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Week of 9 October 2000 Friday, 05 July 2002 08:15 A (mostly) daily journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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recent update Monday, 9 October 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week]
While running web access statistics for Pournelle's and my sites last weekend, I got to wondering about how people use this site. More specifically, how often people visit. So I'm running an official poll, and I'd appreciate you taking a moment to respond. You can do so just by clicking on one of the links below, which will send me an email message with the appropriate subject line. Don't bother to add any body text. I won't read these messages, just filter them into dedicated folders and count them after a week or two. (If you do want to comment on something, you can of course send me regular email.) The question is: "How often do you visit this web site" and here are the choices: I provided a lot of choices because I hate surveys that force you to choose an imprecise answer. If you're not sure which one to pick, just pick whichever seems closest. If you'd like more choices, I apologize. The results will doubtless be skewed in favor of those who visit most often, if only because I won't have this survey posted in future weeks. Still, I suppose a monthly reader may see it anyway, either by pure chance or because he reads back weeks. It'll also be interesting to guesstimate what percentage of my readers respond. I hope for 100%, of course, but I doubt it'll be anything near that. But I'd love to be proved wrong. I have some idea of how many people visit, because my web logs list the number of unique IP addresses. Obviously, the mix of dial-up readers and those with always-on connections makes that imprecise. But from the number of unique IP addresses shown in the log files each week (my last report showed 8,196 distinct hosts served), I'm guessing that I now have at least 1,500 regular readers (assuming 100% dial-up and nearly all frequent visitors), and perhaps as many as 5,000 (assuming a relatively small percentage of dial-up and relatively many infrequent visitors). But we'll see how the numbers work out. There's a trip report of a sort posted on last week's page, and Barbara has more on her page, with more to come once we get pictures sorted out and so on. I confess that I have entirely lost track of SETI. I'd been posting the names of people as they hit milestones for 50, 100, 250, 500, and 1,000 work units complete, but I've now lost track of who passed which milestones while I was gone. I'd been counting on my cached copy of the stats page, which I viewed immediately before leaving. The plan was to call that page up now, open a new window, do a refresh, and compare the pages to determine who had passed which milestones. Unfortunately, Windows NT bluescreened on me yesterday, and one of the side effects was that it wiped out all my cached web pages. So if you passed a milestone while were were gone, please forgive me. I'll catch you as you pass the next one. I'm going to go to weekly SETI updates anyway. I'll store the stats page from this morning as an mht file and then compare it next Monday morning with the then-current figures. Very short shrift time on mail, I'm afraid. I arrived home to find about fifty messages in my webmaster folder, many of which were similar responses to various comments I'd made. Most of those I responded to privately, but here's a selection. If you don't see your message here and didn't get a private response, please resend it. I had something like 500 spams in my inbox when I arrived home, and I'm afraid that I allocated each of them literally a quarter of a second. That is, I deleted 500 messages one-by-one and it took me literally two minutes to do that. I don't think I deleted any real messages, but running at that rate there's always the chance that I might have accidentally deleted one or two real messages that appeared spammish from the subject line or whatever. I'm not normally that cavalier about risking reader messages, but I was tired and 500 spams is an overwhelming number to have to deal with at one sitting. Normally, I allocate at least a full half-second to a message before deleting it, which is longer than it sounds. This in response to my comment that upload throughput restrictions are common with cable modems but I'd never heard of such a restriction on downloads. -----Original Message----- Cox cable, here in Las Vegas has rate limits of 128kb up and 512kb down. You can, of course, pay for more. They also track usage and charge for more than a specified amount of uploads/downloads, but I don't think anyone has ever gone over and it is more of a deterrent than something they actually use. There rates and transfer cap limits can be found at http://www.cox.com/LasVegas/Express/ Thanks. Now if RoadRunner would just throttle MP3 downloads, I'd be happy. I always know when school's out, because the kids all get home and start sucking down MP3s, dropping throughput by a factor of five or more. -----Original Message----- This is an awesome link farm of current news sources, sent to me by a friend who is also in the media. I've been looking for a place to get all stories by Reuters for a long time. --Chuck http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/newscenter.htm Thanks. That indeed looks impressive, although I was too pressed for time to spend much time looking. -----Original Message----- Dear Robert, I stumbled upon your site while looking for information on whether trying to burn a 80-minute CD-Rs can harm a CD-R burner. An acquaintance of mine reported an encounter with the HP -8210. He was successful in burning about a dozen 80 minute CD-R's until the unit stopped recognizing blank media. Never a good symptom for a recorder? Talks with HP technical support revealed that the HP 8210 wasn't designed to "handle" the longer disks and prolonged use could lead to the burner literally "burning out." What would be the additional stresses placed upon a machine in burning the 80 minute disks rather than a standard 74? The literature packaged with the HP-8210 (I have one, too) has no warning of this nature. Would it ok to burn 80 minute CD-Rs if you stayed within the 74-minute time limit? Enquiring minds want to know??!! P.S. HP did replace my friends unit, but I would argue they had no choice since they didn't provide adequate warning. (Besides, I believe it was within warranty.) Thanks, Robert, for any information you can provide. Most but not all recent CD writers are capable of writing to 80-minute blanks. Many models designed more than a year or 18 months ago are not. The issue is the range of movement of the head. Most CD writers that have an insufficient range of head movement to burn 80-minute blanks simply refuse to attempt to do so. Some, apparently including your HP model, have sufficient range of head movement to write to the 80-minute blanks (or overburn 74-minute blanks) but when doing so are working outside their design limits. As far as warning, I suspect that HP specified that the burner could use 63- or 74-minute blanks, so that might be regarded as a warning of a sort. But in fairness to HP (who is not my favorite company), that drive was probably designed and the manual printed before 80-minute blanks became available, so one can't reasonably expect HP to warn users about something that didn't exist at the time. As far as using 80-minute blanks but writing only 74 minutes or less to them, I don't know the answer to that question. I'd guess that you'd probably be okay doing that, but HP would be the ones to ask for a definitive answer. I'd guess you probably have some 80-minute blanks you want to use rather than discarding them. If that's not the case, I'll offer the same advice I've been giving since 80-minute blanks started to ship. Don't use them if you can avoid it. 80-minute blanks are less reliable than 74-minute blanks, which are in turn less reliable than 63-minute blanks (which are, alas, no longer widely available). Always use the shortest blank you can get away with. -----Original Message----- Hello, Wonderful site, lot's of good info. I am looking for information about the installation of the 3060 ADSL modem from bellsouth. I am running win 2000 and they haven't offered up much except the drivers. I have loaded the drivers and the nts software but the connection times out. If you have any information on this or can point me to the right site I would appreciate it. Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately, I have no experience with BellSouth DSL. I wish I did. They still won't let me sign up for it, because they don't know if the cabinet that serves our neighborhood will support DSL. They won't know until they literally send someone with a flashlight to go look. As far as DSL information, the best starting point I know about is the Navas Group at http://cable-dsl.home.att.net/index.htm -----Original Message----- Mr. Thompson: I used your September 8 link to Fatbrain to order your "PC Hardware in a Nutshell" book, and now I see your September 11 note about problems. Because I was a little "spam spooked" I did not give my e-mail to Fatbrain, only my telephone number. However, I did get a confirmation number of AAM1129 for this order, so you can check for credit on this one also. I have enjoyed your daynotes a lot, from your computer expertise to the hobbies and other interests that round out your e-musing tales, as well as the additions of your other contributors that round out the discussions. I hope I can add some relevant discussions of my own when I get the chance. Am trying to finish NT4 MCSE certification and need to pass two more tests --- I know, I have less than three months left --- and from that get a better start on "professional networking", which should not be a problem here in the Washington, DC area. (We'll see.) Good luck on the book!! Thanks for the kind words, and thanks for ordering the book. The deadline for the NT4 MCSE is indeed drawing quickly nigh, and that displeases a lot of people, including me. Everyone I know was shocked at how quickly Microsoft killed the NT4 MCSE, presumably to force people to adopt Windows 2000 much earlier than they might otherwise have done. In my case, getting tests taken isn't the issue. I wrote five on-line MCSE training courses for DigitalThink, which I expected would continue to sell through all of 2001, and perhaps even most of 2002. So Microsoft's decision to kill the NT4 MCSE prematurely ended up taking money out of my pocket, to the tune of a year's to 18 months' worth of royalties on sales of those courses. Basically, Microsoft's decision cut the sales of those courses by probably a third to a half. Ordinarily, I'd probably have re-written the courses for Windows 2000, but I'm booked solid as it is and DigitalThink is not a company that I'd care to work with again anyway. -----Original Message----- Read your musings about your old Pentax. My father left me an old Honeywell Pentax, but unfortunatly not the directions for use. Could you please send me the directions on how to use it or where I can get the directions. Thanks a bunch. Virginia Hanks Sorry, but I lost my manual years ago. Your best bet is probably to pick up one of the third-party books on the subject. Herbert Keppler wrote one called The Honeywell Pentax Way, which you can probably find used. Try searching on www.abebooks.com. -----Original Message----- what is this gun worth it says it was made in 1873? Sorry, but I don't do firearms valuations. Even if I did, I couldn't do one without seeing the gun. Value varies greatly not just with rarity of the model but with condition. For example, a given gun in moderately good condition might sell for several hundred dollars, while an otherwise identical gun in superb condition with all bluing intact might sell for $10,000 or even $100,000. Also, provenance has a great deal to do with value. For example, an 1875 Schofield revolver without any special provenance might sell for something in the thousands, depending on condition. A similar revolver, regardless of condition, might sell in the hundreds of thousands if it included reliable documentary evidence that it had been owned by Jesse James. Your best bet is to take the shotgun to someone who specializes in weapons of that era and have it valued. If you're considering selling it, get a second opinion, if not a third. Be prepared to pay for an appraisal. Free appraisals are worth about what they cost. And here's an interesting one from my friend and fellow O'Reilly author Paul Robichaux, who's just left on a trip to Australia to do some training. Paul is keeping a journal page to describe the trip, and we can always hope that he continues the journal once he returns. -----Original Message----- http://www.robichaux.net/personal/paul/oz.php3. It's pretty empty so far, but expect that to change in the near future. --
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wpoison
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Tuesday, 10 October 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Eyeballing the poll responses, it looks like I've gotten a couple of hundred so far. Probably 90% of those are daily readers. Interestingly, the second largest group, at perhaps 5%, are those who visit more than once a day. I seldom put up more than one post a day, so perhaps that's a hint that I should start posting more frequently. Fall weather has arrived in Winston-Salem. The last several mornings have been near freezing, with temperatures in the afternoon around 60F (16C). We're starting to see falling leaves, so it'll soon be time for me to start climbing up on the roof every weekend to blow out the gutters. My web hosting company, pair Networks, has been upgrading their servers for months to their Pair 2000 service, which will make it much easier for me to manage mail configuration, among other things. I was hoping that the server I'm on would be one of the earlier ones upgraded, but that turns out not to be the case. Here are the last three days of the upgrade schedule, after which all 200+ of pair's web servers will have been upgraded. November 6, 2000
November 7, 2000
November 8, 2000
Guess which server I'm on. Yup. I'm on wawrra.pair.com (109), the very last server to be upgraded. I guess I'm an optimist, because I figure at least they should have the bugs worked out by the time they get to my server. Most of the other people I know who are hosted at pair also ended up being upgraded late in the game. Steve Tucker is on tenshian.pair.com (103), and I think Pournelle is on neter.pair.com (132). And speaking of pair Networks, my problems publishing seem to be over. It wasn't pair Network, it wasn't FrontPage. It was RoadRunner. While we were gone, the problems cleared up, and I've been able to access my pair server normally ever since. Well, except yesterday afternoon and evening, when the SAVVIS backbone route to pair from here was down for six hours. -----Original Message----- Quietly, Booksellers Are Putting an End to the Discount Era Thanks. I'd noticed this recently with computer books, which until recently were typically discounted 30% and are now discounted only 20%, but I hadn't realized that it was a general phenomenon until you sent this article. I don't think it will impact computer book sales too badly, because most of them are purchased by people who need the information and aren't likely to hesitate just because it's selling at only 20% off instead of 30% off. But I wonder about the impact on hardcover fiction, which is a much more discretionary purchase. -----Original Message----- "As far as using 80-minute blanks but writing only 74 minutes or less to them, I don't know the answer to that question. I'd guess that you'd probably be okay doing that," AFAIK the way they get 80mins rather than 74 is to tighten the spiral (the size of the CD stays the same). From this i'd guess that writing only 74mins would do a similar amount of damage as writing the full 80. Yes, the 80-minute blanks definitely use a tighter spiral, but I believe they also extend beyond the physical area occupied on a CD by the spiral on a 74-minute blank. That's why I suggested that he contact HP. -----Original Message----- Please disguise my address. Hi Robert, Great site! Quick question - a neighbor's Win98 system starting haveing VXD errors and blue screens. Also the Kernel: Processor % stays pegged at 100% all the time. He claims that he has not installed anything new. I tried moving everything out of "Startup" and disabling all programs in the icon tray - no change. It is ok in safe mode. NAV will only run in safe mode but reports no problems when run with the latest signiture updates. Ran SFC.EXE and it replaced USER.EXE but no joy. Memory utilization and hard drive free space is ok. Any thoughts before doing a FORMAT C: ? Thanks. I'm not really a Win9X guy, but it sounds to me as though you have a rogue driver or background process sucking all the CPU ticks. If it were me, I'd strip it down to bare metal and re-install, but one of my readers may have a better solution. Another thing you can try is running MSCONFIG and disabling stuff selectively, but in my experience once a Win9X box turns that hinky the best solution is a complete strip and re-install. -----Original Message----- Hi, Robert, nice to have you back. Thought I'd respond to this e-mail: Quick question - a neighbor's Win98 system starting haveing VXD errors and blue screens. Also the Kernel: Processor % stays pegged at 100% all the time. He claims that he has not installed anything new. I tried moving everything out of "Startup" and disabling all programs in the icon tray - no change. It is ok in safe mode. NAV will only run in safe mode but reports no problems when run with the latest signiture updates. Ran SFC.EXE and it replaced USER.EXE but no joy. Memory utilization and hard drive free space is ok. Any thoughts before doing a FORMAT C: ? This sounds like problems with, believe it or not, the TCP/IP stack in 98. It is a known weak point of the OS, and it breaks sometimes for no obvious reason. Solution is to boot in safe mode, remove the old stack, re-boot, re-install the protocol, then re-boot again. All will be well, if that's the problem. You will need the Win98 CD for this. WinME uses the Win2K stack (newer, more stable...supposedly), and hopefully will not have this problem. Thanks. As I said, I'm not a Win9X guy, although I think I did know that the Win9X TCP/IP stack is deficient. I didn't realize it could cause that type of problem, though. I'll forward your mail along to the original poster.
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wpoison
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Wednesday, 11 October 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I periodically get email from people who are curious about my working schedule. I was just mapping some stuff out, so it occurred to me that some may be interested for whatever reason. Here is my expected typical schedule for the next several months: Monday - Friday:
Saturday:
Sunday:
Of course, I have numerous interruptions throughout the days--letting the dogs out, making tea for my mother, taking calls from or placing calls to hardware vendors, and so on. And I sometimes nap for an hour or so in the afternoon. But that's about how my days shape up. Fortunately, Barbara takes care of nearly all the routine stuff, freeing me up to work. Barbara is off to get her hair cut this morning. She cuts my hair, so I thought it was only fair to offer to cut her hair, using the new Ferrari® hair clippers she bought me. But for some reason, she refuses to consider letting me do it. In particular, I thought she might want to avoid going out today, because the presidential debate at Wake Forest University is something like half a mile from our house. She said she'd take back roads to avoid the traffic, though. I've gone to a new method for updating my page. In the past, I'd update the named weekly page (20001009.html in this case), save the changes, copy that page to thisweek.html, and publish. Those extra steps served as a disincentive for me to update this page more frequently, so I've decided to simplify a bit. The thisweek.html page is now a redirector page which points to the named weekly page. So you can still leave thisweek.html bookmarked, and the only change you should notice is that you'll see a blank white page for a fraction of a second before this page displays. In addition to making it simpler and faster for me to update the site, this has the other small advantage that anyone who wants to link to something on one of these weekly pages will be linking to a page with a permanent name rather than the ephemeral contents of thisweek.html. I've got some interesting stuff in the queue or soon to arrive. Norton SystemWorks 2001 is sitting on my desk now. It incorporates Norton Utilities, CleanSweep, and Norton Anti-virus. I'll probably load it on a test-bed for a quick trial and then give it a shot on my main systems. And a Compaq Armada E500 notebook system should be arriving Friday. I suppose that means I need to run a 100BaseT cable out to the den so I can work in the evening while I'm being a couch potato. As usual, one project like that implies doing others first, and I notice that I now have no free ports on my hub. My main office hub has only 8 ports, with another 4 port hub over on the test-bed table. Although 12 ports seems like overkill for one office, perhaps I'll upgrade my main hub to 16 ports, move the 8-port hub over to the test-bed table, and move the 4-port hub back to Barbara's office. Either that, or maybe I'll try working unconnected with the notebook except when I'm in the office. There would have been a network port in the den already, but Barbara simply refused to allow me to have a full desktop system set up on and around my end table in the den. Same thing in the bathroom, incidentally. When we remodeled the hall bathroom a couple of years ago, I wanted to install a phone jack and a 100BaseT port near the toilet. Barbara thought I was kidding, but I was dead serious. So, as usual, we compromised. I didn't install either one. At least I'm allowed to keep my cordless phone on the back of the toilet, but that doesn't help much for data. -----Original Message----- >but in my experience once a Win9X box turns that hinky the best solution is a complete strip and re-install.< As I once heard a presenter put at a Windows training seminar, "Windows is the only operating system with a half-life." Peter A. Moore Very apt. Much less true of NT, though, although I still do sometimes strip NT boxes down to bare metal and re-install. But at least that's not a way of life, as it is with Windows 9X. -----Original Message----- Robert Did you notice Seti web site has been down today? I noticed at about 5:00 AM and it is still down at 2:20 PM. (EST) Question: Should a Pentium II 233Mhz (64Meg laptop) be 20% faster than a Celeron 400Mhz (128Meg desktop) at doing seti? It sure appears that mine are. Mike Boyle Yep, it appears that SETI was effectively down from early yesterday morning until last night. I finally started to get through, with difficulty, late last night. The problem hasn't completely gone away, though. This morning, one of my systems was sitting with an error message on the screen to tell me that it couldn't contact the server. I'd considered installing one of those programs that cache SETI data blocks to allow the system to continue working when SETI can't be contacted, but that seems an unnecessary complication. As far as your relative speeds on the Pentium II and Celeron, I'd expect the Pentium II to be a bit faster clock-for-clock. A Pentium II/233 might match a Celeron/300, for example. But there's no way a Pentium II/233 should be as fast as a Celeron/400, let alone 20% faster. There are a lot of issues concerning SETI processing speed, and I haven't taken time to find out what they all are. The FAQ on the SETI site is a good starting point, as is the detailed performance information posted on Ars Technica. -----Original Message----- Mr. Thompson: 1.) My best friend just moved to the Dartmouth area for post-graduate medical training. He confirms your experience. The trouble with housing almost caused him to choose a different program in Cleveland. However, he did manage to find a home; his family is loving the area. I spoke with him this week and he told me that leaves changing color in the fall is a much different experience than in Cleveland. If you'd like, I would be happy to put you in touch with him. 2.) In my browser, the "Jump to Linux Chronicles page" link is repeated in the header. The text reads Jump to Linux Chronicles pageJump to Linux Chronicles page. You seem to be a stickler for detail; I thought you'd like to know. 3.) In the body of my response to your survey, I wrote: "This is a test if you read this.... I read more than once a day since I usually jump the gun and check to see if you've sent the morning update. I bring the comment to your attention based on your idea of writing updates more frequently. I wonder if your other semi-daily readers are in the same habit? I truly enjoy your writing and website. As I said, I check it more than once a day because I am anxious for my daily fix. But, please, do not publish more than once a day... I have work to do... Thank you for your courtesy, Richard Micko Thanks for the kind words. Much though we like New Hampshire, we've now ruled it out and are looking elsewhere, although I appreciate your offer. As far as the duplicated link, I have no idea how that happened originally, but it's fixed now. I keep an empty copy of next week's page, and then copy it each time I change weeks, updating the links appropriately. So if an error like that sneaks in, it gets replicated from then on. As far as update frequency, I'll probably still be doing updates once a day most of the time, but I will sometimes do multiple updates. -----Original Message----- Hi Bob - Glad you're back from New England - regarding your house hunting in that neck of the woods, here in Minnesota we had something similar. My sister and her husband looked for eighteen months, ending about a year ago - houses that went to the MLS at nine in the morning had offers by three, and by five, when they'd stop by after work to tour the place, there was typically another party sitting at the dining room table writing up a purchase agreement. Or put another way, our real estate agent said the typical valuation growth they expect around here is about 5% annually. Some of our areas have experienced 40% ANNUAL increase in value. Whyinheck I'm looking for a house now I'll never understand. Oh, yeah, it's the wife's idea... Good luck to you, too. ;-) http://www.goldengate.net/~jdominik/index.html Yep, that's pretty much what it was like in New Hampshire. I just did a quick lookup on Knoxville (Tennessee is another area we're considering) and found that there were almost 4,000 homes on the market in that area. Now, granted, the Knoxville area is probably larger than all the towns in New Hampshire combined, but even so.
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Thursday, 12 October 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] My Internet connection went down again last night. It was fine until late evening. When I stopped in the office to check my email and jot down a couple of thoughts, I found I couldn't get out to the Internet from any of my machines. Cursing out RoadRunner, I reached for the Belkin KVM switch to toggle it over to meepmeep, my RoadRunner box. As it turned out, RoadRunner wasn't dead at all. Meepmeep was dead. But not from natural causes, no. When I did a power reset the system rebooted normally, but with a message that the event log was full. I fired up Event Viewer and found a ton of critical error messages, the ones with the red icon, all of which said that my IDE CD-ROM drive was dead. Well, not in so many words. The message was in ARC syntax, but it was pretty obvious which drive had the problem since I'd just booted from the hard disk and the only other drive in the system is the CD-ROM drive. That's the first time ever that I've seen a CD-ROM just die on a system that was running normally. I've seen them die at boot time, but I've never had one just burn out while a system was running. So I restarted the system, fired up CMOS Setup, and told Setup to disable the secondary ATA interface. That did it. No more error messages. Of course, no more CD-ROM drive, either, but that's not a problem on this machine. Barbara is off to play golf with her father this morning. I keep trying to convince her to take Malcolm and/or Duncan with her. Both are well-behaved, and it would be easy enough to train a Border Collie to do the right thing on a golf course. Watch the drive, run and get the ball, head for the green, and drop it in the hole. That counts, incidentally, or it did the last time I looked at the rules of golf. If an animal interferes with a shot, one plays it from where it lies. "Just think, dear. You could be in the Guinness Book of Records. The only person ever to play 18 holes of golf with a total score of 18. That's 54 shots under par!" Didn't work, though. Never does. I just spoke with my editor at O'Reilly yesterday, and he hinted in his usual gentle way that he'd like to see some chapters from Jerry and me soon. So that means I have to buckle down and get some serious work done over the next couple of weeks. I have a bunch of chapters in various states of completion. I have to get those finished up and get them to Pournelle so he can work on them. That means updates around here are likely to be short to non-existent for a couple weeks or more. I'll be reading all mail I receive, but posting very little of it. Sorry. And my new Compaq Armada E500 notebook system should arrive today. That'll allow me to work all evening in the den, for a while in bed before I go to sleep, and so on. Won't that thrill Barbara? Only kidding, dear. I used to be able to pull 14-hour writing days for weeks on end, but nowadays I'm pretty much whipped after 10 hours or so of straight writing. -----Original Message----- Dear Robert, First, permit me to commend your web-site. It's on my daily list of 'must visits'. Judging by the number of balls, chain saws, etc., you juggle, I have hopes you or your readers have run across a solution to keeping track of multiple projects. As a consultant & contract engineer (Hardware and Embedded Firmware) I have multiple clients and projects and am looking for a package that will permit tracking project task lists within the same package used for Daytimer/Franklin Planner type organization ( Meeting schedules, To-Do Lists, Contact Lists, etc. ) Ecco Pro looked like a possible solution, but sadly has been relegated to the list of unsupported packages. Have you heard of anything along this line? Thanks, Jay Harris Sorry, but no. I just use Outlook's Calendar and Tasks to keep me on-track. Its one glaring lack is its inability to group and track projects from within its calendar, but I do okay with it as it is. There must be a good product out there that does what you suggest, but I don't know of it. Perhaps one of the sales-tracking products like Act? Perhaps one of my readers can suggest something. -----Original Message----- Robert: I saw on your page that you are considering the Knoxville Tennessee area for possible relocation. I don't think that you will be dissappointed with the area. Having moved to the area from San Antonio Texas (yeh, I know that is not saying much) I can highly recommend the area. I would also recommend that you look outside the Knoxville area, say something in the Oak Ridge area. I live in Oliver Springs which is 10 minutes from Oak Ridge, 25 minutes from West Knoxville. Oliver Springs is a small town (< 5,000), whereas Oak Ridge is about 25,000 people. Oak Ridge and Oliver Springs both have cable modems and parts of Oak Ridge have DSL service. Oak Ridge has a city school system and you will pay a lot more in taxes in Oak Ridge than you will outside of Oak Ridge. If you choose to be in the county rather than the city you will save a lot on city taxes. Oak Ridge is a high technology city with all the nuclear plants in the area. The Oak Ridge National Lab is close, Y12 weapons plant, and East Tennessee Technology Park. The area is safe as the reactors involved are purely research and the plants are highly protected with high visibility from oversight organizations. The climate is not much different than the area that you currently live. We have natural gas for heating and electrical rates are fairly low. There is a lot of fresh water in the area for many types of water activities. There is also a top rate rowing club and water area in Oak Ridge where many of the college rowing teams compete. Tennessee has no state income tax but a high (8.25%) sales tax on everything except medical (that includes food). They are fighting about a state income tax in the senate but it will take a lot for that to happen. There are also many other small towns and areas to consider. Clinton is not too bad. My personal favorite if I was to move again would be Kingston. It is not too far from Knoxville and is really a pleasant town. You will have to put up with crowds of people in orange and white clothes when Tennessee is playing a home game. Don't even think of traveling the interstate during the two hours before and two hours after the game. Ray Thompson Thanks. Yes, Knoxville is one of the areas we're looking at. Barbara was checking it on the Internet the other day, along with areas up in the western North Carolina mountains, like Asheville and the vicinity. My attitude is that we should take our time to settle on an area, but Barbara wants to move quickly. So I'm not really sure if we'll move in a few months or a year or two. But Barbara definitely wants a place where we have some land and no really close neighbors. -----Original Message----- I hadn't heard this one in a while: Two engineering students were walking across campus when one said, "where did you get such a great bike?" The second engineer replied, "well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. she threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "take what you want." The second engineer nodded approvingly, "good choice; the clothes probably wouldn't have fit." I don't get it. -----Original Message----- Hey Robert, As a daily reader I figured i may as well kick in my small contribution to the Daynotes Seti@home group. I have been quite perplexed with the amount of time it takes to process work units on various computers. My worst record was 147 hours on a 486/100. Best was around 9 hours on a dual PIII/600 with 256 megs of RAM. I have found that the fastest crunching seems to be running CLI mode on windows or running on linux ( not in X however ). Would be rather interesting to crunch all the data from everyone in the group and see what our averages our for each type of machine. Keep up the battle! -- Ray Webmaster by Day and <unfortunately> webmaster by night and weekend and... ;-) ps. check out http://www.thinkgeek.com they have some great computer paraphernalia. I picked up an awesome t-shirt which reads <beer>happiness</beer>. Can't get truer than that! There's some interesting stuff over on Ars Technica about SETI performance on various platforms. It seems that Windows 9X is the fastest OS for SETI, followed by Linux, and then NT. That's not been my experience, though.
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Friday, 13 October 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I get so many deliveries that I've signed releases with FedEx, UPS, Airborne, RPS, and probably every other package delivery service. The releases hold them harmless if they deliver a package to the door and drop it there without getting a signature. Usually, that works out well. Yesterday, it didn't. I was expecting the Compaq Armada to arrive yesterday morning, having followed its progress via the FedEx on-line tracking system. At about 9:00 the dogs started barking and I heard a noise on the front porch. I went out there, opened the door, and saw an envelope lying on the front porch. That contained an early copy of PC Hardware in a Nutshell, which I was also expecting. What wasn't there was the Compaq Armada. The door was sliding closed on the FedEx truck as I opened our front door. I kind of expected the FedEx lady to step back out of the truck with the Compaq, but she drove away. Okay, I figured, perhaps it's on another truck. The truck had the old FedEx logo colors, while the on-line tracking system had the new logo colors, which Barbara and I first noticed on our trip to New England. The computer was coming via tip-top priority, so perhaps FedEx had two sets of trucks driving around. Or so I suspected. A little while later, I did a refresh on the on-line tracking screen, only to find that the computer had been delivered and signed for by someone whose name I didn't recognize. Huh? I went and looked out the front door, just in case. Not there. I went and looked out the back door, because sometimes FedEx drivers other than my usual lady deliver stuff around back. Not there, either. So I called FedEx and spoke to a very nice and cheerful lady. "Oh, my," she said, "we seem to have delivered that to the wrong place." And she started laughing. She quickly apologized and said that she'd been laughing because the address they delivered it to wasn't even close to our address. She gave me the name and address of the recipient, which turned out to be the Alltel Telephone Store, located at a strip mall a mile or so from here. She said they'd pick it up and deliver it this afternoon, but I told her I'd just drive down and get it. So I did. My first impressions are very favorable. In fact, the Compaq Armada E500 is already a candidate for my cold, dead fingers award. After some very bad experiences over the years with name-brand notebooks (not including Compaq) I'd about sworn off notebooks except for situations where they were absolutely, positively necessary. But this notebook is very, very nice. It has a Pentium III/700 processor, 128 MB of RAM, 12 GB hard drive, CD-ROM drive, floppy drive, and a combination 56K modem and 10/100 Ethernet adapter. I had the choice of Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000. I'm certainly no fan of Windows 2000, but, as I've noted before, a notebook system is one place where Windows 2000 makes sense, so that's what I chose. The screen is a 14" TFT, which sounds small, but "feels" like a 17" monitor. The keyboard is the best I've ever used on a notebook system. The layout will take a bit of getting used to (e.g., I keep hitting Caps Lock instead of Shift), but the feel is good and the keys are full size (or close enough not to matter for me). Mouse functions are implemented via a large touchpad centered below the keyboard, between the speakers. That takes a bit of getting used to as well, but I like it a lot better than the "eraser nub" stick on IBM notebooks I've used. Overall, after playing with the Compaq Armada E500 notebook for several hours, installing Office 2000, and so on, I think this notebook is almost certainly Good Enough to serve as the primary system for nearly anyone. I could certainly write a book on it, and I may do just that. Right now, the notebook is a stand-alone system unless I bring it into my office and plug it into the hub. I have a separate shipment coming that includes a spare battery and a port replicator, which'll make it much easier to connect and disconnect the notebook from my office network. Until then, I'll just dump all my data off the network server to a CD-R or CD-RW disc and copy it up to the notebook. That brings up the danger of having two versions of the same document in play, of course, so I'll dispense with that method as soon as I get the port replicator (and perhaps run a 100BaseT cable to the den). This is a very nice computer. Much more about it later. -----Original Message----- Mr. Harris brings up a topic with which I have struggled for years. I, too, always have several projects going at once with different deadlines, contacts, and appointments for each. I desperately have needed the ability to create Gantt (timeline) charts. Since about 1997 I have tracked this, but the results of my experiments and research have convinced me to stick with Microsoft and Outlook--for several reasons. Only Microsoft seems to be continuing development; Lotus Notes would do much of what I need, but further development appears almost non-existent--certainly not on the order of that for Outlook and other MS programs. Notes also has a learning curve and isn't easy to integrate with the other MS programs I use. Oh yes: Notes also crashes. Similarly, most third party software I have chanced upon, is developed, then cast afloat. The Daytimer product has been through two incarnations so far, each done by different contract developers. And finally, every product lacks some feature I need. With Outlook, it is two-fold: 1) no Gantt charts; 2) it is impossible to generate recurring tasks and track their progress. INCREDIBLY, Outlook requires the first instance of the task to be 100% completed BEFORE it creates the next instance. When the minions are given tasks, sometimes they don't complete them. I need to know when that happens, but that's NOT an excuse for them to get out of the same task next week! But even in view of all that, I have stuck with Outlook. Outlook is quite powerful, owing to its almost infinite configurability. By assigning a category to each project (a number in my case), I can create a window with a view which displays most of what I need to see, individualized for each project by using the categories. These windows can be left open, and Outlook will automatically close them all, and open them again on start-up--IF you "Exit and log off", not just a plain "Exit" (I believe this also requires the Corporate Workgroup install, which is the only way I've ever used it). I still create the Gantt charts by hand in the word processor, although--given time I don't have--I believe it is possible to create VBA scripts which could automate my needs in that area. In fact, a lot of things Outlook will not do itself, CAN be accessed by VBA scripts. See Slipstick Systems http://www.slipstick.com/ for sample scripts. And, by all means, get Tom Syroid's and Bo Leuf's book, which explains much of the functionality in Outlook that most people probably don't even know exists. Many love to hate Microsoft, but their programs cross-integrate better as time moves on, and it's just plain easier to upgrade everything with an Office upgrade, than having to remember to check with a bunch of other vendors to find out if upgrading is necessary--or even available. Meanwhile, in weak moments, I have thought about popping for Microsoft Project, which WILL do Gantt charts. But then sanity always returns, when I realize that it takes a fair amount of Gantt chart creation to equal the over $300 retail price. Finally, a Canadian firm called Amicus makes a program which does everything I need. Alas, it is customized for attorneys, with a price that only they can afford. Pity. --Chuck Yes, I know exactly what you mean. With each release of Outlook, from 97 to 98 to 2000, I've kept hoping that Microsoft would add the functionality necessary to make Outlook into a mini-Project. I don't even need the Gannt and CPM stuff. All I really need is the ability to create tiered sub-tasks within tasks. That'd let me make a top-level task the root of a project, with subtasks and subsubtasks depending from it. But I can live with what I have now, although I realize that those with more demanding requirements really need more. -----Original Message----- Hi Robert, Sorry to hear your house hunting did not go too well. Have you thought about Texas as a possible choice? Besides the damn heat in the summer, I really enjoy living here. There is no state income tax, property is very inexpensive, and if you have any desire to get "closer" to the technology, Richardson, Texas is home to the "telco corridor" which many are calling the second Silicon valley. You can also likely afford as much space as you would like...of course the more space you put between yourself and civilization the less likely you are to get broadband access from home :-) It isn't uncommon for early retirees to buy land, have a half finished house built (raw interior), and live in a trailer for six months while they're finishing the inside. I assume the interior work is likely done as much for fun as to save money. Keep up the good work on your site! I'm getting there with mine, but still need to finish up automation--I'm using perl to automate the process for the daynotes which will just let me create a text file with the day of the week as the update. --ron -- Thanks. Actually, I like the idea of Texas, but it's a bit far for Barbara. When we were first talking about moving, I'd considered places like Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and so on, but Barbara really didn't want to be that far from her family. Actually, New England was pushing it. So we'll probably end up moving to somewhere in a nearby state, if not elsewhere in North Carolina itself.
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Saturday, 14 October 2000 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Barbara put up a page with some photos of our trip. My favorite is the road construction one. We were driving down an ordinary little 2-lane blacktop road in northern New Hampshire, trying to get from Point A to Point B, when we saw a sign: Road Construction - Next 10 Miles. We figured that meant they were repairing potholes or something. But no, the sign meant exactly what it said. They were building the damned road from scratch, or so it appeared. Here's a shot out the front window of the Trooper. That's all graded dirt. No pavement we could see.
PC Hardware in a Nutshell is finally starting to arrive in the bookstores. I've been checking Amazon.com (although I won't buy from them) regularly for the last few days to see when the book actually arrived in stock. A couple days ago, the book's rank was over 300,000 and it wasn't showing as in stock. Yesterday, it was showing in stock, but with a rank of nearly 100,000. This morning, it really debuted at Amazon.com, with a rank of 3,178. Of course, we hope it climbs into the low- or mid-hundreds and stays there. If you've been intending to buy a copy and haven't done so yet, please do. We'd appreciate it if you'd order it from our Fatbrain link, which earns us a commission. Also, if you like the book and can spare a moment, it wouldn't hurt to post a favorable review on Amazon, even if you didn't get the book there. I'm not sure how much good favorable Amazon reviews do for book sales, but they can't hurt. We're going up against Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs. I don't think that's a very good book, but it is the book that everyone thinks of when they think about PC hardware books. So we need to gain mindshare against that book. -----Original Message----- If your new Compaq laptop (hawk, spit) has Windows 2000 on it, use the Offline Files synchronise thingy to ensure that you have only one copy of every document you work on. It's a bit like the old Briefcase widget of bad memory, but this one seems to work. I can get it to work from a W2K Pro machine against an NT server, too, which is handy. The only caveat is that if you have nested folders it wants to put everything into one, giant folder instead, which is most definitely not handy. Anyway, that should work until you can rip up the floorboards and flood-wire the entire house. Regards Chris Ward-Johnson Thanks. I may give that a try, although my data directory is something like 7 levels deep. Incidentally, let me know how your new Toshiba laptop (hawk, spit) works out. -----Original Message----- Mine too, and that's a real pain. You can sort by location but everything's in one huge folder, as far as I can tell. So you can list all your data\book\chapter one files together but I prefer having nested folders. How can you stand the Compaq's mushpad? It's right where I want to have the heel of my right hand when I'm typing, which means that I keep touching it, moving the cursor and so end up typing in the wrong place. Regards Chris Ward-Johnson Yeah, the touchpad takes a little getting used to, but I like it a lot better than the eraser nub thingee that the IBM ThinkPads use. My touchpad is centered between the speakers, below the keyboard. The heels of my hands rest more or less over the speakers rather than on the pad. I think the touchpad is the best mouse alternative I've seen on a notebook, but I confess that I will probably use a regular mouse when the system is docked. For that matter, I may use a mouse with it even when I'm away from the office. I have a little Microsoft Basic Mouse that'll work fine, weighs very little, and takes up little space.
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[Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I've been reading old Scotland Yard cases for relaxation. Yesterday, I read about the two famous physician/poisoners, Thomas Neill Cream and Hawley Harvey Crippen. Both were convicted and hanged, Cream in 1892 and Crippen in 1910. In Cream's case, it was fully justifiable. He was a true maniac, a serial killer in Bundy's class. He picked women at random on the street and convinced them to swallow pills full of strychnine, simply because he enjoyed visualizing their agonizing deaths. Cream's famous last words, as the trap was sprung, were "I am Jack the ..." He wasn't, of course. He'd been convicted in the US of performing illegal abortions, and had spent ten years in prison in Illinois, including the entire period that Jack the Ripper had been active in London. Crippen was something else entirely. He was hanged for murdering his wife, but it's quite likely that he didn't murder her at all. She was from all accounts a complete harridan, a drunkard, and an adulteress. For some time before her death, he had been administering a then-new drug called hyoscine (also called scopolamine) to calm her rages, with some success. According to his story, on the fateful evening, she retired to her darkened bedroom, drunk, and mistook the bottle of hyoscine tablets for her headache pills. He later found her dead of a hyoscine overdose. In panic, thinking that no one would believe it had been an accident, he decided to dispose of her body. He cut her up and buried her in the basement, subsequently spreading a story that she'd returned to the United States. Scotland Yard eventually found out the truth, and Crippen fled. In the first use of radio to apprehend a fugitive, Scotland Yard radioed the ship at sea upon which Crippen and Ethel Le Neve, his former secretary and intended future wife, were fleeing to the US, with Le Neve disguised as a boy. The Scotland Yard investigators sympathized with Crippen, and thought that he was probably telling the truth. But cutting up one's wife's body and disposing of the pieces was pretty hard to explain, as was his attempted flight. So Crippen was convicted and hanged, probably wrongly. Le Neve was charged as an accessory after the fact, but was acquitted. She subsequently married and lived quietly in Britain until her death in the late 1960's. There's mail, but I need to get back to work. More tomorrow.
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