian artist, then to a Singapore investment website, which serves them up a page that sure looks like it’s the Bank of America web page, except it isn’t.  They enter their account name and password and then (I think, I haven’t really studied the code there carefully), a servlet wakes up and sends that information to God Knows Where.

If anyone reading this knows a little French, can you please tell the poor soul at nelldominique.be that her website has been hacked.  There’s a page, "boa.html" in her html root that she needs to get rid of.  I’ve already notified the folks at SIAS about their little uninvited guest, and I reckon I’ll tell Bank of America what’s going on too, although by now they probably already know.

[Update…] As of December 12 the Phisher link on Nell’s page was gone.  So her web admin either discovered it, or someone clued them in.  Now if the cops could just get their hands on the lout who put it there…

First…check out this article from Joel Spolsky on how pointlessly complicated the Vista shut down menu apparently became…

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

 

…Then go to this guy’s blog (he’s an ex-Microsoftie who actually worked on the shut down menu) for an explanation of why it turned out that way…

My team’s raison d’etre was: improve the experience for users on laptops, notebooks and ultra-mobile PCs. Noble enough. Of course the Windows Shell team, whose code I needed to muck about in to accomplish my tiny piece of this, had a charter of their own which may or may not have intersected ours.

My team had a very talented UI designer and my particular feature had a good, headstrong program manager with strong ideas about user experience. We had a Mac that we looked to as a paragon of clean UI. Of course the Shell team also had some great UI designers and numerous good, headstrong PMs who valued (I can only assume) simplicity and so on. Perhaps they had a Mac too.

In addition to our excellent UI designer and good headstrong program manager, we had a user-assistance expert, a team of testers, a few layers of management, and me, writing code.

So just on my team, these are the people who came to every single planning meeting about this feature:

1 program manager

1 developer

1 developer lead

2 testers

1 test lead

1 UI designer

1 user experience expert

—

8 people total

These planning meetings happened every week, for the entire year I worked on Windows.

In addition to the above, we had dependencies on the shell team (the guys who wrote, designed and tested the rest of the Start menu), and on the kernel team (who promised to deliver functionality to make our shutdown UI as clean and simple as we wanted it). The relevant part of the shell team was about the same size as our team, as was the relevant part of kernel team.

So that nets us a conservative estimate of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let’s add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team — after a year — there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.

And this, especially…

In small programming projects, there’s a central repository of code. Builds are produced, generally daily, from this central repository. Programmers add their changes to this central repository as they go, so the daily build is a pretty good snapshot of the current state of the product.

In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository — among other problems, the infrastructure just won’t support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.

So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.

Wow.  Just…wow.  Check out the comments section on moblog (Moishe Lettvin).  There are a few other former and current Microsofties in there sharing his complaints and wondering where it’s all leading for Microsoft (and a few who think Joel Spolsky is full of it).  It’s interesting to read them comparing what Microsoft is doing with what Apple and the Open Source community are doing. 

Remember that YouTube in-house parody of how Microsoft would have marketed the iPod?  I guess that wasn’t satire at all, really.

…coming right at you. Okay…sorry…but watching this guy’s review of the new Microsoft Zune music player has made me a tad giddy…

Regards that Universal Music “Pirate Tax” as Nate calls it. Actually, the bad precedent was set back in the days of the compact cassette. The music industry pitched a fit in the 1970s about people taping music off the radio, and off of other people’s LPs with cassette recorders. In the 1980s the same sort of deal was struck regarding blank cassette tapes, and ever since then the price of a blank tape has included in it a “pirate tax”. Later, the Digital Audio Tape formate (DAT) died before it could get off the ground due to RIAA bellyaching about it’s potential for making clean copies from CDs. Even after they got a “serial copy management system,” included on every DAT recorder exported to the U.S., the RIAA bitched for royalties on each and every DAT machine and tape sold. So the precedent for Microsoft’s deal with Universal is, alas, already there. But Nate (who did the YouTube above) lives in Austrialia, where the situation may be different.

Bear in mind, that the first version of Microsoft Windows was an unmitigated piece of junk. By version 3.1 they were raking in the market share. On the other hand, Windows was able to monopolize the desktop market in a number of ways that I don’t see them being able to pull off in the consumer music player market. Sure, they own Windows, and Windows still has something like 90 percent of the desktop market. But music isn’t software. I know it’s techie to think of it that way, and in a sense you can think of it that way. But it’s not software. It’s content. Output, if you like.

Microsoft might be able to lock-in buyers to its own proprietary DRM formats, as Apple does, but the content itself is independent of all that. Even making exclusive deals with the record labels won’t lock people in. If the RIAA lawsuits have proven anything, it’s that locking music up doesn’t work. What Apple’s been proving for the past couple years is that if you make using digital music easy, convenient, and inexpensive, and the DRM unobtrusive, people will support it. Steve Jobs has said that piracy is a behavior issue, not a software issue, and I think Apple has struck the right balance by only making it hard to pirate iTunes music, not trying to make it impossible. Because then you end up locking everything down so tight you’re just pissing off your customers too.

But Microsoft’s business model has always been about locking users in. Extend And Embrace… That’s what that “Zune Points” crap is about. Not so much making the music look less expensive then it is, but locking you in. Microsoft doesn’t know any other way of doing business. That’s why they’ve never been successful outside of their core software business. So I don’t think they’re going to get very far here either.

From Slashdot…

"Just because Richard Stallman is paranoid doesn’t mean Microsoft’s not out to get you. For a hint about the possible end-game of Microsoft’s Trusted Computing Initiative, check out the patent application published Thanksgiving Day for Trusted License Removal, in which Microsoft describes how to revoke rights to render based on ‘who the user is, where the user is located, what type of computing device or other playback device the user is using, what rendering application is calling the copy protection system, the date, the time, etc.’ So much for Microsoft’s you-should-have-control assurances."

If it wasn’t for Microsoft I wouldn’t have the job and the house and the life I have today.  But it’s this sort of utter betrayal of the Personal Computing revolution, and it’s promise of power to the individual, that’s the reason I want as little to do with them now as possible.  If all you glean from this is that Microsoft wants tighter control over piracy you need to think about it a little more carefully.  What this is about, stripped of all the careful rhetoric about security, is taking control of your computer, what you can do with it, away from you.

Via a friend on MySpace…

That’s the Mac "dock", for all you Windows and Linux kids (I am all three).  Be nice if force quitting the Rumsfeld app took all its child processes with it…

Hey…I get to put the "Computer Geeking" tag and the "Politics" tag on the same post! 

[Geek Alert]

There’s a reason why I haven’t posted much lately.  Mowgli, my main workstation at home, the one that uses removable hard drive packs to let me run versions of Windows and Linux, had a motherboard failure last week.  I have other computers here at Casa del Garrett…Bagheera, my art room Mac G5 tower, and Akela, the 12 inch powerbook for example…but getting Mowgli back up and running has been the focus of most of my computer time this past week.  Mowgli is my main machine for working at home, and although I can code and debug the stuff I’m working on for Space Telescope just fine on the Macs (because it’s all Java), I much prefer doing it on Mowgli, usually while its running Linux. 

Mowgli’s motherboard, a Soyo CK8 Dragon Plus, was flaky from the start and I came to regret buying it almost right away.  I forget whose recommendation I took on that purchase but I’ll never do it again.  That board never gave me correct CPU temperature readings, its USB ports would occasionally go comatose on me, and one day I discovered its second COM port had died.  For some reason I could never quite pin down, Firefox running on it would always bog down horribly whenever it had to paint large images on the screen.  I figured it was a DMA issue, but I never resolved it.  IE, which I hate using, never had that problem, so I reckon it’s rendering engine is doing something different.  But viewing something like a Fark.Com Photoshop thread would bog Firefox down to the point where it was almost unusable.  So I figured that motherboard had a lurking DMA problem too.  Replacing it has been on my To Do List for some time now.

Last Monday I switched Mowgli on and it started booting CentOS.  When the kernel came up Mowgli would immediately power off.  Just like that.  Kernel comes up, Mowgli shuts down.  So I pulled out the CentOS drive and put in the Windows XP one.  XP would start to boot, but then hang almost at once.

This is why I have a second physical hard drive in Mowgli, that I keep all my data files on.  I unplugged Mowgli and took its side panel off and removed the data drive and put it into one of those USB conversion kit things and took it down to the art room and booted up Bagheera.  Once Bagheera came up I connected the drive to a free USB port and MacOS instantly recognised and mounted it.  I run the Thunderbird mail client because its multi-platform and here’s one reason why that’s important.  I started Thunderbird on Bagheera, pointed it to the mailbox directories on the data drive out of Mowgli I’d just mounted, and from then on I was able to fetch mail as usual, and I had all my existing mail box files and messages right there.

I put one of my backup USB drives on Bagheera and backed up the drive from Mowgli.  Now my data was safe.  The rest of the next two days were spent looking at motherboards and checking for Linux compatibility.  CentOS mostly, which I’ve been running at Casa del Garret lately.  It’s Redhat binary compatible, and I’ve found it a pure pleasure to use.  But getting hardware compatibility information for it (and for Redhat for that matter) is a real chore.  Redhat doesn’t list individual system components like motherboards anymore, so you have to search around the web to see who’s using what. 

Why do I bother with all this when I could just go out and buy a friggin’ ready-built Intel machine?  Because…I’d rather.  Put it down to that first Heathkit AM radio kit an uncle gave me once for Christmas.  It not only gave me an interest in building my own equipment, it made me realize that I Could, and that if I did, I’d likely end up with something better then mass produced.  I’ve been building my own computers from parts since my first IBM PC-XT compatible.  The only computers here at Casa del Garrett that weren’t hand assembled by yours truly are the Apples…and as long as Steve Jobs keeps making a premium product for the premium price he charges I reckon I’ll keep buying ready-made from him.  But I’d rather just burn my money then buy something from Dell or Gateway…sorry.

I finally decided on an ASUS A8N-E motherboard.  The Asus stuff is reliable, and the only reason I shied away from an ASUS board last time was the last ASUS in Mowgli became extremely noisy over time. One of my goals in the last rebuild was to make Mowgli as quiet as possible.  This time it was reliability.   I’d pretty much had it with the flakiness in the Soyo board.

I bought a new AMD CPU for it, the same Athlon 64 3200+ that I’d put on the Soyo, not being completely sure that the problem was the motherboard and not the CPU (I was bound and determined to replace that board anyway…).  And I bought two more sticks of 512meg DDR-400 memory, again, because I wasn’t completely sure it wasn’t a memory problem either.  I figured I could keep the old CPU for that dedicated file server project I keep putting off, and once I got Mowgli back up and running I could try adding the old memory sticks (also 512 meg DDR-400s) bringing the total on Mowgli up to two gig.  If they were still good. 

The new parts arrived Friday, and I took Mowgli down to my basement work area to remove the old motherboard, and got my first surprise.  Every now and then you have to go inside your computer and blow out the dust.  That’s just a fact of life.  No matter how clean you keep your house, dust will get inside the box.  So I go in from time to time with an air hose and a vacuum and get the dust out.  I do that regularly to Mowgli and always thought I was getting most of it.  But I was missing something critical it turned out.  Once I had Mowgli on its side and open under one of my big work lights I saw that the big Zalmon CPU cooler I’d bought to keep the noise down was caked with it.  Just look at this…

I blew around the Zalmon when I did dust, but obviously not good enough.  I didn’t really see what was going on around the heat fins there, because that large fan sorta hid it from view (and I didn’t have the best lighting while I was doing it).  But…look at that.  I liked the Zalmon because of those huge fins (compare the size of them to those DDR memory slots to the right).  But they’re so close together, particularly around where they join close to the CPU, that it’s easy for dust to close them off completely.  Obviously there was no airflow in those regions.  Whether that contributed to the failure I can’t say…the Soyo was as I said, flaky to start with.  But I’m not so sure I like the Zalmon design anymore.  Those fins are so close down at the base they just have to be more prone to getting clogged like that then other designs.  If you’re running one of these, pay special attention to keeping it dust free.  You should probably dust it more frequently.

AMD screams at you in the instruction booklet that if you use Any Other CPU fan except the ones they package with their CPUs, you are voiding the warranty.  I don’t overclock and all I wanted was something a bit quieter then the factory cooler, but I decided to go with the factory cooler this time.  If it gets to the point I can’t stand the noise, I’ll think about my options.

My next two surprises were also my own fault.  First, I didn’t check to make sure the ASUS motherboard had an AGP slot.  Second, I didn’t check to make sure it took the same power supply as the previous board.  I’d wanted this to be just a straight motherboard swap, and because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the specs it turned out not to be.  Soon as I opened the box I saw that the graphics card slot was different.  Uh-oh…  I looked though the manual and began kicking myself for assuming things.  What I had now, were three PCI Express slots, one of which was a PCI Express x16, which presumptively was for a graphics card.

So now it was back to Bagheera to do another net search for Linux compatible graphics cards.  The nice thing is that one vendor, nVidia, is really good about supporting Linux (I hear ATI is good nowadays too).  I’m not a gamer, so my needs are simple.  But I settled on a somewhat better then average GeForce 7600GS.  So it was off to the Towson CompUSA.

An hour or so later I’m back and the reassembly of Mowgli is going apace.  I have the new motherboard in, the CPU being already installed because the place I buy this stuff from nowadays, Directron, will for a small service charge test your CPU and motherboard before they ship it to you.  I spend the extra just for the peace of mind knowing even before I begin putting things together that the parts were working when they were mailed to me.  I cleaned off the CPU surface and attached the factory cooler.  Then the new memory sticks.  Then the IDE and floppy drive cables.  Then the other motherboard connections.  My first power on test would be just a simple boot into the BIOS setting panels, make sure the BIOS settings are ok…and then a boot off a floppy to DOS.

Before I throw that switch the first time I double check all my connections.  I ticked off all the items and realized I’d forgotten to connect the power supply to the motherboard.  The plugs were different.  Fuck!  So now I discover that there is a new power supply standard, that this new motherboard was built to, and which my old power supply isn’t.  I needed an ATX 12V 2.0 compliant power supply.  Now I started worrying that the new power supply form factor would be incompatible with my existing case.

So it was back to CompUSA, and back home again with a 500 watt power supply that was, thankfully, the same form factor as the previous one.  What was more, this new power supply had pluggable cabling, and the nice thing about that is that you only have the cables you actually use inside the box.  No more masses of unused cables you have to find a way to tie down somewhere out of the way.  Gives you a much less cluttered space inside the box.

That was the last unpleasant surprise.  The new board powered right up, and checked out fine.  I put the data drive back in, its IDC cable, and booted off the hard drive.  CentOS came up, saw that the hardware had changed and asked me a series of questions about what hardware configurations to remove, and which new ones to add.  Once I got past that, CentOS tried to come up, but couldn’t start the X Server (on a Unix/Linux box, the X Server is what runs the graphical user interface).  It asked me if I wanted to try to reconfigure and I told it to go ahead and it eventually came up on the generic VGA drivers, which I expected.

There was no built-in support for the new graphics card, but nVidia had them on their driver download site and a quick trip there and I had an install and configuration program downloaded to my /tmp directory.  What you have to do then is log in as root on a command line only session, because the x server configuration can’t be updated while its running.  But there was no convenient way to do that on the CentOS login screen, so I figured I could just log in as root and then control-alt-backspace to kill the x-server.  About a dozen times, I kid you not, while I was running that nVidia installer, CentOS kept helpfully trying to bring back up the X Server on me and I had to keep killing it.  But eventually I got the nVidia driver installed and it works wonderfully.

The next step was getting XP back up and I wasn’t looking forward to it.  For one thing, I knew that the anti-piracy branding crap embedded in XP was going to take one look at the new hardware decide it might be a stolen copy and I’d have to go through the whole activation routine again and I was concerned that it might just decide I was a pirate anyway and refuse to run.  And beyond that I had no idea how Windows internal hardware management would react to a whole new environment. 

I shut down Mowgli and inserted the XP drive.  When XP came up, it immediately warned me that “the hardware profile on this machine has changed significantly” (no shit Sherlock, I had a goddamned motherboard failure and had to give it the equivalent of a brain transplant) and that I’d have to “re-activate” Windows in 30 days or it would stop running.  Swell.  Windows then came up into basic VGA mode, and asked if I wanted to activate my copy.  I told it to go ahead and a window partially came up, but the display froze while some furious hard disk activity was taking place.  I assume Microsoft was taking a complete inventory of everything on there.  Then the window finished painting and I saw a dialog asking me how I wanted to activate my copy.  I selected “online” and after a few moments it pronounced my copy good and finished booting.  So that much was out of the way.

When it was done booting I had a basic VGA 640 by 480 desktop.  Then Windows gave me a barrage of “new hardware found” notices.  I canceled through all of them, put the driver CD for the new motherboard in and installed the motherboard drivers.  Then I put the CD that came with the new graphics in and started up the drive install program.  I got a huge warning notice that the video driver I was trying to install had not been verified as XP compliant by Microsoft and that Microsoft STRONGLY recommended that I should under no circumstances install it.  Swell.  So another visit to the nVidia driver download site later and I had a more current driver install kit.  The instructions warned me to turn off the anti-virus software I was using before installing the drivers.  I opened up the ZoneAlarm panel and switched off both the anti-virus and the anti-spyware systems.  This time when I ran the installer I got no warning, and the video drivers installed without a hitch.  I rebooted and XP came up with no complaints.  Then ZoneAlarm asked me if I wanted to turn the anti-virus system on again.  Sure…

ZoneAlarm went nuts for some reason.  Suddenly it was eating up 99 percent of my CPU time, which usually means a program has gone into an infinite loop somewhere and is running wild.  I waited a while but it just kept slamming my CPU so I tried to kill it.  Like Jason it wouldn’t die so I tried shutting down Windows.  That worked which was good because at that stage I really, Really didn’t want to have to hit the power switch.  When Windows came up again ZoneAlarm was running normally.  I’ve no idea what happened, but next time it asks me if I want it to turn anything back on I’ll just tell it no and go in and do it manually. 

Now I had a working XP system again.  So Mowgli was back to normal.

Actually, better then normal.  I hadn’t realized how awful the performance of that Soyo motherboard had become until I’d spent a day working on the new ASUS.  The CPUs I’d installed on both were the same so that can’t be it.  The graphics card is much, much better, so that’s probably contributing to a lot of it.  But disk IO is much, Much faster now.  No more problems with the USB ports either.  

So…Mowgli’s back now, after a wee brain transplant.  This is something like its sixth incarnation…first, ages ago, on a Pentium  motherboard running Windows 95 and NT 4…then later, on various AMD motherboards running NT and Linux.  In Kipling’s Jungle Books (I really hate what Disney did to them), Mowgli was a between worlds character…partly of the jungle and his wolf brethren, but also partly of the human village.  He was always struggling with issues of identity.  So I named my multi-OS workstation after him.  As my household network grew, I kept adding characters from the Jungle Books to it.  Akela, the Lone Wolf, is always my laptop, now a Powerbook.  Akela goes with me to work, and wherever I travel.  Bagheera, the elegant and quick panther, is my art room Mac.  Baloo, the slow, wise old teacher of the jungle law, is my remaining 386 DOS box.  They all peacefully co-exist on the Seeonee workgroup.  At some point I’m going to add a file server to it, but I haven’t decided on a name yet.  Maybe Hathi.  Hathi, the long lived, was the keeper of the jungle stories.

As it was last year, there are far, far too many cute longhaired computer geeks here for my own good. And as it was last year, the foreign guys are just a tad sexier.  I think that’s because they just feel more comfortable inside their own bodies.  One of those little ways that American sex-negative religiosity shows though, is in the way American guys dress below the waist.

Portland’s having a bit of a heat wave, and some of the guys here are in shorts or cutoffs, and you can reliably tell who are the American guys and who are the foreigners, by the length of their shorts.  The American guys (generally) won’t wear shorts that are cut well above the knee.  Can’t be showing a little thigh or people might think you’re gay.

I was watching some guys swimming in the hotel pool late yesterday, and swear their swim trunks reached down past their knees, halfway to their ankles.  Except for one cute blond who was wearing a speedo style trunk.  I ran into him at the hotel restaurant and he turned out to be from Spain.  It’s like American guys are wearing below the waist burkas these days.