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Week of 31 January 2000 Sunday, 06 February 2000 12:08 A (mostly) daily journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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Monday, 31 January 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] The start of another week and the end of another month. It hasn't gotten much above freezing since yesterday morning, so everything that fell is still on the ground. Schools and many businesses are closed today. Barbara has an appointment to get her hair cut, and she's always determined not to let weather get in her way, so I'm afraid she'll keep that appointment if the place is open. My attitude is that she should just call the place and reschedule. What's the point to taking a chance on having a wreck when the haircut isn't urgent? Back to work writing about power supplies. * * * * *
Well, that certainly happens sometimes. I'm afraid that company is going to find out that implementing W2K on a motley collection of old machines, upgraded though they may be, is a nightmare. * * * * *
Thanks. I'll look at it, although I agree that a Win3X app is unlikely to do the job. I've found several off-line browsers, but all of them seem to stumble on dynamic content, which is becoming quite common. * * * * *
None that I'm aware of. Pentium II class processors, including the Celeron, determine themselves the cacheable RAM area. Which makes sense when you consider that the L2 cache is built onto the processor.
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Tuesday, 1 February 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] If you're considering buying a high-end digital camera, here's one you may want to wait for. Olympus tells me that they'll begin shipping the 3.34 megapixel (2048X1536) C-3030 Zoom in May, and that it should sell for about $999 on the street. In addition to higher resolution, the C-3030 Zoom includes USB support for fast image transfers, the ability to record QuickTime movies, and numerous other enhancements. From a usability point of view, perhaps the most important enhancement is that the C-3030 Zoom includes a 32 MB SDRAM buffer that allows you to shoot continuously at 3.5 frames per second. More important, that buffer eliminates the annoying delay required to store one picture before you can take another. Although various media reports have speculated that new Olympus models would abandon SmartMedia for CompactFlash, this new camera uses SmartMedia cards, which seems to indicate that SmartMedia isn't going away any time soon. For more information, go here. This article from The Register says Microsoft is at it again with licensing, this time for W2K CALs in a Terminal Server environment. Microsoft has developed a CAL clearing house, against which clients will have to authenticate. Big Brother issues aside, this begs the question, what happens if your network is not connected to the Internet, or if that connection is down? The more I hear about the directions Microsoft is heading in, the less I like it. Their OS and application licenses are becoming more restrictive, and many suspect that Microsoft secretly gathers information via the Internet. For all I know, FrontPage 2000 is talking to Microsoft Secret Headquarters as I type this. For now, at least, I think I'll stick with NT4. Perhaps I'll connect a packet grabber the next time I have a moment and see just what is going out on my Internet link. But I think ultimately Microsoft is digging a hole for themselves. If I had time to learn Linux, I'd give up Microsoft in a heartbeat. Perhaps I'll have to make time soon, but not yet. And Barbara's new article is up on Library Journal.
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Wednesday, 2 February 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] January was my biggest month yet for web traffic, with something over 65,000 hits. So Barbara was surprised yesterday when I told her that I was thinking of pulling a Tom Syroid as of 1 February and going on hiatus until the book was finished. She pointed out that that wouldn't be fair to my readers, or to me given that I've worked very hard to develop a readership. And she's right, so I've given up the idea of shutting down this place temporarily. Barbara also pointed out that others who keep a "daily" journal in fact often go days at a time without making an update, that they often post one-sentence or one-paragraph updates when they're pressed for time, and that there was no reason I couldn't do the same. She's right. I've kind of been doing that already. So that's what I'll do. For the next month or two, updates around here are likely to be sporadic, and perhaps short. I may miss a day or two in a row, but I'll try to post when I have something that needs to be posted. You've probably noticed that I'm posting much less mail than in the past. The influx of mail hasn't dropped off much, but I'm posting much less of it. Also, if you've mailed me, you've probably noticed that whereas I used to respond very quickly it now may take me a day or two to respond, and my response is likely to be shorter than in the past. I can't help it. I simply don't have time to do everything. Something has to give.
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Thursday, 3 February 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Barbara is off to the dentist, so I've got the kids. Fortunately, she won't be long. She was gone most of yesterday, and Malcolm was demonic. Amongst his other depredations, he ate a library book, fortunately a paperback. It's very embarrassing for Barbara, as a former librarian, to have to explain when she returns that book that a dog ate it. And now I'm back to work on the cases & power supplies chapter, yet another Chapter That Will Not Die. Thanks to everyone who mailed me to say how much they appreciated the site. Here's a representative message:
Thanks for the kind words. I intend to keep at it, although I'll be spending less time on it than before. As far as productivity, my secret is simple. I work at home and I work all the time. * * * * *
I don't know what gave you the impression that I had just noticed Microsoft's licensing shifts. I've been complaining for years about Microsoft's changes to their licensing practices. First, they got rid of the personal use exemption, whereby you could use one copy of Office both at home and work. I complained about that. Then they started tightening up their OS license, removing your right to migrate a copy of Windows from an old machine to a new one (it's now licensed only for the machine upon which it was originally installed). I screamed about that. Now they're going to a remote licensing server. I don't like what they're doing, but I understand their reasons for doing it. Ideally, Microsoft doesn't want to license the software to you at all. They want to rent it to you, preferably on a per-use basis. They can't sustain historic revenue streams with the licensing model, particularly as people start to opt out of the upgrade cycle. That has severe implications for their profitability, stock price, and ability to retain employees. Microsoft really is between a rock and a hard place, although people have jeered me for saying that in the past. That was true even before Open Source and Linux. It's true in spades now.
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Friday, 4 February 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I seem to be getting a flood of spam the last few days. One guy has sent me at least twenty identical copies of a message offering to be my South American representative. Can he really think that sending spam, let alone multiple identical spams, is a good way to win new customers? I've also gotten a couple spams flagged as high-priority, of all things. High-priority spam, now that should go in the dictionary as an illustration for oxymoron. I'm also getting messages from some moron named Bob Hager who is apparently a job recruiter. What's extraordinary about these spams is their size, typical 185 KB each! He's been sending me an average of one or two a day of these for weeks. I finally just added him to my kill file. I'm beginning to agree with Pournelle. The solution is to track down a few of the most egregious spammers, kill them, cut off their heads, and post them on pikes with a placard, "Caught Spamming". Actually, what offends me more than anything else is that the people who send spam are generally stupid and illiterate. Here's an excerpt from one spam that I've received three copies of this morning, one from a .no address, one from a .jp address, and one from an msn.com address.
Whoever sent this needs to be killed before he has a chance to pass on his genes. Oh, well. Back to work on the chapter. I also need to do my backups today, and I haven't gotten around to getting any cleaning tapes. * * * * *
I've never used Notes and wasn't aware that it was that badly broken. I'm not sure why anyone would choose Notes. If the mailer has such fundamental flaws, it doesn't make much difference what else the product can do. * * * * *
"Stamina of a shark." Thanks. I like that. * * * * *
Yes, I saw that article when they first posted it, and have been meaning to get a copy of Nero. It's on my list of things to do, but not a priority at the moment. Thanks. * * * * *
Glycerine (also called glycerin, glycerol,
1,2,3-trihydroxypropane, or 1,2,3-propanetriol) is a standard
industrial feedstock. You can buy it in any form from pint
bottles to 55-gallon drums to railroad tanker cars. Your best bet
is probably to contact an industrial chemicals supply house,
which you should be able to find in the yellow pages.
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Saturday, 5 February 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I railed on yesterday about spammers, but I got a spam last night that goes beyond the pale. Ordinary spammers are bad enough, but this one was a spam/scam. It ended up in my Inbox (rather than the Junk Mail folder) and appeared to be an actual message--a reasonable sounding From: address and my main mail account name on the To: line. It informed me that I owed money and that the sender was about to take legal action. To avoid being taken to court, the sender urged me to call the number listed. Now, as it happens, I don't owe money to anyone except the mortgage company, so I knew this message was either mistaken or fraudulent. I checked the area code, and found that it was located in the Caribbean. The 809 area code scam has been around a long time. Even before the proliferation of non-X0X and -X1X area codes, 809 resembled a US area code, so many people didn't realize that it was in fact located in the Caribbean and that a call placed to an 809 number was an international call. Scammers took advantage of this by running what amounted to a 900-number fraud. People naive enough to call an 809 number often found their next phone bill had charges of $100 or more for that call. The proliferation of XXX area codes means that these bastards can now slip through other cracks. 809 was at least easy to remember. But now there are other problem area codes, including 242, 246, 268, 345, 664, 758, 787, 869, and 876. No ordinary person can easily distinguish these fraud-prone foreign area codes from normal US area codes, so be very cautious any time you return a long-distance call to an area code you don't recognize. I just had this conversation with Barbara the other night. She's getting applications from all over the country (and even as far away as Britain) from people who want to adopt one of the rescue Border Collies she works with. She needs to be extremely careful about returning phone calls to these numbers. The phone companies need to eliminate this kind of fraud, which they could do simply by, upon customer request, writing off any outrageously-priced call to one of these area codes and refusing to pay the foreign phone company for those calls. Alternatively, they could block calls to such international area codes by default, requiring customers to explicitly unblock if they wanted to make such calls. Or even run an intercept message any time someone dialed a fraud-prone area code, "The area code you are dialing is known to be used by telephone scammers. A call to this area code may cost $100 or more. Please hang up now if you are unsure whether the number you are about to dial is legitimate, or press 1 to continue dialing." The other fraud problem, of course, is that calls to a toll-free (800, 888) number can be redirected to a 900 number or one of these fraud numbers. When your bill shows up, you get charged for the redirected call. It should be easy enough for the phone companies to eliminate this problem, too, simply by refusing to charge users for such redirected calls. The fact that you can call an 800 number and end up being charged $100 or more for that call without any warning whatsoever is simply unacceptable. Why haven't they done all this already? Perhaps because they share in the revenue stream. If so, that's contemptible. Now I'm seriously pissed. I just called BellSouth to ask about having calls to foreign area codes and 900 numbers blocked. The nice lady told me that of course they could do that. But they charge $19 per line to do so, which would cost me $57. That's outrageous. I told her that I planned to write my congressman, which I will do, and that I simply would refuse to pay for any such calls. It's bad enough that they don't protect their customers by default. That they would actually charge a customer who asked to be protected is simply unacceptable. Obviously they regard protecting their customers as a profit center. Bastards. As I worked yesterday afternoon with Barbara at the library and me supposedly watching the kids, here's what Malcolm did. Actually, this is only a small part of what he did. There was toilet paper scattered over every part of the house he could get to. The muddy paw prints on the love seat are from earlier in the day. Fortunately, the cushions are Scotch-Gard'd, so it's easy to get mud off. Malcolm took literally five minutes or less to make this mess. I know, because I got a cup of tea and it was less than five minutes later that I heard the shredding noises and ran out to see what was going on. What I can't figure out is how he got the roll of toilet paper. He'd already gotten it earlier in the day. Barbara and I can't keep our toilet paper on a roller like normal people. No, we have to put it up on the surface of the vanity to keep Malcolm from getting it. Or we used to. Now he climbs up on the vanity and gets it anyway.
He'd made off with the toilet paper earlier in the day, when one of us forgot to close the hall bathroom door. (Note the diplomatic phrasing) Barbara retrieved a badly chewed roll, but it was still recognizably a roll of toilet paper. We then shut the door, and Barbara left shortly thereafter without using that bathroom. I did not use that bathroom between the time we closed the door and the time I noticed the mess. I went off in search of the source, thinking that perhaps Malcolm had pillaged the master bath. Nope. Bedroom door was shut. I then figured he'd stolen Barbara's box of Kleenex from her end table. Nope. Still there. Finally, I opened the hall bathroom door. The roll of toilet paper was no longer where I'd left it. I think what happened is that Malcolm followed me in when I put the roll away (he's very quiet and very crafty). As I turned around to walk out, he stood up, grabbed the roll, and sneaked out the door behind me. Seriously. That's the only way I can think that this could have happened.
Here Malcolm sits with his "who, me?" expression. When we caught him, he used to try to blame Duncan, but he's finally realized that we weren't buying it. Now he just looks up at you with an innocent expression. Well, as innocent as it can be with his demon eyes showing--red and yellow this time. Malcolm also shreds mail. I've actually thought about turning that habit to productive use, but so far it's proven impossible to teach him to differentiate between first-class mail and junk mail. I still have hopes, though.
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[Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I forgot to mention it, but Friday was a rare quintuple-play day. FedEx, Airborne, DHL, UPS, and USPS all showed up with packages. Unusually, though, all but one of the deliveries were for Barbara. Mostly dog stuff she orders from various dog supply places. Well, actually, two were addressed to me, but one of those was a small gift that Antec sent to thank me for finding an error in the web page specifications for one of their power supplies. The long-standing custom around here is that all such vendor premiums (the red hat that Red Hat sent me, for example) go directly to Barbara. She has mouse pads, t-shirts, caps, and coffee cups galore with vendor logos on them. The only one I've managed to hold onto is the InfoWorld coffee cup that they sent me for being first to correctly identify a quote from the Unabomber. As Barbara points out on her diary page, none of the stuff fits me anyway. Vendors always send X-Large t-shirts, which are a size too small for me (I wear XX-Large Long) and X-Large hats, which are three or four sizes too small for me (I wear, believe it or not, an XXXX-Large or XXXXX-Large hat. People who accuse me of having a swollen head are more accurate than they know). The other box was enough by itself, however. That one held an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 video card. These are just now starting to ship, so I was lucky to be able to get one this quickly. As regular readers know, I'm a big proponent of Matrox video cards. Matrox does make the G400/TV, which appears to have very competent TV features, but the ATI appears to have a better feature set for TV functions. In particular, the ATI can store video as MPEG, which results in much smaller files of similar display quality than the MJPEG used by Matrox. My aversion to ATI started several years ago, when I had many problems with their drivers. Pournelle has been using ATI video cards for a decade or more, and tells me that their recent models are very good indeed. So I decided it was about time to give ATI another chance. I'm particularly looking forward to trying the ATI digital-VCR feature, which should allow me to record quite a bit to the 50 GB Seagate SCSI hard drive currently in theodore. Now the only problem is that I don't have a cable-TV jack in my office. I guess I need to either run one there or build a PC for the den, perhaps moving the 50 GB drive to it. We'll see. As a temporary measure, it'd be easy enough to carry a VCR in here and use it as a source. Given that it's likely that we'll eventually have cable modem service here, I should probably plan around having the equipment in my office. I can use the jack the cable-modem folks will install here as an input line, and install output lines to our bedroom, den, and mom's area downstairs. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a PC controlling things in the den, particularly if Windows is usable on our 27" TV, even at 640X480. All I'd need would be a wireless keyboard and mouse. That'd mean I'd need to run a 100BaseT jack to the den, which shouldn't be that difficult. Barbara is cleaning today for the first time with her new canister vacuum cleaner, which draws 12 amps. Her habit is to roar around the house, leaving overhead lights and lamps on all over the place. Unfortunately, this house is more than 30 years old, and was built with 15 amp circuits. With the vacuum cleaner drawing 12, that doesn't leave much slack on any given circuit. Particularly those to my office, which have several computers running. Of course, she quickly blew a breaker, which caused my UPSs to go berserk. I explained to her that all she needs to do is (a) warn me to shutdown all non-essential machines and (b) turn off all the lights when she's leaving an area. With all that done, everything works fine. If I ever build a house, I'll wire it with 10AWG wire, 30A breakers, and 20A receptacles. Better still, I'll home run each receptacle back to a patch panel, if that's even legal. Romex is cheap enough.
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