Daynotes 1999 week 3

Daynotes: Week of 18 January - 24 January, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 3

Hi, welcome to this third week's daybook page. The reasons for this format are explained in the first week's intro.

Note 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, or get "retroactively" updated (like if I write something but upload it to the site a day or two later). Occasional thematic articles will still be added on the side as separate pages, like before. Note that webpages live, i.e. content editing may also at times be performed retroactively so that some "established" content may change (links updated for example, new comments) or be moved.

Mail inclusions are as a rule on a separate weekly 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 18.01

Got a bit behind on last week's notes (Friday-Sunday), but I have updated them today, including mail notes for the end of the week. The weekly page shifts have to be checked for correct links as well, which is in itself trivial, but also easy to forget, especially since this is a relatively new format.

Working (thinking) mostly on book proposal and seminar outline, when not stuck in the universe of Babylon 5 :)

Ugh. Uploading this last update was a bear. Heavy congestion, either on the Atlantic link, or the geocities server. Bad time of day, local late evening, midday USA. Took several attempts and lots of waiting, but I think everything got saved as it was supposed to.

Interesting new search engine, probably better than AltaVista for simple searches, try it: www.google.com

Tuesday 19.01

It is often said that computers and networks obliviate the need for particular physical locations; in the long run perhaps making cities and suburbs alike obsolete in their cost-inefficiency. Perhaps. Still there are certain advantages to some locations over others. Years ago I heard this story of an American investor who had moved to Sweden and sat in a house literally in the middle of nowhere. Why? He had figured out that this would be the optimal location for him sitting at his consoles, just catching the lagging edge of trading on the Asian markets, fully into things by London prime time, and arriving early into the New York market as it opened his afternoon time. That was his work day, practically normal office hours, offset some six hours from his previous New York existence where he doubtlessly had to get up in the middle of the night to start his trading day.

Anyway, sometimes I feel a similar advantage when my afternoon mail becomes the incoming morning mail for someone in the US. I can spend time in my morning without worrying about being "late". Then I catch any "afternoon" replies my evening before ending the day.

The car diagnosis came in. Apparently the alternator slip-ring brushes had worn down to the point where one got stuck and tore out, wire attached, wrapping itself around the rotor and causing major internal damage. (So was that what sounded like a mildly stuck valve this morning when I ran the engine?)

New alternator required (cheaper than the parts, though certainly not cheap -- about USD 300 with labor). Thus no wheels until tomorrow.

Wednesday 20.01

Speaking of costs, the latest phone bills came. Invested some time doing a spreadsheet analysis of the past three bills (9 months) to see what trends I can see. My local dial-up calls (ordinary so-called POTS line to my ISP) have a starting charge, then a duration rate that varies with time of day. The ISP I use charges only an annual hosting fee for "reasonable" data volumes. Overall, averaged and including the +25% value added tax, my dial-up costs appear to run about USD 0.03 (3 cents) per minute. No doubt about it; my Internet life has been intensifying... :)

Hm, estimating average effective download transfer rates does rather suggest that downloads cost me somewhat less than 30 cents per Mb (~50% at 31kbps, think of those server pauses, even on a good day). Assuming that I wanted to fetch a 70 Mb service pack from MS, that easily translates into something like 20 dollars, minimum, assuming nothing went wrong. Absurd. Even going to a 64kbps ISDN line would only halve this. I hadn't really estimated the real costs of downloading software over a dial-up until this phone bill analysis.

Morning routines: get the kids up, breakfast, get them to school, then a few minor chores before firing up the computer and catching up on mail and of course all the daynote pages I follow, write replies and these notes... Takes time, but almost always worth it as long as I don't get carried away. Clears the mind and inputs new material.

Road salt is a pain, and I seriously question its utility. In practical terms it both makes roads messier and environmentally unfriendly all around, and gives drivers a false sense of security. Serious corrosion problems surfaced with some of the electrical connections when having the alternator replaced. The car will take another day before it's ready. Sigh...

Installed a trial version of Vopt today, but-- where did it go? There was no entry in the program menu after installation. Localization strikes again: my Swedish version of NT has chosen to use the Swedish for "Administrator", i.e. "Administratör" -- anyone notice the two umlaut dots? Didn't think so. Anyways, the installation program simply went ahead and created Administrator/Start menu/Program in the profiles section with not a word of warning, and keyed registry to this. Argh.

Regedit-search-tweak... should work now. Defrag in Win95 has not been defragging reliably it appears, and in any case, I work exclusively in NT and so need an NT-compliant defragmentation tool. I tried Diskkeeper-Lite, but it does not thrill me.

Thursday 21.01

Busy day. More work on the Java/OO seminar planning its structure, a lot of writing concerning developing a collaborative work, and several forrays out on the Web to research a few topics. Travel arrangements to check out and some planning that affects family a few months ahead.

Not to mention picking up the car. Electrical system tweaked and tuned, and all the obvious problems were fixed.

Interesting detail -- in the middle of the garage space where the car electrician works was this large (container-sized) wooden bin overflowing with what I could identify as motor, generator and alternator casings and wired guts, some clearly burned out. Makes me wonder how common such problems might be these days... He seems to be doing a good business, and came highly recommended by our former mechanic (now cook at Japanese restaurant (!).

More about Vopt (www.goldenbow.com). I've so far only used Vopt a few times, having previously and intentionally kept a "severely fragmented" partition from Dkl (DiskkeeperLite) when I realized that Dkl was slow, klunky, and didn't really do that great a job of defragmenting.

Hm, perhaps I should background this a bit...

Hitherto, I've periodically, from W95, simply used defrag (and scandisk).
1. Software was there.
2. All my partitions are FAT16.
3. No big deal.
Defrag programs for NT, such as Dkl, have always posted a warning that use with...
- NT4 SP<3
- notebook computer
...was "not supported, install anyway?" -- (why ask?). Since I (still) run only an SP1 version of NT4, I didn't feel like experimenting.
On the other hand, I should really have an NT utility, because:
- I might some time want to shift to NTFS partitions, assuming I patch my NT-installation to SP3 or SP4.
- It's a bother to have to reboot just to defrag, and then reboot again. Doesn't get done often.
So, what the hey, despite the warning I installed Dkl to try it out, and discovered somewhat to my surprise that the partitions seemed much more fragmented than I had thought. Part of this impression is no doubt due to "verbal inflation" in the reports, because the actual % statistics don't look that bad.

Anyway, Vopt was much nicer, faster, and appeared to do a better job. The Dkl graphical display was perhaps clearer (or just prettier), but if this is a big issue, one can keep Dkl for presentation. (These are "small" apps after all.)

Friday 22.01

I'm having trouble with the ISP modem pool today. Three times running I connected only to have the system freeze (even mouse) during logon. The system will sometimes "beep" at me during authentication handshake, and the (few) times it freezes, the "beep" becomes a sustained "...eeeee...". When this happens, I have to power down the system and restart. I suspect there is a software/timing glitch somewhere (NT-driver-3Com) that explodes given the right (i.e. wrong) input.

On VoptNT, I will agree with others (e.g. Bob Thompson) who remark that its apparent speed comes at a price in the form of hogging processing time. This makes its default priority setting less than optimal if run as a background process (e.g. automatically scheduled).

It almost sounds like a scam, but I read a note in the paper about a company that offered the following unusual service for cellphone owners. Some cellphone subscriptions specify a minimum monthly charge up front, but at the end of a billing period they don't move any remaining credit to the next period. The third-party service is that you can phone up a particular charge-number at night (automatic something-or-other blablabla) and run up a charge with the company (from your current credit) for as long as your batteries can stand it, after which the company refunds you 54% of this amount in cash. Weird idea, but seemingly legitimate... Evolution in action...

Saturday 23.01

Ok, I decided during the night to move the daynotes and mailnotes pages here to my www.leuf.com site. One reason is that with updates several times daily, it is happening too often that there is too much user traffic at Geocities for reliable file management. For less critical updates, I can select optimal times of day when usage is not so heavy. Another reason is the URL matter, in that here the domain URL is consistently displayed, whereas the www.leuf.org works as a redirected VURL, since Geocities does domain mapping in this way, rather than proper DNS serving.

Although the previous daynote pages will remain in place for a time, and a general link from disisay.htm to here is in place, I recommend anyone who has linked to any specific page there to update now those links to the copies here. I assume you will update your bookmarks as a matter of course.

Sunday 24.01

Catching up on some of my reading, I ran across an intriguing report concerning electronic eavesdropping, and current research (University of Cambridge, Ross Andersson and Markus Kuhn) into thwarting such snooping.

Background: it is possible to decypher and read screen content (typical CRO displays) from a distance, say from a van parked outside the building, by analysing the high frequency RF emissions. This is currently not cheap to do, but technologically feasible, and e.g. within the budgets of espionage.

The physics of the situation have some interesting side-issues discovered during th course of the research. For example, it is possible not only to degrade the emissions in various ways so that the eavesdropper can no longer make out text content, but also to (via software) deliberately insert other information that is not visible on the user screen. One example demonstrated in the lab was a screen that displayed the text "Oxford", but on a display connected to snoop equipment read "Cambridge".

The intriguing part of all this, is that Microsoft had reportedly invested $20 million in this research, with the aim of for example having all MS programs invisibly radiate their product serial numbers. Supposedly, then "appropriately equipped vans could patrol business districts looking for copyright infringement" by comparing the emitted numbers with customer records.

In case anyone finds this scenario "science fiction" (a term many, unfortunately, use synonymously with "absurd"), I should mention that for several decades now, both vans amd handheld snoopers have been routinely used in Sweden to look for "license cheaters", that is people who have "neglected" to pay their quarterly state licence fees for owning and using television receivers, and more recently, perhaps "illegally" viewing channels they have not subscribed to. The same kind of equipment is also routinely used pretty much everywhere to "non-invasively" collect viewer statistics about what channels the respective sets are tuned to at given times.

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

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