In2SciFi

In my last note on Movie Series, I forgot to mention an important one. It came up last night while watching one of the entries in the Star Trek Series.

Star Trek (Movies from the original series)

1. Star Trek II - Wrath of Khan

by far the best of all of the entries … it is completely engaging and worth rewatching.

2/3. Star Trek 3/6

I can’t decide between these two. Both were good, though no where near as good as Wrath of Khan

4/5. Star Trek 4/5

Again, I can’t decide between the two, except I found both disappointing.

2. Star Trek 1

The worst of the series. I thought they’d killed it with this one.

Interesting! Need I say more?

I hadn’t tried Echolink before, but decided last night I’d do what I needed to do to get it running. After editing three firewalls, adjusting a bunch of parameters, and more, I finally got it running … at least one one platform.

I downloaded Echolink for Windows and EchoMac for my Macintosh. I got both to work, but the only contacts I was able to make were on Windows. I still can’t figure out why EchoMac isn’t making contacts, if for no other reason than the fact that the Windows version is running in a Virtual Windows environment on my Mac laptop!

No matter though, I spoke to New Zealand (ZL1SLO), Croatia, Netherlands, and Portland Oregon (KB7WUK). This is great. It looks like I’ve got something more to try out and find new ways to use it. I wonder if this might be a good way to talk to students when I teach the HF Digital Course? Interesting idea!

A few friends of mine and I were talking about movie series and books, we came up with some ratings for which movies we thought were best and how they compared to the books if we’d read them.

Jurassic Park series

1. Jurassic Park (book)
2. Jurassic Park (movie)
3. Jurassic Park III (movie)
4. The Lost World (book)
5. The Lost World (movie)

Indiana Jones Movies

1. Indiana Jones I
2. Indiana Jones III
3. Indiana Jones IV
4. Indiana Jones II

Star Wars Series

1. Star Wars IV
2. Star Wars VI
3. Star Wars V
4. Star Wars III
5. Star Wars II a toss up with Star Wars I

Some times it’s just fun to speculate about which is better than the others and why. Of course, we could look at a series that went continuously downhill, like Jaws I-IV. Jaws I was superior and each movie afterwards was exponentially worse than the ones before.

Ever since I was a little kid, it’s always been fun to page through an Encyclopedia and read part or all of the articles I find. Sometimes, I would just grab a volume without looking, let it drop open and just start from wherever it opened up to. I’ve updated that now using the ‘Random article‘ on Wikipedia’s menu to look at a random selection of articles.

When I’m browsing like this, I’m just enjoying seeing new things I would NEVER have thought to look up. I’d never heard of ‘Samuel Ekeme‘, a Cameroon Football player until his entry came up randomly. Sometimes I’ll come across something I’m familiar with, like ‘Application gateway‘.

Sometimes a random article will turn up something interesting that I want to know more about, such as Caucus about political meetings. I’ve never been to one, so during this political season, it’s a term I’d like to learn more about. As I read through the article though, I also learned that my concept of caucus was too narrow. The term in fact also applies to facilitation and mediation. I didn’t know that. It also mentions Alternate Dispute Resolution. Since I read the blog article ‘Apple and Psystar agree to Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)‘, I’m going to followup in Wikipedia and learn more about it. Why? Because I NEVER expected Apple to agree to something like mediation. They’ve taken so many people to court, even people dedicated to Apple and it’s products, that this article really hit me. No one knows why, but I hope to know more about the process they’ll be going through.

Still another time I was just browsing, I went thought a whole bunch of interesting short articles, and wound up on King Arthur. Now I lived in England for several years and I took every opportunity to visit Arthurian sites, or at least sites thought to be related to what is expected to be the Arthurian period. Further, three of my favorite novels are the Warlord Trilogy from Bernard Cornwell about Arthur.

Some people will think of this as a strange occupation, but I find it fascinating to bring up random articles on things I’ve never heard of. I read enough to define the word or phrase or name, and then usually click on for another random title. Stopping, like I did for caucus and following up on links and other connections expands my knowledge, keeps my mind active, and generally helps me to keep from going crazy at time. Since most of my work is on the computer, this is a great way to break my mind out of a rut. If I’m writing something, I can break out, play in Wikipedia with random searches for a while. Sometimes just browsing like this will bring new ideas to mind that I can go back and work into what I’m doing.

Do you have a way to get your mind out of what you’re writing and refresh it on something completely different from what you’re doing?

WOW!

Where have I been!

I found Baen Books Free Library today. I wonder why I never found it before. At first, I thought it was probably just a few marginal books, but no … some of my favorite authors are represented there and at least a few of them have free downloadable books.

I’m a fan of David Drake’s writings for example and most of his books are there for sale and several are available for free download. I’m in heaven all of a sudden. My god, how could I have missed this before. I’m going to have to look some more and see what I can find.

Why don’t I ever see it mentioned that the dream of a popular UNIX system with a killer desktop is real … and it’s the Macintosh with OS-X!

Everyone is so focused on Linux that they forget that Apple brought UNIX to the desktop as part of OS-X and they made it nothing less than great. There’s no hype … well … there’s ALWAYS been hype … but Apple did hit it as hard as most UNIX vendors did, they brought it out and made it work.

I always loved UNIX from the first time I got my hands on it. UNIX is great. It’s definitely a programmer’s environment which makes it easy to do a lot of things.

I also loved the Macintosh. I had my hands on one of the early 128K models and loved it. I bought several including one of the early powerbooks and carried with me everywhere (even when that meant carrying a LARGE case to get it somewhere).

Windows has always been OK, but frustrating. I’d much rather be using UNIX for most things and Mac for things I want a GUI for, but I couldn’t afford to carry 3 computers to get what I wanted. Beyond that, everything I needed to work with was on Windows, not Mac or UNIX. So I’ve been carrying Windows laptops for years. That’s changed though.

With the advent of Parallels and the Macbook Pro, I could carry ALL of the environments I loved best with me and use whatever I needed to get my work done. Now OS-X has become my primary application platform with all of my normal apps there. However, Windows has a number of apps that I run, some of which go as far back as WIN98. I can run all of those easily under Parallels. For activities like Penetration Testing or low level network programming I work on the Linux platform because nothing beats the programming environment on Linux these days for this kind of work.

A local friend’s computer was giving him problems, so I stopped by to help. I found much more than I expected.

FIRST - everything was operating erratically. A variety of programs wouldn’t work, nothing seemed to make sense. A warning kept coming up saying that the machine was infected, but no details could be found nor could the source of the warning.

SECOND - the machine wouldn’t follow it’s boot sequence. It wouldn’t boot from the repair disk or any other disk, it always went to the hard disk even though we went in and adjusted the boot ROM to change the boot order

I tried different approaches to get in but nothing worked. I recommended that my friend wipe the disk and completely rebuild it, but he didn’t have a set of distribution disks and would have to buy some. The operating system was preloaded but he didn’t have any distribution disks to go with it. Beyond this, he wanted very badly to save a collection of pictures on the disk that hadn’t been written to CD yet.

I agreed to bring the computer back to my place and work on it, but I couldn’t promise much because of all the problems. Nothing seemed to work, so I decided it was time to shift directions and move to Linux.

Working on Linux gave me tremendous flexibility AND assured me that I’d be working with a system that shouldn’t be susceptible to the problems my friend was having. I also wanted to play with some other distributions to see how they all worked. I downloaded a Number of Linux distributions and burned them to CD :

Knoppix
Trinity Rescue Kit
System Rescue CD
Ubuntu 8
Fedora 9

I had plenty of experience with Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. Knoppix I’d worked with a little as a recovery CD and as a demo CD. I have a virtual Knoppix and a virtual Unbuntu on my laptop that I use when I need Linux. I hadn’t yet tried Fedora 9 or Ubuntu 8, so this was a good excuse to work with them and I’d never tried the specialized packages ‘Trinity Rescue Kit’ and ‘Security Rescue CD’, both of which interested me.

At this point, I’ve got some of what my friend wants, but there’s more that could be done, so while I’ve got the computer I’ll play a bit. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

1) After trying to boot Knoppix and other Linux repair disks and not being able to, I disconnected the hard disk and tried again.

Once I disconnected the hard disk, I found that the CD/RW disk didn’t recognize the disk inserted in it, but the CD-ROM drive did, so I changed boot configuration and started Knoppix.

2) With Knoppix able to load now, I first did hardware checks triggering MEMTEST on boot and running it through it’s paces, then running checks on everything else I could. Except for the RW CD disk, everything appeared to be working. I tried to write CDs with the CD/RW but it didn’t recognize that there was a disk inserted. I need to do some more tests on it. For now, I can use network disks to get done what I need to.

3) I reconnected the hard disk and again was puzzled when the computer wouldn’t boot according to the boot sequence. However, I noticed that it seemed to try everything in the proper sequence as I had it set up (CD-FLOPPY-HARD DISK). With a bit more experimentation, I found that if I closed the CD door just as the boot process started, it recognized the disk and booted properly. It was replicable, so I went with that for now. I still don’t understand the boot problem, but it’s of less importance than saving the files my friend doesn’t want to lose, so I’ll come back to it if I have time.

4) I booted Knoppix and checked to make sure I could mount the hard drive. Using CLAMAV, I ran basic checks on the drive, but it failed during the process. There was no explanation, so I decided to try another system.

5) This time, I booted the Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK - another Linux bootable CD), mounted the hard disk again, and using TRK’s Virusscan to select the Grisoft AVG scanner to rescan the disk. This time I picked up several worms on the hard disk and repaired them.

6) With the disk at least cleaner, I rebooted to Windows, but it’s still so messed up it’s just not useable. More work yet to do. So I booted back to Knoppix

7) With Knoppix running and the hard disk mounted, I searched for picture files and copied them off to my network drive. At this point, I’ve pulled about 4Gb of pictures

That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. I’ve got the pictures saved that my friend wants. I don’t want to wipe the disk because he’s out of town and won’t be back for several weeks. I need him to confirm that I have everything copied off that he wants. Once I’m sure, then I’ll help him reformat and setup his system again. In the mean time, the system is mine to play with and I want to try other tools out to see what I can do.

One of the things I’ll be playing with is some of the raw access that I wrote about in my book DOS Programmer’s Reference. A lot has changed over the years, so I’ll update my programs to handle changes in the systems as I play.

While my book is now out of print (after 4 editions), many people still find it useful for what they learned from it and for working with older systems. Some copies are still available used through Amazon.com:

Oveall, my friends computer should give me a chance to play with some of the known problems, try out some of the known solutions, and see what else can be done.

I really like Stephen Donaldson’s writing, what I don’t understand is why. Here is an exceptional writer who makes what he writes come alive in my head. More than many other writers, when Donaldson describes something, I come away feeling like I’ve actually seen it. But why?

What I’m trying to think about is not the power of his approach, but what it is that gives it that power. If someone else described the scene, it wouldn’t be as powerful. Why?

I recently ran across a reference to a software package called ‘MarsEdit‘ which is an offline editor for blogs. I’ve downloaded it and I’m going to try it for the 30-day trial. I’ll be tracking it on my Writing blog, so if you’re interested, drop by to follow along on what I’m finding.

NOTE: MarsEdit is for MAC OSX only, it won’t work on Windows. But this is about more than just using a Mac version of something, I’m interested in the good and bad of using an offline editor overall. If I find something for Windows or Linux that appears as good, I’ll probably setup a trial of that software as well.

I’m re-reading the Gap Series at the moment. I need to take some time as I read it to get my thoughts in order and really understand these books. While I’m moving forward, let me say a few things about the series from my first reading several years ago.

I first learned of Donaldson when I heard about his Thomas Covenant novels. I started on his first Covenant series while he was still writing it. That was HARD. I read the first book before the 2nd came out and I was on edge waiting for more. It was incredible writing. I wished I could write like that. I went through that with the 2nd when I read it and had to wait for the 3rd.

With the second Covenant series, I decided to wait until all three were available. I was so engaged in other things that I had very little time anyway. Once they were available, I jumped on them and I read them so fast I amazed myself. I loved that series as well as the first. I had never seen a story sustained at such high quality for so long. I’ve loved Tolkien for years, but Donaldson is just as good a writer in a different way.

With my experience in the Covenant series, I had high hopes for the Gap Series. As high as my hopes were, they were surpassed. I can’t say enough about how much these books impressed me. Across five novels, Donaldson wove a complex story so engaging and enthralling that I had to force myself to put it down. I’m almost afraid to pick one of the books up because I just can’t stop.

WARNING - If you’re thinking about reading ANY of these novels, I should point out that they’re not for kids. They address some very brutal things and create some scenes that could give some people nightmares. The writing is exceptional and the story is exceptionally well crafted, but some of the characters are so brutalized in the process that it can be very hard for anyone who is not prepared.