davintosh

I was digging through my Sitemeter visitor stats a few days ago, and noticed again with a bit of wonder that one of the posts that consistently sees a fair bit of traffic is the one about the 68000 dash 30fx computer I have at home. The dash 30fx a monster of a Macintosh clone that was built without Apple’s blessing in the early ’90’s. The manufacturer got away with it by building the computer around the logic board of a IIfx purchased from Apple. The IIfx was no slouch in its day, but the 30fx stepped things up to the next rung, but at a high price.

You can read more about that relic in the old post, but seeing a bump in interest on that page made me wonder whether some of that traffic might be driven by some new chatter about those computers. So I did a little searching, and came up with several Google Books hits that I hadn’t seen before. One of them was a Network World article from June 15, 1992:

The part that got me…

The network had to be Ethernet-based in order to accommodate the Macintosh equipment. But the bandwidth constraints of a conventional Ethernet LAN were insufficient for transmitting images ranging from 100M to 300M bytes in size.

That’s a blast from the past. I remember the days of 10baseT ethernet all too well, when pushing a 100MB file over an AppleTalk network would take a matter of minutes, and 300MB… Start the transfer and go take a coffee break! It makes me feel a bit old. The digital prepress shop described in the article sounds amazingly similar to to our shop at CCL where we used the dash 30fx along with a IIfx, some Quadra 950’s, a LaserWriter, a couple of Sun SPARCstation 2s (which served as raster image processors (RIPs) for a DuPont Crosfield imagesetter). Our operation was a lot smaller than the one described in the article, as we only had one Crosfield — they had ten. They may have had more equipment, but still dealt with the same constraints in moving data around the network.

I started work for CCL in 1991, and moved to the graphics department about a year later. I worked in traditional stripping, proof & platemaking for a while before transferring to the digital art department. Not long after getting in the door, the department’s tech guy decided to venture out on his own & started a digital imaging company. I was “promoted” to fill his shoes, providing tech support for the department in addition to my regular duties. In that position, one of my first tasks/learning opportunities was to move a couple of pieces of equipment around in the department, which involved making a couple of changes on the old thinnet daisy chain network. I started the job on a Friday afternoon after everybody else had left, and could not get it working again. Thinnet was as quirky as it gets; throughput may have been slow, but reliability & configuration flexibility were awful. That made the speed less of an issue I guess.

One of the projects my predecessor had started but hadn’t finished was upgrading the network in the department to 10Base-T twisted pair ethernet. The network drops were in place and most of the pieces were there, but we were still waiting on a few last pieces so we weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger on it. The trouble I had that evening helped me decide we were ready enough, so I blasted forward with the 10Base-T and figured I’d deal with the missing pieces afterward. I didn’t see much hope in getting the thinnet working, so even if I spent the whole weekend finishing the project up, I figured I could spend the same time with the thinnet and still end up with a slow dodgy network that might still not work. That turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I had everything installed and working in less than an hour (after screwing around with the thinnet for four hours just trying to get it to work.) The few devices still on thinnet stayed on a little sub-network, with a Mac bridging the two segments. We limped along like that for a week or so until the rest of the equipment showed up, but just having things working — and working at five times the previous network speed — made it more than worthwhile. My boss was impressed!

I learned a lot on that first 10Base-T ethernet network; the 10 megabit speed in AppleTalk, combined with those early machines made image processing pretty time consuming. In 1992, pushing a 100MB file around the network indeed took a while, plus disk space was very expensive, so all kinds of extra work went into making things as compact as possible. Even on the state-of-the-art RIP running on that 90MHz Sparc 20 workstation, an eight-page layout literally took hours to process before it would begin imaging. A lot of times, we’d set up a layout, send it to the RIP and let the RIP chew on it overnight; if we somehow made a mistake somewhere along the line (it happened; not often, but it happened) we’d have to fix the foible & start all over again. Even before the job went to the RIP we’d examine the Quark, Illustrator & Photoshop files trying to find places we could streamline things a bit; Photoshop images that were scaled and/or rotated in Quark or Illustrator would take extra RIP time, so we’d take the time to re-do those files in Photoshop so they would be placed at 100% with no rotation.

Now though, eighteen years later, with RIPs running multiple 3GHz processors (with multiple cores), 4GB of memory, and gigabit ethernet, that same eight-page spread takes a matter of minutes to send to the RIP and for the RIP to process it. And modern operating systems, gigabit ethernet NIC’s and faster hardware make file transfers of several gigabytes pretty much a non-issue. Then there is disk space; one of the first purchases I had to make was a 1GB SCSI hard drive to replace one that had died in a Macintosh Quadra 950. I don’t remember exactly what I paid for it, but I know it was in the neighborhood of $1,000. Now you can buy a 1 terabyte drive for under $100! So with disk space so cheap and network transfer speeds so fast, the time we spent trimming file sizes and optimizing placement seems a total waste.

The years I’ve spent in this business have pretty much flown by At this point in my career, I’m probably in it for the duration. But thinking about how much things have changed since I started back in 1992 really makes me wonder what kind of changes and improvements the next 18 years will bring; cheaper, faster, smarter…

I think I have a new favorite car; the Pagani Zonda. And this awesome piece of marketing magic does a fantastic job of making me want one. Not that I ever will, but… Enjoy.

I had never really heard of this car before buying a copy of Ambrosia Software’s Redline for the kids last Christmas; the Zonda is one of the downloadable add-ons for the game, and it’s one of the fastest & best handling cars in the game. Kinda makes sense, since it’s essentially a street-legal Formula 1 race car.

Apple just introduced the iPad, and I want one. You can read about all the details and watch the demo movie in lots of places, so I won’t spend any time on that…

I just want one.

I helped a friend set up her new 27″ iMac last weekend, and it came with the coolest new mouse… The Apple Magic Mouse.

The mouse is the button, plus it has no scroll wheel, but you can use it to scroll up, down, diagonally and sideways. Comes in one color, wireless Bluetooth, but right now is only supported for use on a Mac (Windows support is coming!) The way it works is similar to the MacBook trackpads with multiple-finger functions, but that is a couple of steps above the trackpad on my getting-older-by-the-day PowerBook G4! I want one!

Actually, these would be great for use at work; seems like I’m replacing a mouse somewhere in the building at least once a week. The failures are usually with the scroll wheels, and the Apple Mighty Mouse with its tiny little scroll ball is the worst offender. The Magic Mouse with no external moving parts should be nothing but great! And as great as this mouse is, the tablet computer that Apple is expected to announce should be nothing less than amazing.

We were watching Scientific American Frontiers on PBS tonight; the episode was Mysteries Of The Deep covered several topics dealing with underwater exploration, and the last part featured Bob Ballard, an undersea explorer best known for finding the wreck of the Titanic. He had some fascinating stories to tell about deep-sea submersibles he’s designed & built, sea-bottom discoveries he’s made, finding the wreck of the Titanic… But the program closed with something that was almost an afterthought, but really caught my attention.

ALAN ALDA Now he’s off and running with a new crazy idea. If 70% of the globe is covered in water, it’s time we started living out there, he says. Here’s a marine habitation you tow into place, then tip up and anchor.

BOB BALLARD There’s no budget in America, zero, zip, for colonizing the world’s oceans. Nothing. They’re not even thinking about it.

ALAN ALDA You’re actively at work on this? I mean, you’ve designed..

BOB BALLARD Yeah, we’re designing it. See, also you can use heat exchangers, so that you can take advantage of the thermocline to have nice air conditioning. You can have this solar panels, where this thing…

ALAN ALDA You’re just moving cold air up, or you’re creating electricity or what?

BOB BALLARD Yeah, no. It’s cold! It’s freezing down there! Circulating air. You’ve got vanes that you can control so your solar panel follows the sun throughout the day. You can helo out to it. I want to put it in a marine sanctuary, and have rangers living on it.

ALAN ALDA (NARRATOR) I have to admit I was skeptical about the ocean colonization idea, but when I said so, Bob Ballard answered with the confidence of experience.

BOB BALLARD All my life, I’ve had these ideas, and people say, “you’re nuts.” ‘Til I do them. Then you know what they say? “You know, actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, but it’s the new one you have that’s nuts.” And then I go on with the new one and I do it, and then they go, “Well, actually it wasn’t such a bad idea but it’s the next one.” This is the one they think I’m nuts on right now.

Think of it… Living on the water, with all the ocean breezes you could want, fishing from your front porch, the constant but gentle swell of the sea under your feet… sure, there would be downsides, but the upsides would definitely outweigh them. Kinda like living in South Dakota. There was about a 30 second computer-generated video blip of the marine habitation Ballard has been working on — screenshots from it are shown below. Very cool concept. Not sure if it will go anywhere, but cool idea.

While looking for more/better images of Ballard’s work, I stumbled across this site for The Seasteading Institute. TSI seeks to create “permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading the high seas.” Another interesting concept, but why live on a tiny little man-made island in the middle of the ocean? “Because the world needs a new frontier, a place where those who wish to experiment with building new societies can go to test out their ideas. By opening the ocean as a new frontier, we hope to revolutionize the quality of government and social systems worldwide by enabling experimentation, innovation, and competition.” That set of goals sounds a little too utopian for my taste, but if something like this caught on it might be a good elsewhere for the likes of Alec Baldwin to go when elections don’t go their way!

Somebody posted a link to this interactive Flash graphic on the USA Today website that shows the growth of the International Space Station since the first piece was put in orbit in 1998. I knew pieces had been sent up and added to the station over the years, but I had no idea it had become that big. Amazing!

I know my way around mechanical things pretty well, but an automobile’s differential is one of those things that I never quite understood… I knew what it did, and that it involved gears and whatnot, but the principles of operation were never laid out in terms that helped me to really get it. But this video changed all that. I now get it!

Thanks to Deane for posting about it on Gadgetopia. I think I owe you lunch!

How about a break from politics today…

I took the dive yesterday & updated my WordPress install. I’ve been a little lazy about that lately… Came to rely on Powweb’s InstallCentral to do the updates, but that method tends to lag pretty far behind. When I updated yesterday, InstallCentral only took it to v.2.7. While there was an interface improvement over the 2.6.x install I had been using for a while, it was still months behind the current version; with the security holes in earlier versions I wasn’t eager to find out how bad things could get, especially after the trouble the sfgroove.us website had a month or so ago — hackers completely took it over twice before we got the Joomla install updated & locked down. I’ll take their advice & stick to taking my vitamins and avoid the open heart surgery.
The upgrade wasn’t without glitches though; since upgrading, Google and the other search engines seem to have forgotten me. According to Sitemeter, yesterday saw 41 unique visitors and 78 page views; today, 5 and 5. Since most traffic here is from search engine referrals, things have been a bit quiet. Once I update the code for Google Adsense and all that, things should improve. Until then it’s just the handful of faithful direct hits from various places and the RSS subscribers; thanks for clicking, people!

The other glitch was with the Akismet antispam plugin for WordPress; it was deactivated by default after the upgrade, but when I activated it, all the admin pages came up totally blank. The site was working fine, but being able to see things on the admin side is somewhat important. Things were working fine before I clicked to activate Akismet, so I figured that wasn’t up to date, so I had to go in via ftp and kill the plugin folder for Akismet before I could get back in and see anything. Very pleased that it wasn’t any more complicated than that! And installing it again was again, easy.

One of the beautiful features introduced in v.2.7 is the one-click upgrades; inside the dashboard, WordPress will throw up a flag when an update is available, and present an Upgrade Automatically button that will do the hard work to bring an installation up to date. You can also download the update from the same screen, but why bother? Of course, it’s a good idea to use the Export Tool in the dashboard to back up all the data that makes my blog mine… Just in case, you know. Hopefully future upgrades won’t include surprises like today’s did.

Just for fun, I downloaded the current version and put a second install on my (hosted) server; had I realized it was that easy I wouldn’t have bothered with the InstallCentral dance… Why did I wait so long? And that’s another one of the goofy things with Powweb’s InstallCentral control panel; it will only do one WordPress installation for you. That second install is for testing and setting up a replacement for the Joomla-driven Groove website; I’m getting tired of wrestling with Joomla just trying to put up the simplest content, so I’m making the executive decision to move the site to WordPress. A couple of weeks ago I tried adding some YouTube videos to an article on the site, and for some reason Joomla decided after I pasted in the code to link the videos that one line of that code wasn’t needed. That would be fine if the embedded video would show up in the article, but it doesn’t. I tried every trick I could think of and searched around to no avail. Other articles with embedded videos continue to work fine… Anyway, I’m moving the site to WordPress because using Joomla is like having a bureaucracy the size of the Federal Government to manage a small company; way too complex and way too many hoops to jump through just to accomplish something simple. WordPress is a great tool with lots of expansion possibilities, and I think it’ll be perfect for Groove.

I was in the process of setting up another new iMac for a user at work the other day, and got to looking at the hard drive — the ‘entry level’ 24″ iMac comes standard with a dual-core 2.66GHz processor, 4GB of memory and a 600GB hard drive. Much of that capacity (other than that memory) just won’t get used. There will be times when the processors will peak a bit, but most of the time they’ll be just barely above idle. And the hard drive… 600GB? On a desktop machine? If the computer were used in a home setting, that might get utilized, but here… Boy could I use some of that capacity for other stuff on the network! I guess I could just buy some cheap 100GB SATA drives and swap them out, but I’ve seen the gymnastics necessary to replace a drive in an iMac, and I don’t want to go through that any more than absolutely necessary.

I remember back when Apple was first rolling out OS X, there was talk of these super apps that would allow us to tap into some of that unused processing power by creating a distributed network computer by linking the computers on a network together; if one computer had a huge task of some sort to complete and other computers on the network had spare processor cycles available, there’d be some sharing going on, and you could get more done. At least that was the idea, but I haven’t heard much about distributed computer grid clusters since the big splash about using a host of Macs to create a monster grid computer. Xgrid sharing lives on, and even has a checkbox to enable it in the Sharing Preference Panel in Mac OS 10.5 (and maybe earlier.) Years ago when it might take a raster image processor (RIP) multiple hours to chew through an eight-page layout I would’ve have loved to put something like this to work, but today with the typical tasks done on the typical desktop computer in a print shop or an office environment, and without some monstrously processor-intensive task that needs to be done, I don’t really see much point in messing with it.

What I would like to see though is some kind of distributed disk sharing; that iMac I set up today starts out with a whopping big 600GB drive; after loading all the software on it there was still an easy 500GB… And that computer is one of three that I set up recently, and one of five of the same configuration. If I were to partition the disks in each of those machines to set aside half of the available space I’d have an easy terabyte and a half of disk space that could be used for other stuff.

What if there was some way of joining the disks on multiple computers over the network to create a disk array of sorts… A local area network RAID array. Think of a RAID array with the network acting as the interface card and some software on a server striping the bits & bytes across the disks. In all my digging through Google and other search engines, I haven’t found anything like what I’m thinking of; either I’m not asking the right questions or it hasn’t been done yet. If not, that’s too bad, because I think there’s a lot of potential there, but I can also understand some of the obstacles to making it work. The biggest issue is probably that the network can be a lot more fragile than the hardware & software that it takes to make a RAID array in a server or external box work. A mirrored drive in a RAID 1 arrangement would probably work best, as the other RAID levels with the data striped across multiple volumes would require a higher level of availability for the disks than might be possible.

But you know, since it doesn’t look like using that disk space for live files will work any time soon, maybe I can still put it to use for backups; set Retrospect up to use that space for backing stuff on the server up to disk, just for extra redundancy… Hmmm… Might have to play with that a bit…

I almost set the title to Josh Wilson — Amazing Guitar, but that’s not the name of the song…

Yvonne & I attended the Willow Creek Association Leadership Summit today (tomorrow too), and after our lunch break we were treated to a couple of songs by Josh Wilson. Josh is an incredibly talented guitarist who does some simply amazing things with his instrument (and some sort of foot-controlled electronic sampling gizmo on the floor.) Here’s a video of the same song, but in a different venue; have a listen, and enjoy!

(And hey; isn’t that a Mac Pro (or G5) in the background?)

When he was first introduced, I had no idea who he was, but I recognized his second song — Savior Please — just a few measures in. It was just him on stage with his guitar and the same sampling gizmo for this song, but he used a microphone to lay down background vocals with his own voice while performing. The sounds coming from just one guy and those two instruments was just… Wow! Here’s that song, again in a different venue and with his band playing along.

Even though he’s put his music up on Tangle and YouTube, I think I’ll have to go and buy it anyway, just to say thanks. I’d suggest you do the same; here are the iTunes links for Amazing Grace and for Savior, Please.