Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

A lot of companies are touting "the cloud" or "cloud computing" as the Next Big Thing in computing. Or even the Current Big Thing. But they don't take the time to explain what "the cloud" is.

I'm a skeptic and a cynic. I won't trust my precious data to something I don't know, understand, or have confidece in. And so I do research, in order to educate myself, and eventually, educate others

( So, what is 'cloud computing'? )

Not so many years ago, there was a shortage of computer programmers here in America. We were dealing with the Y2K problem at the time. So we opened our doors to immigrants from other countries who had talent in computer programming and software development. And thus, the H-1B Visa program was born. It was a good idea at the time.

In 2000, I worked on a program for a client that tracked engineering drawings and reminded them (and their managers) if a drawing was going to be late. Two years later, I'm told that a team in India will be taking my code and re-writing it in Java to be used business-wide, and that I would not have any involvement in the effort, other than the notes and code I already provided. At the time, I thought, "Great for globalization and the bottom line. Not so great for American programmers."

Somehow, the idea that companies can offshore their software development to people in other countries became all the rage. Why pay an American programmer to do the work when someone overseas can do the work for less than half the price?

And here it is, 2011. The American economy is in a recession, has been for the past few years, and may very well be on the verge of depression. We appear to have a glut of computer programmers now. So why are companies keeping American programmers like me out of work? (I can't be the only programmer in this situation.) Because the folks from overseas are still cheaper than I am, and may be able to do the job better than me because they're trained and experienced with the new technologies that are in demand.

So I'll ask: Is it time to retire the H-1B visa program? Or do we need to curtail the amount of foreign workers that come to America every year?

Or am I way off-base on this one?

A couple of weeks ago, I had the crazy idea of getting another bare-bones Dell Latitude CPx laptop and outfitting it with the spare parts I had on hand -- battery, hard drive, and memory -- and using it as a "loaner" laptop.

Yes, it's an older laptop -- it has a Pentium III 650 MHz processor in it -- but when I'm on the road, it mostly gets the job done. Web surfing, email, playing short videos, playing music -- it does all of that.

Last week, I found one on EBay for about $40 (plus $10 shipping via Priority Mail). It arrived today. I spent a little bit of time swapping in the spare parts, along with a CD-ROM module I picked up at Laptop World yesterday for $5, and voila! It worked. Well, sort of. It booted, and didn't do anything more because the hard drive was blank. So I installed Ubuntu Linux on the laptop. Now it's working.

I still need to get a wireless network card, a USB 2.0 card, and a power adapter in order for the laptop to be truly roadworthy. I'll probably be going back to EBay for these parts.

I've been using my "older" laptop this week. Tardis Mk III is a Dell Latitude CPx with a 650 MHz CPU, a 40 Gb hard drive, and 512 Mb of RAM. It's dual-boot Windows XP annd Ubuntu Linux.

Last year, I purchased the RAM form a vendor on eBay. It passed the Memtest86+ test, so I kept it. Two weeks ago, I purchased replacement RAM from computermemoryoutlet.com. It too passed the Memtest86+ test, so I kept it in the machine as well.

Despite the new memory, I boot up, and I get a read/write error early on into the second DIMM during the POST test. At one point -- and it happens at two different locations -- it writes 00EF00EF and reads back 00EF00EE, or something like that. And so the BIOS automagically reduces the available memory to 256 Mb. I can run both OSes on it using only 256 Mb of memory, but it's darned slow.

I tried taking it to a laptop repair place, and they were reluctant to look at it, since it was an older machine. I don't think they'd do a repair beyond replacement memory.

So now I'm thinking I have a memory socket -- or probably a solder -- that's going bad, or gone bad. I can limp along with what I have, or start saving my dollars for a new laptop, or both. I found a nice model on overstock.com that I like. But the purchase will have to wait until I'm gainfully employed again. I hope one will still be available but the time I'm ready to buy.

Once I retire it, what can I do with this laptop and accessories? It's not exactly working well, so I probably can't give it away like I did its predecessor. Maybe someone can use it for spare parts.

(I need a better computer icon. This one is supposed to denote complexity.)

Some time ago, a few of you were discussing the technique of putting a dead hard drive in the freezer in order to revive it temporarily -- long enough to get all the data off it. How's it done? I remember double-bagging the drive so that it doesn't get any water inside it.

A few months ago, a good friend gave me an external Iomega hard drive unit that failed. Inside was a Seagate 1.5 Tb disk. I plugged it in and I couldn't read anything from the drive. Not even my GetDataBack program could do anything with it. So now I'm considering the freezer trick.

I was going through old files this past weekend, and came across some notes for some projects I worked on from 1997-2000. One of the projects I worked on at that time was for the US Air Force. I was part of a virtual prototyping initiative betwen the Government and the leading-edge players in the aerospace industry -- Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. Each company was already doing CAD (computer-aided design), but used different 3D modeling packages -- if I remember correctly, Boeing used CATIA, someone else used AutoCAD, and Lockheed Martin used a home-developed (and proprietary) system called ACAD.

How would these companies exchange part and airframe information? This was where VRML came in. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) was selected as the lingua franca between the various players. Companies would export their data to VRML and send it to another company, who would then import it into their system. Companies would use a plug-in to a web browser to view the VRML data. The ultimate goal of this project was to reduce part and/or airframe design time and cost.

( I got to play with Cool Stuff for a while. )

...to my Windows networking problem.

The Windows application layer might not think I have a network, but if I go deeper to the physical level, I have one. I can ping the systems. And I can probably ftp between them, if I open up the right port (21). So.....why not run an ftp server on the laptop, and an ftp client on the desktop? That'll enable me to do what I mostly want to do: transfer files between the laptop and the desktop.

I initially chose the Home FTP Server from snapfiles.com. After some iterations futzing with the configuration -- I needed to set up an account and a virtual directory on the server -- I was all set. I fired up the command prompt on the desktop, connected to the laptop, and transferred a couple of files.

The next iteration of this is to use the FileZilla client on the desktop, and the FileZilla server on the laptop.

Of course, I need to keep security in mind, so I need to remember to close off port 21 after I shut down the ftp server. And I should only run the ftp server when they're connected.

As Oliver Wendell Jones would say, "Piece o' cake."

Shout-outs: Happy birthday folkmew and diva_di!

Nope, still no progress on the home network issue. I took my question to techrepublic.com.

A few days ago, my Labtec mouse stopped working properly. I could move up, down, and left, but it wouldn't go to the right. It felt as if the mouse ball wasn't rolling when I moved it to the right. I had to physically pick up the mouse and try to move the pointer. When I took out the ball, I found that the rollers were working OK. I also cleaned the innards with a Q-Tip and some compressed air.

So after my interview yesterday, I stopped at Micro Center and bought a new optical mouse for $4. When I got home, I swapped out the old roller-ball mouse with the new optical mouse and things are working fine again. Although I'm going to have to get used to using a much lighter mouse. And I hope M doesn't try to pick it up and throw it around when she uses the computer.

After upgrading the network card driver and turning off Norton Firewall on orac, I'm able to ping orac from both orac and tardis without the packets vanishing in to the ether. I still can't view files across my network, though, when I open My Network Places.

Which leads to another question: I currently have Norton Internet Security 2004, and only using its firewall capability. I use AVG for my antivirus protection. Do I still need Norton Internet Security? Or should I rely on Microsoft's built-in firewall? In other words, would it be safe for me to uninstall Norton Internet Security?

[Updated 22:00] I still can't see \\orac\SharedDocs on orac when I open up My Network Places. Nor can I see any systems when I try to view the computers in my workgroup. I tried making a new network place, but when I browse, I don't see "Microsoft Windows Network" under "Entire Network". I did some searching on techrepublic.com and it seems that others have had the same problem.

Tonight's project: Set up a peer-to-peer network between my desktop (orac) and my laptop (tardis) so I can share and copy files between them.

Both systems are running XP; tardis runs XP Pro and orac runs XP Home. Both have been upgraded to SP 3. Instead of a hub or router, I have a crossover cable connecting the two computers. The workgroup is named the same on both computers, and the IP addresses are set accordingly. tardis can see orac, but can't go to any of orac's shared directories. orac can't see itself or tardis when I look at my network places on orac. I've tried running the network setup wizard on orac, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything to fix the problem.

Would any of you out there have a solution? (Besides ditching Windows and switching to Linux. :-) )

"Oh drat these computers. They're so naughty, I could pinch them. --Marvin the Martian