Category Archives: computers

computers, humane society, netbooks

Five for Friday

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I thought about doing a Friday High Five post, but since I’m not sure Angela is back often enough to host, I decided to let it slide for this week. Instead I’ll ask the rhetorical question – Do you think there are enough computers on my desk?

Oops, sorry – I forgot that you don’t have telescopic x-ray vision. Here is what my desk looks like tonight:

It looks a bit like the computers are mating and multiplying. The two little netbooks on the left are in the process of being prepped and loaded for use by the animal officers in the humane society. (I’m not only the executive director, but also the IT guru of the humane society.) Couple them with some antennas and mounts and misc. electronics added to the vehicles and we will shortly have brought the process into at least the 20th century and maybe even the 21st.

One neat capability will be almost instant load from the cameras to the netbooks to the back-end database and then to the web site so that found and captured animals can be spotted almost immediately by their owners simply by visiting the web site. Likewise, when animals are cleared for adoption, they are then visible on the site as well, hopefully decreasing the time to adoption.

The animal officers are in seventh heaven over the idea of the netbooks and computerized vehicles. We’ll have to see how they feel in a few months when they have had time to hit the real warts.

Time to load some more software.

(Did you spot where the five in the title came from? Five monitors on the desk: 2 on netbooks, one on laptop, and two on the desk side server. )

computers, mama kat, writer's challenge

I remember when ….

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This week, one of the topics posed by Mama Kat was to write on the topic of “I remember when …”

I remember when I saw my first small computer. I can’t say it was a personal computer because it wasn’t. It had about 1/1000 the power of the first PC and cost more than a house at the time. It was a special prototype lab instrument in the Hewlett-Packard research labs. I was attending a science institute during high school when I saw this beautiful desktop sized computer. It was love at first sight and I dearly wanted one of my own.

Later on in graduate school. I drooled over the experimental group’s hand crafted computers running the data acquisition software for the particle detectors. The price had dropped to the point where each little board on the detector cost less than $10,000.

When the advent of the CP/M based hobbyist machines finally brought the price of personal computers down to the level I could afford, it was close to decade after my first sighting. My very first “real” PC had a blazingly fast 2MHz Z80 processor, 32 KB of memory, used an old character-only terminal as the user interface, and had one (1!) of the old eight inch floppy disks for storage. I could compile a program with only 8 swaps of the floppy disk for temporary storage and various passes of the compiler. I was in hog heaven!

Over the next year and a couple of hundred visits to surplus and swap meets, I added 4 five inch floppy disks to replace the single eight inch disk. It made me the envy of all my friends since I could now compile a program without swapping the disks. Just start the compile and go to bed and it might be done by morning. I also added one of those new-fangled 1200 baud modems so I could call into the Bulletin Board Systems and the nascent Compuserv network. And I added another 32K of memory so that I had the full 64k addressable by the Z80. Still no hard drive since the technology for winchester disks was just starting to ramp up and even a 5MB drive cost more than $10,000 (and had a mean time between failures measured in months, not years).

Now that I have put you all to sleep as I drool over my first techno love, let me put the capabilities of this beautiful little machine in terms that may be more meaningful:

  • The Z80 processor in the machine had less compute power than the chip in a  toaster today
  • 64k of memory is less than the amount of memory your toaster probably has in it today
  • The five inch floppy disks held 96K each. Thus all four disks together held less than .5 MB. A typial notebook today has 200GB of hard disk – more than 400,000 times the capacity of my little machine.

What makes all the memories so remarkable is that today with literally thousands of times the memory and compute power, the only real change in computing is that all that power is devoted to the user interface. Things happen faster and are flashier, but are not fundamentally improved from the old days. It will be interesting to see what the changes are in the new few years and if they finally fundamentally change the underlying computing model.

I am reminded of a collegue from long ago who once said that the only change in computing from 1980 to 2000 was that we made the machines faster and larger so that ever less capable people could write programs. There is some real truth to that view. (And it isn’t necessarily bad either.)

computers, weather

I’m Still Here

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I know! I didn’t post yesterday, nor have I been able to comment on the blogs I follow for the last couple of days. When you replace the main interface machine, you can waste a lot of time trying to decide what to save and what to throw away to the bit bucket.

I finally decided (after booting 5 different linux distros) to go with openSUSE for the moment. (And I preserved at least some of my old XP environment by installing it into a VirtualBox VM.) So now that your eyes are glazing over and you are wondering what the blank the idiot is talking about, I’ll mosey on into the real post. (See – patience is a virtue!)

Today was a day of massive weather shift. This weekend, L and I got to enjoy mid 70’s both days, but then this morning the winds began howling and it spit a bit of rain. It never got above 45 all day and by afternoon it was below freezing with 50 to 80 mile and winds. I hate this kind of day because the windows rattle and anything outdoors feels like you are being chopped to death with little itty bitty blades. Needless to say, Molly was not overjoyed with the winds ruffling her coat amidst her mope over the departure of L early this morning for the mountains.

It was windy enough that Mom called from the nursing home and suggested I not bother to venture over to see her today. It wouldn’t have been a problem; I only live about four blocks from the nursing home where she is. I think it really had more to do with the fact that I’ll have to be packing all of her stuff up to bring over to her house tomorrow when she gets to escape back home. Although she’ll be pretty much house bound for the next 6-8 weeks, she clearly can’t wait to get back to *her* home. Can’t say that I blame her.

In other pressing news, I’m sure you will all be overjoyed to note that the vote came out in favor of keeping the the dubious LinkWithin widget at the bottom of the posts. The end result was 66% in favor of keeping the widget, 33% didn’t care, and no one voted to remove. So evidently some people like it and some don’t care, but no one was annoyed enough to want to see it go away.

My own suspicion is that 90% of the readers of this blog read via a reader like Google Reader or Bloglines or … and only click through to comment. That is backed up by the stats that say I get ~60 page views a day but closer to 150 subscriptions to the two feeds that come off this page. Thus they don’t care about the widget since they only see it when they are interested enough to comment. What do you think?

Along those same lines you’ll remember a while back I was disappointed about the paucity of sex searches landing visitors here at this site. Well, I may have interesting changes to report next time.  
(What A tease I am.) 

Well, off to get notes ready for the council meeting tomorrow night since it will be a long day tomorrow, what with getting move moved and settled.  

banquet, computers, weather

A Late Quicky

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This will be a quick post since I am struggling to avoid strangling a computer that runs everything OS fine except for Windows XP. And then it just kicks up its heels and dies. Actually I suspect it is more the SATA disk controller than anything else. XP is old enough not to have deep grained support for SATA so it may be time to say goodbye to XP forever and start running one of my favorite Linux distributions on it.

Tomorrow evening is the annual city employee appreciation banquet. It’s always interesting. Municipal employees tend to be somewhat clique driven by department. I.e. the sanitation people don’t hang with the street people who don’t hang with the water treatment people who … So you end up with a lot of smaller groups that sort of ignore each other. And of course the temporary blips on the radar like the city council members are usually given a bit of a cold shoulder as well. (I suspect more from awe than from dislike. Just kidding!) It’s interesting because we used to give awards and service pins and associated spiels, etc. The employees finally stood up and admitted they’d much rather just have a a good supper with casual dress and no hot air from the likes of me. So that is what we have done for the past several years and it really seems to work better and be considerably less boring.

It was close to 70 again today, so Molly and I took our walk later in the day to enjoy the twilight. Sometime in the next few days it is going to turn cold again. The forecast for Tuesday has a high of 40 and possible snow and rain. Of course that means believing the weather people are going to get it right; here in Colorado that is a rare occurrence. When L and I used lived in LA, we always joked about how it paid to be a weather person in an area where you could see all the weather coming at you from huge distances and the only question was sunny or real sunny. (It all came in from the Pacific Ocean with no land features to change it for hundreds of miles as it rolled in.) Made them look like paragons of accuracy. You don’t get the same luxury when there are mountains and huge land masses that heat and cool to drive the vertical circulation.

Back to the recalcitrant computer. It was the last of the machines here running a Microsoft OS natively, but that may be over soon. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

computers, DOH, geek

DOH! Moments

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I am sitting here, installing a new  operating system on one of the computer systems here. It is late and I am just happy that I finally figured out how to do what I wanted to do. I have done similar things for the other computers here with no problem, but this particular one has really odd hardware. The worst part is that once the light bulb turned on, it was trivial. And it is painful that this should have been done months ago if I wasn’t stuck awaiting the DOH moment. All I can plead is that I am getting old and senile and having months long DOH moments. I suppose I could also plead to being a geek. 

It seems that the older I get, the more often DOH moments turn into DOH weeks, sometimes even DOH months. DOH moments are those times when you know that you just know you can do some task, but just can’t quite figure out one critical step. And then the light turns on and it is obvious and you go around smacking your head because it is so simple. DOH! 
At least there is a happy geek ending here. {Remember, you are not officially a geek unless you have a network of at least three different CPU architectures in your office.}Â