Daynotes 1999 week 4

Daynotes: Week of 25 January - 31 January, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 4

* Link to: last modified 23:50 GMT+1 on 31.01.1999

Hi, welcome to this fourth week's daybook page. Some changes...

I'm introducing an update-link (above) that points to the start of where I last added some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, you'll still have to scroll back a bit and see if I've updated more than once since you last visited, but that should be a minimal bother.

Webpages live -- i.e. content editing may at times be performed retroactively, so that some "established" content may change (updated links, new comments, etc.) or material be moved. Any such "retro-updates" (or if I write something but for some reason upload it to the site a day or two later) will be noted in the current daynote. For any thematic articles added "on the side", see separate pages off the contents page at the previous location at www.leuf.org/articles/disisay.htm .

Mail inclusions are as a rule on a separate weekly mail page -- see Mailnotes link in sidebar. The Mailnotes link beside each weekday, below, points to the corresponding weekday in the mail page for the same week.

Monday 25.01

Catching up on the mail page took a while this morning. There was more material Sunday-Monday than I thought -- lucky that some of it was posted on Bob's and Tom's daynote pages already, so I didn't have to :)

Stormy weather, and Therese is home from school, so my working concentration is not optimal. Have her distracted with SimAnt at the moment... So maybe I can get some outline thoughts down.

SimAnt, by the way, is the classic DOS version. Bought it used from a computer shop once, along with a few others over time (shop vanished rather abruptly though, like most computer shops around here -- here today, gone tomorrow, new shop next month...).

Computer games are more and more being sold in the video rental shops, while video rentals is more and more being displaced by video sales (price differential is sort of rent 2 or 3 = buy one). Strange business, I wonder where most of the revenue is, because the landscape is changing so fast and competition seems cutthroat with just about each and every convenience shop having at least a few shelves of videos to rent or buy.

One outline got completed (sort of, at least enough to solicit critical feedback) and I tried to get back to the seminar planning, but was "as usual" distracted by the nagging curiosity about what my colleagues were posting on their pages :) Gads, but this is an addictive hobby.

Tuesday 26.01

Walking around in circles on my keyboard, not sure of where I am... :) Too many other things "interfering" with my "addiction", the Web.

Spent most of the morning going through the stack of papers that had collected on my desk during a week or so. (Happens more frequently now that things pile up -- I wonder why?) I use spreadsheets a lot to track personal and business finances, but that sort of assumes a regular updating from paper to computer, before the papers get filed away until the accounting routines get there. Strictly speaking, the tracking and the accounting should be integrated, but in practice this is rarely the case. I file the stuff away in chronological order and tend to do the accounts in a more formal way much later. The tracking part at any rate identified a few critical spots where cashflow was inadequate for bills that had to be paid, so some transfers of funds was needed.

A sizable portion of the rest of the day went to mail and mailnotes, and another chunk vanished for no good reason I can immediately identify. Interruptions probably. Hm, I was going to have progressed much further into working with Linux by now, but the day-to-day things have pre-empted the long-term projects to some extent. It's clear that when book writing goes into high gear, which seems increasingly likely and soon now, I will need to implement fairly tight scheduling of time on a daily basis.

In an unrelated topic, I saw a news item on www.cnn.com, of which I have completely missed the beginnings of this story.

"Intel Corp. Monday said it would change the way its next-generation Pentium III chips would implement individual serial numbers designed to verify individual users' identities."

I did a double-take on that and read on... Ostensibly to "help boost the security of online transactions", PIII processors are intended to by default "transmit serial numbers online". This would apparently be required behavior in order to execute electronic-commerce transactions.

A couple of odd assumptions lurk here.

User identity (for economic transactions yet) being non-intuitively tied to a specific piece of fixed hardware, the physical CPU.
That user ID should be automatically transmitted online (though it is unclear if this is in fact "transponder" behavior).
That Intel has tried to slide this into the market. See earlier notes about security issues concerning future MS products being designed to "emit" their serial numbers via screen RF emissions.

Some are at least reacting to this...

"Junkbusters, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Privacy International announced a boycott of the Pentium III, saying the chips will make it possible to track an individual's online activity without a user's knowledge."

As if this was the only problematic issue at stake here.

Wednesday 27.01

Good morning :) Our son, Edward, goes to an English-language class in a school across town, so we usually drive him there in the mornings. This gives either Isabel or myself a more or less daily "cross-section", as it were, of traffic. We are sometimes at a loss for words to describe the driver behavior we see (or for that matter come close to experiencing more tangibly).

An example from today. Cruising down a quiet residential street past a couple of schools (not Edward's) and down towards a traffic light, I'm at or just above the speed limit, when I notice this little car zip up right behind me. He must have been doing at least twice the limit. Next second, the driver swerves abruptly attempting to squeeze by me to my right. I edge slightly towards the centerline, but not too far, because about 50 meters ahead is one of several pedestrian crossings on this stretch, with a built up island with signs in the middle. Although in theory you can put two cars abreast along most of this stretch, this is impossible beside these islands. In addition, you have cyclists and occasional parked/stopped cars along the right. This doesn't stop people from trying, of course, and it can be a real circus in the other direction in morning rush hour on the schools' side, with cars both stopping and turning in to the parking lots, while others try to squeeze by on their left into meeting heavy cyclist traffic also trying to turn in. And when it's dark and rainy or snowy... (Did I mention buses...?)

Anyway, having just edged a bit left, just in case, I next in the rearview mirror see this car wildly swerve to my left, flashing his headlights. WTF? I think, but am not about to do much of anything, and the lights further ahead are red in any case, so I start slowing. The car swerves right again, but of course now we're by the crossing's island, so there's just no way. Up by the lights, the street acquires a dividing line for lanes ahead and turning, to continue after the lights as double lanes. This by me now classed "idiot" driver pulls up alongside, in the right turning lane. He glares at me and launches into this most abusive tirade; shouting, swearing and insulting, ranting about how I hogged all three lanes. (Three??) I was dumbfounded. On and on and on he rants... until the lights turn, and off he zooms on ahead -- trying to burn rubber no doubt, but quite frankly, the car he was driving was not up to displays like that. Nevertheless, I estimated that he was soon up to double the legal limit again, swerving between lanes to pass some cars far ahead.

I was amazed at the sheer amount of raw hatred this guy was projecting, and reflected afterwards that had this guy had a gun, it's quite possible he would have taken it out and started using it. Around these parts, random weapons assault is usually seen as a minimal risk (some say non-existent), but the rising number of violent shootings suggests that such a feeling of security might be missplaced. This man had a serious problem, and I sure wasn't about to get into a harangue with him, after my initial flash of response anger basically just trying to ignore him after his first few "sentences".

Thursday 28.01

A synaptic connection was made this morning when I read Jerry Pournelle's Wednesday View , where he among other things writes:

"... I also know plenty of places where multiple machines are all running copies of a single license of Windows 98 upgrade, and I expect most of you do as well. This is technically theft, although I doubt that Microsoft would send in the FBI or Secret Service or whoever has enforcement responsibility in the case of a home user with machines for himself, his wife, and his kids. ..."

This reminds me of the two issues I recently took up here:

the research in part funded by MS to develop software that invisibly "transmits" its own serial number as a detectable component in the monitor's RF emissions.
the recent brouhaha about Intel's Pentium III plans to have the chip "transmit online the registered user's ID" (transponder?)

By itself, the 2nd is really rather odd, especially because it apparently assumes you will always be using the same physical machine when conducting economic transactions online. Most of the loud brouhaha also seems to miss the real issue. But there may be other agendas involved here... For one, there is the side issue of "marrying" software at installation time to a specific hardware product, using e.g. the CPU serial number. Problematic, that, even for legitimate users who then must use the very same specific hardware configuration in order to run the software. Upgrade/replace the CPU, buy a new license for the software -- does not play well. Like many half-baked ideas, this may ultimately fall by the wayside, but it does point out how "easy" it can be to slip in ID-related locks and checks without the user/buyer being aware of it.

I am also now reminded of the shareware communications packages that unknown to the user broadcast to the world, sometimes incorrectly, that the version being used is an "unregistered copy".

I refer you to my full texts of 1 and 2 at the respective links, only noting here that both developments would dovetail nicely with future efforts by MS to actively track down "all illegal use" (however defined) and implementation of "active licensing", e.g. issuing new registration codes for product functionality on receipt of yearly license renewal fees. There is a clear MS trend indicated here (started with constant "registration nags" for everything, even free upgrades/fixes) to more actively identify and lock in the customers.

The open question is: should we get uncomfortable about that, and the means used, or not? Passive ID-codes in software and hardware is one thing, but when my tools start automatically broadcasting (or even on external demand transpond) to the world at large outside my control... As said elsewhere apropos Linux, MS is running scared and seems to be taking precautions (as MS sees it).

Friday 29.01

Suffering a bit of mental whiplash after some particularly intense email pingpong concerning book proposals, though likely most of my discomfort is due to a late night and an apparent case of flu developing. Splitting headache this morning, and slight nausea. If this gets any worse, it's likely that notes here may be sparse a few days. Managing for the moment on "pseudo-aspirin" (paracytomol) to keep tolerably alert. (I just love the dictonary entry for aspirin by the way: "an analgetic and febrifuge" -- If that doesn't give you a headache and nausea, nothing will...)

Something to frame and hang on the wall. Isabel got a neatly printed wages payment check for December in the mail... for 0.77 Swedish Crowns -- that's about US 10 cents. Serious problems there, somewhere... ("Mommy, are you working for Uncle Scrooge?") The correct sum due did come as a manual transfer to the bank later, but that check is something else.

Saturday 30.01

Feeling somewhat better today. But not very productive. I should follow Tom Syroid's cure-all, i.e. sit down with a good book and forget about the rest of the world a while. Might just do that -- I am half-way through C J Cherry's Finity's End, untypically for me I've been reading it a chapter at a time, I usually devour books in a single sitting. (Also see my SF author pages .)

So, the rest of the year may be worth living for after all... :) The airing of Babylon 5 episodes here just continued now with episode 67 (being taped), starting season 4. Last week was episode 66, the season 3 finale, and I would not have been one bit surprised had they this week just paused or started repeats. There was always the risk too that the network (kanal5 ) would say to heck with it, even though the Lurker site posted that the Swedish rights to both season 4 and 5 had been purchased by the channel. Now only remains the paranoid monitoring the abrupt shifts of airing times to ensure that we don't miss an episode. Preliminary schedule suggests running through the summer without pause. I wonder.

Having a serious look at how I've been allocating disk space lately. You would think a couple of Gb would be enough for just about anything, but oh no... Still, there is a lot of "junk" and duplication that could be tidied up.

I tried to have another look at Linux the other day, but I was too distracted to get very far. One problem is that the distribution I have (RedHat 5.2) is on these "blue" CD-R disks, and my normal player will either throw fits or refuse to read these at all. Previously, I had gone with the Debian distribution, largely because this includes M68k binaries -- this I had installed on one (Atari/CLab) Falcon, with a view to in due time networking everything. On a spare HD for my 486 notebook I had installed the i386 version of the same. Of course, on a PC and with an external SCSI Cd-player (that does read blue CD-R just fine, thank you), you quickly run into the add-a-driver problem. Especially when you're still at the base installation stage. I have a driver source, but not a diff as I'm supposed to need, so I'm not quite sure what I have.

Initially, it seemed that using the RH CD with Debian would be ok, since there was a package called Alien to covert rpm package format to deb format. Complications arose on installation, howver, since there were unresolved dependencies on modules I didn't have installed, and some trouble locating the needed modules.

Anyway, I ended up staring at the prompt with no real indication of "what next?" once too often to want to continue at the time.

Sunday 31.01

* Today turned rather nasty in terms of weather. We had arranged to drive out and pick up a piece of furniture, intended for our son's room, and by the time we were on the road, a fine hint of powder snow had turned into freezing slush driven by a hard wind. For a change, most drivers in town were actually sticking to the legal limit -- although probably only because they couldn't really accelerate to much more before the next set of lights...

The day was largely devoured by this, washday, and other houshold chores. There was one item of mail concerning a reader's problem with Win95OSR2 losing the CD-icon, which I posted on the mailpage.

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

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