Daynotes 1999 week 16

Daynotes: Week of 19 - 25 April, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 16

* Link to: last modified 23:50 GMT+2 on 25.04.1999

Hi, welcome to this sixteenth 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 19.04

(Late updates to Sunday's page)

Next translation under way, a somewhat technical test report.

FedEx delivered the physical publisher contracts for our book this morning. With a cheerful smile. Signed, picked up only hours later, they are now on their way to O'Reilly & Associates. Now that was a door-to-door service that gives a good impression to the customer. Consider that FedEx maintains only a single office for Sweden, in Stockholm. Pickup was arranged via phone in a matter of minutes, including suitable pickup time, and the driver supplied all needed papers and covers when he came.

However, the day sort of vanished in the details... Not sure how or why. At least I got well into the translated document; enough to get a good feel for how to pace the work over the next few days so as not to hit the deadline before completion, while not burning out at full throttle somewhere along the way. It's an art form.

Words transformed, essense
of thoughts, filtered, recast, lost?
Content retained, clear.

While catching up on some reading, I ran across this little nugget of information. Make of it what you will. Early this month the Wall Street Journal reported that the top executives of Compaq, Apple and Gateway had all sold off personal stock during 1999 -- $90 million worth... The sound of parachute ripcords?

Tuesday 20.04

I ran across this interesting site: www.webstandards.org, of interest to anyone wondering about how to code clean and consistently viewable webpages. I quote their own mission statement:

"The WEB STANDARDS PROJECT is a coalition of web developers and users. Our mission is to stop the fragmentation of the web, by persuading browser makers that standards are in everyone's best interest. Together we can make the web accessible to everyone."

Of particular interest were the documents detailing the major rendering bugs in Opera and IE5. There was also a more general statement regarding IE5. It was revealing to point IE5 and Opera to the same examples provided in the analysis documents, and since I am running Opera 3.51, I could clearly see which issues had been addressed between 3.50 and 3.51. (There is a beta 3.53, but I have not yet installed this to try it out.)

Also noted from a recent issue of Risks Digest (20:30):

"... a [MS web site] white paper on security features in Office 2000. This was a Word document packaged in a self-extracting executable program. Not the ideal format to inspire confidence in this reader! The paper (o2ksec.exe) does contain useful information, including the registry settings to disable VBA macros or add-ins, and suggestions for locking critical sections of the registry without interfering unduly with user activities. ..."

(Risks archives at e.g. http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks, with (ir)regular postings on news://comp.risks)

Wednesday 21.04

Sorry, I wrote yesterday's notes early in the day, but never got the page published.

Most of yesterday was occupied with attending a PC dealer's conference (a reseller-consultant is one of the hats I wear when in the mood), sponsored by one of the major Scandinavian "one-stop shop" distributers. Part of this event was "preparing" resellers for the Swedish Office 2000 roll-out, now tentatively set for June 6. Part was vendor presentation of new products (not a lot actually). The major part was socializing and contact promotion.

Not a big affair. Here we are talking about a road-show organization with perhaps 20 or so reps (vendors and distributer) and in Malmoe say 100-odd dealers turning up. Venue was at local cinema, included a film preview (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels -- most definately a UK cult film.), and simple restaurant dinner afterwards. All in all, an enjoyable way to spend an evening for a change of pace.

The day's planning quickly became a shambles, since my wife was sick and confined to bed.

Thursday 22.04

Another day in shambles. The wife's problem turned out to be a tooth root canal that had given up the ghost, with resulting infection, complicated by a medication intolerance. Spent most of today being supportive in a waiting room for emergency dental examination. Our ordinary dentist is unavailable until Monday. (No problem knowing where to spend the money that should be incoming in a few weeks -- it's already spent, retroactively...)

Friday 23.04

(Day spent catching up on other issues.)

Also, a "summer day" during the afternoon, so I herded the kids outdoors to practice some cycling. Got a bit of sun myself -- face felt strange in the evening; haven't experienced sun like that for a long time. Trees are getting green. Life looks grand...

Had intended to note this earlier:

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for April 18 is now online:
"Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003"
"Historical curves for the speed with which users upgrade to new browser versions suggest that sites must continue to support old browsers until the Year 2003 and that Netscape 5 may be a "lost generation" that will never get more users than version 4."

Actually, Netscape as such appears more and more irrelevant these days, as is the Mozilla flavor of html. From standard to non-standard to sub-standard. So it goes... The ironic thing is that Netscape (last Mozilla version) is fast becoming the most popular browser for Linux.

Saturday 24.04

Sorry about the lack of timely updates for the past few days (and no, I haven't always remembered to the date at top when moving the Link-to anchor). There is some apparent "backfilling" in cases like this, because I may still write but not post the page to the web until much later.

Day starts nicely with a "summer-like" atmosphere. Our usual major cleaning day of the week, so it was check incoming mail, then vacuum and scrub while mulling on what to respond and write here.

I mentioned AOLServer some weeks back. Time came to uninstall from my Swedish NT installation. Hmm, no uninstall icon or script? Install log, what's that? Ok, manual delete and purge... AOL software has this shall we say tenacity... Recall AOL Messenger? Kind of like trying to pull out a dandilion root. AOL programmers have clearly carefully studied MS procedures for "integrating" software into the system. Granted that NT services aren't the same as your ordinary applications, but still...

I'm presently going to set up an NT version of Apache instead. -- In part to learn more about running Apache, since that is what LeufNet (and LeufOrg) is being served with. Also, I need a local server setup to e.g. properly set up and debug some Perl scripts I'm looking at. (Actually, I'd like to be running all this in Linux, but for various reasons I'm not there yet. Before then I need to change to a significantly larger harddisk, since I must retain full NT and Office2000 functionality for the forseeable future, and that may include a trial version of NT5 before long.)

Sunday 25.04

* Oops, got the dates mixed up Sat/Sun here. Fixed now.

Spent more time than I should have last night playing around with Apache and (ActiveState) perl. But it was all very enlightening and gave new insight into how the leuf.net server is set up. It was very quick work really to set up the server on NT, and it functions as advertised, despite the caveats about the NT version. Documentation is very good.

Relevant links...

Active State (perl) -perl/perl32bit

So I twiddled perl code for some hours, both last night, and portions of the day, seeing what gave what and modifying some wiki scripts I've been collecting and meaning to use. Learning some more about the power of aliasing and server configuration. And for that matter more about the concept of "virtual domain hosting", which is rather common.

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