Silicon Valley Redneck

Bad industrial design: the PC power supply

Continuing on the subject of perpetually bad design... consider the PC power supply.

The basic mainstream fungible PC power supply is on its third generation: PC(/XT), AT, ATX.  Small-form-factor PCs are on a fourth generation: micro-ATX.

The mounting arrangements (unless you buy some name-brand PC that doesn't follow the industry conventions) are well standardized, so, when (not if) you have to replace your PC's supply because it's gone bad or (more likely) the fan in the supply has worn out, you can run down to the local Comp-U-Mart for a replacement, and be pretty sure it'll fit and work.

Now, here's the trouble: the standardized form factor mounts on the inside of the case, with all the power distribution cables permanently attached to the supply.  So, when (not if) you have to replace the supply, you have to take the covers off the case, disconnect the far ends of all the power cables from the motherboard & drives, dismount the old supply, install the new one, connect all the new cables....

Why is it that whatever committee that came up with the ATX configuration - or the micro-ATX - didn't take maintainability into account?

The proper way to handle it is to select a suitable blind-mate bulkhead connector set, and have the power supply module plug into the chassis wiring, which would hook up the motherboard, drives, chassis fans, and bling-bling.  The power supply module could then slide in from the outside of the case, without pulling any covers off, and be secured to the chassis with screws through a flange on the supply.

I guess that would make maintenance too easy, huh?  And add about $8 to the price of the chassis... while shaving $5 of the price of the supply.  Figure in the labor savings, and it's probably a wash for pre-assembled systems, and a huge win after the first power-supply replacement.

Yes, there are a few ATX power supplies out there with detachable cables, which theoretically could offer a partial labor saving on replacement... assuming a replacement with matching receptacles is still on the market when the original dies.  This is no substitute for standardizing on a proper design.

Dumb ideas: the rack-mount industrial PC

The tale was told, many years ago, of the time the Soviet Union first made washing machines.

Soviet women, so the story goes, were demanding Western-style washing machines to make their lives easier.  After much discussion, the Kremlin decided to authorize production of washing machines.

The factory was set up, and, to save on design effort, a sample washing machine ordered out of the Sears Roebuck catalog.  The machine arrived, and the team set to work copying it.

After an unexpectedly long time, the first Soviet-made washing machines started coming off the production line.

They didn't work.

After months of investigation, someone had the bright idea of plugging in the Sears machine.

It didn't work either.  It had a broken gear.

They'd had a heck of a time duplicating that broken gear!

So...

What, you may ask, does this have to do with rack-mount industrial PCs?

Well, the whole PC industry has been playing the Soviet washing machine game ever since the beginning.  Look at the bizarre quirks, the active-high IRQ/DMARQ lines, the strange hacks involving A20 and the keyboard controller....

The PCI bus corrects some of the worst weirdness introduced by the original PC bus and continued by the AT bus.  It preserves, however, a great design crock: the perpendicular I/O card.

Take a look at one of the cards for your PC.  It has the faceplate and I/O connectors on one side, the bus connector on an adjacent side, and the other two sides flapping in the breeze.

Now look at a real industrial I/O card... VMEbus, say, or a plugin module for telecom equipment.  Notice the difference?  The faceplate and I/O connectors are at one end, the bus connector is at the opposite end, and, when it's inserted into the chassis, the other two sides are supported by card guides.  This is the way it was always done, before the PC appeared on the scene: faceplate at one end, bus connector on the other, and I/O either through the faceplate or through the backplane.

With the PC-style perpendicular card, you can't swap a card out without removing the cover from the chassis.  This is no big deal if it's a desktop machine sitting on the top of an uncluttered desk (yeah, right).  In a rackmount machine, it means that, in order to replace a card, you have to pull the whole freakin' system apart - disconnect all the cables from the PC, unbolt it from the rack, pull it out, and, finally, open the chassis and change the card.

There's also the problem of getting the faceplate to line up, and the problem of persuading the I/O connectors to go through the slot in the chassis... neither of which is an issue with a proper industrial design.

Yeah, I know, the perpendicular format allows variable-length cards, which allows manufacturers to save a couple of bucks on fiberglass on simple I/O cards.  Look at the retail pricing of simple PCI bus I/O cards and tell me why I, the consumer, should be excited about this.

No more Soviet washing machines!

Heard on the radio a few days ago

I suppose it must have been Friday or thereabouts, and it kinda slipped my mind - it's not like I blog, in real time, stuff heard on the car radio....

Anyway, this was one of those sound-bite interviews in among the news.  The subject was the declining market for newspapers.

The interviewee was promising to make his newspaper more exciting, thereby competing with the more immediate media - teevee, Interweb, and so on.  Words to that effect.

I don't suppose he would give any consideration to making his newspaper more accurate, thereby making it a useful source for news...?

Naw.  Where's the fun in that?

Humanitarian rice!

"If vegetarians eat vegetables...."

Via Slashdot comes this news story: Ventria is trying to grow rice with human genes spliced in.

Yes, now you can be a vegetarian and a cannibal at the same time!

(As might be expected, the anti-biotech crowd skips over the philosophical implications, and just chants the "it's unsafe" mantra.  Like, everyone knows the proteins in mother's milk are deadly poison.)

Break out the tinfoil!

Judicial Watch has posted the long-suppressed footage, from two entry-gate surveillance cameras, of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon.

What we can see in this is: one frame with something that might be an airplane appearing at the right of the frame; one frame with a streak of fire across the lawn; fire blossoming against the building; smoke.  No great and wondrous revelations there.

Surprise!  The looney kids are out in force.  It's another wonderful exercise in "how much lunacy can you fit in 500 characters."  Of course, a thoughtful response takes far more than 500 characters, so the lunacy reigns.

Most of the complaints relate to the poor quality of the video.  It's roughly TV resolution, with a very low frame rate.  I have recent experience with this stuff: the nighttime Tingacam captures 640x480, 6 frames/sec, doesn't do a very good job of recording what I'm trying to see even though it's carefully set up for the purpose, and still gobbles storage like there's no tomorrow.

With a low frame rate and a poor camera angle ('cause, you see, kids, the camera wasn't set up specially to record the plane crash), you don't expect to see much of a fast-moving object off in the distance.  What we can see there is about what I'd expect to see with that quality of video and some luck.

What the kiddies seem to be demanding as evidence is high-resolution, full-frame-rate, Hollywood-quality video, with an optimal camera angle.  Now, maybe it's just me, but if something like that suddenly turned up, my bogometer would blow all its fuses.

A couple of particularly stupid comments:

"... but i never thought a 757 could fly at ground level for even that distance without tumbling."  OK, kid, ever hear of an advanced aeronautical procedure called "landing?"

"Flight 77 was an unique flight, in that they used an airplane made out of special material that doesn't cast a shadow...."  Not that we have a view of the ground under the plane, where the shadow would ordinarily be.  I guess ordinary airplanes cast shadows on the ground they're going to be passing over, at times that they're not actually passing over it?

"Yeah, all the money and technology in the world and the Pentagon cannot afford better SECURITY cameras. This just looks like a prolonged .gif"  Anyone who's tried to store surveillance video, even on a small scale, would realize that you just don't store more resolution than you need; those megabytes per second add up to gigabytes awfully fast.  This video is of appropriate quality for keeping track of vehicles passing through the gate, which is presumably all that camera was meant for.  If we assume that the surveillance system was designed even two years ago - never mind some time prior to September 11, 2001 - than the storage constraints (and available camera quality, on any sort of reasonable budget) would have been much worse at the time.

Selective predation?

Heard on the radio yesterday: alligators have killed three women in Florida in the last (mumble) weeks.

Curious.  Florida has no man-eating alligators, only woman-eating alligators?

Now, if they start getting more selective, it'll really be time to worry....

Not as bad as it might have been... but...

The transcript isn't up on whitehouse.gov yet, but Insty has a copy of Dubya's immigration speech. [Update: official transcript is here.]

As rumored, the Plan involves using the National Guard to patrol the border.  However, this is explicitly a temporary measure, to help out until the Border Patrol is scaled up enough to do its job.  OK.

Overall, it doesn't sound too bad... but...

Third, we need to hold employers to account for the workers they hire. It is against the law to hire someone who is in this country illegally. Yet businesses often cannot verify the legal status of their employees, because of the widespread problem of document fraud. Therefore, comprehensive immigration reform must include a better system for verifying documents and work eligibility. A key part of that system should be a new identification card for every legal foreign worker. This card should use biometric technology, such as digital fingerprints, to make it tamper-proof. A tamper-proof card would help us enforce the law – and leave employers with no excuse for violating it. And by making it harder for illegal immigrants to find work in our country, we would discourage people from crossing the border illegally in the first place.

Here we are, back at ID cards.

Point one, there's no such thing as a tamper-proof ID card.  This has been thoroughly hashed out before, in many venues.  There's only "more secure."  Of course, just about anything would be more secure than a piece of cardboard that says, right on it, that it's not for identification....

Point two, while Bush says the ID card is for "every legal foreign worker," how's that gonna work in practice?  Shall we just assume that anyone without such a card is a citizen, or shall we make the card mandatory for all workers, foreign, naturalized, or native?  Wanna bet which way that'll go?

...And, no, I'm not willing to bet that I can just pass for a native.  It's amazing how many people think I'm foreign, despite the fact that I was born and raised less than 20 miles from where I live now.

How are small-time employers going to verify these high-tech ID cards anyway?  Are there going to be severe crackdowns on people who hire day laborers in front of Home Depot?  Just how many new criminals will be created by a new generation of employer sanctions?

Just how intrusive will enforcement get?  Will it end up being coordinated with the IRS, and with any government agencies that feel like asking where people are working, or like tracking the movements of legal workers?

I'm strongly in favor of getting the borders (plural) under some semblance of control.  I'm not at all in favor of advancing the surveillance state within the borders in the name (again) of immigration reform.

This is Sunday, isn't it?

Perhaps this is a Sign...

...that I shouldn't be trying to work right now.

I've been working on an EMI-control projectlet for a client.  Came time to check availability of suitable ceramic caps - for a given value & voltage rating, see what's available in terms of package and price.

As usual, I was using Digi-Key for quickie searches.

For one part, #445-2389-1-ND, a 2200pF, 2kV capacitor in an 1812 package, I was quoted $44.50 each, 3710 in stock.  Whatwhatwhat??? Search again, see a much more sensible price ($1.959), in the search results, for what turns out to be the same part.  Eh?  Click reload: now it's $1863.36 each, non-stock.  Reload again: $1.79 each, 17822 in stock.

The part number, manufacturer part number, description, and specs are consistent, but the pricing, stock, and lead-free status appear to be grabbed at random.  Or maybe just made up.  Did they borrow my "clickless ordering" feature?

Ah, looks like they've fixed it while I was ranting.  It's actually $1.959, 10 pcs. minimum, 880 in stock, and it's consistent now.

I still shouldn't be trying to work now.  Time to declare the work day over!

Thursday morning silliness

The Norm links to a new Web toy: Google Fight!

Give it two words, and see which one would win!

Monkeys beat Aquaman, of course.  TOPS-10 beats RSX-11M.  KDE beats Gnome, but only by a narrow margin.  Mozart beats Holst.

Arrr! Internet pirate attack!

Look ahead, look astern, check the mail server log.
Blow high, blow low....

Avast!  A flurry of rejected relay attempts!  All directed to various addresses @orgue-de-barbarie.biz - must be pirates checking for an open mail relay!

Out cutlasses, and prepare to repel spammers!

So what's the deal...

... with Bush's nominee for CIA director, anyway?

People are making a big fuss, apparently, about his occupation, but why shouldn't we have a musically-talented spymaster?  (Cue Tom Lehrer's song about George Murphy.)

OK, so he's foreign differently American, and dead vitally challenged, but in these enlightened days we shouldn't mind such petty considerations.

Un-housebroken freakin' Windows software...!

So, here I am, trying to read some documentation bundled with Windows software.  It appears to be in PDF form, but, not having taken the trouble to search the disk for the documents' location, I'm reading it as a click-through from the software wherewith it came.

Acrobat Reader comes up with an update announcement.  Well, it's not like I use the Windows version very often.  It says I need the 7.0.5 update and the 7.0.7 update.

So, I tell it to go ahead and update.

It's on the second reboot now.  The Windows machine is in the lab, so every time it reboots, I wave to walk into the lab and log in at the physical console, so the VNC server can start up, so I can use the remote terminal here.

Why does a userland application need to force a reboot at all... let alone twice?  Why does Windows allow such nonsense?  For that matter, why is a simple read from file, display on screen application like Acrobat Reader sensitive to Windows versions?

Yeesh.  The wonderful world of Microsoft....

A flurry of IT activity

Along with all the other stuff I'm trying to do... I finally got around to turning on spam rejection at ACL time in Exim.  This means that incoming messages with egregiously high spam scores (currently 15+) get rejected before the transfer is complete, leaving the sending server to generate the bounce message.  If it was a legitimate message that somehow scored way high (few legitimate messages score over 1; most are in the -3 to +0.5 range), the sender will get a bounce message giving the reason for the non-delivery; if it's being delivered by a spam zombie, there won't be a bounce message sent to the forged return address, and, hey, maybe the undeliverability of spam will get me out of some of the spam databases.

I also turned on virus rejection, for somewhat the same reasons.

Meanwhile, I've got Subversion mostly set up.  I have three repositories configured on the server (one personal/work, and two for work), and client software (currently both RapidSVN and Subcommander) configured on the home computers and the work laptop.  My "projects" directory tree lives in one of the repositories, and now contains project files that were formerly organized by application / document type rather than by project.  Working copies live on my home directory on the server, and on the laptop.  Synchronization of laptop with home environment is now simple, and I can do it anywhere I can connect the laptop to the Net - no more futzing around with thumb drives and FTP (though I should start carrying the Windows version of the client software on the thumb drive and maybe on a business-card CD, for use on customer machines).

I've also got mostly-automated backups set up; there's a daily mirror (no, not the Daily Mirror), at 2:15 AM, onto two Firewire hard drives, with different filesystem formats (UFS and EXT3), plugged into different machines, plus a weekly gzipped dump.  The part that's not automated is writing the dump out to two CDs (DVDs, once the repository grows) and archiving one here and one elsewhere.

So now... with that out of the way, and my back mostly recovered so I can sit at my desk or workbench again... it's time to get a whole bunch of work done on client projects.

Today in history

On 5 May 1884, Capt. Enrique ("Pat") McHernandez led his troops to victory against the Turks in the celebrated Battle of Veracruz.

The Turks in question were a group of sailors on shore leave, who were hogging the salad bar at the British-run Seaside Hotel.  Twelve of the Turks required medical attention, and McHernandez and his men spent a week in the stockade before being hailed as heroes in the national press, and released.  (The press uproar would later serve as a model for William Randolph Hearst.)

In light of the location of his victory, McHernandez was eventually appointed Commander-in-Chief of Salad Dressings, or CinC o' de Mayo.  His holiday is still widely celebrated, though no one seems to remember why.

Eureka!

No, I'm not running, pajamaless, though the streets.  I did, however, just solve a problem.

Yesterday afternoon, I made a start on the physical portion of Operation Mothball Humball - oooh, my back!  In the evening, and on into the night, I was working on the 'Net side: preparing to relocate the web & mail server functions.

Setting up web service for a virtual domain is easy; I had a few of those already configured.  Just a matter of dropping in a new configuration file and restarting Apache.

That leaves the mail server.  I hadn't been handling mail for the various *.orgzone.net subdomains, so this was a new task.  Between the Exim manual and some commentary found on the Web, I came up with a configuration that would handle "aliases"-type forwarding files for multiple domains, and it seemed to work... for a local sender.  If I logged onto my shell account on the ISP's machine and tried to send to a test virtual domain, the message would bounce with "relaying denied."

After much investigation, I discovered that the reason for this was that the testname@virtual-domain.com was somehow being translated into testname@physical-server.com, instead of the expansion given in the virtual domain's aliases file.

Eventually, I determined that the translation wasn't being done by my Exim at all, but by something on the sending side.

So here's the lesson:

When setting up the DNS for a virtual domain that'll be handling mail, don't use a CNAME record.  It can have interesting side-effects.  Use an A and an MX.

(There's a secondary issue, which is that mail sent to me@servername.domain.com instead of just me@domain.com will apparently bounce.)

(Update: I've just fixed that.  I hate hosts that won't accept mail addressed to valid-user@hostname... or at least have a valid MX record for hostname.)

Han shot first!

...and now, it seems, that will be available on DVD.  Slashdot links to this report that Star Wars Classic (episodes IV-VI) will be released on a limited-edition DVD set this fall, along with the remastered versions.

The remastered versions have greatly improved special effects (the critters don't look so cardboard-cutoutish), but having Greedo shoot first has got to be one of the dumbest plot changes ever - not only does it misguidedly clean up Han's character, but it requires that Greedo be one of the worst marksmen of all time - some bounty hunter!

Update: I notice that the article is dated yesterday.  Today, of course, is Star Wars Day.  May the Fourth be with you!

Here's today's nugget of wisdom

Lower back pain and Bridgeports are a bad combination.

And it's not like I was lifting the 100-pound vise onto the table... it was already there, clamped down, ready to hold my ½-ounce workpiece.

Nope, it's the bendin' down to turn the cranks and to read the scales that gets to ya.

Hooray, hooray - it's the First of May!

Ah, Mayday - time for Morris dancers, red banners, Bolshoi Ivanovitch missiles, and all that stuff...

Well, actually, I disregarded my annual 3:30 AM alarm and slept in this morning, thereby missing the Morris dancers.  I guess they managed to dance the Sun up without me; it got plenty warm today.

I didn't go check out the parades.  Actually, I spent most of the morning in front of the computer, which my back didn't appreciate at all, so then I spent most of the afternoon horizontal.  Apparently there weren't many red banners (never mind missiles) at the parades anyway.

Let's see if I've got this straight: somebody had the bright idea of having illegal-immigrant parades all over the country.  (I guess this is safe, really; attending such a gathering isn't actually grounds for detention by the INS, or whetever it's called these days.)  Friday would be a bit too Mexican, so they held it today, on a Communist holiday.  Brilliant!  So, you have the Mexicans out parading, along with the pampered white trust-fund socialists in their mass murderer appreciation society T-shirts.  Well, OK, those show up for everything, so I guess the choice of dates doesn't make much difference.

The idea of calling a general strike, while it's been a favored tactic of hard-left groups in some places, is kinda wonky when those calling the strike have influence over only a small minority of the workers, and even more so when those on whose behalf the strike is called aren't supposed to be here in the first place.  Do the organizers need their heads examined?  ("If they didn't need their heads examined, they wouldn't be Stalinists, would they?")