Daynote mail 1999 week 14

Daynote mail: Week of 5 - 11 April, 1999

Daynote mail and replies -- Week 14

* Link to: last modified at 12:45 GMT+2, on 11.04.1999

Any quoted mail from reader feedback ends up here. This tends to reflect something of the ongoing discussions between myself and readers (and other web-daynote maintainers), provide tips, ask for help, and just be plain fun.

The sidebar "Daynotes"-link, beside each weekday, links to the corresponding day in the daynote file. The reverse linkage is also provided on the daynotes.

himself Mail your comments to: bo@leuf.com

Anyone who wishes correspondence to remain private should say so up front.

Quoted mail may be shortened and is usually based on my reply quotes. There may be some minor overlap between what's on the daynote page and what is given here in order to give correct context.

(BTW, week numbering is according to the Swedish calendar, which this year started January in week 53. "Current" weekday is of course based on GMT+1.)

Monday 05.04

Bob Thompson, continuing an exchange about the fact that his site seemed to have been hit by a junk-mail utility for extracting email addresses from his pages:

I've noticed a slight increase in my own junk mail lately. Interestingly, I get essentially zero junk mail addressed to some of my very public accounts, such as webmaster@ttgnet.com. I assume that junk mail address parsers are smart enough to realize that such addresses are not worth mailing to.
As far as Melissa, I had the same thoughts. Interesting how software parallels life. Many people are concerned about monoculture in agriculture for similar reasons. Everyone now grows the same wheat and the same pigs. In the past, a disease that affected one or another variant of a crop would have limited effect because other variants would be resistant. Nowadays, if a virus arises that affects wheat, it's going to affect essentially the entire crop.
Yes, I would imagine that these email-address extractors do a certain amount of filtering. Interestingly, I think I've only once got a letter addressed to "webmaster", from anyone. Had nothing to do with the website as such, was just a request for a programming hint.
We still see a fair bit of evolutionary pressure on the Internet, and on software as a whole, and although one can carry biological analogies too far, there are very interesting parallels here.
> most people in this country were not aware that the telephone company keeps detailed records of local calls. Now that everyone knows that, virus creators will be unlikely to deliver the initial copy via their own dial up connection.
I don't know about that. Never underestimate the myopic focus of evil, not to mention just plain stupidity.

Tuesday 06.04

I spotted the following yesterday on Yahoo news:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court Monday gave police broad new powers to search a passenger's personal belongings inside a car suspected of containing contraband.
The high court, by a 6-3 vote, ruled that officers may inspect a passenger's purse, briefcase or other personal items if they have sufficient grounds to search the car.
Continuing a trend in recent years by the court's conservative majority to expand police powers to search and seize evidence, Justice Antonin Scalia said in the ruling the passenger's constitutional privacy rights were not violated.
In the car search case, Scalia said ``passengers, no less than drivers, possess a reduced expectation of privacy with regard to the property that they transport in cars.''
He said the constitutional right against unreasonable searches would not bar the search and a court warrant would not be needed as long as the police had sufficient reason to believe the car contained illegal contraband.
``Effective law enforcement would be appreciably impaired without the ability to search a passenger's personal belongings when there is reason to believe contraband or evidence of criminal wrongdoing is hidden in the car,'' he said.”

...so of course I asked Bob Thompson for a comment.

Traditional rights eroding further?
Yeah, I'd call that an erosion. Warrantless searches of any sort are prima facie unconstitutional, viz.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The problem, of course, is that the Supremes "interpret" things that don't need to be interpreted. The latest attempt to get around constitutional safeguards is their interpretation of "unreasonable." In a literal sense, as it was intended, "unreasonable" means "without reason", i.e. without evidence that a crime has occurred. Now they're attempting to redefine a cop's suspicion as being grounds for a "reasonable" search. That, of course, eliminates the safeguard entirely, since any copy can suspect anyone of anything at any time. Exactly the situation the Fourth Amendment was intended to protect us against.

Wednesday 07.04

I would like to mention author C J Cherryh's own website, recently updated and revised (under my SF list I maintain a listing of CJC's works) after some lengthy periods of standstill during the past year or so. A casual now&then contact has been kept via email, and I received a mail apropos my comments on the recent changes:

Spring greetings!
That's a very nice front page image you've changed to. And it is good to have some fresh and upbeat updates in your newsletter to read. Keep up the good work!

Thank you! I'm trying to keep it easily update-able...and thanks for the kind words on the image. I did that myself, with Microsoft Image Composer. I love the special effects.
I'm learning...
My, I *am* impressed. I thought perhaps you had one of your professional artist friends do it for you. It had a very nice spacey balance to it; solar flare-fountain thingy.
A happy spring to you and yours. We're in the season of spring storms...tornado alley, but mostly we just duck.
I've heard about some of those. Very nasty tornados and other storms lately given the extremes in temperature as these global-warming effects take hold. Well, do keep ducking; I want more stories from that imagination of yours.
...
BTW, I read your advice texts for authors way back when I first saw them, and applaud your no-nonsense approach to the business and spreading the word to the rest of us about how things work (or don't, as the case may be).

This advice and background information, perhaps primarily for fiction authors (and interested readers), is found at CJC's site. Oh yes, and I do warmly recommend her books.

Thursday 08.04

A follow-up came on yesterday's reply to CJC:

Oh, I duck with great efficiency. I assure you.
The painting? Done with a flared straight line across a page and a multiple rotational deformation through the special effects panel. The "sun" in the middle however was a last-moment inspiration. I'm flattered.

Actually, it turned into a rather busy day for email. Partly because of a lot of contractual stuff flying back and forth as the US time-zone morning hit my European afternoon, and partly because of this comment from Bob Thompson:

Unless I'm missing something, her web site doesn't work now. I get the initial image map just fine, but it points to:
http://www.cherryh.com/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/www/index.html/map?568,354
which I can't make do anything at all. I've tried entering URLS manually, e.g. www.cherryh.com/index.html, but nothing works for me.
I don't know what the problem might be:
http://www.cherryh.com/ works fine for me, and I click on the center sun which indicates http://www.cherryh.com/menu.htm and so on...
(http://www.cherryh.com/index.html works fine too)
Hmm, this was with Opera. With IE5, I get an "incorrect" indication that the entire image is a link, not just the center sun. Only the center will actually link to the menu page. I'll tell CJC about this, and suggest she adds a normal link.

So, I dashed off a forward of this to CJC, explaining:

A reader of my webpages observed a problem with your site, which I have verified for people using IE5.
The immediate fix, which should be added in any case, is an ordinary plain-text link, perhaps under the image. You should also be aware of the fact that a search engine robot will as a rule be unable to index your site using only an imagemap link in to the rest of the site.
On second thought, make "Greetings Voyager" at the top into the link.

CJC's reply:

Thanks! I do know Opera has a problem and I'm going to try a fix [it rests with Frontpage's webbot mapping, which I want to use, but which I have to learn how to use intelligently ... but I think your notion of a top of page link is very, very good...and very easy to do both.

and later:

The fix is made, at least the quick one...thanks so much. My apologies to all visitors who were annoyed by this problem.

I verified that the top page worked. There is an interesting additional comment to this, from Bob:

Thanks. Until I read your page, I thought of Ms. Cherryh as a fantasy author, so I didn't bother ever reading one of her books. After reading your page, I dropped what I was doing and Barbara & I cruised over to the library to check out a couple of her books. I say a couple, because that's all they had on the shelves. Fortunately, both were ones you'd listed as hard SF. Assuming I enjoy them, I'll start buying her books.

Life on the Internet has its moments of connectivity...

Friday 09.04

Bob Thompson remarked somewhat ruefully today that my recommendation of CJ Cherryh as a good SF author was "going to end up costing ... a lot of money". He like what he saw at the library, and so planned on buying other SF-genre titles.

Trying to "get even", he recommended some other authors, and when I commented that I would likely have little reading time for a while now, he responded:

Well, as I explained to Barbara one time, when I write and all those words come out, I have to do something to replace them or suffer a severe word deficiency. The best way to replace all those words I've used up is to read some more. My general rule of thumb is that when I write five to ten pages, I need to read one book to replace the lost words.
This theory reminds me somewhat of the spending-velocity theory of getting rich :)
On balance, I'd rather have books and no money than money and no books.

A man of my own convictions...

The usual smattering of junk email today (get rich instantly, be multi-orgasmic, talk to our sex-staved women, get alien sex-change now, ...), plus one personally addressed version relating to SF. I pass it along as an example of current "electronic publishing" experiments:

My name is Mark Edward Jones. I'm an author who's created a website to showcase my original novel WINGS OF THE VALIANT, an epic-length, sci-fi, action/adventure story that's now available exclusively on the World Wide Web at Electric Works Publishing,
You're invited to visit my website which includes links, webrings, awards, media interviews, a novel review from Starfire Reviews, and a free preview of my novel.

I have "repaired" the odd state of ascii-fied html tags that this message came as. The site(s) as such may be of passing interest to some, though I hasten to add I am not in any way endorsing or recommending here. If nothing else, I find the introductory pages heavy on sponsors and animated banners, and repetitive and "loud" in layout. The "previewed" fiction content is perhaps better than I feared, but not what would keep me reading, much less buy the book. Though I have seen much worse, there were nonetheless distracting typos, spelling mistakes and sentences that badly needed the attention of an editor's mindset.

As a whole, I tend to avoid sites self-promoted in this way, but am willing to concede that I may from time to time run across something fun or interesting to read. The Web is after all a place to explore, and when exploring off the beaten track (or even on it), you can find much trash and occasional gems. Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud. -- But oh, that remaining 10%...

Saturday 10.04

More between Bob Thompson and myself...

Is that the one that involves the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction as the speed of spending accelerates?
Not exactly, the relativistic mass increase may however cause quickly spent money to gravitationally attract money in the same direction, and all joy of spending does go FL-flat at near-c speeds, but I was thinking of the resulting monetary vacuum at the source that attracts further funding there.

and

I'll have to trust you. The last time I did any work with quantum mechanics was more than twenty years ago. I can see how it might apply, though.
Trust me, and give me enough money to spend quickly and I will happily demonstrate :)
And what are you still doing up? Isn't it 0200 there?
Tell me about it. 02:12
I'm reading, answering mail, what else? Nice quiet time to write...

I also made this comment based on a reader comment about IE and Outlook posted in Bob's daynotes:

"... Whichever finishes first, hangs up on the other. That may not be a problem with your proxy server, but it will be for anybody using modems."

Oh yes, I have noticed this. If an IE5 window is open, and I'm using something else on the dial-up (ftp, Opera, OL), after the present time (20 minutes) this dialog pops up saying that the connection hasn't been active recently (never mind any other activity on the line), asking shall it be closed, with an automatic countdown to actually close the connection -- such rudeness!
The first time I got very confused, because I was doing a lengthy ftp download, and had I not been there, this download would have been cut off in mid- transfer. The dialog was anonymous, so it took a while to realize that it was IE triggering it.
Interestingly, it doesn't matter whether IE starts the dial-up session or not, it just blithely assumes somehow that it is the only application using the connection and is therefore fully competent to decide that it can be terminated just because nobody is browsing in IE.

Sunday 11.04

* Hohum... As usual, it is a snapp to join, but sticky-glue, Canadian-prairie-mud, hard to leave (Geocities). So it goes...

To: "geobilling" <geobilling@geostaff.com>
Date sent: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 11:55:54 +0200
Notice hereby served that I will contest any attempts to autocharge my Visa account for Geoplus and VURL during the current billing period, or any one thereafter. Services have been repeatedly cancelled via the account manager, and repeatedly notified as cancelled via the report forms and via email. Your account management system is however not updating the account status to reflect this, despite 2 weeks having passed.
Each time I have later come back to the accounts manager, the system tells me both that VURL leuf.org is active (incorrect since DNS updates by the end of March), and that the site Athens/5272 is still Geoplus.
You were advised of this change by explicit email on 30 March, the system ack of reading this message as below.
geobilling, on 31 Mar 99, at 15:40, you wrote:
> Confirmation of reading: your message -
> Date: 30 Mar 99, 18:05
> To: geoplusbilling@geocities.com
> Subject: Re: Geoplus Bill Statement
> Was read at 15:40, 31 Mar 99.

So much for the illusion of button-click termination of services.

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