Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"If we say that law is a calculus of events, with emphasis on the relation of 'causality', then I think we have a description of law that bears some relation to what lawyers actually do, but which doesn't paint them as dangerous idiots from the computer-science point of view." -- Matthew Skala, "Colour, social beings, and undecidability", 2004-08-09. (Note that in context, the quote is a little less amusing but, IMNSHO, much more interesting. For more context than the essay in which this quote appears, in a previous essay Mr. Skala pointed out ways in which computer scientists and lawyers look like 'dangerous idiots or possibly Commie Mutant Traitors' from the perspectives of each other's fields. Thanks to ysabel for pointing out the first essay.)

87 octane @ $2.50/gal = Ouch! 40 cents more than the last time I looked.

So, I've got this scavenged rack that cost me a week's worth of spoons to wrestle into the house in December, which has been taking up space since then but is supposed to save space once I get the screws to mount computer equipment in it that's currently spread out over desks and an improvised workbench.

But I couldn't find screws that fit it. One day when I remembered to mention that I was looking for affordable shelves and found out that syntonic_comma had a few extras he could part with, he also handed me a screw from his rack to match at a hardware store on my way home and buy more of, which turned out to be a 10-24 when I took it to Home Depot, so I bought a bunch of 10-24 screws and, on a hunch, a bunch of 10-32 screws just in case. Neither size fit my rack (though a 10-32 nut did fit onto one a screw I had that was already in the rack). I asked my favourite mailing list for clues, and got pointed to a web page that said the most common sizes of mounting screws for computer racks were -- ta da! -- 10-24 and 10-32, with a small minority being M6. So, back to Home Depot -- the one I usually go to instead of the one on the way home from Virginia -- where I found that my sample screw would go into the M5 hole in the screw-guage in the store. So home again with a few M5 screws ... which did not fit into the rack (though they went in about half a turn farther than the 10-32 screws).

That was a couple weeks ago. I've been annoyed by the sight of the rack all that time. Over the weekend I finally got one side of the rack off (nearly wrecking my 10mm socket in the in the process), amd this morning I tossed it in the car (had to fold down the back seat and put it in through the trunk) to go to hardware stores, expecting to have to visit specialty fastener companies afterwards (and not being sure which of those were wholesale-only). But first, since I was out at regular-person hours instead of night-owl-time, and also because the Catonsville Home Depot is a little farther than I want to drive my car while it's steering funny (by the way: today I noticed that the cruise control no longer works, which I hadn't thought to check during my test drive after the hit-and-run) I stopped at a tiny corner corner hardware store (in a converted rowhouse) a few blocks from my house first.

They tried various screws.

Their 10-32 screws fit. They fit about as well as the one that came from the rack in the first place, in two holes, and more stiffly than that but not "oh no it's the wrong thread"-stuck in the other holes we tried.

The 10-32 screws from Home Depot do not fit. Though, as I mentioned before, 10-32 nuts from Home Depot fit my sample screw.

I forgot to ask which manufacturer Zeskind Hardware buys screws from. But in addition to fitting -- the primary criterion -- these are also not countersunk, so I don't need to fiddle with extra washers to get a snug fit against the things I'm mounting. (All the screws I saw in the between-1/8"-and-1/4" size range at two Home Depot stores were countersunk.)

I've been cursing the manufacturer of the rack for using some obscure, bizarre screw thread, when the problem turned out to be the screws themselves, from a particular manufacturer. (Or maybe both the rack and the Home Depot screws are ever so slightly out of spec in opposite directions and these screws are out of spec in a compatible direction, I dunno, but it looks like the rack is supposed to be bog standard 10-32 after all.)

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Must remember: try the tiny little corner hardware store first instead of going to a Great Big Chain Store straightaway.

I am annoyed. I am annoyed in roughly equal parts, at the incompatibility of the ostensibly standard components, and at myself for having missed the easy solution close to my house until after banging my head against the problem for so long.

The bad: pain too bad for codeine to fix[1] -- ow -- so no 3LF for me. Making my way back downstairs for a bite of dinner was very difficult.

The good: I feel like I accomplished something -- no net space savings yet with just one component (the switch) screwed into the rack, but it's a visible sign of progress (and hey, bonus, the blinkenlights are facing in an easier-to-see direction now).

The next obvious machine to move there is the gateway[2], but it's a 486 in an ancient AT-style case (that is, the same footprint as a PC/XT case but taller and with a vertical front), so it's too wide to fit between the rack rails. So I'm going to have to finally get around to configuring a faster machine in a smaller case to replace it. (Or maybe I could just put it on the shelf crossways, which wouldn't look tidy but should fit...)

Upgrading a 486/66 to (probably) a Pentium/350 just to get a smaller footprint when the job that machine does isn't enough to strain the 486 feels funny to me. But I'd been planning to upgrade anyhow in case the newer kernel I want to use -- to handle port forwarding better and for VPN and IPv6 support -- didn't like a 486. So this is also clearly the time for me to get around to borrowing the clamp-on ammeter a friend offerred to lend me so I can see which consumes more electricity, the faster, more oomphy machine, or the one made with older, possibly less efficient tech. I've gotten a large handful of machines faster than most of the machines I'm already using, and need to get around to seeing which ones work, getting disk drives into them, and setting them up to replace my older hardware. Reclaiming enough work space to be have room to start opening them up and tinkering will be a start.

I'm guessing that plotting power consumption vs. speed (or possibly power consumption vs. year of manufacture) will yield a graph that increases up to some point and then starts falling off as "green" became a selling point; I'm interested in finding out whether that guess is correct, and also whether the newest machines I can get ahold of wind up using less energy than my oldest still-useable (for Linux at least) computers. And, for that matter, how the newest, well beyond my economic reach, machines compare. I haven't had the patience to wade through Google looking for a detailed answer; hooking up the machines in the house to a meter seems more straightforward even if it'll probably mean fewer data points than digging up a study someone else has already done.

[1] Well it did have some effect; the pain moved about four inches higher on my back from where it started, making it slightly easier to walk.

[2] That's its function, not a brand name. That box, stjoan, is supposed to be the internal firewall, but when the box that had been the external gateway (eon, aka beaumont) ate its IDE controller (or the motherboard ate itself; I'm not certain, but the error message says it can't see the disk controller) I attached stjoan to the modem "temporarily" and later to the broadband antenna, and my to-do list has had "replace eon" on it for quite some time. Anyhow, I figure it makes sense to mount the switch because it has rack-mount ears, and it makes sense to rack the gateway and/or firewall because they logically go with the switch. But if they'll all fit, I'll squeeze the name server and file server and maybe the main shell/X-app box in there as well, and that'll be most of the downstairs machines except the Suns. I haven't gotten around to whipping out the tape measure to see how many boxes will fit yet; whatever doesn't will just go on a table or desk next to the rack.

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Urk. Sleepy and distracted, between the caffeine (in the codeine) and the pain; adding that second footnote, it just took me three minutes of banging the escape key and wondering why my commands kept showing up as inserted characters before I finally remembered that a text-entry box in a web browser is not 'vi'. "Silly machine, isn't it obvious to every app what I mean when I type '[escape]bbbbi'? Oh wait, my bad."