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Week of 12 June 2000 Friday, 05 July 2002 08:10 A (mostly) daily journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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wpoison
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[Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] About Mail IF YOU SEND MAIL to thompson@ttgnet.com or webmaster@ttgnet.com, I may publish it, including your email address. If you do not want your message published; or do not want your email address published; or want your email address published but in disguised form (e.g. thompson at ttgnet dot com); or want a different email address published than what appears in your "From:" field; or want your message published anonymously, send your message to anonymous@ttgnet.com and note whatever special handling you want at the top of the message. I don't publish many completely anonymous messages, but I do my best to honor requests to remove or conceal senders' email addresses. Note that if I reply to one of your messages, my message will be From: thompson@ttgnet.com, so if you reply to one of my replies and want any special handling, make sure to change the To: field to anonymous@ttgnet.com before you send your reply. I try to respect confidences, but I sometimes get more than 100 email messages a day, not counting mailing list traffic and spam. Things are always very hectic around here, and stuff happens. Using anonymous@ttgnet.com helps me keep things sorted out. Using it is not a 100% guarantee that I won't mishandle your message, but it is about 99.999% certain, because messages sent to that account are sorted into a special Outlook mail folder. If mail you send to one of my ttgnet.com addresses bounces, you can resend it to ttgnet@triad.rr.com. That's my alternate main mail address, and I check it frequently. I try to answer mail as soon as possible, but it's gotten to the point where I simply don't have time to reply to all of it. So if you send me mail and get a short reply or no reply at all, I apologize. I'm working as hard as I can. Monday, 12 June 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Lots and lots and lots of mail from readers about RoadRunner and sharing/securing a connection. I've put up a separate page for this stuff, over in Current Topics. Concerning Western Digital hard drives, given the recent problems I've reported with them it's interesting that Pournelle just posted a story about an unrelated problem with Western Digital. For the remainder of this week, you can read it here. After this week, it'll be available here. AMD seems destined to follow in Intel's footsteps. After the recent wide-reported fiasco with Intel 820 chipsets, which resulted in many motherboard makers being stranded with hundreds of thousands of unusable i820-based motherboards, the same thing is apparently happening to AMD. The Register reports that "[...] there appears to be as many as a million boards piled up in Taipei warehouses which were designed using the KX-133 chipset, and which will now be useless. Fingers are being pointed at both Via and AMD." Motherboard makers have been having a very rough time lately. * * * * *
Thanks for the kind words. Your problems have nothing to do with the drive per se. The problem is the motherboard. You may be able to solve the problem with a BIOS update, but it's possible that you'll need either to replace the motherboard or add a third-party IDE interface like the Promise Ultra66. Be very careful. The way things are now, your data is at risk. I'd suggest you visit the Microsoft web site and do an all-words search for "large" and "IDE". You'll find several articles there that explain what's going on and what can be done to fix the problem. * * * * *
Good point, and one I should have mentioned. I know that 80 minute CD-R blanks are a lot more available and less expensive than they used to be. The last time I looked at 80 minute blanks, they were something like $4 each, compared to $1 for a standard blank. I think the 80 minute ones are a lot cheaper now, and it may be worth a try using one. * * * * *
The problem really isn't with NT4. I've installed NT4 many times on hard drives larger than 8 GB. The NT4 distribution has an ATAPI.SYS file that limits you to installing it to a partition smaller than 4 GB. You can (kind of) overcome that limitation by substituting the ATAPI.SYS from SP4 or later during installation. Rather than allowing NT4 to detect drives, you tell it that you have a driver and supply the newer version of ATAPI.SYS on floppy. That allows you to install NT4 to a partition up to just under 8 GB (Microsoft calls it 7.8 GB). It still won't recognize your full 13 GB drive at install-time. But you can install NT4 to a partition of 7.8 GB or smaller, and subsequently use Disk Administrator to partition and format the remainder of the drive. There are ways to get around the 7.8 GB limitation (Barbara's NT4 box has one 10 GB partition), but it's easier and better simply to work the way NT4 wants to work. * * * * *
Well, at that point, you'd better have a Windows CD handy, or you're out of luck. That's why Microsoft's new policy is going to lead to more, not less, copying of their OS CDs. 11:05: I spent this morning getting my RoadRunner machine finished and tested. It's named meepmeep for obvious reasons. Actually, that brings a burning controversy to the fore. Is the Roadrunner's call "meep, meep" or "beep, beep"? I've been in the former camp for forty years now, and I see no reason to change. Actually, if there's a final "p" on the sound, it's just barely audible. Judge for yourself here. I found a couple of 10BaseT cards, but they're ISA and I didn't want to poison meepmeep with any ISA cards. I found a couple of LinkSys PCI EtherFast 10/100 LAN cards that I'd bought at Computer & Software Outlet and stuck on the shelf, so that's what I decided to use. The danger in building a multi-homed system with two identical Ethernet cards, of course, is that it can get confusing as to which card is which. So, before closing the case, I documented the cards as follows:
At this point, meepmeep is ready to go when the cable modem installer shows up. As I was making brunch for my mother, she was watching CNN news. It mentioned that at least one airline is considering using strait-jackets to restrain unruly passengers. I'm not sure how that differs from typical coach seating.
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wpoison
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Tuesday, 13 June 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I wasted a bunch of time yesterday trying to deal with Barbara's mail problem. She uses a bunch of email addresses, such as barbara@ttgnet.com, but all are forwarded to her main mail account, thompsrb@bellsouth.net. Unfortunately, the BellSouth SMTP server yesterday decided that there was no such account as thompsrb for about four out of every five messages sent to that account. As a result, it started sending 550 error messages to remote SMTP servers, which of course results in people who attempt to send mail to Barbara getting a fatal error message telling them that there is no such user on the server. Fortunately, most of Barbara's mail comes to one of her autoforwarded accounts at pair, which means that I was the only one seeing those bounces. I called BellSouth and gradually worked my way up from the level-one support morons to an "email specialist". She actually did seem to know a little about mail but she wasn't able to be much help because she was hamstrung by Bellsouth's policies. She knew there was something wrong with the mail.lig.bellsouth.net mailserver, because she could see for herself it wasn't working properly. But she couldn't turn in a trouble ticket to report the problem to someone who could do something about it, because doing that required that she have a copy of one of the bounce messages that I was seeing. I was forwarding those to her, but she couldn't get them because the server was having problems. She couldn't report that the server was having problems until she got one of the messages. Duh. Catch 22. She finally went over to Yahoo and opened a free email account there so that she could get the messages I was forwarding. The bounces were continuing as of 11:00 last night. This morning there were no new bounces in my general-delivery mailbox, but neither did Barbara have any mail in her main box. I sent two test messages. One of them arrived and the other disappeared into the ether. So I don't know if the problem is fixed yet or not. More new stuff on the RoadRunner page, this time about small dedicated hardware routers. * * * * * Here's one of those messages that I have no idea how to reply to:
It sounds like you need to hire a consultant who understands switching, routing, NetWare, TCP/IP, and IPX/SPX. * * * * *
Well, perhaps. But you're more of an optimist than I am. * * * * *
Thanks for the kind words. You're correct that overburning must be supported by the drive hardware. As far as the size mismatch, that's one I'd not heard of, but it makes sense. When I'm copying a distribution CD, I always do a full disk copy, so I've never encountered that problem. Usually, I just use the Plextor disk copy utility, which seems to work fine. As far as copying software, I agree that it's a bad idea to show someone how to steal the software, but there are certainly legitimate reasons to make a backup copy, which is permitted under US law (or was the last time I checked). I tend to abuse CDs when I'm building a system, leaving them lying on the desk covered up by other stuff and so on. So I usually knock off a copy of the distribution CD, put the original back in the box, and work from the copy. * * * * *
That's something I've not encountered. I have Partition Magic 5. I know I have it, because I have the CD sleeve lying right here on my desk. Damned if I can find the CD, though. At first I thought it must be in one of the CD drives, but after an exhaustive search it didn't turn up in any of them. So it's around here somewhere, and I'll try installing it and getting that patch when I have a moment. As far as disappearing printers, that's a new one on me. * * * * *
The Empire State Building is perhaps a good analogy. As they say, "If at first you don't succeed, don't take up skydiving."
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wpoison
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Wednesday, 14 June 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] After all those nice things I said about BellSouth, they turn around and screw up big-time. Their SMTP server started having problems Monday, refusing to deliver 80% or 90% of the messages addressed to our main mailbox. The POP server works fine, but that's little consolation when the SMTP server isn't delivering the mail to the mailbox in the first place. That continued through yesterday, but with an added twist. Now the SMTP server won't allow us to send mail, either. We can get one out once in a great while, but otherwise stuff just stays queued up in our outboxes. Nor is the problem limited to just our own mail server. BellSouth names servers for the cities they serve. For example, the server that serves the Raleigh-Durham area is mail.rdu.bellsouth.net, and the one for Atlanta is mail.atl.bellsouth.net. We're on the catch-all mail server, mail.lig.bellsouth.net, the one they use to serve everyone who doesn't have a dedicated city server. In the past, when I'd had problems sending mail via mail.lig.bellsouth.net, I'd switched to mail.rdu.bellsouth.net. They're all on the same internal network, so there's no problem accessing some other city's server. This time, though, I can't get mail sent through either lig or rdu. So the upshot is, most mail sent to Barbara is bouncing, and she can't send any mail. I can receive mail, because I POP from the server at pair Networks, but I also can't send mail because the SMTP server won't accept it. As I was writing this, the SMTP server came back to life. Wonderful. Only about two days without inbound mail and one day without outbound mail. I don't guess I'll be keeping BellSouth service for long after RoadRunner is installed. I planned to do that just to have something reliable, but these recent problems make that a dubious plan. I really must bring up a local mailserver. I'd almost decided to use BlackICE Defender but, as usual, I decided to do a bit more research. I'm glad I did. BlackICE gets glowing reviews lots of places. But if I read ten 5-star reviews of a product in the PC magazines and then read one 0-star review from someone I know and respect, guess whose opinion I give more weight to? If a magazine gives BlaceICE a great review, that may mean nothing more than that BlackICE bought a big ad from them for that issue. Who knows? But when Steve Gibson says "I can no longer recommend BID . . . even with reservation", I sit up and take notice. Steve recommends ZoneAlarm (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is what RoadRunner recommends), and that's good enough for me. Steve mentions that ZoneAlarm only works with stand-alone PCs, not with Internet Connection Sharing, but he's referring to an earlier version. The ZoneAlarm FAQ claims the current version works fine with ICS, so we'll see. Barbara leaves this evening for a trip to Pennsylvania with her parents. Her father is attending his 60th high school reunion, and Barbara is riding along to visit relatives and friends. That means I get to dog-sit while she's gone. As usual, I tried to convince Barbara of the benefits of taking Malcolm along on the trip. As usual, I failed. At least she'll only be away until Monday. And I'd better get my estimated taxes mailed. Ugh. * * * * *
You may well be right, but I simply don't have the time to mess with them. When I bought those drives, they cost $200 each, so it's aggravating. But now the value of a used 4.3 GB drive is so small that it's just not worth the time and effort it would take to get the RMA information, track down the receipt, package the drives, and get them delivered to WD. A 4.3 GB drive is still a decent size for a client PC, so it might still be worth the effort if I were short of drives, but I'm not. I'll stick with Seagate SCSI drives and Seagate or Maxtor ATA drives. * * * * *
Thanks. That's something I've never encountered. I suspect if the problem is occurring on a network that runs only TCP/IP transport, it may have something to do with the whole WINS/browser/NetBIOS over TCP mess. A lot of people run NetBEUI on their TCP/IP networks for just that reason. Microsoft Networking was designed around NetBEUI, and always seems happier on a network that has NetBEUI transport available. * * * * *
You may be right about Easy CD. As far as copying stuff, it's amazing what lies people will tell when their jobs are on the line. Conversely, some companies are a bit unreasonable about what employees take home. I once received a message with a sad tale. The guy who sent it was a systems/network administrator for a medium size company. The company was too cheap to spend the $1,000 or so a data-rated fire safe would cost. So, with the best of intentions, he'd started taking the previous night's backup tape home with him each day, and bringing back the next-oldest tape the following morning. All he wanted to do was have a recent tape stored securely off-site in case a disaster occurred. One day, he was "caught" carrying the backup tape off premises. They called him on the carpet and accused him of stealing company data. They actually threatened to call the police and charge him with theft, but they didn't end up doing that. They did, however, fire him. So the moral is that trying to do someone a favor can get you in big trouble.
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wpoison
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Thursday, 15 June 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] The Time-Warner guy is supposed to show up between 0800 and 1000 this morning to install my cable-modem. I'm assuming it'll be closer to 0800, since this surely must be his first stop of the day. I'd better get the dogs out for their morning constitutional and then get them all the pills that Barbara has lined up for them. I'll pen them all downstairs with my mother while the cable guy is here. The new RoadRunner box, meepmeep, is set up and ready to go. With any luck, I'll have joined the ranks of those with high-speed, always-on Internet connections by the next time I update this page. * * * * *
Which says it all. Thanks. I haven't bought anything other than Maxtor or Seagate drives for the last 18 months or so, and see no reason to change. * * * * *
Thanks. I may give that a shot. You're correct that all the drive makers have had bad patches, but it seems to me that Western Digital has been going through one for much longer than anyone else has. * * * * *
Sorry, but I can't agree. That's like going out and buying a Ford and insisting that the Ford dealership take back the bundled tires and pay you for them because you want to put some other kind of tires on your new car. Just as Ford has the right to bundle whatever tires they choose, HP and Microsoft have the right to agree that HP will bundle a copy of Windows with every PC they sell. When you buy that computer from HP, you're buying one product, with one SKU, not a collection of individual products. You no more have the right to insist that they take back Windows and pay you for it than you have the right to insist that they take back the hard disk or the video card because you happen to prefer some other model. If you don't like the deal, buy from someone who doesn't bundle Windows with the PC. There are any number of places that would be happy to sell you a PC without bundled Microsoft software. * * * * *
Ah. Sorry, I didn't realize from your original post that you were operating in a NetWare environment. The problems with the Novell NetWare client for Windows versus the Microsoft NetWare client for Windows go all the way back to at least Windows 3.11 for WorkGroups. I forget all the sad details now, but Novell sued or threatened to sue Microsoft for including their software in Windows. Microsoft pulled it, and the result of the ongoing spat between Novell and Microsoft was that users and administrators got screwed. What should have happened, of course, is that both companies should have worked together to make sure the Windows client for NetWare worked properly. But that would have been putting users first, a consideration that neither Novell nor Microsoft seemed to consider important. 17:23: The cable guy finally showed up at 0945. I guess I can't complain. They did say 0800 through 1000. They schedule the cable guy to do two installs during each two-hour period, and I was the second install scheduled for 0800 to 1000. The first install wasn't easy. Neither was mine. He ended up leaving here at 1145, having spent an hour and a half on the first install and two hours on mine. I kept Malcolm crated the whole time, and he barked. The whole time. Once he left, I was looking forward to getting RoadRunner up and running on meepmeep. To make a very long story short, RoadRunner is working now on meepmeep, but meepmeep is no longer a Windows 2000 Professional system. It's now running NT4 Workstation. Why? I messed for the better part of two hours with W2KP, trying to make it recognize that I had an Internet connection on one of the interfaces. No joy. I finally ended up removing the other interface, leaving only the one connected to RoadRunner. No joy. I reinstalled W2KP. No joy. I finally stripped the disk down to bare metal and installed Windows NT 4 Workstation. Alas, the symptoms were exactly the same. No IP address assigned to the RoadRunner adapter. I remember thinking more than once that it seemed as though the DHCP server at RoadRunner was not responding. But that's impossible, I thought. Surely if you're going to run a service that uses dynamic IP addresses, particularly when you assign very short lease periods and expirations, you'll make absolutely certain that your DCHP server is available at all times. Finally I ended up calling RoadRunner tech support. "Oh, yeah," says the guy. "the DHCP server is down." I was struck speechless. At any rate, the DCHP server came back up shortly after I hung up with tech support. At that point, I had a functioning system connected to RoadRunner, but running NT4. Oh, well. No great loss. I'd frankly just as soon run NT4 as W2KP anyway. The second interface was on a private IP number, 192.168.111.204, and I did the usual stuff with bindings and so on to secure the network on the private side. I was able to get to the other machines on the network with no problem, so I copied WinGate Pro 3.0 over from my install directory on theodore and ran Setup. Everything worked fine. WinGate automatically recognized both interfaces. All I needed to do was change the proxy server configuration in IE5 from 192.168.111.203 (kerby, the old dial-up WinGate server) to 192.168.111.204. At that point, I could use IE running on any machine on the network to access the Internet, and I was able to POP mail with no problems. Setting up SMTP takes a couple more steps. For some reason, WinGate doesn't install the TCP mapping service by default, so I installed that and configured it outbound on Port 25 for SMTP. At that point, I was able to send mail as well. So at this point everything is working fine, with one glaring exception. FrontPage 2000 can't publish. Microsoft butchered the FTP implementation in FP2K, and it can't use a proxy server, at least not without going through hoops. That leaves me three choices: install FP2K on meepmeep, which I may eventually do; put up with the hacked configuration required to publish through a proxy server (which I can't make work, anyway); or publish manually with FTP Voyager, my ftp client. For now, at least, I'm going to use FTP Voyager and publish manually. I'll probably eventually install FP2K on meepmeep. Nothing new there. Until today, I was writing this stuff on kiwi (my main workstation) and publishing it from kerby (which has the direct dial-up connection). I sure wish that Microsoft would fix the FTP client stub in FP2K, though. It'd be nice if it actually supported publishing via proxy server, as it's supposed to.
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wpoison
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Friday, 16 June 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] My first reaction to browsing with RoadRunner was disappointment. The first half dozen or so web sites I hit didn't load any faster than they normally do on a dial-up connection. But then I hit Jerry Pournelle's site, which loaded almost instantly. My site did the same, as did Steve Tucker's site and Paul Robichaux's site. All four of those sites are hosted by pair Networks, which knows how to run a web host and has the connectivity to back up that knowledge. Then I downloaded a 2.6 MB file, which transferred in about 20 seconds, as opposed to the 10 or 15 minutes it would have taken on a dial-up connection. That's very nice, but hardly earth-shattering. On balance, I'd have to say that a cable modem is a nice upgrade over dial-up access, well worth doing, but not something that'll change my life. * * * * *
I suppose that's possible. If true, it's yet another good reason for spammers to be tracked down and killed, or at the least horsewhipped. Understand, I make more distinctions about spam than most people. For example, I regularly get what most people would call spam from such companies as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Insight, L. L. Bean, and so on. Although I wish they wouldn't send it to me, I'm not upset with them for doing so, nor do I consider it spam. I have purchased from each of those companies in the past and so, while what they're sending me is definitely Unsolicited Commercial Email, it is not spam, at least in my opinion. Similarly, I sometimes get targeted email from a company I've never heard of. Although many, perhaps most, would consider such messages spam, I do not. Those messages are addressed individually To: my address (rather than X-envelope-to), have a valid reply address, and often contain a message that I might reasonably be thought to have potential interest in. To my way of thinking, true spam has several characteristics. First, it is a substantially identical message sent to thousands of people, usually via BCC. Second, it is sent from a false or non-existent source address, with efforts made to conceal the true source of the message. Third, the addressees are taken from a purchased list, or one compiled by an address parser. As much as I hate spam, I'm very uncomfortable with every proposed government restriction on spam that I've seen. If there must be a law against spam and I were able to wave a magic wand to define that law, I think I'd define spamming as sending 1,000 or more substantially similar messages (individually or in the aggregate--that is, sending five different messages to 200 recipients each counts as an aggregate 1,000 messages) during any 24-hour period to recipients with whom the sender had no pre-existing commercial relationship. That leaves the door open for closely targeted UCE while slamming it shut on the true spammers, who can't make a living sending only 1,000 messages per day. There should be severe punishment for spamming, with expedited trials. Caught spamming on Monday, tried on Tuesday, state court appeal on Wednesday, Supreme Court appeal on Thursday, hanged on Friday would be about right. * * * * *
Thanks for the kind words. No, it doesn't surprise me, but I sure wish things were different. Ultimately, I blame it on the MBAs, most of whom are smart enough to run the numbers but not smart enough to understand the importance of things that can't be quantified in a spreadsheet. The original Cringely has a PBS column. A couple of weeks ago, he talked about the industrial recovery of Japan after WWII. There was a quote in there from a US company that built ships during WWII. "We build good ships. At a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but we build good ships." Nowadays, with the MBAs in control, that quote would instead be something like, "We build profitable ships. Good ships if we can, bad ships if we must, but we build profitable ships." There are a few companies that still have that "customer first" philosophy, and all of them are well respected. L. L. Bean is an obvious example. Most of the stuff they sell is readily available elsewhere at lower prices. But I buy from them because I like the way they do business. Crutchfield is another. Years ago, I ordered a bunch of audio equipment from them--receiver, speakers, cassette deck, CD changer, VCR, and so on. All of it was JVC, and all of it was supposed to work together automatically to do stuff like record a CD to tape, automatically setting volume level, mapping tracks to fit them on the tape, and so on. As it turned out, the CD changer I got didn't have the automatic interface necessary to do what I'd planned to do. I called up Crutchfield, and they checked their technical documentation and admitted that I was right. They offered to exchange the CD changer for a single-disc JVC player that did have the automatic interface. I told them that was no good, because I specifically wanted a changer *and* the ability to automatically set recording levels. JVC at that time made only single-disc players that had the automatic interface and changers that did not. I told the guy at Crutchfield that if I'd known that in the first place, I'd have bought all Sony gear instead of JVC. The tech support guy said he had an idea and asked me to hold for a manager. The manager came on the line about 30 seconds later and said he had an easy solution. "How about if we just send you a free single-disc JVC CD player and you keep the changer as well? You can connect both, use the changer for playing CDs normally, and use the single-disc player when you want to record something to tape." That was indeed a solution to my problem, and one that must have cost Crutchfield more than the profit they'd made on the original sale. But they made me very happy. I've never bought any audio equipment from anyone but Crutchfield since then, and I've recommended them strongly to many people. Overall, Crutchfield lost money on that original sale to me, but they've much more than made up for that loss in the additional business I've sent their way since then. Same deal in computer book publishing. O'Reilly and Associates focuses solely on quality, to the exclusion of all else. O'Reilly's attitude is that a book is done when it's done. I took more than 18 months to finish PC Hardware in a Nutshell, a book that was originally scheduled to take six months. Most other computer book publishers focus on deadlines. They want the book finished on the schedule originally agreed to. They prefer a good book, but if the choice comes down to getting a bad book on time or a good book late, they'll take the bad book on time every time. O'Reilly wants a good book no matter how long it takes. And it's no coincidence that O'Reilly is the most respected name in computer books. I didn't really intend to write an essay, but I guess my point is that if Microsoft, Novell, and other software companies were smart, they'd take this customer-first approach. It may give up short-term profits, but it's the way to build a viable business that will succeed in the long term. * * * * *
Because the FTP problem is a very minor one, easily worked around by publishing manually with my FTP client, or by installing FP2K on the system that connects directly to the Internet. And, yes, I do recommend FrontPage for people, like me, who just want to get a web site published without worrying about the details. All of the competing products I've seen are inferior for that purpose. FrontPage is more than "Good Enough". It's the best product available by far for people who just want to have a web site without becoming full-time webmasters. FrontPage is not perfect by any means, but it beats the hell out of whatever comes in a far-distant second place. * * * * *
That's probably a reasonably valid comparison, because Kernersville is served by the same RoadRunner affiliate. I just hit the speed test site you mention, and they report that my line speed is 620.2 Kbps or 76 K bytes/sec. Yesterday afternoon I was getting 133 KB/s, so the speed clearly varies according to time of day, system load, and other factors. But it's fast no matter what. 11:45: I've printed numerous rants about the music industry, so when J. H. Ricketson posted this link to a speech made by Courtney Love I immediately followed it to see what she had to say. Although I recognize her name, I knew nothing about her, and I don't believe I've ever heard any of her music. But what she has to say about music piracy and who the real pirates are is definitely worth reading. We see similar things happening in the publishing industry. Until now, distribution has been key in both music and publishing. The Internet is in the process of making distribution trivial, which gores the ox of the music companies and publishers. It's not surprising that they're doing everything they can to hold back the tide, because what they do as middlemen will soon lose its value. So both the music publishers and book publishers are attempting to lock the content creators into contracts that will guarantee the publishers their traditional major piece of the pie. That effort is doomed to fail in the long run, but a lot of content creators will suffer in the short run.
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Saturday, 17 June 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I installed FrontPage 2000 on meepmeep yesterday, so I can now publish this site normally. I actually write this material on kiwi, my main workstation, and then use FP2K running on meepmeep to publish it. I also migrated Analog, the program I use for processing web stats, over to meepmeep. I was hoping that the higher speed connection would allow me to go back to doing DNS lookups while processing the raw log files. That probably won't turn out to be the case. I did a test run last night with six days' worth of data from my own site (~ 1,000 page reads/day). It took 45 minutes or so to process with DNS lookups enabled, versus probably 5 seconds (literally) without. Analog caches DNS lookups for a user-specified period (I have it set to one month), so it took only 5 minutes or so this morning to run my stats for the full seven-day week. All it had to do DNS lookups for was the new IP addresses from one day's worth of data. I also run Pournelle's stats for him, and his site gets 5 to 7 times the number of page reads that mine does. That means I can expect his weekly stats, which I'm running as I write this, to take perhaps 4 or 5 hours to run. I helped as best I could by copying my own dns.txt file over to his data directory, on the assumption that we have many readers in common, so that should allow his report to run using my DNS lookups for those who accessed both sites with a static IP address. We'll see. The bad part is that I had been running stats for week, month-to-date, and year-to-date. There's no way I can do year-to-date stats, particularly for Pournelle's site. It'd take forever. I suppose I could set the DNSGOODHOURS parameter to something like a year and just bite the bullet and let the reports run for the days it'd take them to complete, but that doesn't seem worth the effort. The annoying thing is that pair Networks will process the stats locally on their servers, including DNS lookups, but when I mailed them to ask if they could supply the raw logs with DNS data included, they never responded. Speaking of pair Networks, I need to get hardwareguys.com, the domain for the hardware books, running on their server. Getting to the point where I can do that has been an exercise in frustration. More than a year ago, I talked to David Rogelberg of StudioB (my agent) about registering a domain for the hardware books. We tossed many ideas around, and everyone seemed to like hardwareguys.com. It wasn't my favorite, but David, Barbara, and several others really liked it, so I decided to go with it. The trouble was, I kept dithering about actually registering it. David was afraid I'd lose it to someone else, so he finally asked if I'd like him to just register it for me. I was so busy that I gratefully accepted that offer. The problem was, David didn't realize that it's extremely difficult to transfer a domain name from one entity to another, so he registered it with StudioB as the registrant rather than me. After a major struggle, we managed to get me listed as the Administrative Contact, which should have been a trivial change, but was not. That means I now have the power to manage that domain. Currently, it's still listed with StudioB as the registrant, but I'll take care of that shortly. The first step, though, is to get the domain activated at pair Networks. Once I do that, I'll transfer the domain to joker.com (still with StudioB as the owner of record) and then transfer ownership from StudioB to me. It seems as though that should be do-able in one step, but it's not. NSI wants paid twice for the change. * * * * *
Ah. My sympathy. I've gone through the long waiting period, too. One day, you'll have it. I have to say that it's nice, but nothing earthshattering. * * * * *
Sorry. I should have been explicit. Basically, all I did was install SP6a (which takes care of nearly all the security updates to NT4) and unbound everything except TCP/IP from the adapter connected to RoadRunner. You'll find a pretty good summary of the whole process on Steve Gibson's page. * * * * *
Thanks. And that brings up something I should have mentioned in my original post. I was speaking generally rather than specifically about that company. For all I know, they still make good ships. * * * * *
Thanks. I don't guess I'll be trying ZoneAlarm. I knew that if I waited long enough someone else would do all the hard work. * * * * *
Thanks. There is indeed a lot of interesting stuff on that site. I spent a few minutes cruising around it, but will have to go through it in detail when I have more time. * * * * *
I'll say up front that I'm no expert on either Windows 98 or Windows 2000 (yet). That said, it sounds to me as though there's a problem either with the boot.ini file or with the master boot record and/or partition table on the hard drive. Here, for example, is the boot.ini file from the root directory of C: on one of my systems that triple-boots Windows 98, Windows NT4 and Windows 2000:
If that final line is trashed, the system can't boot to Windows 98. When I've encountered similar situations in the past, I've sometimes had success by booting a Win98 emergency disk and running FDISK /MBR. That restores the default Master Boot Record. I can't say for sure that it's safe to do that in a dual-boot Win98/W2K environment, but I believe it should be. Alternatively, since you have an image file of your Win98 installation, it may be easier to reformat C: and restore the image. If you do that, however, be aware that Windows NT/2000 installs several files to C:\, which you must have available if W2K is to boot. On my triple-boot machine, those files include BOOT.INI, BOOTSECT.DOS, BOOTLOG.TXT, VIDEOROM.BIN, BOOTLOG.PRV, AUTOEXEC.001, CONFIG.SYS, NETLOG.TXT, SETUPLOG.TXT, MSDOS.SYS, DETLOG.TXT, SUHDLOG.DAT, SYSTEM.1ST, and MSDOS.--. Some of those may not strictly be needed, but I'd copy them to a safe place nonetheless before formatting. Once again, I'm speculating here rather than speaking from definite knowledge. Perhaps some of my readers will have some better ideas and can mail you directly. 17:15: Here's a message that may be important for anyone considering using the procedure I mentioned above to restore a dual-boot Windows 98/2000 system:
How odd. Before I wrote that response this morning, I ran Windows 98 FDISK /MBR on my secondary system, which triple-boots Windows 98/NT/2000. After running FDISK /MBR, it successfully booted all three operating systems as usual. When I got this message, I immediately tried running FDISK /MBR on two of my test-bed systems, both of which are currently set to dual-boot Windows 98 and 2000. Again, it had no apparent effect, and both systems successfully booted both Windows 98 and 2000 after I ran FDISK /MBR. The only things I can think of to explain this anomaly are: (a) all three of these systems happen to be running FAT32 for both Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Perhaps the results would have been disastrous if I'd been running Windows 2000 with NTFS, or (b) perhaps there's some kind of hardware problem on the system you had the problems with.
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wpoison
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[Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Malcolm loves any dog food except his own. Any time he gets the chance he starts scarfing down Kerry's Fat Dog Chow or Duncan's Dog Chow Lite. Last night, Malcolm hit the mother lode. Duncan informs us when his bowl is empty by batting it around. Let me tell you, a stainless steel bowl bouncing around on a hardwood floor is hard to overlook. After Duncan batted his bowl several times with me ignoring him it became obvious that he wasn't going to give it up. He'd just eaten, you understand, and he wasn't hungry. But he likes having food in his bowl at all times, and it was obvious that he planned to make my life miserable until I put some food in his bowl. So I picked up his bowl and went into the kitchen. Barbara has a couple of giant RubberMaid tubs to store dog food. They hold something like 100 pounds (say 45 kilos) each, and they have snap-fitting tops. Ordinarily, they sit in the corner of the dining room, where the open door to the kitchen hides them. We're using them now, however, to block Malcolm's access from the kitchen to the dining room and library (where our first editions live). When I took the top off the tub, I tried to prop it whilst I filled Duncan's bowl with the scoop. The top slid off into the dining room, where I couldn't reach it. Figuring I'd replace the lid later, after filling Duncan's bowl I went over to the far end of the kitchen where Barbara keeps the Post Bran Flakes that she sprinkles on Duncan's food (I am not making this up). While I was there, sprinkling bran over Duncan's food, I heard munching noises coming from the direction of the dining room. Not a good sign. Sure enough, there was Malcolm, standing with his front paws inside Duncan's tub and eating as fast as he could. I yelled at him, and he took off running, but not before grabbing one more huge mouthful. He got past me and into the den, shedding dog food kernels from his mouth as he ran. I told Barbara the other night that I don't really blame Malcolm for "stealing" food. In the wild, senior dogs eat first, and junior dogs get whatever is left over. When Malcolm sees food left in Kerry's or Duncan's bowl, I'm sure he instinctively regards it as belonging to him. This morning I was awakened at 0545 by Duncan making the characteristic noise that means he's about to vomit. I leapt from the bed, trying to get him out of the bedroom, down the hall, and out the front door before he erupted. I probably would have succeeded, too, if it hadn't been for Malcolm. Malcolm got all excited and started barking at Duncan and body-blocking him from getting out the door and down the hall. As a result, Duncan vomited all over the bedroom floor and down parts of the hall. Thank goodness we have hardwood floors. Mop and bucket time... * * * * *
Thanks for the kind words. As far as the "always-on" aspect, that's nothing new for me. Back years ago, I had a full-time dial-up Internet connection to my employer. Those phone calls lasted literally months on end. When I left that job back in 1994 or 1995, I signed on with BellSouth.net. They advertised "unlimited" usage, and I took them at their word. Actually, they lied, because they have a 12-hour timeout on dial-up connections. But my typical usage pattern has been to dial in to BellSouth when I first get into my office in the morning (about 0700 to 0730 pre-puppy; anything from 0615 to 0645 now that we have Malcolm) and stay connected all day long. And I was actually *using* the connection all day long, so I didn't feel the slightest bit guilty about it. I'd usually drop the connection sometime after dinner, when the timeout meter was about to expire, and then immediately re-establish the connection. It'd then stay up until about 2300, when I went to bed. At that point, I'd manually drop the connection. A regular ISP would have gotten very upset with me for being connected for such long periods, but BellSouth never said a word about it. Nor should they have, because, being the Phone Company, they have advantages that ordinary ISPs don't have. The only resources I was using were (a) the phone line I use to dial in, which I'm paying for, and which doesn't occupy any CO resources once the connection is made; and (b) a modem in their rack, which probably costs them less than $5/month on an amortized basis. Unlike regular ISPs, BellSouth.net doesn't have to worry about paying for the inbound telephone line I'm using, because there isn't one. If I'd been connecting instead to a private ISP, I'd also have been consuming essentially 100% of a $60/month 1FB business CO line (or the equivalent percentage of a trunk line or PRI ISDN line), which means they'd be losing something like $45/month on my account. So, in effect, I was already enjoying the benefits of always-on. (Right now, my European readers are probably gnashing their teeth, because most of them pay by the minute for local calls. Sorry, guys). As far as downloads, I never worried about them, either, because everything took place in the background. I downloaded a 75 MB service pack not long ago, for example. It took something like 6 or 7 hours to download, but I didn't care. I wasn't in a hurry to get it, and the only noticeable impact was that it was a bit slower to retrieve mail and web pages while the download was in progress. I'm not sure what the problem is with AvantGo. My web pages (for the complete week) are typically in the range of 50 KB at the smallest to perhaps 200 KB at the largest. Obviously, they're smaller during the earlier part of the week. I don't know if any of my other readers download to PDAs. If one does, perhaps he'll have a suggestion. * * * * *
Ah, that means I'll have to try it myself with W2KP installed on an NTFS volume. Not that I don't believe you, you understand, but nothing substitutes for doing it myself.
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