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Week of 13 December 1999 Sunday, 19 December 1999 09:56 A (mostly) daily journal of the trials, tribulations, and random observations of Robert Bruce Thompson, a writer of computer books. |
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Monday, 13 December 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] More work with Linux last night. On advice from Dave Farquhar, I tried running Xconfigurator. No joy. It chokes on my Matrox Millennium PCI video card, which is surely one of the more common video cards used on systems that Linux is likely to be run on. I think I'll take his second suggestion, which is to reinstall. I like to keep up with the Jones's in computer equipment, but this is getting ridiculous. Tom Syroid has installed an IBM RS/6000 F50/7025 minicomputer in his home office, from which he plans to run his web site and an unspecified small city. This thing has four PPC processors, a gig of RAM, and 14 SCSI hard drives, so he can probably do it, too. A lot of back-channel communication goes on among the members of what Bo Leuf designated the Daynotes Gang. Many of us end up making changes to our pages based on these discussions. The most recent changes had to do with the fact that most of us use a page named current.html (or something similar) that contains the most recent week's page. The problem with that is that links to anything on that page become obsolete when the new week arrives. Brian Bilbrey came up with the clever idea of using current.html as a redirect page that points to the named weekly page. Chris Ward-Johnson (aka Dr. Keyboard) pointed out that because the redirect page disappears after a second or two, it was very difficult for new readers to bookmark it. As a solution to that problem, I did a JavaScript link to automatically generate an entry in Favorites for IE4/5 users Add Daynotes Journal to Favorites (IE4/5 only) but that generated howls of outrage. What about people who use Navigator? What about people who have JavaScript disabled? And what's Thompson doing writing JavaScript anyway? Good points all. Bo Leuf suggested a low-tech approach. Put a link to current.html on the named weekly page, and let people right click it to add a bookmark. Okay. Fair enough. * * * * *
I agree. I've always regarded 800X600 as appropriate for 15" monitors, 1024 for 17", 1280 for 19" and 1600 for 21". And the refresh rates that most monitors support at given resolutions supports that. I'll run 75 Hz in an emergency, but basically I want my monitor to support 85 Hz refresh at whatever resolution I'm running. My new Hitachi supports 85 Hz at 1280, but only 75 Hz at 1600. Even at only 75 Hz, though, I'm surprised by just how good the Hitachi looks at 1600. No noticeable flicker or image instability. As you say, though, everything is just too small at 1600 on a 19" tube. * * * * *
Actually, that wouldn't be a problem. I checked headers on sample messages from the four or five listserves that Barbara was subscribed to. On all but one, the To: line contained "barbara@ttgnet.com". On the one exception, X-envelope-To included her address. My attitude is that if her address is anywhere in the headers, I'll be able to sort it out locally. * * * * *
I think I did pick a bus mouse, but that was the only choice available that was close to what I have. As I recall, there was no option to choose a PS/2 mouse, and I remember looking for that choice. I was going to say that I hadn't had any video problems, and that was true until I ran Xconfigurator, which choked on my Matrox Millennium PCI video card. I have the actual Red Hat distribution CDs, but this old Gateway Pentium/133 doesn't support booting from CD. * * * * *
No doubt. Now all I have to do is get it configured properly. I think I'm just going to re-install. I always figure that doing multiple re-installs of a new OS is no bad thing, so we'll see what happens. * * * * *
Nah, I always understand Rudzki's point when he has one. As it happens, Barbara makes pitchers of both leaded and unleaded ice tea. I drink only the unleaded stuff. Caffeine is a relatively mild diuretic (as compared with, say, Lasix) so I'm not too concerned. Also, any kind of arbitrary ratio of how much non-caffeinated beverage you require per unit of caffeinated beverage ignores the fact that different caffeinated beverages contain vastly different quantities of caffeine. Coke contains a relatively small amount of caffeine, as does tea. Well, actually tea contains more caffeine than coffee weight for weight, but tea as a beverage contains much less caffeine than coffee as a beverage. * * * * *
Sure. Here's my current .mailproto: FORWARD To barbara thompsrb@bellsouth.net Here's .procmailrc "|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/local/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #ttgnet" Here's an example of the headers from one of the messages that
pair now fails to forward (but was forwarding successfully before I
changed .mailproto): * * * * * Arghh. I've had it. I'm going back to doing things the way I used to. I'll keep identical copies of the named weekly page (in this case, 1213RTDN.html) and thisweek.html. If anyone links to something on thisweek.html instead of on the corresponding named weekly page, tough. I need to publish from kiwi rather than kerby anyway. You might expect that it wouldn't matter which machine I published from, but you'd probably be wrong. My guess is that the first time I publish from kiwi, FP2K is going to publish the entire site. I don't know why it tracks stuff on a per-machine basis rather than per the local web, but there it is.
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Tuesday, 14 December 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I spent most of yesterday working on a chapter. Updates will be shorter than usual this week. Actually, they'll be shorter for the next several months, assuming I can discipline myself to strictly limit the amount of time I spend working on this site. I have lots of work left to do on the books, a dentist appointment tomorrow (ugh), and I'm thinking it's about time to get started on my Christmas shopping. Several readers have written to ask why I've been so slow in responding to their mail (or not responded at all). I'm sorry, but I am really covered up at the moment, and that's likely to remain true for quite some time to come. I do read everything I get, except Spam, but replying takes more time than I have right now, and posting the messages and replies takes still more time. I've put the Linux box on the back burner for now. I simply don't have time to mess with it. I hope that will change in a month or two.
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Wednesday, 15 December 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Barbara is really very mechanically-inclined. Yesterday she came into my office to announce that the CD changer that we thought was fixed was in fact hosed. I asked her how she knew, and she said that it had grabbed the cartridge with 5 CDs in it and wouldn't let go. Since she was holding the cartridge in her hand as she told me this, I asked her how she'd gotten it to let go of the cartridge if it wouldn't let go of the cartridge. She replied that she'd disassembled the unit and forced it to cough up the cartridge. You have to love a woman who can force a recalcitrant piece of home audio equipment to comply with her wishes. I guess we'll pitch that CD changer. More likely, Barbara will give it to Goodwill in case they have some use for it. And it's off to the dentist for me. * * * * *
I must be missing something. Why is it much nicer for the readers to use the redirect page? It seems to me that the result is more or less the same either way from the reader's point of view, except that with the redirect you have to look at the redirect page for a couple of seconds. The only advantage I can see to using the redirect page is that it makes it easier to link to specific items on the page. I've had several users comment that they preferred my old method of using identical copies of thisweek.html and the named weekly page, so I changed back to it. You're the only one so far who's indicated a preference for the redirect page.
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Thursday, 16 December 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Barbara is off to play golf with her father, leaving me as pup-sitter. Malcolm is 12 weeks old today. As usual, I tried to convince Barbara to take Malcolm along, but with as little success as usual. This morning, I told her, "I read on the Internet somewhere that if you want to train a golf dog, you should start taking him along with you when he's no older than 12 weeks." Didn't work. Didn't really expect it to. Tom Syroid sent me a copy of the installation chapter from the Outlook in a Nutshell book he and Bo Leuf are writing for O'Reilly. I must say that the chapter looks fine to me, at least after a quick read-through. This is the chapter that's been giving Tom fits for a month now. I know the feeling. The file name is Chapter2.1215A.doc. I hope the 1215 refers to the date rather than the revision number. And speaking of chapters, I'm getting ready to send one off to my editor, finally. This one is on building PCs. I hope it doesn't choke his mailbox. It's over 10 MB, most of which is due to embedded image files. And the plumbers just showed up to fix the faucet in the hall bathroom. They'd come by a couple of weeks ago, but needed to order a part. I had to shut them in the bathroom because Malcolm was insisting on helping them. Fortunately, they have a sense of humor. Well, that took about two minutes. We had an interesting Y2K discussion as they were leaving. I told them that I didn't really expect much to happen. I also told them that everyone I know who really knows computers says they don't expect many problems, but is stocking up on food and water nonetheless. "Do as I do" is usually a better guideline than "do as I say." Enough for now. I have to get another chapter finished. * * * * *
I haven't gotten all that much feedback from readers on this issue, but what I have gotten runs two or three to one in favor of using the old original method (what I'm using right now). It takes me only a few extra seconds to copy the named weekly file to thisweek.html, so I guess I'll keep doing that. The main problem with the redirector page is that caching problems arise. I've noticed that myself on several other journal pages that have switched to using the redirector. Depending on your browser version and cache settings, you never get the redirector page that points to the new week. Clicking Reload or Refresh simply clears the redirector page and displays last week's journal page. So I think I'll stick with the two-page method. * * * * *
I hadn't thought about people using Offline Browsing, which is strange since I do it myself for The Register. It sounds like you have Offline Browsing set to download 0 levels beneath thisweek.html. If you don't mind giving up a few megabytes of disk space, perhaps the easiest thing would be to bookmark http://www.ttgnet.com/index.html as the top page, and tell IE to go down three levels. That would get everything, I think. There are more than three levels, but I think no page is further than 3 levels from the top, counting links. I don't mind people synchronizing my entire site, although I hope that not everyone will do it on the same day. Once you have the entire site synchronized, subsequent updates download only a few pages.
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Friday, 17 December 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] This time of year, the phrase "batteries not included" rears its ugly head. Buying a digital camera immediately impresses upon you how important battery issues are. My Olympus D400-Z has a relatively small appetite. Shooting outdoors, without using flash or the LCD, I get 50 or more shots on a set of four alkaline AAs. Some people aren't that lucky. Some digital camera models allow as few as ten shots on a set of batteries. That can put you in the poorhouse very quickly. As most digital camera users know by now, NiMH batteries are the way to go. But, as with many other things, the issues aren't always as straightforward as they at first appear. I decided to do some research on NiMH batteries, both for my book and for personal use. A short web search turned up Thomas Distributing as an excellent source of information about NiMH batteries. I have various batteries and chargers on the way from Thomas, and will report on the results as I complete my tests. Going into it, I expect to find that there are few real differences between brands of "good" NiMH batteries. I also expect to find that not all NiMH batteries are "good". Traditional battery manufacturers like Eveready and Duracell have a compelling interest in making sure that NiMH batteries don't catch on. I have already read various reports and allegations concerning these companies' attempts to protect sales of their alkaline batteries, including producing inferior quality NiMH batteries with relatively small storage capacities. I don't know if that's true or not. But from their point of view that would make sense, because one $2.50 NiMH battery may replace 300 to 1,000 alkaline batteries. If your core business is making and selling alkaline batteries, NiMH is a deadly threat. Based on experiments I've already done with the NiMH batteries I'm using in the Olympus D400-Z versus standard alkaline batteries, I've already come up with a few tentative conclusions:
Well, I'd better get back to work.
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Saturday, 18 December 1999 [Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] I completed my Saturnalia shopping yesterday, the first time I've done so without waiting until the last minute. In the past, I'd aimed at having it done by December 23rd. After all, what's FedEx for? This year, I completed my shopping with more than a week to spare. This is the first year that I've done 100% of my shopping on-line. I didn't make any phone calls or speak to any salespeople. I simply pointed and clicked. One issue with potentially deep implications is that it's much cheaper for businesses to take orders on-line than to employ people to process them. Certainly, the cost of bringing up an e-commerce site is high, but it's nothing compared to the costs of producing, printing, and mailing catalogs, let alone building and sustaining an 800 order desk. I'd guess that L. L. Bean, for example, probably spent far less designing and constructing their on-line commerce site than they spend each year on traditional order generation and fulfillment methods. And the annual cost to maintain the on-line site is probably a tenth or less the cost of printing and mailing all those catalogs and paying people to answer the phones. That has implications for how much it costs to buy things traditionally versus on-line, and that cost differential is already starting to be reflected. Many sites, for example, throw in a bonus if you order on-line. For example, you pay the same price either way, but if you order on-line, you get an optional-but-necessary cable for free, or a free set of NiMH batteries and a charger. Some sites actually have "on-line only" prices already, and the difference can be substantial. One direct computer vendor I contacted adds a $25 "processing fee" if you speak to a salesperson instead of completing your order on-line. Expect to see this become more common. In a couple of years, L. L. Bean and similar retailers will probably employ half or fewer the number of 800 order takers that they do now, and will provide strong economic incentives to buyers to use their on-line ordering rather than speaking to a salesperson. Barbara and I stopped by the library the other day so that I could replenish my stock of books and she could do some research. I finished before she did, and sat down to wait. As usual, I picked up the current copy of Scientific American. It mentioned briefly an interesting theory about why violent crime is on the wane in this country. Various people have tried to correlate this drop with such factors as more police on the streets, more inmates in prison, and so on. None of those things correlates very well. Crime dropped about the same amount in cities that have added police as it did in those that did not, for example. But one thing does correlate remarkably well. Roe v. Wade. The authors speculate that when abortions became readily available, the number of unwanted children who were born dropped dramatically, which reduced the supply of likely future criminals. Violent crimes are most likely to be committed by 18- to 25-year-old males, and Roe v. Wade simply reduced the future number of those. The decrease in violent crimes begins 18 years after Roe v. Wade and continues today. All of this is horribly Politically Incorrect, of course, but intuitively it makes sense, at least to me. Neither the pro-choice or anti-abortion camps are comfortable with this, the latter for obvious reasons, and the former because of the risk that it will be perceived as latter-day eugenics. Doubtless there will be outcries from the same folks who so shrilly vilified Jensen and Shockley and The Bell Curve. But it will be interesting to see if anyone offers any substantial rebuttal. What with the world about to end, Ragnarok, the Second Coming, and all of that, I got to thinking the other day about who I'd like to have attend my End of the World Dinner Party. Here, alphabetically, are the people I invited:
I've emailed invitations to all of them. None have RSVP'd yet, but I'm still hoping for a good turn-out. Barbara suggested that my original list showed a certain bias against the life-impaired, so I also invited:
Unfortunately, the emails I sent to these people all bounced. * * * * *
Thanks. If I'd seen that article first I probably wouldn't have bothered posting mine. Incidentally, I charged up a set of AA Kodak 1450 mAH NiMH batteries and put them in Barbara's portable CD player. She gets 40 to 45 minutes on a set of alkalines, or less than a full CD. Given the high current draw, I expected the NiMH batteries to do much better, and they have. She's playing her third full CD so far on that first set of NiMHs, and they're showing no signs of dying yet. * * * * *
I've never tried recharging alkalines. I think Consumer Reports did a report on this a couple of years ago, and concluded that it wasn't worth it. But I believe you more than I do Consumer Reports. Perhaps I'll try it. Thanks. * * * * *
Good points. I also like how you always leave people wanting more...
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[Last Week] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday] [Friday] [Saturday] [Sunday] [Next Week] Barbara finally ran down the set of Kodak NiMH batteries in her portable CD player. She got through 3.5 CDs, totaling about 225 minutes. That's 5 to 5.5 times the 40 to 45 minutes she gets from a fresh set of alkalines. That's on the first charge, and NiMH batteries often improve after the first few charges. Pretty clearly, NiMH batteries are the way to go for high current drain applications. But I already knew that from comparing the results of alkaline and NiMH in my Olympus D400-Z digital camera. It seems that Dan Bowman will be getting a digital camera as a surprise gift this year. He couldn't wait, so as he says, "Hmmm, slit open the package; substitute an object of equal weight..." He has nothing to be ashamed of. It certainly makes sense to shoot a few test photos just to make sure the camera works properly. He's posted his test photos, which happen to show his office and work area. Obviously, he fits right in with the rest of us. A neat work area is a happy work area, as one of my elementary school teachers used to tell me. But it's not a real work area. Chris Ward-Johnson, aka Dr. Keyboard, one of the last people I would have expected to succumb to millennium fever, is madly stocking up on food, wine, gasoline, and firewood. He's so busy cutting up firewood with Tex, his chainsaw, that he can't find time to play with his poor little dog. He's probably wise in taking precautions. As he says, even a routine thunderstorm can cause their power to fail for extended periods. And he lives in France, which I suspect is not as well prepared as it might be for the clock turning over on 1/1/00. Chris mentions me, although not by name, as being armed and prepared to defend myself if necessary. But I point out that Chris has chosen to name his chainsaw (odd enough in itself) in honor of the movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As a prudent man, if I found myself short of supplies early next year, I think I'd avoid Chateau Keyboard. I spent a few hours yesterday reading through the installation chapter from Outlook in a Nutshell, by Tom Syroid and Bo Leuf. It looks good, even in rough draft form. If you use Outlook 2000, this book should be on your must-buy list. Look for it at your favorite bookstore early next year.
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