Ignorance

Ignorance is a blessed shadow that follows me though life. No matter how much light I put on it, it gets stronger.

My first "hand laid" train switch

Today I completed my first major accomplishment in my reincarnated hobby. A fully hand-made "hand laid" HO train switch. These are hand-cut rails soldered to a PC form then attached to wood ties

Here's what the full switch looks like (to scale with fingers)

In the bottom pix Notice the closeup of the "Frog". Once this is attached to the roadbed and painted over you wont see the shiny PC boards or solder joints .

Along with this I've also completed my first set of "hand laid" rail track, its really amazing experience. You glue down the ties then cut rail and actually spike them in with tiny tiny microscopic railroad spikes and thats how the rail stays put. Needs to be very accurate (like the switches but not quite so tollerence sensitive).

See the details with the "Points" (the parts that turn left and right

Special thanks to Fast Tracks for their incredible high quality tools and resources

A new soul for my IBM X40

I recently bit the bullet and dived into the SSD game. My trusty IBM X40 is 5 years old, still running strong but slow as a dog. Even though I only use it for occasional travel, and to RDP to my main box while sitting on my Lazyboy ... the laptop has always been annoyingly slow.

While I wait to decide to plunge into a new desktop system with SSD (Probably the Intel X25), with Windows 7 and 64 bit etc ... I lazily poked around and discovered that recently there have been aftermarket sales of SSD drives for the X40. The X40 is a strange laptop in that it has a special and very uncommon slot for hard drives, a 1.8 inch IDE slot. Until recently you could *ONLY* get the 30GB drive from IBM and nothing else.

Well now thats changed, you can get SSD drives from KingSpec and Levano ! The 60GB Levano drives list at $1200+ (eikes) but you can get them on ebay for $200. The Kingspec comes in 32G and 64G for $150-$200. There's a lot on the net about these and which works best etc. I went with the Kingspec for its slightly better ratings. (I suggest for an X41 you go with Levano to avoid an annoying boot time beep).

I knew that I'd have problems re-installing the OS because the X40 doesnt come with installation media, instead it has a seceret partition used to re-install. You have to talk IBM into selling you a reinstall CD set for $50. I found a company on the net selling these for $20 so I bought them. I also needed an external CD drive (X40 is CD-less). I swear I had one lying around but couldnt find it ... so thanks to ebay a $30 el-cheapo USB CD drive. Plus I used TrueImage to do an image backup of my HD to an USB Drive. And at worse, I still have my original drive if all else fails I can put it back in ...

Packages all came within a week and I brought out the screw driver, watched the "how to remove your hard drive" video from Levano, worried because there were horror stories about how these SSD drives dont fit right sometimes ... but nope. 10 minutes later and 5 screws I had the SSD drive installed. (1 screw on the case, then the drive itself is in a little caddy that is screwed on, you need to move the caddy to the SSD drive). It booted up in BIOS fine , although I cant find a single place in the X40 BIOS that refers to the HD or IDE ports. Weird.

My first goal was to do a re-install from my TrueImage Backup. I read some people were successful at this (using some other backup program). Not me. TrueImage recognized the drive fine and the backup device, but about 1/2 way through setting up the From and Too parameters it went into "beep beep beep" mode. Totally hung. Retried 3 times same deal.

Ok try #2. Use the Recovery CD's from Levano. They take FOREVER. There are 7 CD's. The first one takes 20 minutes to launch the recovery panel, then you put in CD after CD about 30 minutes a piece (really!). #Fail. 2 of the CDs' reported CRC errors. I even tried duplicating on my desktop (they Dup fine, and the files read fine). But nope. Reading on the net many people have this problem and noone reports success, even after having the CD's replaced 4 times.

And worse ... it takes HOURS ... I mean like 4 hours to get to the point where it dies.

Screw that.

Ok last resort. I have an XP Pro bare-bones (non-OEM) CD.

Voila ! It installs in under 15 minutes !

Bare bones though, it barely recognized my hardware but it was enough to bootstrap.
Then update with an XP/SP3 CD (45 mintes). Then I had to start digging on Levano site for drivers as not even my hardwired ethernet driver was working. Thankfully my USB port was, and the Thumb drives worked great to download the network drivers from Levano.

Boing ! couple drivers later I had networking, from there on it was a breeze.
I picked and chose which drivers to download, and avoided the crapware (like Access IBM Connections) ... took a couple more hours but mostly idle time.

I now have a fully driver installed XP running. There are a few glitches. For some reason the Trackpoint driver took several installs before it worked, my InnoculateIT isnt getting up to date signatures (goes to 1% and says "done" leaving 2001 signature files in place). But other then that, once I got things going it works great !

Now for the fun.,

Speed.

BEFORE:

Power On to Login Prompt: 1 min 24 sec

Login to Desktop with no wait cursors: 1 minute

No wait cursor to no more disk light flashing: 5 minutes

AFTER

Power on to Login Prompt: 20 sec

Login to Desktop with no wait: 20 sec

No wait to no more disk flashing: 10 sec

It FEELS like its about 100x faster ... but even the #'s are good. I can now do a hard reboot without going for 2 cups of coffee. and it feels like its a new modern machine.

In fact it feels faster then a LOT of modern machines. even though its only a 1.6 Ghz, single processor machine. It feels born again. Now if only I can scrounge some keyboard parts for my pointer key that's wearing out.

I Love DELL - FREE Overnight shipping

I know people love to hate the big companies but I personally love DELL. If only I could find my way around their web site I'd give them an A+ but today I give them an A++ for pricing (but a C for the web site - cant have everything !)

Monday My system crashed again with ECC errors. I think I have a systematic design problem with my system as I've replaced the MB, the RAM the PS and I still get ECC errors occasionally and they get worse in time. ( btw all were replaced under warentee for free with no complaints). But after 4 years I decided to not buy into a year's more warentee (for $175) ... of course 1 month later I get ECC errors again. SO this time I'm looking for just replacing my ECC memory with NON-ECC memory so it will shut up .. (debate about if thats a good idea outstanding).

Login to DELL web site and I find some killer deals. $39 gets me 2 x 1G DDR2's of non-ECC 800mhz memory. Great deal. AND guarenteed to work with my particular model (Precision 380). Sweet. Try that at joes-cheep-memory.com.
So ok I'm doing the checkout thing wondering how I will get reamed for shipping (or worse "S&H"). Figure I'd pay atleast $20 do get 2nd day air.
But NO !

$0 for "standard"
$0 for "2nd day"
$0 for "Overnight"

What ?
Where's the catch ?
I cautiously click through to the final confirm page fully expecting a red warning to pop up that says "OH we didnt MEAN that ... " but nope.

Checkout. $0 for overnight shipping. Tax cost more !
Hot damn.

Thank you DELL.

Now waiting to see if my memory arrives today so I can try it. Atleast I'm running on 3/4 G OK in the mean time.

I still don't know if this is intentional or accidental. And I don't care.
But it would be nice if it wasn't an accident. I'll certainly visit dell.com as my first try next time I need parts.

Putting software "Softlets" online

I'm sure most programmers (either professionals or hobbyists) have this problem. I write tons of "one off" programs that eventually just get lost. These range from attempts-at-products down to one-liner scripts with everything in between. A favorite example is a very small java program that downloads streaming music into individual MP3 files. (shhh Don't tell the suits that "streaming audio" is just a text file of MP3 URL's ) Sometimes I use these programs, or I'll call them "Softlets" and sometimes I abandon them. I suspect they might have value to others even if they are not complete. When I have a coding problem the first thing I do is google the net and I get a lot of value from very simple snips of code. But how can I contribute to this Shared Mind of information ? Unless I'm going to publish a full blown product (such as xmlsh) I dont bother putting it on the net. Its too much pain. I would have to actually *document* it then make it into a buildable format (often I just run from a GUI). And let alone actually name the thing, find a web page for it, write the descriptions etc. That might take longer then it took me to write the Softlet in the first place, and the reason I write these things is I dont want to bother writing a full-blown program in the first place (or they become part of one later).

So what to do ? I'd love to point a Mini-Google at my hard drive and say "go get em", (excluding of course those directories where I do work for my employeers).

It would be nice to post these things in a wiki or blogish format, self archived and indexed with documentation AI'd out of the code. Ok maybe just a directory structure.

Any thoughts on this ? Are there any such tools to easily publish "My Codelets" web site?

What is your investing strategy ?

Curious minds want to know ! Feel free to reply as comment or to me personally.
Presuming, of course, that you have a monthly or periodic amount of "investment capital" say like I do pulled out of my paycheck before I can spend it on beer, horse feed or saddles, where are you putting it ?

Inquiring minds want to know !!!

Depending on who you listen to or ignore these options are recommended

* "Stay to the course"
Keep dollar-cost-avaraging a monthly amount into long term diversified mutual funds.

* "Invest like wild"
The market is at a long time low, NOW is the time to invest in risky high gain stocks ! Ya baby!

* "Gold"
Gold is at a long term high. So of course you should invest in it ! Who ever heard of "buy low sell high" , its "Buy High!" because your terrified of the future !

* "Hold Cash"
Play it safe and put money in money market, or under the bed.
There's scary dragons out there that want to eat your money. Better times ahead.

* "T-Bills / CDS's"
Atleast you can get what, 1.5% ? Thats good nowadays right ?


* "Invest? Whats that !"
The economy is crashing around us, money is worthless, spend while you got em and then try to go into debt before the system collapses. Who ever dies with the most debt wins !

Star Trek Movie == Great

I saw the new Star Trek movie last night.  Summary: Great !

As an admitted avid star trek fan I *have* to see these movies, no questions asked.  But I admit that many of them have left me disappointed.  Nay, almost ALL of them have left me disappointed.  

This one, no.  Its great.  Not "mind shattering" great, but "good movie" great.  

No spoilers here, but JJ Abrams did a great job.  I was worried because on the Steven Colbert show he admitted he was not originally a Star Trek fan .. *gasp* ... how can you make  a star trek movie without being a fan ? That's like making Life of Jesus movie without being Christian!

But I was happy.  Good action, decent (although not mind blowing) plot.  Overall good characters.  A strange mix of Nostalgia, which surprised me because these were NOT the same actors (except *spoiler alert* one ...) as in any previous star trek movie or show, but they captured the essence of the characters extremely well, even perhaps better then the originals.  How can that be ? I dont know !  But every one of the main characters, including Spock , Kirk, Uhura , Chekhov, Sulo, Scotty and Bones were all just a bit *more real* and *more essential* then the originals.  Really quite amazing and almost brought a tear.

And on the other hand, my 9 year old son who has never seen a star trek show or movie, and who didn't want to go because it was going to be boring and stupid, loved it.   So somehow the show, while it had huge nostalgia points, and lots of subtle hints of the old stuff , didn't rely on them. It worked as a movie on its own.

Great job.  I hope they keep them coming ... it certainly was setup as a start of a "Next Next Generation" of movies.