Daynotes 1999 week 1

Daynotes: Week of 4 January - 10 January, 1999

Daily notes and commentary

I decided to try another format this year, the daybook with weekly pages. Having contributed with this tabled format to several other sites (see e.g. Chaos Manor View(30) and Thompson's Daynotes), I have found it a useful one for daily browsing of daynote format writings. So why not use it myself?

This means that any given weekly page may receive several updates during the week, or even several times during a single day, but it may also mean that some days do not get any special notes at all. Occasional thematic articles will still be added on the side as separate pages, like before. Note that webpages live, i.e. editing may at times be performed retroactively so that some "established" content may change (links updated for example, new comments).

(BTW, week numbering is according to the Swedish calendar, which this year started January in week 53. "Current" weekday is of course based on GMT+1.)

We'll see how things go... With the previous format, it was a bit too easy to forget to write something on a regular basis.

Mail inclusions have as a rule been moved to a separate mail page. See Mailnote link in sidebar. The link beside each weekday links to the corresponding weekday in the mail page for the same week.

Monday 04.01

Rain, dark and windy. Winter weather is sometimes heavy on the "weather" around here, severely neglecting the "winter" part. Family went out together shopping today, to see if there was much left from the Christmas sales. Not really much left, no; but then again there wasn't all that much around before Christmas either, so... :) Picked up a few things (daughter has birthday on the 9th), but saw little of real interest. Saying that we picked up a new toaster and some fish for the aquarium, neither on sale, may suggest the general lack of enthusiasm for the offerings.

Reflecting on 1998, I realize that my Internet surfing settled early into certain routine sites to visit, and with few departures, this behaviour persists. That urge to explore, soon distracted, needs conscious prodding from time to time -- and perhaps not a little strategy. Random link-hopping holds little attraction. I find that most new links are followed from existing sites, or as the result of deliberate searches for material about something specific. This highlights the issue of web visibility -- with ever more webpages out there, how does one find the ones relevant to current interests, not to mention those of potential interest? Conversely, how would I attract potential visitors to this site?

I also note that nobody is using the comment server. What feedback I get is entirely via email, which may be best from the point of view of reaching me, but does lack the potential for free-for-all discussion. I had hoped to (elsewhere) set up my own "wiki" server, but there were complications with the perl script and the host server that have not been identified yet.

About six months ago, I finally found and got round to disabling (with TweakUI) the setting that makes Explorer "convert 8.3 filenames" to mixed-case. Since then, I have on and off been going through sections of my webpage master copies on the local system ensuring that links and filenames consistently use lowercase. Tedious work, and to be sure not strictly essential, so I don't do either much or often. But it does in the long run simplify page management, and makes the Aolpress miniwebs come out correct without "shadow" instances where link and filename have differing case. Therefore, I keep coming back to it. (We're talking here about some 1500 webpages in total, some legacy from Win3.1, so the task is not trivial.)

My webhosts use unix, and my ftp program is set to automatically convert to lowercase, but because the MS-vfat filesystem is so inconsistent about case, I still find occasional "broken" links creeping in. While inconsistent case link-filename works just fine under Windows, the link will be wrong in unix where correct case matters. The tweak is I find a necessary setting, since I early discovered that simply renaming a known (but not shown) uppercase filename to lowercase was pretty much hit-or-miss while this setting is active, i.e. it usually had no effect unless the name was also actually changed.

(Yes, I know that making case irrelevant is a classic example of user-friendly interface design, but the MS implementation of this feature is not a good one.)

Speaking of case inconsistencies, spelunk through Registry some time -- there we find many examples of "DOS" and full filenames used at apparent random, sometimes mixed in the same path.

Tuesday 05.01

"Thirteenday's Eve", more commonly known in English as Twelfthnight. For the orthodox churches, this is the run-up to their "Christmas" on the 6th. Since part of the family maintains Spanish traditions, this means a few more presents today or tomorrow (Reyes). Otherwise, this is the earliest one would throw out the tree; the normal plunder&chuck here being "20th-day", Wednesday next. The deciding issue is of course how dried out the tree gets. A few million needles hitting the floor every day helps make up your mind that it's time :)

I read once an article about how many minute lifeforms there are in your average Christmas tree, and how all these creatures all tend to abandon the dying tree pretty much as soon as it was taken indoors, looking for new homes. Incredible really.

I prepared and sent a "Mail" template for Jerry Pournelle this morning, sort of along the lines of the earlier "View" one, and rather similar to this one. (Jerry liked it and implemented it with some tweaks.) Webpage design is an arcane artform, black magic to some, and I had occasion yesterday to make a few comments on this subject to Tom Syroid about his new homepage (Syroid Manor). See mailnotes link in sidebar or this link.

Allergies came up in the local news this morning. Yet another research report that expressed surprise, not at the number of children with allergic reactions (roughly one in three had some), but the fact that these appeared so early (in the first year). The whole issue is of some concern, and although clearly correlated with smoking parents, also due to other factors in our home environment -- detergents, dust, chemicals (plastics), fumes from hot tv-sets and monitors, antibiotics and preservatives in our foods, ... Short of going completely Amish, there are still sensible measures that people could take to reduce some of these risks. Generally, too much of anything poses a hazard, so the simplest preventive is moderation. Then there are numerous totally unnecessary things -- perfumed diapers comes to mind.

Timelapse (the game) has again occupied our time lately, after getting back the cds lent to my brother-in-law's family over December. This is a remarkable and very well-made game (2 years in the making) that has kept me and the kids busy on-and-off since last February, and we are only now exploring the final section "Atlantis". Some of the puzzles can get tedious to work out, especially before one sees the what&why of it, something that can stop you for a long time at certain stages.

(The current game homepage is Hammerhead Entertainment Timelapse Web Site, where they kindly provide a selection of four different game backgrounds to use as desktop images. You can also still order the game -- well worth it in my opinion. They also hold out the promise of a Timelapse part 2 sometime in the future, since the ending of part 1 leads to a continuation.)

Riven kept us busy while Timelapse was lent out. We finished this much earlier than I would have expected, and the ending left us all a bit disappointed. No question that it is well made, but something is lacking.

(Some interesting views on adventure gaming in general can be found on Talin's homepage. One of the classic problems in creating games of this nature is how "open-ended" they can be and still retain a "plotline" and "solution"/resolution. Most games are clearly compromise here by invoking "stages" where the player must solve certain puzzles to reach the next stage. In effect, this breaks the game down into smaller chunks, whose fixed relationship provides the strict control needed to define a clearcut ending. I went through a lot of thought on this issue when designing Gize over a decade ago.)

(Still tweaking the page layout here. Tagging mail quotes "small" helped.)

Wednesday 06.01

Struggling to regain normal schedules. The kids start school tomorrow, and their times have slipped significantly in just two weeks. Must also get down to bookkeeping and back to writing. Book writing, that is.

Tom Syroid wrote again (Syroid Manor) about sandwich-food-for-thought :) -- some excerpts (moved to mail page). A lot of our correspondence concerns web design and html.

I am contemplating at this stage collecting some html basics and "web insight" on some pages somewhere, probably the business domain since it sort of ties in with my facilitation profile. I will then place a link here to this material.

The link is http://www.leuf.com/fc3/web/index.html

Thursday 07.01

A real dog's day, today.

For some reason I got little sleep, feeling much too hot all night despite open window. General wake-up call at 7 AM -- get the kids to school and all that. Wash day, too. In short, not much computer-related getting done at all.

Well, I did get another reply off to Tom Syroid, this time about Cascading Style Sheets. It has become clear that much of this material would make a good beginning to a "web insights" section elsewhere. So this is what I will be working on for a few days, to at least get a few pages up.

I did manage to verify that this take of tabled layout, with each day as a separate table, does have the intended effect of making earlier days readable even while later sections are still loading. Otherwise, this is the main disadvantage of tables in markup, that the browser waits for the terminating /TABLE before starting to render it. Since a lot of people are using one humongeous table for long pages, when server response slows down, you can end up with long waits in front of a blank window.

Friday 08.01

The local newspaper, which styles itself as "independently liberal", took up a call for reduced Swedish taxation (again). There were some interesting figures given in this context, for example that the country's total tax burden in 1998 was more than 55% of the GNP. One of the factors that keeps the level this high is the "tax on tax" effect, illustrated very graphically in a thought example, summarized here, and converted to US dollars. It also speaks of a "tax-multiplier factor" as a simple way of comparing tax pressure.

Consider a Swedish couple, both working at average industrial salary, who want to have their house south wall repainted. The tradesman who agrees to do the work (openly and legally) would like to earn a particular sum (in pocket) for this extra work, after tax, let us say USD 1000 net. Allowing for direct taxes and fees, this means an asking price of USD 2400, but factoring in employer/employee fees and value added tax, the invoice would come to roughly USD 4000. The couple, in paying this amount, would have to themselves earn another USD 10,000 pre-tax in order to have that extra 4000 cash. Allowing for the employer/employee fees implicit in this, that comes to USD 13,000. Although the article does not mention it, the employers would also be paying VAT on the revenue used to pay these wages, which is another 25% extra tax.

Note from this example, that each regression means paying yet more taxes and so-called fees based on the previous stage's sum including tax -- i.e. full tax on tax. Based on this calculation, the article's author states a "tax-multiplier" effect here of factor 13. By comparison, a similar calculation for US conditions, though details were not given, was said to result in a factor of 2.5. The average for the OECD countries is said to be about factor 5.

Our more mundane concerns for today include taking out the Christmas tree and tucking away the decorations. Daughter Therese has decided that the needles must go first -- more fun I suppose. At least she is sweeping them all up into a bag. Her birthday being tomorrow, it seems better to fade out Christmas now, rather than the traditional 20th-day, Next week.

Robert (Bob) Thompson (homepage) sent a comment on the taxation figures above and had an observation about my mail layout here. See Mailnotes.

Saturday 09.01

(Messing about with duplicate pages deleted my previous entries here, reconstructing... (a better version <grin>)...)

Today was a low-key birthday for Therese, now 9. She was a bit disappointed however, partly because she had unsuccessfully trying to arrange a meeting with a couple of her friends over the weekend. "Doesn't feel like a birthday..." Partly our fault too, we ran out of time and the cake will be tommorrow. Party has to be later, if only to give time for invitations.

The day largely went to cleaning, cleaning the aquarium, correspondance, making food, and playing Mah Jong. Been many years since last, but after a trial game and much leafing through the (not-so-velly-cleal) rulebook, the essentials did begin to come back to me. Therese won.

Sunday 10.01

Therese won another game of Mah Jong. We're going to try and make this a regular weekend thing. Good for collecting the family, and a good set of Mah Jong is a calming influence.

Picked up a copy of Xenu Link Sleuth today, yet another of these free tools that you wonder how you ever managed without before, written by yet another one of these Germans with a certain un-German sense of humour who one tends to find in the software arena. You'll find it at the Xenu homepage (www.snafu.de yet!).

This is an invaluable tool, and fast with decent reports. I promptly pointed it at a few of my sites as a background task while I browsed for other things. Although I felt I have always paid extra much attention to getting links right, a number of oddities still turned up at my sites. With links numbering into the hundreds, or easily soon thousands, checking every one manually is not realistic, except perhaps when writing the page initially. One does need a good automated tool, and especially to keep track of external links.

Most of the faults found were the broken-link variety caused by various typo URL-oddities ("htm"/"html", wrong case, "\" instead of "/", "...%7E...", concatenated URLs), plus some which seem to be software "enhancements" hard at work ("E:\\WWW\LEUF_org\fc3\../../../gifs/DISKETT.gif"). Incidently, all these broken links work perfectly well locally, under Windows -- they just break when the page is served under Unix.

I did also find a few less well-considered legacy links that no longer fit in with the changed site structure, and a few broken external links to keep an eye on. External links should always be tried at least a few times during a week or so before really classing them as broken, because the non-connection result may have been temporary.

All original material copyright bo@leuf.com.
Comments and discussion welcome.

Back to top -- Week list