Daynotes 1999 week 10

Daynotes: Week of 8 - 14 March, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 10

* Link to: last modified 23:55 GMT+1 on 14.03.1999

Hi, welcome to this tenth week's daybook page.

himself See the update-link (above) that points where I last added some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, you may still have to scroll back a bit and see if I've updated more than once since you last visited, but that is easily done.

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 08.03

A reminder: I am requesting user comments about Outlook.

Unsettled weather, inside and out. Concentrating on two major issues: writing, writing and writing :) On the one hand, I am setting up the net domain content, and adjusting pages that are to be moved to subwebs under the new domain. On the other, I am fielding collaborative material and entertaining asides to Tom. On the third hand, I am catching up on a lot of realworld paperwork as we draw closer to a number of tax and authority deadlines. Now if I could just learn to type with my feet, one keyboard each -- I have the machines... twinkletoe multitasking and networking.

I today got a bounced email back. It had been sloshing around somewhere since I sent on March 1st, a week -- an eternity in computer terms. Undeliverable, spake the daemons of the cyberworld cryptically but firmly, and having so expounded, tossed back said sad flotsam of unwanted and homeless bits to wash up against my silicon beaches of mailbox-RAM. Weird.

(This is fascinating... I'm having intermittent connection problems this evening, so I started doing a traceroute scan (tracert <domain>) and it's like watching a stormcloud move across the Net. I get triple * timeouts, and the point where these occur is slowly shifting from hop node to hop node; sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away. Wonder what's going on there...)

Unfortunately, the congestion also now just timed out a 7 Mb download only a few paltry kb from the end. Spent 2 hours of phone time for nothing.

Tuesday 09.03

Some very important web issues are (as usual) taken up at Jakob Nielsen's Useit site, in the now current article "Trustworthiness in Web Design". He for example makes an interesting point about why, in the current advertising-driven web market, he does not wish to use the relatively new eFax service, an otherwise excellent way of using Internet connectivity for faxing. (Any comment from Bob Thompson on this? - I know he wondered why fax-by-Net isn't ubiquitous.) Anyway, Jakob basically makes the point that the Web is turning into a low-trust society because of the way users are being herded this way or that by advertiser marketing and buy-up efforts, to the detriment of the services and reliability that users want.

I have made some follow-up comments about web typography on today's mail page. General mail flow continues to be very low. Nothing deserving comment?

I ran across two very interesting in-depth articles about some issues concerning long filename support I have been puzzling over...
.

PC-Guide ref: FAT file system, disk volume structures
-- This gives a decent overview of the "vfat hack" on Win95, along with a number of other basic filesystem details. As is the case with WinNT, see below, a fundamental flaw is the dynamic assignment of the DOS 8+3 alias, which leads to there being no permanent association between the alias and the actual long filename. There are other problems, all nicely explained here.
.
Real World Tech: WinNT, No rest(ore) for the wary
-- This article examines the MS oversight in long filename support in Win32 due to the fact that the 8+3 "keys" (AAAAA~n.XXX) are always dynamically (re)created by the system in the order files are created on the system. Given that numerous (and critical) Registry path and name entries are stored in the 8+3 format, though not with any apparent consistent method in why and when, it becomes apparent that there may be a serious problem here.
I quote the article's conclusion: "Based upon the information provided by Microsoft themselves, Windows NT is the mission critical 24x7 operating system which cannot be restored from a backup. Maybe one can accept having to rebuild a workstation which does not operate correctly after a restore, but this is completely unacceptable for a server."
.

Recommended reading, both. I now have a deeper understanding of why my early Win95 restores kept getting clobbered (probably) by registry problems. I am also beginning to see some reason for strange behavior in NT, e.g. odd drag&drop symptoms, inconsistencies among different programs about which directory and filename format to use, and as always potential Registry corruption causes. Especially interesting is the information that NTFS uses the same 8+3 aliasing for compatibility reasons.

There is the claim (in article 2) that "the Registry entries do not contain both the short and long filenames, only the short one.", yet spelunking Registry in both Win95 and WinNT, I see numerous examples of both, often mixed in the same long path e.g. for Office or shared components. Possibly, this may be an artifact of installing from CD, where there may be problems with long filenames. Possibly, there was a lapse in thought when that sentence was written; clearly only one or the other will be used for any given long-name, not both.

In any case, my conclusion is that Win9x and WinNT are perfectly stable as long as no changes ever occur in the file system. :)

Wednesday 10.03

Bus strike was over today, and rides were free this day. Convenient, since I had to be across town for a dentist appointment by 9 AM, and it was cold, raining, and later snow in the air.

Since Therese was home today, and I had promised to spend some time with her, I eventually got off the computer, after at least starting on some of the bookkeeping chores I need to do to achieve closure on 1998 for tax purposes.

What Therese likes doing with me, is miniature painting. This means 25mm cast figures, usually fantasy roleplaying style, set in suitable scenarios. We do the figures mostly in oil paint. This is a hobby that goes way back with me, started some 20 years ago when I an a shop importing and selling F&SF books, roleplaying games and figures. Back when D&D rules ruled. Since then, I've had a couple of painted scenarios kicking about, and a few small boxes with left-over or collected figures, and the kids got interested, so we had some sessions about a year ago making more. Now and then, we return to this, and it is a great relaxing pastime, talking and thinking while slowly finishing up some interesting scenes.

In a way, I suppose it is a continuation of the model building I did when I was that age, plus the landscapes I made for the railroad set I had at one time. There is a definite satisfaction in crafting at that scale, and getting things just right. I intend to put up a few macro photos of some of this stuff later. Might interest a few readers.

Thursday 11.03

More painting with my daughter today. I've been touching up an old miniatures scenario (Good grief, 17 years old! -- I had signed it with a date.) and musing about how it had become the starting point (sort of) of a Science Fiction novel I have been working on recently. The second scenario, as it takes shape, I find is insinuating itself into a chapter I've not yet written, in fact barely outlined. Strange how the creative mind works.

The story itself is also interesting, in that it started as an idea for a role-playing "world", about as many years ago...
I started with a very simple premise: a single change in the common characteristics of metals (they were hot, to a varying degree), and postulated a reasonable why, and extraplated a number of reasonable consequences, both physical and social. It all gave a very interesting, internally consistent game world, in which I set a number of tasks for players to solve.
Much later, I found that the concept was still alive and well in a creative corner of the mind, and when I examined it closer, there was much more waiting to be explored. Writing it down, a story developed around a pivotal moment in the history of this world. I found myself vastly entertained. I keep adding to the narrative and background at odd moments.
I have another novel growing in much the same manner, but more about this another time. Writing becomes a habit...

I've been checking out some (NT) back-up software. Sunbelt Software (US/UK/FR) has a few interesting NT utility offerings, some free. UtraBac for example covers both a backup manager (eval) and a simple (floppy-based) image cloner (free) -- the latter will transfer a disk image to another disk (or tape) and do basic Registry backup/restore tasks. From what I learned (above) about how 8+3 aliases are dynamically assigned, image backup seems to be the only "safe" option. If nothing else, this is the utility of choice to use when upgrading harddisks without reinstalling everything.

Friday 12.03

Traffic is back to "normal", what with buses running as scheduled. I wonder what drivers are thinking when they "park" in the middle of crossings or other interesting places.

In some cases it's pretty obvious -- they're having a conversation with a pedestrian , cyclist or even other driver in the oposite direction ("Oh, hi Joe! <screech> How'ya'doing? Blablabla..."), totally oblivious to the cars lining up behind and around them.

Other times you eventually see gestures and such that indicate a cellular call. Of course, one should be grateful for small blessings, such as that the driver has realized that he or she cannot concentrate on driving and talking on the phone at the same time.

Sometimes, there's not a clue. Like this morning, I'm turning left into a side street, in the gap after the usual gaggle of meeting traffic. The trailing car is rather slow, and as I begin the turn, the driver actually stops on top of the pedestrian crossing and begins backing up in front of me. There I am, straddling two meeting lanes, and he's cut me off, doing-- what? He reconsiders, and grudgingly gives me a few inches by moving slightly ahead again. I squeeze past him and the parked cars that come right up to the corner here. Looking back in the rear view mirror, in due time I see him decide to turn in and drive down the street. Maybe he was looking for parking spaces?

One could write a book about this sort of thing... <grin>.

Microsoft approach:
When the design is unclear,
Another dialog.
-- Haiku-Bo

Saturday 13.03

Good morning, dear readers...

Insight of the week: Dust is worthless precisely because there is so much of it. (Cleaning day...)
Final word on driving in Malmoe: It's really just a survival training course. Graduates can go on to, say, Calcutta.

Speaking of this town, it was in the news yesterday that the unemployement figures here were the worst in the country -- 40%. No wonder the place has such a low-mood ambience.

The local tax authority computer is doing something odd lately. I applied for a minor change in tax status after the New Year, and eventually, a registration change notice was sent to me, though not with the right change. Then some weeks later, another copy was sent. Then some weeks later, I got two copies, one as before, the other with the requested change noted. The following week, another set came in the mail, just like the previous one, except for the date. Followed by yet another. This past week, I have now received a new set every day... I spoke with someone at the local authority on the phone, and they had never heard of anything like it. Someone was going to look into it. Personally, I think the computer got lonely and is trying for outside contact using the only means it has...

tax triangle The logo on the left is that of the Swedish tax authority. I find that this is an interesting cross between a Bermuda Triangle symbol and a black hole visualization. I can just see the tax money swirling in and vanishing into the invisible singularity at the center. Remarkably apt; there must be higher forces at work here (anyone read Illuminati?). Perhaps like the synchronicity one sometimes sees in people's names -- Joe Clerke works in an office, Jack Plumber is one, Justin Case is always working on contingency plans... :)

My amusement this weekend is (re)installing NT4, this time a version with SP4 applied. I had forgotten how frustrating it was to install network and RAS (at 2 AM) with hardware whose drivers are not on the CD. On the one hand, the install script wants NT files from the CD (i.e. set path to CD), on the other wants OEM files not on the CD -- but you cannot at this stage change paths, so you have to cancel out of the repeating next and error dialogs. Even the Alt-B trick that had worked (I think) last year, didn't now. Actually, last time I put a lot of the CD i386 files on a spare partition and added the OEM stuff, but now things are a bit too crowded for that, at least without some preparations that I did not feel like attempting at 2 AM.

I ended up doing a few manual file copies and tweaks based on the previous NT4 setup, which might have worked. I'll know today.

However, this morning, it struck me that maybe I was doing it wrong. Perhaps I should first install the services (from CD) using generic drivers (from CD), and then later change/add to the OEM drivers, on the theory that the service files are then already present.

Sunday 14.03

* I'm sorry for the missed update today, I was too deep into figuring out what kind of shell-game NT plays with its half-PnP and hardware allocations. This means long hours of reinstall and detective work.

I've several times got to the stage where I think I've nailed everything down (we're talking base installation here, adding network and modem), and I adjust IRQ and IO on COM3 to the 3Com LAN+modem so it won't get clobbered. New setting: reboot. And Boom -- it gets clobbered again, and I in passing lose autoreboot; i.e. I suddenly have to power-down to restart the boot sequence.

Reinstall. Get autoreboot back. Start again. Reboot, reboot, reboot... and we're back to square one: add network, add modem, add RAS...

Strange part is, I have it all working on another NT partition, same base build 1381-SP1, except becuase of PnP the allocations cannot simply be copied.

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