(Updated Aug. 13, 1998) (Not a Friday, either!) Traditionally these newsletter-thingies start with the word "Well". That's a bad habit, isn't it?
Well I just got a mail from a farmer cow-orker at Acoustic Imaging reminding me the cows had come home quite a few times since I updated this... dangnear 2 years from the looks of it.
As I said last time, after AI I worked at Gateway Data Sciences (no, not that Gateway). We were building Transact, one of the world's first Java point-of-sale packages (software for PC-based cash registers). Unfortunately they waited too long to start selling it (in my opinion) and ran out of money; so it was stillborn at version 1.1. I left in December after a couple of my paychecks had bounced.
I'm now working at Essential Wisdom where we are building another Java application that I can't talk about much yet, but there will be a beta in a few weeks (watch the web site for it!). It is a very cool idea, and can be sold to a broad horizontal market; chances are you would have a use for it.
On the home front... I sold off the slum (link to glamour shot) in south Phoenix. Best move I ever made; in spite of losing money on what I thought was a smokin' deal. I was going to fix it up to a livable condition on the weekends, then move in and fix it up some more, so I started leaving tools locked up inside. All the windows and doors were securely sealed with 3/4" plywood. Very bad idea. First they broke in and stole my tools, then they kept coming back, like 5 or so times, to steal the worthless little stuff like copper tubing, light bulbs, water heater, etc., or even just to have a place to spend the night. Each time they broke in, it involved quite a lot of banging with blunt instruments and the like. (How do you break through 3/4" plywood with no appreciable tools?) But nobody noticed or cared. I installed a burglar alarm and they stole that too. I think at least half the neighborhood must have been criminals of one kind or another. That, despite there being 3 or 4 churches within a block.
Then in July '97, I bought another place in a nice neighborhood, two miles south of snooty Camelback, and half a mile north of more undesirables. The "niceness" gradient along 24th street is simply astounding. Anyhow so far it has been a pretty good neighborhood. All my neighbors are nice neighborly permanent residents. But this house cost over 6 times as much too. (I really hated to "give in" like that and buy a normal, overpriced average-looking American city house on a lifelong mortgage, but I had to live somewhere and it's still a better investment than rent.) It's no mansion but I really like it. One of my "wishful" criteria was that I wanted irrigation, because I love those old neighborhoods where there are 100-year-old trees hanging out over the streets, and everything is green. (I know, it's an abomination in Phoenix with our impending water shortage, but if somebody's going to enjoy it, it might as well be me.) I got the irrigation; there is a ditch behind my back yard, and they fill it up every two weeks, at various inconvenient hours of the day or night, so that we can flood our yards. There aren't enough trees yet but I'm going to do my part by planting some. My neighbor to the east moved there in the 40's, and his was the first house built in the area. He watched mine being built. So he has a lot of interesting old stories about early Phoenix.
When I first moved in, the big project was to convert the middle room into a multimedia room, intended to be stuffed to the gills with the coolest array of high-tech gadgets imaginable. I took some time off work (to use up my vacation time before I left Gateway) and dug in. It used to be a patio before it was converted into a room, so there was a bay window sticking out from the kitchen, into this room. It looked silly. So I took that out. The lower half was masonry so it was quite a job. I then replaced that whole wall with more concrete block. Along the south side of the room was a lot of windows (looking out into the next room, which also used to be a patio after the first patio had been converted into a room). So I took those out too. There are a few feet of masonry wall now, but half of that wall-length is devoted to equipment racks. I wanted them to be accessible from both sides, to make it easier to wire everything up, so there is nothing behind them; the racks are the wall. I also plan to have some kind of sci-fi-looking automatic door in the doorway. There will eventually be sliding steel doors behind the racks also, and the other doorway will have its French doors replaced with steel ones; so then the room will have masonry walls on all 4 sides, and all steel doors. It should be pretty secure. (Hey, can you blame me for being paranoid after that other place?) The rest of the house will look (almost) normal, insecure, and uninteresting, but little will the would-be burglars know about the vault that lurks inside. Heh heh. I also put down green genuine slate tile (boy was that a chore!).
So the multimedia room is about 10 by 20 feet; a salvaged DEC PDP computer desk with built-in rack sits in the middle, and my main system is in there. As you sit behind it, 3 (soon, 4) floor-to-ceiling racks are to your right. 12 feet or so of bookcases are to the left. A projector hangs overhead. Two recliners are in front, for watching movies on a whole-wall display that pretty much fills your field of view at that distance. Big speakers pound as the FX kick in (more power, har har har - you need it to overcome all the noise of the computers' cooling fans). Yet the neighbors never complain because you're sitting inside a masonry-enclosed room inside a masonry house.
As for the computers... I finally got an SMP machine; well two of them actually; well, not that they actually do SMP though... :-) I got a dual Pentium II system shortly after the PII came out, and only put one processor in it. Prices are getting low enough now that I will be looking for a second processor soon. I got the All-in-Wonder video board, but I'm not that happy with it; will probably sell it off and get something that has OpenGL support in Linux. The video features only work in Win95, which I hardly ever run, and not terribly well, either. They have the usual buggy-driver problem, and there is no support for the video features in either Linux or WinNT. The other dual machine is a Neptune-chipset dual 100MHz Pentium that I'm using as a server. But the second processor isn't recognized by either Linux or NT, because it's a Neptune chipset, and back then they required a special P54CM chip for the second processor, and hardly anybody nowadays even knows it ever existed, let alone still sells them. I want to put a RAID in it as soon as I find an affordable used DPT controller. It runs Debian 2.0 and serves as my Internet gateway (I have Cox cable-modem service now) and soon, I'm going to put Cyrus on it again. (Poor electron, my trusty ole' 386 from 5 years ago that is still running 24x7, basically had a swap-to-death meltdown after I had saved a years' worth of email in Cyrus - about 40,000 messages or so. I had to go back to reading email via elm at Goodnet.) It's also fast enough be an X client so I can just install my smaller, frequently-used X apps in one place and use them from machines around the house. And, it's fast enough to run Java.
I'm working on doing the whole "computer in every room" thing. I picked up some touchscreen 386 computers here and intend to use them as convenience terminals various places that a full-fledged workstation isn't necessary, such as the living room, the kitchen, etc. They have 2 megs of RAM and 5 megs of FLASH, no hard drives, no ethernet built in or standard PCMCIA but they do have parallel ports, so I intend to use D-link parallel-port ethernet adapters which are supported by Linux. For a long time I dithered over what kind of thin client would be small and fast enough to run on these machines, yet still provide infinite extensibility. An X server is too bulky, Java requires too much horsepower, simple VT-100 emulation isn't graphical, RIP is too limited, I tried a DOS web browser but it also ran too slow, etc. Well I think I may have found the answer: VNC. There is an SVGAlib version, so I just need to see how much memory that requires. I probably only have enough to run that and the kernel itself, just barely, but that would be enough. Then I intend to develop an LCARS-like look and feel for Java apps to run on the server and display on the terminals.
The packet radio stuff hasn't been on the air since I moved. I finally put up a 20' mast on a rotator a couple months ago, with a 6-meter beam and a 2-meter Ringo, only to have it get bent over in a hellacious storm we had here a month or so ago. My Ringo is now horizontally polarized, and the beam is vertically-polarized and pointing West. :-( I guess I'm going to have to just do the same thing all over again, but this time, I'm going to build a short tower on the roof to help support it. Then, I can get the 9600 baud packet working again, still on electron, just for old times' sake.
The '66 Ford pickup is still running great, and I don't drive it a lot, so expect it to last a long time. I rewired the electrical system last fall since there were just too many things shorting out and smoking and being an unintelligible mess. I also still have the Z; it has been a most reliable car as well as being fun to drive. The Datsun pickup ended up being 2 of them, taking up space in my back yard; the newer one supposedly has a running engine, so I was going to put that in the '68 truck. I also got a 5-speed tranny for it. But lately I'm thinking of selling the whole mess because I'm tired of it taking up space, and could use the money.
Once again, if I don't talk to you for the next year or two, have a good one. :-) Hopefully it'll be sooner this time.
ecloud@goodnet.com
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