Daynotes 1999 week 14

Daynotes: Week of 5 - 11 April, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 14

* Link to: last modified 15:30 GMT+2 on 11.04.1999

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

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Monday 05.04

Easter Monday, here a public holiday as well. Many Catholics from more southern areas of Europe are very surprised that Swedes, protestant by name, atheist by claim, make public holidays out of what is to be sure observed in Catholic countries, but rarely with business and shops closed.

Historical reasons explain a lot. The old Swedish agrarian society, centuries back, had holidays, festivities and drinking excuses practically every week, until the combined efforts of church and king severely cut back on these "red days" in the calendar. Later reforms also moved several remaining halidays to the nearest weekend. Nevertheless, plenty of holidays and "squeeze days", the latter normal day(s) between bank holiday and weekend, where many establishments close or have extremely reduced work forces. Trying to do get anything "official" accomplished during such days is pretty much doomed.

I find I get a lot of disparaging comments lately about the Opera browser, sometimes indirect, sometimes explicit. It is usually dismissed as "oh yeah, that one, built on the Netscape kernel" - the last which is a misconception, probably born of the fact that Opera will "identify" itself as "Netscape v3" so as not to trigger IE-specific (or Nav4-specific) webpage or server functionality.

Opera, BTW, still uses the MDI style interface, i.e. a virtually "unlimited" number of document windows constrained by the overall application window. Yes, I know, terribly old fashioned... But it works both well and fast, even in the 16 bit version on my old 486 notebook, which still gets used now and then.

Tuesday 06.04

Translation work (billable) rules the day. My notes are likely to be brief this week. By some odd synchronicity, the subject of the telco documents I am working on concerns the very ISDN packages that I am considering signing up for. By the end of this job, I will likely know more about it than anyone in the telco Front Office ranks. Talk about informed decisions :)

The one "problem" as I see it, is that there is this box involved in the installation, to which is connected the ISDN modem and the in-house analog network. It is not especially small -- think size fat notebook computer hung on wall by main phone outlet. It is supposed to be close to this outlet (which will become digital), and also close to the envisioned more-or-less "permanent" placement of the computer. The latter constraint is approximately equal to how much RS232 serial cable you want to run to the ISDN modem. The former is a matter of feet. Needs a bit of thought.

Quote of the day: "there is a vacuum in thinking about the next stage" -- NATO general at HQ Europe considering out loud what is next in the Kosovo/Yugoslavia campaign. Do tell...

Oh well, the intensity of the air bombardment continues to increase and it is plain that the Serbian infrastructure is beginning to crumble. This does not unfortunately make Serbs or their government any more inclined to roll over. And you have to admit that taking out any number of Stalinist-era huge-scale administration eyesores in downtown Belgrade can only improve the neighbourhood, even in the eyes of the locals once they get over their initial anger.

Wednesday 07.04

Translating in top gear just now. Word2000 is a much better product than Word97, which I had been using up until last month. Things just flow better in terms of routine writing and editing, and most of the automatic features are much better implemented and make fewer irritating mistakes. And those mistakes that do occur are usually very easily corrected (e.g. undo, retype, and no automation kicks in second time around).

This is good, as the writing schedule will be ramping up into warp speed now when Tom and I sign the contract with O'Reilly for our book on Outlook2000. Thanks for all the cheering support we've received from our correspondents, and special thanks go to our agent David L. Rogelberg at Studio B and editor Troy Mott at O'Reilly who both praised our proposal and samples highly, supported us in the submission process, and have done a fantastic job of getting us to the contract stage. The atmosphere all around has been most agreeable, so we embark on this new adventure with great anticipation in the very best of spirits.

This evening (8 PM GMT+2) I am suddenly cut off from all my net/com/org sites, and a goodly portion of the Internet west of New York (as seen from Europe). Doing tracert to a variety of US sites shows DNS services and AlterNet backbone nodes timing out totally in various places. Pro-Serbian hackers attempting service denial attacks perhaps?

10 PM: Everything seems normal again.

Oops... Second document in the series I was translating was set by its author not to make backup copies. So naturally, a late amendment, meaning I had to replace one chapter with a new version from another file, trashed the document, and there was no last-save backup version to revert to. I had to go back to the original document, wisely copied and stashed in a ZIP file. Normally, before drastic changes or experiments, I tend to do a save-as and continue from it, leaving a version-breakpoint copy. Here I had not come so far , and assumed that backup would do.

Why, oh why, does Microsoft mandate that loaded documents must always override my own backup settings?

Thursday 08.04

Mystery of the day: When I started the system this morning, mouse motion seemed extremely slow. Checking in the control panel, the motion setting was almost at minimum. This is typical Windows somehow... settings change at apparent random, seemingly by themselves. Granted not often, but every once in a while, a significant change will be there to surprise and disconcert you when you least expect it.

Two reboots later. Hmm, seems the external keyboard, if plugged in at startup time (first time this morning, previously I had simply plugged it into a running system), confuses NT/drivers and changes not only the settings as such, but more significantly the real pointer speed for each setting. Just set lower would not have mattered so much, except that the real speed for each setting was about half as well. That's slo-o-o-ow.

Speaking of slow, I kept task manager up today tracking performance, apropos the mouse thing earlier, and made the interesting observation that whenever any Office2000 component has a window open, CPU activity is pegged at 100%.

(Actually, it ticks periodically between 95% and 100%, but if there was a sound to go with it, all I would hear would be this insane whining at top revs -- come to think of it, given the sound/animation theme options we have for everything these days, I mildly surprised task manager doesn't already have this option...)

Note, the window does not have to be in the foreground, it's enough that it is open. Minimize all Office windows, however, and the activity bar immediately plummets to the more typical 4% (on my system) idle level. Other applications show widely fluctuating activity demands, depending on what they're doing, but Office components (Word, Excel; hmm... interestingly not Outlook) just consistently hog everything they can get all the time. Task priority is "normal", so I wonder a bit about this, although other foreground tasks seem to function normally. However, there is in fact a distinct (on a P200 system) slowdown with an Office window in the background, when I now compare response time in Aolpress while writing this tabled format. I have usually been careless about leaving many windows open while jotting notes here, especially when doing e.g. translation work, but clearly this does mean a performance hit.

For music I sometimes play a MOD-player on my system called "Modplug". It is very good, and implements Pro Logic Surround, which can make any halfway decent PC multimedia speaker set sound rather amazing. As I figure it, this is a higher tech version of what "quadrophonic sound" used to do with four speakers, only here it is done with two and some advanced echo crossfeeding between the stereo channels. Something similar comes prepackaged in some newer "digital" speaker sets. (Tom was drooling over a set of these the other day, along with a 35" high-rezolution TV...)

Anyway, here's an interesting site for some higher quality ambient MOD-music files that I ran across: "Nighbeat".

Friday 09.04

For a change I wandered into other areas of the Web today, and ran across the site Gamasutra. I was mildly surprised to find a large number of very interesting, and well-written technical articles on the gaming industry written by some of its professionals. This place is worth visiting for anyone curious about the workings and design processes behind those games you see everywhere. Or more philosophical contributions about how and why magic game elements should convey more awe and fear, or that there should be more emotional, suspenseful and even weird ambience to games, something current game programmers are not good at.

Expected some feedback on the submitted half of the translation today, but it never materialized. Oh well, there was enough other things happening, including a couple of new bkes for the kids, and Therese learning very happily to ride hers in about half an hour of practice. She's planning on gettting up early tommorrow morning to continue. Hmm...

Saturday 10.04

Jerry Pournelle noted in yesterday's View (later to be View43?):

"... One of the announcements at WinHec will come as no great surprise: there will be a Windows 98 Second edition (they are NOT calling it Windows 99) this year, and that will be in addition to Windows 2000 which is the upgrade of NT. The divergence between NT and Windows continues into the next millenium. Windows 98 Second Edition is in fact OSR1, mostly bug fixes. I'll have to go over the notes to see what the real changes are if any.
I gather it's mostly game support that has made them keep the dual system another year. The commercial/home/consumer market gets increasingly important, bigger than business/enterprise. ..."

This is an interesting observation, as W98SE is likely also a stopgap move in anticipation of further delays in delivering W2999 -- oops, W2000 (home or pro). Any bets on seeing W98TE (alias OSR2) next year?

I am reminded that one of the reasons for Atari's demise was an increasingly frantic thrashing between targeting the home/games market and the business sector. Games have progressively driven the Win9x platform further and further from base compatibility with NT. Meanwhile, "NT5" (W2000) tests suggests upwards of 60% incompatibility with existing productivity software, and the requirement that most games need to be (re)written specifically for this OS to function. I am therefore led to suspect there is some serious agonizing going on inside MS about when and how the transition to a single NT5-ish OS can be achieved with minimum losses (or corporate casualties).

It was noted elsewhere the other day that Mr Gates had become the world's first 100-billion-dollar man, with a personal fortune in excess of the worth of all but the top 18 countries in the world. I wonder when (and where) he will register his own country to dodge further legal disputes... Perhaps we can suggest cleaning up and retrosfitting some hotly disputed region such as the former Yugoslavia. Sort of solve two problems at once.

Jerry also adds in the View page a long but perceptive analysis of the mistakes of Kosovo.

Sunday 11.04

* Yesterday was a mixed success. The kids got new bikes on Friday, adult size ones. First time for Therese, but she got the hang of it very quickly, cycling quite well after an evening of practice. Yesterday, she was out first thing in the morning, and things went fine until around lunch time when a couple visiting a neighbour apparently did not give her sufficient margin to pass. Although she had experienced a few spills before, this one was major, and made worse by their telling her off for being there on a bicycle. Not that they really had any say in the matter, since this is private property -- a common yard for those who live here, and they don't. But since when has circumstances ever stopped people from having clear opinions of right (them) and wrong (others)? In any case, most everyone cycles everywhere on the yard, especially the kids. It was an unfortunate incident, made much worse than necessary by the so-called adults involved. We later took Therese to an emergency dental reception, because she complained of pain and we saw what looked like cracks in her front teeth. Sure enough, some enamel had flaked off from impact, but luckily not deemed serious, even though it was her permanent teeth.

A weather system has rolled in today, and really makes concentrated thinking a struggle. Not a day for major projects of any kind. Let's see, what's on the tv...? Video...? Book...?

System check, subtest:
Date y2k roll-over!
Play dead! Good system!
-- Haiku-Bo

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