Daynotes 1999 week 11

Daynotes: Week of 15 - 21 March, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 11

* Link to: last modified 22:40 GMT+1 on 21.03.1999

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

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Monday 15.03

A reminder: I am requesting user comments about Outlook.

Well, I have finally crawled out from inside my NT system, spitting assorted registry entries and configuration entrails, and can sweep up the accumulated frustrations of four re-installs in just over two days. After which I fully subscribe to the theory reported on Jerry Pournelle's mail page that there is a random number generator at the heart of Win32 -- the master arbitrator.

I honestly don't know exactly what happened, but in the fourth install, I suddenly got back connectivity. Perhaps the numbers simply came up in such an order that I got the same configuration as the working NT on the other partition. I can't say. There appeared to be no connection between what I was doing and the end result. It just... happened.

Perhaps the most amusing (?) event report during this time read something like this:

The register content of COM3 overlapped that of COM3 register content.

The most cryptic may have been:

While validating that COM3 was really a serial port, the contents of the divisor latch register was identical to the interrupt enable and the receive registers. The device is assumed not to be a serial port and will be deleted.

Though, oddly, I still get that report even now when it is working and the port is there and functional. Go figure. At least Microsoft believes in democratic principles:

The browser has forced an election on network \Device\NetBT_elpc3n1 because a master browser was stopped.

Given that they allow electoral processes inside device management, I can only hope the ballot wasn't too rigged.

Tom Syroid and I completed the "sprint" effort on the book proposal we've been working on of late, and we feel pretty good about it. It's a real pleasure collaborating with Tom, even in the insanely hectic moments, because we both have this rare sense of humor to complement our real respect for each other's professionalism.

It's also been terrific with the positive feedback from our agent David L Rogelberg of Studio B and Troy Mott, the editor at O'Reilly. Now that the book proposal is submitted, we await the decision from the publisher. Watch this space; we're set to go far together...

It was kind of irksome to be in the midst of installation arcana with the pressure of maintaining an online presence all the while. Thus I never touched any settings on the existing NT4 while I was messing around with all of this and Office2000.

Tuesday 16.03

Well, a much more relaxed and bright day today. And NT is behaving, mostly. Catching up on the Daygang rounds.. (How curious, has everyone stopped using underlined links -- Oh, my reinstall of Opera hadn't imported all the existing settings.) Hello again, everyone! (Sunny smile.)

Word 2000, which I am now using on the new NT4 setup, has a distinctly faster feel (I used Word97 earlier), and for that matter a very solid one. I can believe that it is in part a core rewrite (how very un-MS-ish, to rewrite code!?)

Having used Word6 and up for a lot of writing over the years, the interface and conventions are pretty familiar by now - frustrations and all. Pretty much the first thing I did with both OL and Word was turn off all the menu animations and context-adaptivity - scheesch, please give me a break, I'm an old geezer who once twiddled bit-level ASM-coding from front panels and I do prefer things to stay reasonably put. Sometimes I think MS has too much golly-gee-whiz attitude in its development ranks. Auto-correction is kind of neat, though sometimes disconcerting and needs at times to be slapped down, firmly. (Sit! Stay! Good code.)

Haven't done much since yesterday. Still get odd event reports about COM3 at startup, but I can dial out and connect, so I'm not agonizing about it. System seems stable, and every so often, I add something more. For the moment I'm refraining from using RegClean, because I'm not sanguine about how I get upwards of 20K Registry keys dumped in my lap every time e.g. Office has installed or de-installed something.

With Partition Magic, I have incrementally been moving free space down and expanding D (the new NT partition) as required by NT and Office/IE5 - D was originally only a 250 Mb "CD-games" partition. My previous NT (Swedish) resides on F.

I was surprised that IE5 does not display all gifs, only some. In particular the little speech balloon on the daynote index page and the mail-envelope gif on the Mail pages don't show. Odd...

Anyway, at present I now and then "re-install" onto the new NT system some main application, as seen from D. Most of these reside on an apps&doc partition (E) separate from any OS. Some don't care a bit how they're run or from where -- fine, others need the complete install to function, or to realize they are correctly registered, or add something to the system directories.

Office 2000 installation was smooth enough. It just trundled away and did its stuff, though with the usual misleading progress bars "Installing Office… (ok, almost done now, there 100%. What? Bar starting over from 0. Ok, now soon done… What again!? Same non-descriptive heading.)" I kind of wonder what "optimizing" my system meant, since that seemed a lengthy process.

I started up Outlook and was led through the introductory set-up wizards. Symantic Fax was also installed, and the main wizard thread forked a couple of times, partly to set this up, partly to nag me about "let's create a new Internet account for you". At one point I discovered I had about 4 of these eager little nags up and panting, begging behind the main window. (Sit! Stay!)

There appeared to be a few glitches in all this, because all the wizard-entered info is not fully transferred into the relevant setting dialogs, as I later discovered. I was particularly unimpressed by how several email fields were filled in as "Bo Leuf@Leuf fc3 Consultancy", spaces and all, lifted from name and organization entries, despite me having correctly specified email-URLs in the wizard forms.

Wednesday 17.03

Too many late night recently, and last night until 2 AM. This morning, after getting the kids to school, I had to sleep in for a change, then do some errands, so my "normal" day started very late.

Finally starting up the system this afternoon gave me a bit of a shock, however: "Warning, your drive may be corrupt...blabla" I can't even recall except dimly the exact wording; first time I've seen this, the dire warnings about inaccessible partition or even unusable system. Autocheck was already trundling, so there was nothing to do but wait. The system resumed startup into NT on D with no further reports of any kind. I spent a few minutes wandering about looking for any recent log files that might explain more. Nada.

Ah, of course, system event viewer... nope? ... hmm, application view... there was the report:

Checking file system on D: The type of the file system is FAT.
WARNING! Your drive may be corrupt. Please let AUTOCHK run. Skipping AUTOCHK on a volume may lead to an unmountable volume. Skipping AUTOCHK on a system drive may lead to an unusable system.
AUTOCHK resumed.

Followed by the normal stats on disk space and usage.

Not especially helpful.

(Later) Reapplied SP4 -- just making sure -- and rebooted. The only thing of note was the alert stating "No known Year 2000 issues detected on this system." Yeah, sure, we'll see when we get there...

(Later) Hmm, firing up Outlook immediately started up two things: Winfax installation wizard (Cancel! Sit! Stay!) and a "Windows 2000 Premium edition installation configuration" progress alert. WTF? The latter finished whatever it was doing and went away on its own.

Ok, down to the usual writing and catching up on mail...

Thursday 18.03

It is so much easier with mornings that start off sunny. Now approaching the spring equinox, it is light both earlier and later, and the dark gloom of winter is lifting. (This is about the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska, but with a predominantly rainy winter climate -- the Gulf Stream still brings warmth and reminants of hurricanes, so while the rest of the country has lots of snow during the winter, just here on the southwestern coast it is mostly rain.) The birds sound like spring is just around the corner. The rollerblade fanatics, albeit well bundled up, have already taken to the fast lanes during the morning rush hour (argh, screech).

Very ungood -- I have in short order experienced two of the freeze-on-connect that SP4 was supposed to have fixed. This kind of freeze mandates manual power-off. The first time, I got the expected checkdisk at startup. The second time, I got Autocheck as above, with that dreaded warning of a corrupt drive. Could this be because Outlook was open at the time? Again, there were no fault reports from checkdisk, and things seem normal.

NT = Normal Trepidation -- to go where no user has gone before.

This is weird. I generally set up a few desktop folders to collect stuff in, shortcuts on a theme, that sort of thing, and am now getting around to it in this installation. Previously, each such folder would inutitively open into its last set size and location. Now, however, they all open to the same size and location, according to what was last set in any window just closed. If I move and resize one, then close it, all the others not yet opened will open precisely on top of the changed one. Argh... SP4 has changed something here? Shit, it affects the sorting setting as well, and the auto-arrange! Sorting order is not retained. Set one to sort-by-xxx, and they all will! Default behavior is to always resort by name... Yep, affects view mode too (icons-list-details). Grrr... I. Do. Not. Like. This.

Friday 19.03

A day of catching up. Among other things, I translate and manage the Web version of the newsletter for the Rotary Doctor Bank, and once the printed copy is done, I do the final layout and image updates for the webpages. It is high time for web-issue 1, 1999, added to which I have decided to move the whole site to a subweb under my new domain. Geocities as host has worked ok, but updates are sometimes very heavy due to server load, and the banner ads a nuisance, even when "tamed" to "geoguide" format.

Saturday 20.03

Daygang doldrums. I note Tom Syroid's observation the lull in mail and general activity (I was also late in posting yesterday's notes) and having ISP problems, and of course Jerry Pournelle was off in Ohio, leaving no web updates these days. So really, it was really only Bob Thompson keeping readers up to speed on IE5 developments. Still, that's what's nice about a chain of related sites, it would be a rare day that had us all down/dormant.

Apropos Bob, I am surprised and dismayed at the lack of response he's getting about the incorrect billing at pair Networks, culminating in his final irate non-recommendation. I seriously contemplated setting up a site with pair myself, based on responsive servers (undisputedly, pair has good connectivity ratings) and good recommendations. That the administrative routines would be so bad was unexpected, and one may hope a temporary aberration. Anyone can make mistakes; the key issue is whether they can apologize and take corrective action.

What ultimately decided against pair in my case was simply that I found another host with more flexible overall control (as expressed by their term "virtual server" and scalable policy) which better suited my intentions for the leuf.net hosting domain. (This is at AIT.) I'm still setting things up there, so the intro page does not yet have active links to anything yet. Mostly Tom and I have just been using a subweb on it as our shared collaborative site. This was really an overriding concern, to set up a site where we could have "equal" access to some part of it. With the full control I have on the AIT account, I could easily achieve this; readily assigning web, ftp and POP privileges on the fly.

As it happens, I did get a bit miffed some nights ago when the leuf.net server started having significant down-times. Granted that the system status had a warning posted that server upgrades would make connectivity "intermittent" during an hour or so, but I experienced total downtime for several hours during a time when I was expecting to perform numerous updates and mail checks (in the midst of proposal work among other things), and this was repeated over several nights. Well, a complaint at least got a speedy reply and explanation:

While doing an upgrade on our server software our servers were required to restart. During this restart our servers are configured to do a file system check to ensure data safety. This was an unfortunate oversite on our part and we apologize for the inconvenience. This oversite will not happen again.

Apology accepted. Server availability seems normal since then.

Sunday 21.03

This is... interesting... Ok, so I'm running two different NT systems here, on separate partitions (and Win95 on C). The full set of fonts is installed on the F-system. Now I'm gradually moving everything over to the D-system. Comes time to set up more fonts than the base install. From previous experience with Win95+NT, I know that anything to do with the special system folder FONTS tends to be non-intuitive, so one is best advised to not brute-force things. Let's run through the given options:

The obvious one: Open control panel, fonts, and install new font. Point file selector to F, WINNT, FONTS -- Oops, the file selector refuses to see system-flagged folders. I can see it in explorer, so this does not depend on explorer settings.
Less-obvious. Open explorer and copy (default action from system folder) all the font files to a normal folder I called All_Fonts. Open control panel, fonts, install, point at the new folder. Fine, except there are no new fonts there. WTF? I check with explorer: yep, absolutely correct. The only font files copied were the ones already installed in the D-system.
Not-obvious. I will restart into F-NT, from there copy all the font files out to All_Fonts, which should work, since they are all registered there, and then return to D-NT and try the install method again. No wait, maybe--
Brilliant insight: from the DOS window, I note that FONTS is accessible, so I copy *.* to all_fonts. Hmm... perhaps less than brilliant... I now note that the F fonts folder has been (seemingly, see below) emptied of everything except the fonts defined in D.
This is really, I mean really non-intuitive.
From DOS the copy command did the exact opposite of what happened using copy in explorer!
Ok, Copy back from All_fonts to (F) FONTS. Ah, nuts. The files may have copied, but they sure aren't visible except in DOS dir. Explorer tells me that only the D-system fonts are there, hiding the others. I think I will reboot into F-NT and see what gives.
But first, control panel, fonts, install, point to all-fonts. Fine, the system detects that there are new fonts there and generates the full-name list. I install Century Schoolbook with copy to (D-)fonts folder. No problem. Doesn't register in this editing program's font preferences, however, so I close and restart it, at which point I can see the font here.

That all only took about an hour... (And I still need to check what the registered font situation is in F-NT.)

* Ok, I'm doing things that MS has not intended. Eventually, it all comes together, non-intuitively or not. Until then...

For best peace of mind,
Screen saver, starfield, slowest;
Count stars, format disk.

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