The Mu

In the last few years, I have started building my own computers.  This is the story of troubleshooting one of my computers and why it was relatively easy.

Industry standards in software is a recurring theme on this blog. But I have to give a round of applause to the microcomputer industry for arriving at some standards that have lasted for a good long while.  Also, when new standards come along that supercede (and make obsolete) the previous standards, there is almost always a component that helps bridge the gap.

The ATX form factor is a computer case size and configuration that has been standard in desktop computers for a good long while.  Motherboards and power supplies that match the ATX standard plug easily into this size and shape of box — with all the screw holes in exactly the right place.

Recently I pushed the power button on my PC and was greeted with… utter silence.  This was disconcerting to say the least.  When absolutely nothing happens like that, it is usually either the power button itself that is broken or the power supply has fried.  I jumped the gun and put in a new ATX power supply (courtesy of my friends at www.thetechzone.ca).  When everything was hooked up I got the same result: silence.

When you get no response after replacing the power supply, you might suspect the power switch itself or the connection from the power switch to the motherboard.  By disconnecting everything except the motherboard, I confirmed that the CPU fan would spin up using the power switch — proving that the problem was with one of the peripherals.

What kind of problem?  Well, it usually means that something is “shorting out” and to be honest my wife had noticed a “electrical burning” smell the day before.  She has a better sense of smell than I do.

So I attached the peripherals (video card, hard drives, CD and DVD burners, fans, etc.) one at a time and tried powering up after hooking up each one.  Everything was working right up until the very last connection: a USB wireless adapter.  But it turns out that it wasn’t the adapter itself that was the problem… it was the extender that comes with this particular Linksys model.  The extender cable went from the USB port up onto my desktop where a little base held the adapter itself.  This had been handy because I could use the high speed adapter in my laptop without crawling behind the desktop machine.  However, once I chucked the extender and plugged the adapter directly into the USB port, all was back to normal.

At any point it might have been any of the other peripherals.  The beautiful thing is that each potentially failed component could have been swapped out — industry standards make that possible.

The collaborative nature of a wiki has garnered much attention.  Most of the debate has been around the true value of collaboration and how very few wikis get the same level of contribution as Wikipedia does.

But I’ve been involved in the question of what to do with all the wonderful collaboratively created content once it is there. Wiki tagged content lacks structure.  The contributions of multiple authors are all made directly to the source and their choices for tagging it are as individual as the content itself.

I don’t want to sidetrack into the question of a unified writing style and making multiple authors sound like they are really speaking with the same voice.  That could be a very interesting related topic.

What I want to focus on is a way to make the content reusable simply from a technology standpoint. XHTML was developed as a “disciplined” HTML.  Predictable content allows for easier automated processing (even something as simple as rendering it predictably in a browser).  But wiki tagging (like MoinMoin) made that advancement — for the sake of simplicity — take a backwards step again.  Wiki content is usually far from predictable.

The idea of using forms or some other template enforcement policy on a wiki seems to fly in the face of “anyone can write whatever they want”.  Yet experts agree that more structure is needed to get the benefits of reuse from a wiki.  Enter XML variants like DITA and other structured markup.  These seem to be regarded as the next generation of wiki source.  We just need to figure out a good way to keep collaborative authoring simple AND predictable.