Daynotes Journal

Week of 23 July 2001

Latest Update: Friday, 05 July 2002 09:16
 

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Monday, 23 July 2001

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The music industry's attitude is that if not too many people complain, it must be all right. It seems to me that the way to make them withdraw this little experiment is to make it cost them money. So I suggest that anyone who's bought a CD recently rip a copy of it to his hard drive. If the sound quality of the ripped version is impaired, return the CD to the place of purchase, tell them the sound quality is unacceptable, and demand a refund. If enough people do this and enough CDs are returned, you can bet the music industry will abandon this ill-conceived attempt to deny people their fair-use rights. Better yet, buy music only from artists who sell their work directly, and let the RIAA and the music industry suck vacuum.

I did a full network backup to tape yesterday, the first in a long time. I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable at not having a current tape backup, and decided to do something about it. I'd been backing up all along, of course, by xcopying data to multiple systems frequently and by periodically burning a copy of our current data to CD-R. That covers accidental deletions and so on, but it isn't really an acceptable general backup strategy.

So yesterday, I decided to figure out why Windows 2000 Professional Backup on my main workstation wouldn't write to the Tecmar DDS tape drive. In the past, I'd tried repeatedly to get it to work, but it refused to write to any of several tapes. Those tapes had all been used on my previous main workstation, which ran under Windows NT 4 and used Arcada/Seagate/Veritas BackupExec. I didn't have a copy of BackupExec for Windows 2000, and so decided just to use the bundled backup applet. Every time I tried it, though, W2KP Backup would display an error message telling me it couldn't write to the tape.

I'd left the tape from my last attempt in the drive. When Barbara was cleaning the other day, she accidentally bumped my system and ejected the tape. I gave her a hard time about it, of course, but it appears she may have fixed the problem. How, I'm not sure. But yesterday, I fired up Windows 2000 Professional Backup and reloaded that tape. Backup popped up a message that said unrecognized media had been inserted and asked me what I wanted to do with it. I told it to add the tape to the free pool, which it did. I then set the backup parameters and told it to backup to that tape. A few hours later, I had 16 GB of data backed up and verified with no unexpected errors.

So now I have a backup of our important stuff on a DDS tape, and I feel a lot better.

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Tuesday, 24 July 2001

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According to The Register, Adobe has caved on the prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian programmer charged under DMCA. For what good it will do. What The Register apparently doesn't fully understand is that in the US criminal prosecutions are up to the government. If an employee embezzles funds, the employer is not considered the injured party. The offense is not against the employer. It is against the state. It is the state that decides whether or not to prosecute, and in this case whether or not Adobe wants to continue the prosecution against Mr. Sklyarov is immaterial. It is the government that will decide whether or not to prosecute.

Adobe sees this as a way to avoid the boycott against them at no cost to themselves. I think the boycott against Adobe should continue unless and until all charges against Sklyarov are dismissed and he is released. Adobe should pay all of Sklyarov's legal fees and other expenses as well. If that doesn't happen, we should all continue to boycott Adobe, just to let Adobe, other software makers, and the US government know exactly what we think of the DMCA.

The DMCA is unconstitutional on the face of it, but that doesn't guarantee it will be repealed. There was another similar law passed many years ago called the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO. For many years, the government was careful in selectively applying RICO only to gangsters, because they knew that if RICO was ever seriously challenged it would have to be ruled unconstitutional. After 20 years of applying RICO selectively in successful prosecutions that led to an aura of constitutionality, the government began using it more indiscriminately. RICO is now used against individuals, small businesses, and others against who it was never intended to be used. I fear the same process will occur with DMCA. 

In that respect, I almost hope the government does continue with the prosecution of Sklyarov, although that unfortunately makes life difficult for him. But by proceeding in this case, the government clearly is prosecuting a man who was simply exercising his First Amendment rights, and any unbiased court should dismiss the charges with prejudice. That might be the first step toward the repeal of this reprehensible law.

I downloaded a truly bizarre movie clip yesterday. It's apparently a Microsoft Office XP commercial that runs in Switzerland. It stars an attractive young woman and a young man who hasn't shaved lately. Apparently the room is warmer than she prefers, because she pulls her tank top off and he begins trying to unhook her bra. He's obviously having problems, but up pops a Microsoft Office XP context-sensitive menu on her back. The menu offers choices like "Get Help", "Print Help", "Open Directly", and "Abort". Being a computer-literate kind of guy, he runs his finger down her back to scroll the menu to "Open Directly" and single-clicks her back, whereupon a prompt appears, "Enter Password". 

The message I get from this commercial is that Office XP is difficult to understand and may demand a password before it will allow you to open it. Or perhaps he forgot to complete the required Office XP activation. At any rate, from the expression on the young woman's face, she's pretty disgusted with Office XP as well. Hmmm.

The SirCam worm continues to spread. Barbara got her first infected email yesterday. I got two. I've spoken with some people who are receiving ten or more infected emails per day. What's interesting is that Norton AntiVirus doesn't catch or flag the infected emails, despite the fact that our virus sigs are up-to-date and we have NAV set to scan incoming email messages. I now have both Barbara's and my main systems set to download the current virus sigs at 03:30 every morning and to do a full system virus scan at 03:45. It's never detected a virus on either system.

Oh, well. This too shall pass. Until the next one. I think it's interesting that the perils of monoculture in agriculture are almost exactly duplicated in computer software.

Barbara is off to Old Salem with her parents this morning, and I need to go load and run the dishwasher. I have a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro in there that definitely needs a good wash.

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Wednesday, 25 July 2001

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It's not a theoretical threat. It's real, and it's getting worse every day. If nothing is done, your children's children will live under a totalitarian regime. Some believe with considerable justification that that's already true. As Lysander Spooner, the great 19th century Constitutional lawyer, anarchist, and author of No Treason once observed, "A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years."

Hmmm. It seems we need a Truth in Web Journaling Act. Marcia and Brian Bilbrey flew to Vancouver to meet the Syroids. She posted a trip report wherein she notes that the photo Tom Syroid uses on his web page is 13 years old (!). She also posted "before" and "after" photos, including one of Tom before his morning coffee. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that the photo of me at the top of this page is about 2.5 years old. But then I frequently post current pictures of myself, so that's all right then.

Speaking of before and after pictures, I ran my main keyboard through the dishwasher yesterday. Here are before and after photos of it:

For some reason, a lot of people think I'm kidding about running keyboards through the dishwasher. But it's the best way I know to get them really clean. One could spend hours pulling keycaps, disassembling and reassembling the keyboard, trying to get all the crud out, and still not end up with a completely clean keyboard. Or one could put the keyboard in the dishwasher and get it completely clean with little effort. 

I didn't bother to bake this one in the oven because I'm in no hurry for it, although I'll never forget the look on Barbara's face years ago when she returned home to find her new Jenn-Air oven full of old keyboards baking away. I'll let this one dry for a week or three before I reconnect it, at which point I'm sure it'll work just fine. No dirt, no sticky keys, good as new. I've been doing this for 20 years now, and have never harmed a keyboard. Of course, your mileage may vary.

It appears that Microsoft has taken down one of the most popular features that ever appeared on MSN. Until yesterday, pointing your browser to http://communities.msn.com/_secure.msnw?ticket=lol delivered an ever-changing random assortment of images gleaned from the private user areas on MSN. Sometimes you had to refresh the page repeatedly, but you eventually got an image. 

About 80% of the images were porn, some of the commercial variety, and some of the homegrown sort. The other 20 percent were everything from baby pictures to vacation pictures to graduation pictures to commercial shots of automobiles to clip art. Very strange. I particularly liked the ones that were obviously amateur shots of someone's wife or girlfriend. Some are pornographic, but many are just charming pictures of pretty young women with their clothes off. A few are decidedly kinky. It's unfortunate that Microsoft decided to withdraw this popular web resource.

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Thursday, 26 July 2001

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They may even be right, but I suspect their decision has more to do with profit margins than with the likelihood that flat-panels will begin outselling CRTs anytime soon. Flat-panel displays are improving on two fronts--performance and manufacturing efficiency, which leads to lower costs--but there's a long way to go on both before flat-panels can match CRTs. If you don't believe me, just compare the image quality and price of a good 19" CRT to the equivalent flat-panel. Or, conversely, take the $175 that would buy a good 17" monitor and see how much flat-panel that $175 will buy you. You'll find you can buy two good 17" CRTs for the price of one 15" flat-panel.

Microsoft removed their Swiss television commercial for XP from their server, but if you haven't seen it Dan Bowman points out that you can still download it here. 

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Friday, 27 July 2001

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The Register posted an interesting article that explains why Symantec AntiVirus fails to catch inbound email infected with the SirCam worm. Symantec hastens to add, however, that attempting to open the attachment or save it to disk invokes NAV. I can confirm that by personal testing. Just to see what would happen, I tried to open an attachment yesterday on an expendable computer. NAV immediately popped up a warning message and refused to allow me to open the attachment. So anyone running NAV with current program and sig updates should be safe. SirCam was supposed to have peaked yesterday, but Barbara has received one infected email this morning and I've received two.

Symantec is working on a fix for the bug that allows SirCam to arrive undetected, but blew it by not reporting the bug to their users. I've been to the SARC site repeatedly, and have seen no mention of this problem. Why has Symantec not warned users that, although NAV would prevent the virus from being run, it wouldn't catch the virus in inbound email? Doing that would have saved a lot of wasted time and effort by administrators trying to figure out why their NAV protection appeared not to be working.

Okay, I'm told that Mr. Ward-Johnson has chosen to paraphrase the text I sent him of my original comments, so in the interests of accuracy I'll post what I originally wrote, full and unchanged:

Chris Ward-Johnson, AKA Dr. Keyboard, is at it again. As usual, this latest episode in his periodic US-bashing is long on emotional appeal and short on facts. Whether it is because he is ignorant of the facts or because he simply chooses to ignore them, Mr. Ward-Johnson distorts the truth. No, it's worse than that. It can't be from ignorance, because others have repeatedly pointed out the lies that Mr. Ward-Johnson insists on presenting as fact. Mr. Ward-Johnson flatly lies. 

For example, he insists on incorrectly referring to the Kyoto Accords as a treaty to which the US is a party, and states repeatedly that Mr. Bush is abrogating that treaty. But the simple fact is that the US never ratified the Kyoto Accords, and by definition one cannot abrogate a treaty which one has not ratified. In this latest episode, Mr. Ward-Johnson takes Mr. Bush to task for repudiating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. He has done no such thing. What is at issue is proposed changes to that convention, which go far beyond the original terms of the treaty, and which the US finds unacceptable. So what Mr. Ward-Johnson is really complaining about is that the US is unwilling to change the terms of the original treaty, at least in the manner proposed. Obviously, that does not constitute repudiating the original treaty. Mr. Ward-Johnson routinely expects the US to act against its own best interests and those of its citizens, and takes umbrage when it fails to do so.

I've become increasingly disgusted with Mr. Ward-Johnson's repeated attempts to advance his ultra-leftwing Marxist political agenda at the expense of the facts. The Soviet Union had two major newspapers, Pravda ("The Truth") and Isvestia ("News"). The old joke among the Soviet citizenry was that The Truth wasn't News and News wasn't The Truth. Mr. Ward-Johnson would have been right at home writing for Pravda or Isvestia. He says, "In the meantime, if you're doing business with the United States - just remember that any agreements you sign may well not be worth the paper they're written on, come the next round of elections." I say, don't believe a word Mr. Ward-Johnson says. He's demonstrated repeatedly that he has no respect for facts. Oh, well. Pravda and Isvestia may no longer be hiring, but I think Granma may be looking for Marxist propaganda writers.

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Saturday, 28 July 2001

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If it had been me, I'd have designed the device a bit differently. As it is, both drives have to be on one ATA cable, which makes sense. However, from reading the review and checking the NickLock web site, it seems that the only thing this device does is set the Master jumper on one or the other drive. It appears that the cable for each drive has two connectors, which made me think that there was a connector for both Master and Slave on each drive, but apparently that's not the case. Most hard drives default to Master if no jumper is installed, which means that using NickLock with such drives would result in having two Master drives connected to the same IDE channel. Not good.

In order to work properly with common drives, this device really needs a couple of enhancements. First, it needs to switch two jumpers rather than just one. With the switch in the A position, it should jumper the first drive Master and the second drive Slave. With the switch in the B position, it should reverse those jumper settings. Second, they need to add two switches to the front, preferably with LED pilot lights, that would allow the user to switch power on or off to each of the two drives. Although those switches would remain on by default, there are times when you might want only one drive active on the channel and removing power from the other drive is the way to do it.

This is interesting. While I was playing around yesterday I decided to enable password protection on the screensaver on my main Windows 2000 box. I set the time-out at 20 minutes, and everything worked fine all day. That time-out is long enough that I didn't often need to enter my password, but when I took a shower and returned to my system I found that it was locked and required I enter the password to access it. So far, so good. But this morning a problem became evident.

I have Norton Internet Security installed, and Norton AntiVirus set to download program and sig updates and run the scan in the middle of the night. When I sit down at the computer first thing every morning and move the mouse, there's a Norton screen up telling me that the scan was run and no viruses were found. When I sat down at my computer this morning and moved the mouse, it prompted me to enter my password, as expected. But when I did so instead of seeing the normal NAV "scan complete" screen, I saw NAV just start to scan files. Obviously, using password protection on the screen saver prevented NAV from running overnight. That doesn't seem right. What if I'd left a long compile or something running in the background? Obviously, when the password protection kicked in that process would have been put to sleep as well. At any rate, I've disabled password protection on the screen saver. Yet another strange thing about Windows 2000.

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Sunday, 29 July 2001

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I have a question about the accuracy of some information in PC Hardware in a Nutshell. The questions relates to the following section in Chapter 16 on monitors:

Resolution, refresh rate, and color depth are all inter-related parts of synchronization range. For example, increasing the refresh rate increases the number of screens (and accordingly the amount of data) that must be transferred each second. Similarly, increasing color depth from High Color (2 bytes/pixel) to True Color (3 bytes/pixel) increases the amount of data to be transferred by 50%. To increase resolution, refresh rate, or color depth, you may have to decrease one of the others to stay within the HSF limit on total bandwidth.

I don't see how color depth would have any effect on the bandwidth required at the monitor. The required bandwidth at the monitor should be a function of only resolution and refresh rate. The color depth should be irrelevant after the digital to analog converter on the video card. Increasing the color depth from High Color (2 bytes/pixel) to True Color (3 bytes/pixel) would increase the required bandwidth required from the video memory, but that is only relevant to the video card, not the monitor. (Assuming of course we are discussing a monitor with an analog interface and not a LCD display with a digital interface.)

Please keep in mind that I am very impressed with PC Hardware in a Nutshell, and it is the only thing I have a question about. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

Thanks for catching that. You are, of course, right. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that, except that perhaps I wrote it about the same time as I did the chapter on video cards, so perhaps I still had the digital-side mindset that higher color depth required additional bandwidth. On the analog side of the video adapter, of course, the RGB pins simply have a voltage set that corresponds to the correct intensity level for each.

I confess that when I first read your message I thought that you must have somehow misinterpreted what I'd written, because I couldn't have possibly written what you thought I'd written. But of course I had.

I'll fix it. Thanks again.

Well, perhaps not hideous, since Barbara and I, our tech reviewers, and thousands of readers hadn't noticed it. Congratulations to Mr. Browning for catching it.

Thanks to everyone who responded about my problem with NAV not running when my console was using the password-protected screensaver. As it turns out, I'm not the only one to experience that problem, which is apparently a NAV problem rather than a W2K problem.

If all of the astronomy comments on these pages have gotten you at least somewhat interested in buying a scope of your own, I see that you can now buy decent quality Dobsonian reflectors for incredibly low prices. These scopes are made by Synta, a Red Chinese company, and resold under various brand names in the US and Canada. I won't buy one, because I don't knowingly buy Red Chinese products, but if you don't feel that way you can get an incredible deal. 

For example, Canadian vendors like Joe O'Neill and Ray Khan sell the 8" version under the Sky-Watcher brand name for CN$499 - $545 (~US$321 - $350) and the 6" version for CN$399 - $475 (~US$262 - $305). Those prices will be increasing soon, so you probably want to wait for the price increase before you order. That may sound strange, but the reason the price is going up is that both Joe and Ray are going to start replacing the bundled 6X30 finder with a 9X50 finder which is a more appropriate size for these scopes. I'd want the 9X50 even if I planned to install a Telrad finder, which I would.

Joe and Ray both ship to the US, and Joe assures me that there are no customs hassles, duties, or other problems involved in shipping to the US. The same scopes will soon become available in the US under the Stardust brand name from Gary Hand. These are well-built scopes with decent optics, worlds ahead of the department store junk. I would be inclined to buy an Orion SkyQuest XT Dobsonian instead. But their 8" model sells for $499 (~42% more) and their 6" model for $339 (~29% more). The Orion SkyQuest scopes are better built, probably have somewhat superior primary mirrors with less variability from sample to sample, and come with better eyepieces. On the other hand, the Synta scopes have a high-quality 2" Crayford focuser versus the 1.25" rack-and-pinion supplied with the 6" and 8" Orions. 

If you want a scope and can afford $350 plus shipping, I think you'd be happy with the 8" Sky-Watcher, assuming that you don't object to buying Red Chinese products. Intriguingly, Gary Hand has these scopes listed on his page with the prices shown as TBA. The interesting part is that in addition to the 6" and 8" models, which are available now from other sources, Gary lists a 10" model, a 12.5" model, and a 15" model, all of which will be shipping later this year, from Autumn for the 10" and 12.5" to Winter for the 15". 

And Joe O'Neill sends some interesting comments on that:

The 8" SW Dob, as of about a month ago, started to come with the 9x50mm finder as standard, but the wholesale price also went up to reflect this, so the ones being sold with 30mm finders will soon be disappearing. Not a bad thing as I found 80% of all customers were wanting to upgrade to the 50mm finder anyhow. Also, any dealer can order these Dobsonians with SW Plössls in place of the Kellners for a modest extra charge, so this Dob, with Plössl and 50mm finder, should still sell for just under $600 Cdn (or $400 US).

The only major complaint I have is a 32mm Plössl should be standard. Now these Plössls, be they any brand (Orion Sirius, Sky-Watcher), etc) are about 50% more in cost than the standard 25 to 26mm Plössl, but still, it will be the most used eyepiece you ever have. The only exception is if you go to a 32 to 40mm eyepiece in the 2" range on the SW Dob, as it has a 2" focuser. But every telescope, be it Dob, refractor, Mak-Newt, SCT, etc, - I don't care what you use, should have one, decent, lowest power eyepiece you can possibly lay your hands one, as it will be your most used eyepiece. Any telescope is useless if you cannot find what you are looking for, and even if you are using DSCs or GOTO, you still need that lower power eyepiece to centre and find things. Personally I use a 28mm Pentax SMC, which is overkill in some ways, but i am spoiled. :)

Shipping is kinda pricey anywhere as you have two boxes it comes in. The base is heavy, while the tube is large, and subject to - oh, what do they call it - forget the term, but weight determined by total volume of the package charge.

Anyhow, be it across the street or across the country, the average shipping charge by ground mail with insurance is running around $60 to $90 Cdn, or $40 to $60 US, but it does vary. Everything to Alaska and Hawaii is air mail, but sometimes if costs me only $10 more to ship to Los Angeles than it does to Detroit, the latter being 100 miles away while the former being over 3,000 miles away. Go figure that one?

The only drawback to them, well two, is one the eyepiece rack is still sharp and needs the corners filed down, and the material used in the base is inferior to the Orion XT series. For example, the XT base will probably last you 10 or 20 years outside, if you take care of it, while the SW base, my guess is, will need a good coat of paint after 5 years use outside. I sell both, so it's six of one and half dozen of the other over which ones people choose from my point of view.

Biased as I am, I think they are the two best beginner's scopes on the market. My first "real" telescope 18 years ago was an 8", F4.5 Coulter Dob, and both the XT and the SW are better made, better mirror cell and spider, better focusers, better optics and better price. I originally paid $239 US, and covert that money 18 years ago into today's dollars, I think it would be more than $400 US. Not only that, the optics were soft, NO finder at all, and one Kellner eyepiece which came from an old pair of binoculars on the Coulter. These other Dobs come as a complete package. Heck, you even get free software with the Orion model. :)

Still I would buy that same Coulter scope all over again, as I got a lot of use out of it, dragged it all over the place. I simply cannot think of a better first scope than an 8" Dob (any brand) in terms of price, ease of use, reliability, and lack of things to go wrong, save for perhaps a 6" version in cases of size/weight/financial restraints. No wires, no batteries, no grease to freeze in winter or run in summer, no setup time, all you have to do is wait for the optics to cool down. Funny thing is, my main scope now is a 6" Dob (Mak-Newt mind you :).

joe

http://www.oneilphoto.on.ca
http://www.multiboard.com/~joneil

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