my question was about high precision devices like:
Capilatiry DNA Sequencer (ABI brand).
High precision scales for analitical use (for drug weight).
PCR machines and other laboratory equipment.
I just guess that this lab equipment is "digital", i.e. it uses mostly microprocessors and perhaps a little bit of mechanic. So, it is very likely that these devices have a regulated power supply that should work with a little bit less AC input.
You may want to ask the vendor or manufaturer of the devices if any of the devices has a problem with 209V.
Some time ago, voltage was switched from 220V to 230V in Germany (and thus 380V to 400V for three phase current). There was a lot of arguing and lamenting, but nothing interesting happened. Most consumer electr(on)ic devices were rated 220V +/- 10%, while the power authorities guaranteed 220V +/- 5%. Now, devices are rated 230V +/- 10% and power is 230V +/- 5%. So most devices work within their specification, no matter if it is based on 220V or 230V. Some light bulbs rated 220V will light a tiny bit brighter while reducing ther lifetime by a few days.
I don't know how precise Argentina's power authorities can deliver electric power, but I guess they specify it with +/- 5%. They reduced power by exactly 5%, it should not harm most consumer electr(on)ic devices. All heating devices should have no problems, they work with slightly reduced power. Most electronic devices use voltage regulators, so they can accept a wide range of input voltage. Some few devices may need a very precise AC input voltage, but they should already work with some regulation device. The remainder could use an active UPS that generates a very precise output voltage no matter how "ugly" the input voltage is. Wide range power supplies, as used with many modern laptops, accept any input voltage between 90V and 260V, as long as it is AC. They won't have any problems with 230V, 209 V, 135V, 188V, or whatever you find at the next power outlet.
And the best of all: Light bulbs will life longer in Argentina.;-)
Connect the doorbell via opto coupler / relais or similar to a key on an old keyboard. Use an application that can restart a presentation when a single key is pressed. For example, Mozilla reloads the current page when F5 is pressed, so do Opera and the IE. Set a local html page as homepage, containing a Flash or similar presentation. Connect the doorbell interface to F5. Make the browser start when the OS starts. For Win9x, place a shortcut to the browser into %windir%\start menu\startup.
My solution for a room of three people (including me): An old PC with a soundcard, a pair of el-cheapo passive speakers, an ISA-Bus FM radio card, and a selfmade floppy-sized Linux. It runs a tiny webserver (mini_httpd), dhcpcd, and three CGIs, one to select the radio station, one to control the soundcard's mixer, and one to control the CDROM drive (Audio CD only). After booting, the sound volume is set to background level, and a local FM station playing acceptable music is tuned in. Now we can control everything via web browser, and (because I had too much time) a CHM (Windows HTML Help) file. Station names are stored in a text file on the DOS-formatted floppy, so we could easily update the station list when needed.
Imagine some better speakers and you have music for the entire classroom. OK, my solution has no MP3 player, but it would require just one more CGI and some kind of mass storage device full of MP3s (CD-R/W, DVD-/+RW, USB Flash, Harddisk, CF, whatever). You may want to look for some self-made Linux-based MP3 players, they usually have a web interface for play lists (and perhaps volume controls).
... running an Apache 1.3.something, serving a hand-written (S)HTML page containing the most frequently used pages and some CGIs for various stuff, mostly converting POD, man, info and so on; both at home and in the office.
Using a TV as huge monitor: I own a very recent TV with 100 Hz (storing a 50 Hz PAL picture and displaying it twice) that also has a VGA input, limited to 640x480 @ 60Hz. You can not calibrate the picture geometry as exactly as with a high end VGA monitor, so squares look like hand-drawn boxes and circles look like eggs. High contrast test pictures (three bars white-black-white across the entire screen) influence the geometry as well. So this is no solution you want to use day by day for several hours. But it is usable for surfing and mailing. Some problematic websites assume a resolution of at least 800x600, so you have to scroll a lot. Opera in full screen mode (F11 key) is usable.
Using a beamer: This beasts are loud, need a lot of power, and a replacement light bulb costs half of a new beamer. But you get 800x600 or even 1024x768 at a screen size of 2 meters or more, depending on the quality of the beamer. But you need the room for that picture.
Huge keyboards for nearly blind people or people having trouble with fine motor manipulations: Simple! There are several vendors offering custon keyboards for electronic cash register systems. Those systems are essentially stripped-down PCs, so you should have no interfacing problems. A friend of mine (suffering spasticity) uses a standard PC keyboard combined with a cash register keyboard at work. That keyboard has a matrix of programmable push buttons and can be equipped with key caps that fit one, two, or four (2x2) pushbuttons. He uses it with 2x2 key caps, so he has the 20 most used keys on the cash register keyboard rapidly available even with spasticity, and for the other 80 keys, he still can use the standard keyboard, with a "speed penality".
Mouse replacement: I don't look at my mouse, I feel its case and buttons. I know where it is placed, about 5 to 10 cm right of my keyboard. No need to look away from the screen. So I guess blind people should have not much problems using a mouse. My friend (suffering spasticity) uses a standard mouse (now wireless, but just for fun) with no special hardware, I just slowed down the settings in the mouse driver (low speed, low acceleration). He's not as fast as me using Windows, but he reaches nearly the speed of an average Windows user. A touchpad or that little nipple on IBM laptops would be horror for him, but I think he could also work with a trackball, with a little training. We also tried a special mouse driver that used a low cost PC joystick to move the mouse cursor. It was quite usable, but my friend decided to use a standard mouse, mostly because the driver conflicted with the games that needed a joystick.
Cats usually don't chew on cables, so this is an indicator that something is wrong. And it's not your cables.
It might be an indicator that the two of you have a relation problem. The cat may want more attention. Especially if the cat does not go out of the house, you are the only one "social contact" for the cat. Play with the cat, pet the cat, crawl the cat. Or if you don't think that you have the time to do so, give away your cat to someone who cares for it; and get your self a cat doll.
Maybe your cat is a real hunter but has no other prey than those dangling cables. Get or make some cat toys. Remember: "Everything not nailed down is a cat toy." You just have to make sure that your cat toys are more attractive than your hardware.
A last idea, to cure the symptoms but not the disease: place your cables in flexible tubes. IKEA has flexible tubes in black and white that can be wrapped around the cables without disconnecting them. Unless your cat can look onto your table while standing on the floor, it will have a hard time chewing through those tubes.
If you(r friend) really need the data and have no recent backup, call a professional data rescue company and pay them some 100 dollars to get the files back from the harddisk (that's how laptop "backups" are done at the company I work for - not very clever, but it avoids thinking about a backup strategy). Don't make the problem worse by fiddling with the drive, it will make the job harder for those people who know how to read from a broken drive.
If the data is not that important that you are willing to pay some 100 dollars for it, take a big marker and write "LESSONS LEARNED" onto the broken drive. Buy and use(!) a backup software that writes your important data from the new harddisk to CDROM, DVD, tape or another harddisk and verifies(!) what it wrote.
If you really need the data, but can't afford the data rescue company, you may try to torture your drive (heat, cold, shock, shake, hit) until it is really dead or spills out a few files.
(Please note: German situation - US may be a little bit different)
Cable advantages
No need for separate receivers
VCR and TV can share a single outlet (daisy-chained)
No extra costs for receivers
"fool-proof"
Cable disadvantages
Limited program selection
Limited image and sound quality due to bandwidth restrictions
Program selection choosen by provider
Monthly fee (ever increasing)
Satellite advantages
(Nearly) unlimited program selection
High image and sound quality
No monthy fee
Satellite disadvantages
One reciever per TV, one receiver per VCR
One outlet per receiver
expert required for setup of antenna and cabling
Weather problems? Guess where the cable providers get the TV program from! Right, a satellite antenna. Their's may be slightly larger than yours, but in bad weather, cable will also be disturbed. Lesson learned: Buy a BIG satellite antenna and good equipment. There is no need for gold-plated mast, but you should have a high-gain antenna, combined with low-attenuation cable. And you shold remember that the best amplifier is a good antenna.
Looking at TCO, cable wins only if you need it for only a short time (say: a year). The longer you use it, the lower is the TCO for satellite compared to cable.
NTFS has "Streams", essentially a more generic case of the HFS. You don't just have two forks, you have a nearly infinite number of forks/streams, with the unnamed stream being the "normal" file. Windows uses this forks for file descriptions and a few other things. But nearly nobody knows this feature. It seems even the virus programmers don't (ab)use it.
Microsoft has a list of keyboard scancodes (used for PS/2, USB and DIN keyboards). There are special scancodes for the power management keys (commonly found on those cheap semi-transparent "multimedia" keyboards made in asia). There seem to be special scancodes for Copy, Paste, Cut, and friends, and for real multimedia keys (volume, muting).
Combine both information and you probably can remap some more or less useless keys to Cut, Copy and Paste.
Using this tricks, it should also be possible to add a windows key to an old 101/102 keys keyboard, by abusing Scroll Lock, Right Ctrl or some other nearly unused key. It could also help some laptops. IBM sells brandnew Thinkpads without a windows key but with a big, fat and useless "Access IBM" key (starts BIOS setup / accesses IBM webpage in Windows). If I had to work with such a machine, I would remap that key to be a windows key.
Don't like fiddling with Windows and the registry? Just buy a nice Sun Sparc machine, it comes with a really big keyboard having all those extra keys for cut, copy, paste, help, undo and some other stuff you ever dreamed of. It only lacks a key for making coffee.;-)
No money for a real computer made by Sun? Google finds several instructions how to connect a Sun keyboard to an IBM PC.
A web-based application, developped in the second half of 1990ies, containing cludges for Netscape 4 and other workarounds. Some parts of the code - unfortunately the most important ones - were coded in a few night sessions, and need a major rewrite since at least two years.
Our new plan: A facelift that makes the application look a little better, and no more development except for a little customizing. It has to stay like this for at least a year. During that time, we will develop a completely rewritten version of the application, with a redesigned data model, a new modular approach, conforming to standards, faster, with a lot of new features, new ideas and new bugs.
(And because I am the one who does the main design and coding, I will make sure that all output is nice and valid HTML 4 with CSS. If browsers can't display it, it's not my fault. Netscape 4 is dead and will no longer be supported in the new millenium.)
If you have more than 5 files on your desktop, create a scratch folder (preferably on a RAMDISK). Create a single shortcut to that scratch folder.
If you frequently need some of those files, create a second folder named today, frequently-used, or similar, and add a shortcut to it.
Move frequently used application shortcuts into the quickbar. The quickbar is also a good place for applications that accept files via drag-and-drop. Drop an HTML file onto the shortcut to the currently-not-windows-standard-browser icon in the quickbar and the browser will start with the dropped file.
Move less frequently used application shortcuts into the start menu (they probably are already there).
Remove shortcuts from the desktop that you don't need. What was the last time you started Real Player, Quicktime or similar by doubleclicking the shortcut on the desktop instead of a media file?
Organize your start menu. Rightclick it and choose "Explore"
Use keyboard shortcuts for frequently used applications.
Several years ago, I found a tool called WinKey, allowing to create a huge ammount of keyboard shortcuts that do not interfer with application-specific hotkeys. Imagine a keyboard that has 80 or 100 extra buttons for applications. Weird? Useful! Just hold down the Windows key and type almost any other key to start one of your 50 most used applications.
My current shortcut mappings are:
Windows-A = ACDSee
Windows-C = cmd.exe (DOS-Box)
Windows-G = http://www.google.com/
Windows-I = Internet Explorer
Windows-N = better than Netscape: Mozilla (Windows-M is used to minimize all windows and can't be used)
Windows-Shift-N = the original Netscape 4.7 - less frequently used, so the shortcut is more complicated
Windows-O = Opera
Windows-P = Putty Menu (selfmade)
Windows-Q = Quirk for Ultraedit (Windows-U is used by usability tools and can't be used)
Windows-V = VNC viewer
Windows-W = WS_FTP
Windows-X = access the Exchange server: Mozilla Mail!
(You are not limited to letters: Numers, arrows and F-keys also work, and you can combine with Shift, Alt and Ctrl.)
And of course, I use some of the standard hardcoded shortcuts:
Windows-E = File Explorer
Windows-M = Minimize all Windows
Windows-Shift-M = undo Minimize
Windows-R = Run command
Windows-Break = Break Windows using the System Properties;-)
Windows-F = Find files or folders
Less frequently used:
Windows-D = Show Desktop
Windows-Tab = Switch Tasks in the taskbar
Windows-F1 = Windows Help
Windows-U = Utility Manager (Windows 2000) - starts Narrator and other usability tools (Winkey does not know this shortcut)
Executive summary: Click count reduction and mouse movement reduction by using short ways for frequently executed tasks. (This is very similar to what packers like winzip do. See also "poor Huffman coding" in Apocalypse 5.)
No, PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse have exactly the same pinout (+5V, GND, data, clock and two unused lines). And while regular PS/2 systems used to have two distinct interfaces for keyboard and mouse, most newer laptops have one smart controller that can switch its identity to either keyboard or mouse interface (Usually, it also controls the buildin keyboard and mouse replacements). And the very smart versions of those controllers have two additional data lines of the controller wired
to the spare pins of the combined keyboard/mouse connector so that you can use a splitter cable, that connects those spare pins back to the regular pins for one of its female connectors.
Well, if you prefer hacking non-case-sensitive code, just don't leave your Visual Basic and Windows playground and let adult programmers with a mathematical background work as they did since the computer was invented. If you really want a non-case-sensitive Java, just grab some free, open source Java implementation and modify it to be case insensitive. No one will stop you. But you do remember that Java source code is assumed to be Unicode, do you? And you remember that some Unicode characters are considered to be either upper or lower case, but have not exactly one corresponding lower resp. upper case character, do you? One simple example is the German sz ligature, but there are many more. In France, it is custom to leave out the accent signs on upper case letters, so toLower(toUpper(s)) is not equal to s.
Yes, trivial obscuring like user(at)example(dot)com with various special characters can be done in 10 lines. (Could be hard to get the last 3 lines filled with code.)
But what if the user does not use English language, but German? And what if (s)he does not mark the obscured charachters? user klammeraffe example punkt com or with some funny synonymes user a im kringel example klecks com. Decoding this in 10 lines of Perl becomes harder, and it becomes harder with every new language. Decode this with 10 lines for English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Bantu, Spanish,...
What happens if the user is really "evil" to spammers? Meine Mail-Adresse besteht aus dem Domainnamen meines Providers example unter der Top-Level-Domain fur kommerzielle Webseiten, dem wird mein Kundenpseudonym user und ein Klammeraffe vorangestellt. (I'm still hiding user@example.com - translation: My mail address is composed from the domain name of my provider example undet the top level domain for commercial websites, prefixed with my client pseudonym user and an at sign.) Decode this and similar examples in 10 lines of Perl for 10 languages, while still being able do decode all trivial variants and all slashdot mail obscurations.
Getting more evil: Meine e-Mail ist catch-those-spammers@example.com mit user vor dem Klammeraffen. Schicken Sie keine Mails an die falsche Adresse. (My email is catch-those-spammers@example.com with user in front of the at sign. Don't send mail to the wrong address.) Set up an account catch-those-spammers that marks and blocks all computers that test that acocunt or send mail to it. Now decode this and all examples above and all slashdot obscuration and don't run into the trap, and do not use more than 10 lines (with 80 characters each) of Perl code.
I bet it can't be done in 10 lines with 80 characters each, using Perl 5 and no external modules.
With nearly no work it is possible to make automatic address collecting harder and thus more expensive. Spammers don't want to spend much money, they want to maximise their profit. So they will do at most only trivial decoding, if they can't collect enough unobscured mail adresses. This is why images containing the mail address won't be OCRed for a while. It simply costs too much. On the other hand, just guessing names for existing domains works pretty well and it is very cheap. I have an unpublished six-letter account at a big German mail provider, and it is permanently hit by spam. The generic (unused and unpublished) accounts (sales, info, mail, accounting, vertrieb) of my domain are also spammed very often. Guessing is cheaper than collecting addresses.
So while this is not a mathematical proof, you can see that non-trivial obscuration will help. See also What You Get When You Buy a Spam CD.
... there still is hope. Venkman won't run in IE, but you can get something like Venkman:
To debug Javascript in Internet Explorer with more than just a few alert() statements, you need to install the MS Script debugger. It has two versions, one for NT/2000/XP and one for 9x/ME. There is even a KB entry describing how to find the Debugger in the jungle of microsoft.com: KBID 268445.
Mail attachments are usually transfered base64-encoded, thus having an overhead of about 33%. If the server decodes the attachments and lets the user download them using HTTP(S), there is only a very small, nearly constant overhead of the HTTP protocol headers, as HTTP itself is "8-bit clean". So if you download already-decoded large attachments using HTTP, you save about 25% compared to POP3. If browser and HTTP server can agree to using gzip transfer encoding (see gzip_cnc project; most browsers support it), you can save even more.
Nevertheless, I don't want my provider to mess around with my emails, especially I want the attachments within the emails, not a "click here within the next three days" link. It would make archiving emails much harder if I had to download each attachment separately.
Once upon a time, there was a small, innocent server room. A few servers for the company's knowledge and document management, main part of the intranet, were connected to two UPSes, and everything was good. One day, the power failed for a few minutes, the UPSes switched to battery power, and nobody noticed it until the servers suddenly stopped responding. Both batteries were empty, the UPSes could not tell the servers to shut down because nobody had wired the serial port of the UPSes to the servers. But the best fact: Both UPSes were connected in parallel to a single 16 amps automatic circuit breaker, and both UPSes tried to recharge their batteries immediately after the power returned while still supplying power to the servers, drawing much more than 16 amps. Guess what happens: The breaker switched off and the UPSes where discharged until they could not even light a single LED.
The next server room had 12 circuit breakers rated 16 amps each, a well-calculated power distribution, and the UPSes could tell all servers (a few more than in that good old times) about their battery states.
Tux2000, happy not to be responsible for that old server room
Since the old days when there was a 1024 cylinder limit for the ROM BIOS and so for LILO, I usually have a very small partition (10 to 50 MBytes) somewhere in the first 1024 cylinders mounted at/boot. LILO is installed in that partition's super block, and the partition is marked active.
So if I would use XFS for/ and other partitions, I still would keep that trusted little helper/boot partition with an ext2/ext3/minix/whatever filesystem that works with LILO.
Minor drawback: You have to uncomment export INSTALL_PATH=/boot in/usr/src/linux/Makefile or vmlinuz will be installed to the/ partition.
... a long time ago. Basically, every user gets a simple switch, all switches are connected in parallel, so you get a "wired-or". All users are told: If you need the server, turn on that switch. If you don't need the server any more, switch it off again. A little piece of electronic connected to a RS232 port and a tiny C programm control the power supply for the server. Details (german only, sorry) are here.
The trick is: The server now knows best when to start and to shutdown, there is no more need for manual boot or shutdown. If you replace the switches with a relay per workstation that closes the contact whenever the workstation is powered on, you don't even have to tell the users about the switch. You don't even need extra cables if you use 10/100 MBit/s ethernet, there are two unused wire pairs in every ethernet connection.
OK, this is a hardware solution, not a nice popup window. But don't we all hate those nasty popups?;-)
One continuing problem that IT has is locking down computers. It is very common for employees to install their own software and dial connections on laptops.
At my company, users simply can't change dialup connections, and they can't install software requiring administrative privileges. They are "Restricted Users" in Windows. To select a dial-up connection, a selfmade software running "suid" (or the equivalent of this on W2K) changes a preconfigured and locked dial-up connection. To install more software than the default, they need to connect to a software distribution server in the corporate network. To install other software, they need to hand out their machine and the cdrom to the IT support. In very rare cases (having a high rank or having robbed on knees for a while), the IT support can enable a "24 hours administator" mode, giving the user local administrator rights for 24 hours.
(It might be possible to copy a special program onto the machines to bypass some of the restrictions, but our users don't know that much about computers. Most can't even tell the difference between a power cable and a (laptop) power supply unit, they name both "power cord".)
Slashdot Mirror
I just guess that this lab equipment is "digital", i.e. it uses mostly microprocessors and perhaps a little bit of mechanic. So, it is very likely that these devices have a regulated power supply that should work with a little bit less AC input.
You may want to ask the vendor or manufaturer of the devices if any of the devices has a problem with 209V.
This never hurts.
Tux2000
Some time ago, voltage was switched from 220V to 230V in Germany (and thus 380V to 400V for three phase current). There was a lot of arguing and lamenting, but nothing interesting happened. Most consumer electr(on)ic devices were rated 220V +/- 10%, while the power authorities guaranteed 220V +/- 5%. Now, devices are rated 230V +/- 10% and power is 230V +/- 5%. So most devices work within their specification, no matter if it is based on 220V or 230V. Some light bulbs rated 220V will light a tiny bit brighter while reducing ther lifetime by a few days.
I don't know how precise Argentina's power authorities can deliver electric power, but I guess they specify it with +/- 5%. They reduced power by exactly 5%, it should not harm most consumer electr(on)ic devices. All heating devices should have no problems, they work with slightly reduced power. Most electronic devices use voltage regulators, so they can accept a wide range of input voltage. Some few devices may need a very precise AC input voltage, but they should already work with some regulation device. The remainder could use an active UPS that generates a very precise output voltage no matter how "ugly" the input voltage is. Wide range power supplies, as used with many modern laptops, accept any input voltage between 90V and 260V, as long as it is AC. They won't have any problems with 230V, 209 V, 135V, 188V, or whatever you find at the next power outlet.
And the best of all: Light bulbs will life longer in Argentina. ;-)
Tux2000
Connect the doorbell via opto coupler / relais or similar to a key on an old keyboard. Use an application that can restart a presentation when a single key is pressed. For example, Mozilla reloads the current page when F5 is pressed, so do Opera and the IE. Set a local html page as homepage, containing a Flash or similar presentation. Connect the doorbell interface to F5. Make the browser start when the OS starts. For Win9x, place a shortcut to the browser into %windir%\start menu\startup.
Tux2000
My solution for a room of three people (including me): An old PC with a soundcard, a pair of el-cheapo passive speakers, an ISA-Bus FM radio card, and a selfmade floppy-sized Linux. It runs a tiny webserver (mini_httpd), dhcpcd, and three CGIs, one to select the radio station, one to control the soundcard's mixer, and one to control the CDROM drive (Audio CD only). After booting, the sound volume is set to background level, and a local FM station playing acceptable music is tuned in. Now we can control everything via web browser, and (because I had too much time) a CHM (Windows HTML Help) file. Station names are stored in a text file on the DOS-formatted floppy, so we could easily update the station list when needed.
Imagine some better speakers and you have music for the entire classroom. OK, my solution has no MP3 player, but it would require just one more CGI and some kind of mass storage device full of MP3s (CD-R/W, DVD-/+RW, USB Flash, Harddisk, CF, whatever). You may want to look for some self-made Linux-based MP3 players, they usually have a web interface for play lists (and perhaps volume controls).
Tux2000
... running an Apache 1.3.something, serving a hand-written (S)HTML page containing the most frequently used pages and some CGIs for various stuff, mostly converting POD, man, info and so on; both at home and in the office.
Tux2000
Using a TV as huge monitor: I own a very recent TV with 100 Hz (storing a 50 Hz PAL picture and displaying it twice) that also has a VGA input, limited to 640x480 @ 60Hz. You can not calibrate the picture geometry as exactly as with a high end VGA monitor, so squares look like hand-drawn boxes and circles look like eggs. High contrast test pictures (three bars white-black-white across the entire screen) influence the geometry as well. So this is no solution you want to use day by day for several hours. But it is usable for surfing and mailing. Some problematic websites assume a resolution of at least 800x600, so you have to scroll a lot. Opera in full screen mode (F11 key) is usable.
Using a beamer: This beasts are loud, need a lot of power, and a replacement light bulb costs half of a new beamer. But you get 800x600 or even 1024x768 at a screen size of 2 meters or more, depending on the quality of the beamer. But you need the room for that picture.
Huge keyboards for nearly blind people or people having trouble with fine motor manipulations: Simple! There are several vendors offering custon keyboards for electronic cash register systems. Those systems are essentially stripped-down PCs, so you should have no interfacing problems. A friend of mine (suffering spasticity) uses a standard PC keyboard combined with a cash register keyboard at work. That keyboard has a matrix of programmable push buttons and can be equipped with key caps that fit one, two, or four (2x2) pushbuttons. He uses it with 2x2 key caps, so he has the 20 most used keys on the cash register keyboard rapidly available even with spasticity, and for the other 80 keys, he still can use the standard keyboard, with a "speed penality".
Mouse replacement: I don't look at my mouse, I feel its case and buttons. I know where it is placed, about 5 to 10 cm right of my keyboard. No need to look away from the screen. So I guess blind people should have not much problems using a mouse. My friend (suffering spasticity) uses a standard mouse (now wireless, but just for fun) with no special hardware, I just slowed down the settings in the mouse driver (low speed, low acceleration). He's not as fast as me using Windows, but he reaches nearly the speed of an average Windows user. A touchpad or that little nipple on IBM laptops would be horror for him, but I think he could also work with a trackball, with a little training. We also tried a special mouse driver that used a low cost PC joystick to move the mouse cursor. It was quite usable, but my friend decided to use a standard mouse, mostly because the driver conflicted with the games that needed a joystick.
Tux2000
Cats usually don't chew on cables, so this is an indicator that something is wrong. And it's not your cables.
It might be an indicator that the two of you have a relation problem. The cat may want more attention. Especially if the cat does not go out of the house, you are the only one "social contact" for the cat. Play with the cat, pet the cat, crawl the cat. Or if you don't think that you have the time to do so, give away your cat to someone who cares for it; and get your self a cat doll.
Maybe your cat is a real hunter but has no other prey than those dangling cables. Get or make some cat toys. Remember: "Everything not nailed down is a cat toy." You just have to make sure that your cat toys are more attractive than your hardware.
A last idea, to cure the symptoms but not the disease: place your cables in flexible tubes. IKEA has flexible tubes in black and white that can be wrapped around the cables without disconnecting them. Unless your cat can look onto your table while standing on the floor, it will have a hard time chewing through those tubes.
Tux2000
If you(r friend) really need the data and have no recent backup, call a professional data rescue company and pay them some 100 dollars to get the files back from the harddisk (that's how laptop "backups" are done at the company I work for - not very clever, but it avoids thinking about a backup strategy). Don't make the problem worse by fiddling with the drive, it will make the job harder for those people who know how to read from a broken drive.
If the data is not that important that you are willing to pay some 100 dollars for it, take a big marker and write "LESSONS LEARNED" onto the broken drive. Buy and use(!) a backup software that writes your important data from the new harddisk to CDROM, DVD, tape or another harddisk and verifies(!) what it wrote.
If you really need the data, but can't afford the data rescue company, you may try to torture your drive (heat, cold, shock, shake, hit) until it is really dead or spills out a few files.
Tux2000
(Please note: German situation - US may be a little bit different)
Cable advantages
Cable disadvantages
Satellite advantages
Satellite disadvantages
Weather problems? Guess where the cable providers get the TV program from! Right, a satellite antenna. Their's may be slightly larger than yours, but in bad weather, cable will also be disturbed. Lesson learned: Buy a BIG satellite antenna and good equipment. There is no need for gold-plated mast, but you should have a high-gain antenna, combined with low-attenuation cable. And you shold remember that the best amplifier is a good antenna.
Looking at TCO, cable wins only if you need it for only a short time (say: a year). The longer you use it, the lower is the TCO for satellite compared to cable.
Tux2000, forced to use cable
NTFS has "Streams", essentially a more generic case of the HFS. You don't just have two forks, you have a nearly infinite number of forks/streams, with the unnamed stream being the "normal" file. Windows uses this forks for file descriptions and a few other things. But nearly nobody knows this feature. It seems even the virus programmers don't (ab)use it.
Google found among others this page explaining those streams a little more.
The most evil thing about streams is that you can only see the default stream using "onboard" tools like "dir" or the Explorer.
Tux2000
... except for the wording, and it does not show the password.
Go to http://www.opera.com/ and see for yourself.
Tux2000 <-- Opera is my default browser
Could be possible:
Combine both information and you probably can remap some more or less useless keys to Cut, Copy and Paste.
Using this tricks, it should also be possible to add a windows key to an old 101/102 keys keyboard, by abusing Scroll Lock, Right Ctrl or some other nearly unused key. It could also help some laptops. IBM sells brandnew Thinkpads without a windows key but with a big, fat and useless "Access IBM" key (starts BIOS setup / accesses IBM webpage in Windows). If I had to work with such a machine, I would remap that key to be a windows key.
Don't like fiddling with Windows and the registry? Just buy a nice Sun Sparc machine, it comes with a really big keyboard having all those extra keys for cut, copy, paste, help, undo and some other stuff you ever dreamed of. It only lacks a key for making coffee. ;-)
No money for a real computer made by Sun? Google finds several instructions how to connect a Sun keyboard to an IBM PC.
Tux2000
A web-based application, developped in the second half of 1990ies, containing cludges for Netscape 4 and other workarounds. Some parts of the code - unfortunately the most important ones - were coded in a few night sessions, and need a major rewrite since at least two years.
Our new plan: A facelift that makes the application look a little better, and no more development except for a little customizing. It has to stay like this for at least a year. During that time, we will develop a completely rewritten version of the application, with a redesigned data model, a new modular approach, conforming to standards, faster, with a lot of new features, new ideas and new bugs.
(And because I am the one who does the main design and coding, I will make sure that all output is nice and valid HTML 4 with CSS. If browsers can't display it, it's not my fault. Netscape 4 is dead and will no longer be supported in the new millenium.)
Tux2000
My tips:
Clean up your desktop.
Several years ago, I found a tool called WinKey, allowing to create a huge ammount of keyboard shortcuts that do not interfer with application-specific hotkeys. Imagine a keyboard that has 80 or 100 extra buttons for applications. Weird? Useful! Just hold down the Windows key and type almost any other key to start one of your 50 most used applications.
My current shortcut mappings are:
Windows-A = ACDSee
Windows-C = cmd.exe (DOS-Box)
Windows-G = http://www.google.com/
Windows-I = Internet Explorer
Windows-N = better than Netscape: Mozilla (Windows-M is used to minimize all windows and can't be used)
Windows-Shift-N = the original Netscape 4.7 - less frequently used, so the shortcut is more complicated
Windows-O = Opera
Windows-P = Putty Menu (selfmade)
Windows-Q = Quirk for Ultraedit (Windows-U is used by usability tools and can't be used)
Windows-V = VNC viewer
Windows-W = WS_FTP
Windows-X = access the Exchange server: Mozilla Mail!
(You are not limited to letters: Numers, arrows and F-keys also work, and you can combine with Shift, Alt and Ctrl.)
And of course, I use some of the standard hardcoded shortcuts:
Windows-E = File Explorer ;-)
Windows-M = Minimize all Windows
Windows-Shift-M = undo Minimize
Windows-R = Run command
Windows-Break = Break Windows using the System Properties
Windows-F = Find files or folders
Less frequently used:
Windows-D = Show Desktop
Windows-Tab = Switch Tasks in the taskbar
Windows-F1 = Windows Help Windows-U = Utility Manager (Windows 2000) - starts Narrator and other usability tools (Winkey does not know this shortcut)
Executive summary: Click count reduction and mouse movement reduction by using short ways for frequently executed tasks. (This is very similar to what packers like winzip do. See also "poor Huffman coding" in Apocalypse 5.)
Tux2000
No, PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse have exactly the same pinout (+5V, GND, data, clock and two unused lines). And while regular PS/2 systems used to have two distinct interfaces for keyboard and mouse, most newer laptops have one smart controller that can switch its identity to either keyboard or mouse interface (Usually, it also controls the buildin keyboard and mouse replacements). And the very smart versions of those controllers have two additional data lines of the controller wired to the spare pins of the combined keyboard/mouse connector so that you can use a splitter cable, that connects those spare pins back to the regular pins for one of its female connectors.
Tux2000
Well, if you prefer hacking non-case-sensitive code, just don't leave your Visual Basic and Windows playground and let adult programmers with a mathematical background work as they did since the computer was invented. If you really want a non-case-sensitive Java, just grab some free, open source Java implementation and modify it to be case insensitive. No one will stop you. But you do remember that Java source code is assumed to be Unicode, do you? And you remember that some Unicode characters are considered to be either upper or lower case, but have not exactly one corresponding lower resp. upper case character, do you? One simple example is the German sz ligature, but there are many more. In France, it is custom to leave out the accent signs on upper case letters, so toLower(toUpper(s)) is not equal to s.
Tux2000
Yes, it does. You can even write a perl program with zero lines, if you do not count invoking the program as a line:
Real Operating Systems (those not from Redmond) allow command lines of 4 KBytes or even more, this is more than sufficient for most small tasks.
For even more useful examples, see Google search for "perl one-liners"
Tux2000
Yes, trivial obscuring like user(at)example(dot)com with various special characters can be done in 10 lines. (Could be hard to get the last 3 lines filled with code.)
But what if the user does not use English language, but German? And what if (s)he does not mark the obscured charachters? user klammeraffe example punkt com or with some funny synonymes user a im kringel example klecks com. Decoding this in 10 lines of Perl becomes harder, and it becomes harder with every new language. Decode this with 10 lines for English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Bantu, Spanish, ...
What happens if the user is really "evil" to spammers? Meine Mail-Adresse besteht aus dem Domainnamen meines Providers example unter der Top-Level-Domain fur kommerzielle Webseiten, dem wird mein Kundenpseudonym user und ein Klammeraffe vorangestellt. (I'm still hiding user@example.com - translation: My mail address is composed from the domain name of my provider example undet the top level domain for commercial websites, prefixed with my client pseudonym user and an at sign.) Decode this and similar examples in 10 lines of Perl for 10 languages, while still being able do decode all trivial variants and all slashdot mail obscurations.
Getting more evil: Meine e-Mail ist catch-those-spammers@example.com mit user vor dem Klammeraffen. Schicken Sie keine Mails an die falsche Adresse. (My email is catch-those-spammers@example.com with user in front of the at sign. Don't send mail to the wrong address.) Set up an account catch-those-spammers that marks and blocks all computers that test that acocunt or send mail to it. Now decode this and all examples above and all slashdot obscuration and don't run into the trap, and do not use more than 10 lines (with 80 characters each) of Perl code.
I bet it can't be done in 10 lines with 80 characters each, using Perl 5 and no external modules.
With nearly no work it is possible to make automatic address collecting harder and thus more expensive. Spammers don't want to spend much money, they want to maximise their profit. So they will do at most only trivial decoding, if they can't collect enough unobscured mail adresses. This is why images containing the mail address won't be OCRed for a while. It simply costs too much. On the other hand, just guessing names for existing domains works pretty well and it is very cheap. I have an unpublished six-letter account at a big German mail provider, and it is permanently hit by spam. The generic (unused and unpublished) accounts (sales, info, mail, accounting, vertrieb) of my domain are also spammed very often. Guessing is cheaper than collecting addresses.
So while this is not a mathematical proof, you can see that non-trivial obscuration will help. See also What You Get When You Buy a Spam CD.
Tux2000
Telepolis article (german only, may the fish be with you)
... there still is hope. Venkman won't run in IE, but you can get something like Venkman:
To debug Javascript in Internet Explorer with more than just a few alert() statements, you need to install the MS Script debugger. It has two versions, one for NT/2000/XP and one for 9x/ME. There is even a KB entry describing how to find the Debugger in the jungle of microsoft.com: KBID 268445.
Just my 2 cents.
Tux2000
Mail attachments are usually transfered base64-encoded, thus having an overhead of about 33%. If the server decodes the attachments and lets the user download them using HTTP(S), there is only a very small, nearly constant overhead of the HTTP protocol headers, as HTTP itself is "8-bit clean". So if you download already-decoded large attachments using HTTP, you save about 25% compared to POP3. If browser and HTTP server can agree to using gzip transfer encoding (see gzip_cnc project; most browsers support it), you can save even more.
Nevertheless, I don't want my provider to mess around with my emails, especially I want the attachments within the emails, not a "click here within the next three days" link. It would make archiving emails much harder if I had to download each attachment separately.
Tux2000
Once upon a time, there was a small, innocent server room. A few servers for the company's knowledge and document management, main part of the intranet, were connected to two UPSes, and everything was good. One day, the power failed for a few minutes, the UPSes switched to battery power, and nobody noticed it until the servers suddenly stopped responding. Both batteries were empty, the UPSes could not tell the servers to shut down because nobody had wired the serial port of the UPSes to the servers. But the best fact: Both UPSes were connected in parallel to a single 16 amps automatic circuit breaker, and both UPSes tried to recharge their batteries immediately after the power returned while still supplying power to the servers, drawing much more than 16 amps. Guess what happens: The breaker switched off and the UPSes where discharged until they could not even light a single LED.
The next server room had 12 circuit breakers rated 16 amps each, a well-calculated power distribution, and the UPSes could tell all servers (a few more than in that good old times) about their battery states.
Tux2000, happy not to be responsible for that old server room
Since the old days when there was a 1024 cylinder limit for the ROM BIOS and so for LILO, I usually have a very small partition (10 to 50 MBytes) somewhere in the first 1024 cylinders mounted at /boot. LILO is installed in that partition's super block, and the partition is marked active.
So if I would use XFS for / and other partitions, I still would keep that trusted little helper /boot partition with an ext2/ext3/minix/whatever filesystem that works with LILO.
Minor drawback: You have to uncomment export INSTALL_PATH=/boot in /usr/src/linux/Makefile or vmlinuz will be installed to the / partition.
Tux2000
... a long time ago. Basically, every user gets a simple switch, all switches are connected in parallel, so you get a "wired-or". All users are told: If you need the server, turn on that switch. If you don't need the server any more, switch it off again. A little piece of electronic connected to a RS232 port and a tiny C programm control the power supply for the server. Details (german only, sorry) are here.
The trick is: The server now knows best when to start and to shutdown, there is no more need for manual boot or shutdown. If you replace the switches with a relay per workstation that closes the contact whenever the workstation is powered on, you don't even have to tell the users about the switch. You don't even need extra cables if you use 10/100 MBit/s ethernet, there are two unused wire pairs in every ethernet connection.
OK, this is a hardware solution, not a nice popup window. But don't we all hate those nasty popups? ;-)
Tux2000
At my company, users simply can't change dialup connections, and they can't install software requiring administrative privileges. They are "Restricted Users" in Windows. To select a dial-up connection, a selfmade software running "suid" (or the equivalent of this on W2K) changes a preconfigured and locked dial-up connection. To install more software than the default, they need to connect to a software distribution server in the corporate network. To install other software, they need to hand out their machine and the cdrom to the IT support. In very rare cases (having a high rank or having robbed on knees for a while), the IT support can enable a "24 hours administator" mode, giving the user local administrator rights for 24 hours.
(It might be possible to copy a special program onto the machines to bypass some of the restrictions, but our users don't know that much about computers. Most can't even tell the difference between a power cable and a (laptop) power supply unit, they name both "power cord".)