Daynotes 1999 week 21

Daynotes: Week of 24 - 30 May, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 21

* Link to: last modified 11:45 GMT+2 on 30.05.1999

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Monday 24.05

(public holiday, Whitsun-second-day)

I made a disturbing, and potentially problematic observation today, while looking at the local copies of my website pages. In the move between harddisks, the partition contents had been transferred as a Win95 Backup QIC file. In the restore process, it seems that most, though curiously not all, folder and file names complying with the 8+3 DOS-alias name format were resaved as ALL-CAPS. Long filenames were of course resaved as they were, albeit likely with different 8+3 aliases (these being dynamically assigned for each save, as it occurs).

Much careful work attempting to maintain consistent usage between server and local copies of case in folder and file names has thus been completely and in some respects randomly undone. We are talking in excess of some 3000 core web files here. I am now back in the situation that I will carefully have to inspect and correct any all all site links that I pick up through browsing when editing the webpages. I last had this problem when I moved the first webpages from my Windows 3.1 system to the NT one, and it took quite a few hours spread over several months to gradually attain the consistency that I wanted. I had not expected this setback only because of moving between harddisks.

Note that the only reason I saw this now, is that I have disabled the usual Wintel 32bit default of automatically adjusting case in Explorer. Actually, I would see it in the WS_FTP window as well. I don't really care that e.g. NT ignores case in file names -- I do care that the system or its utilities actively change what I have chosen to use. This is Not Good.

I have also heard the counter-argument, that it is Unix that sucks for distinguishing between upper and lower case in file names. That is mostly a matter of personal opinion. Like I say, I don't really care one way or the other, except that I expect some kind of consistency either way in how this is handled, instead of this arbitrary changing around of what is set. It is like the way Registry mixes alias and long names in path and file specifications. Or how long names with spaces can be used in some circumstances, but not in others unless perhaps quoted.

(I don't suppose anyone knows of a nifty case-changing utility? No, I thought not.)

I suppose my immediate workaround can be to restore a fresh copy of the webpages, only this time via a ZIP file, not Backup. Trouble is that already a number of files have changed, so I will have to be careful how I do this.

Another workaround is to grab a working copy from what's on the server. Unfortunately, that will mess up the last-changed datestamp, which has a few side-effects when managing the local copies that I can do without.

I could also manually work through the local directories, adjusting each. (This only works consistently when automatic case adjustment in Explorer is turned off, by the way.)

I am after this seriously considering moving all my web-related work to Linux, assuming I can set up adequate tools for this.

Whangdepootenawah, n. In the Ojibwa tongue, disaster; an unexpected affliction that strikes hard. In modern parlance: Windowsdefaultyfeh.

Tuesday 25.05

Day wasted in various ways.

Installing Seven Kingdoms, which my daughter received as a gift yesterday, on the Win95 system had the interesting consequence that all sound capability died except when playing the game. That it installed ActiveX 5 is probably not a coincidence. Unfortunately, while the game can be uninstalled, the ActiveX drivers cannot, and this has apparently blitzed the sound system handlers. The restore drivers options are greyed out in the control box for it as well. The unit is permanently marked with a "!" and nothing gets it going again -- diagnostics report "no sound card installed". Luckily, this is local to Win95, and starting up in Nt shows nothing wrong, so I soothed my mind by staying in NT and playing some stored music files. I strongly suspect I will need to wipe the current Win95 and reinstall. I suppose this means I will need to reinstall the NT bootloader as well, and perhaps...? Good Lord, the complications that Windows introduces...

Reboot, repent, reinstall. -- System Shaman's Second Mantra

Wednesday 26.05

Yet another link thrown my way, relating to the Wiki concept of how to manage a website: Dave Winer's May 1999 column musing about the Web for the Rest of Us. And in passing, mention of ClueTrain.Com, another site for reflections on where it is, what it is, and why it is, or isn't, as the case may be.

Thursday 27.05

India and Pakistan having another row over Kashmir. The world at large seems rather uninterested in "hot" conflicts these days,weary as it is of the daily and nightly bombing in Serbia and Kosovo that's been going on for over two months now. Watching the news on tv is a rare event these days, and even then I tend to go for BBC World rather than any of the usual channels.

Speaking of BBS World, I caught part of an intersting interview with author Terry "Discworld" Pratchett. Not at all like I would have imagined him, and with a remarkably lively and humorous personality. Now I better understand the remark once attributed to him: "We may have been poor, but we were at least miserable!"

On the local front, state health care suffered another setback. Because of unexpected "losses" in the budget, I hear that children will no longer get free visits to the clinics to see the nurse or doctor. Instead it will be as for adults, USD 10-20 per visit. Not clear yet if dental care will also be affected. Seems they have had double the number of child visits compared to what was budgeted. Free health care for children is one of the last sacred cows left of the social democrat vision. Sic transit utopia...

I've run an old version of Partition Magic (v2) for ages, which has been OK since all my partitions have been FAT16. But now I will be installing a major Linux partition on my main harddisk, so it was high time to upgrade to a newer version that can handle this format as well. Very much a must-have utility -- check out the PowerQuest site if you don't know about it. Although their online ordering turned out to only only for US and Canadian customers, this was reasonably clearly indicated, and worldwide ordering links were given,. It was not too convoluted to order a copy from the local representative, and it arrived the other day. (I rather dislike sites that advertise products worldwide, as it were, but turn out to be US-only after a lot of wasted time.)

Anyway, the Partition Magic package contains some other interesting software too. The licensing terms are excessively strict for private user, however, in that they insist that the product can only be used on a single machine (but multiple permanently mounted harddisks? -- on the face of it that excludes notebooks with swapable harddisk trays...). Now honestly, an individual who runs several machines at home.is highly unlikely to buy the professional, several times more expensive multi-PC license. I will have to see if the installed software gets "married" in any way to the machine...

Ah well, with PMv2, I learned to appreciate powerful and user-friendly partition management that preserved data enough so that the investment in the new version seems more than worthwhile.

We know better the needs of ourselves than of others. To serve oneself is economy of administration. (Bierce, tDD)

Friday 28.05

Busy day with some serious multitasking. It was time for a new issue of the Doctor Bank newsletter to translate, and I am of course working on one of the chapters of our book. If we had a house, it would have been a back porch kind of day, laptop in the shade. Ah well, when I get rich and famous...

A lot of interesting material on my colleagues' sites recently, hardware stuff by Tom and Bob, and a lot of more general material on Jerry Pournelle's site. Even when at my busiest, I take the time to read these different journal pages, for there is so often something valuable there; quite a lot in the course of a week. I appreciate it when some reader provides a link to other journal sites like this, for it broadens the mind. I do note that, apart from various wiki-swiki sites, there are not very many websites that provide daily updates with personal reflections. Takes time and effort, but very rewarding in the long run. There is a certain ebb and flow to it of course.

An interesting thing about wiki servers. One part of my experiment using wiki is to maintain one or more on my system locally, as a general system notebook. It's an interesting experience, mostly because of the on-the-fly link&page creation in what is essentially write&post of simple text notes. Being so often online, there is almost always a browser window just a click away, and I have the Windows version of Apache set up as an NT service. All it takes is another bookmark or two, and I have this infinitely expandable, cross-linked notebook always at hand. Because this is a web thing, in a browser, my notebook links can of course point to any URL on the Net, and I find this very useful in many situations, that external pages are just a click away from my own personal notes, yet the personal pages remain just that, strictly my private ones. It takes getting used to, that one can do this, but there is really no turning back. The search feature is very handy, making stricter structure not strictly necessary.

I still don't use the wiki as much as I could (should?), but this is mostly a question of habit. It sure beats the earlier LOG-style textfiles I would on occasion create, update, and forget. As I remember these, I am now making them over into wiki pages, discovering past insights about e.g. system behaviour that were lost because I couldn't find the specific note very easily. Say for example, looking for previous occurrences of blue-screen lockup, or when I installed XXX for the first time and what happened. Paper notebooks and journals are all good and well for backup purposes (and Tom's model of ring binders for regular printouts of on-system notes is an excellent one there)., but you can't easily search or cross-link in paper copy.

I am mulling in the back of my mind including a few more advanced formatting features for wiki pages, but this will likely be later than sooner. I don't want to complicate what is a fairly simple entry convention, and in any case, I would then like something better than a browser form textwindow. That is where the real bottleneck lies at present when editing a page.

Thoughts for the day:

When people in science argue and avoid doing experiments, I get suspicious. -- Jerry Pournelle
Paranoia is merely a state of heightened awareness. Most people are persecuted beyond their wildest delusions. -- Claude Steiner

Saturday 29.05

Not a lot of work today for some reason. Deep-cleaning and picnic ruled, along with family time. That didn't keep from being connected from time to time during the day, of course.

As I had hoped, ISDN makes a difference, compared to modem dial-up, in making connectivity "only a click away". The past week or two have been remarkable in that respect. Amazing how 30-40 seconds modem protocol can matter so much. Already I am taking for granted the less-than-a-second transition from local to global and back, and it does affect how I work even more than I thought.

Sign of the times: Swedish public telephones are slated to disappear. The assumption is that "almost everyone" has cellulars, so the telco has decided that the expense maintaining public coin and card telephones is not motivated. Already now, it can be difficult to find any, and many newer locations, like rebuilt city bus hubs.lack them completely.

Speaking of cellulars, it is really remarkable how much louder people tend to speak into them than to physically present persons, or even compared to an ordinary phone handset. In a restaurant, for example, suddenly (after a suitable preset jingle) some clown off at a corner table will dominate the entire room with one-sided trivia ("... Yes, we're eating right now. ... Oh, half an hour. ...No, he's here too... Really? ... Yes, I'll call back."), not once, but repeatedly in the course of the entire meal. Really absurd can be to see two or more people at what is obviously intended as a business lunch, all busily talking on their respective cellulars the entire meal, such as it is.

I gave up on teaching business people some years back, in disgust, when it became apparent that these mid to top level management types insisted on having an enabled cellular into the classroom. Not only were lessons interrupted by random often unimportant calls in, but many of these people also interrupted lessons themselves to make calls out that they just remembered at random times. Again, rarely anything vital. These were people who still professed that the teaching, one-on-one, was important. They sure didn't show it.

A variant of this behaviour, I have experience with people I've talked to on the phone. You may have experienced something similar, more or less pronounced. At best, you may only note that the other person seems, shall we say, distracted from time to time. At worst, you will experience the other person interrupting you with sudden curses, or an incredulous WTF or shit, followed by mumbling and muttering before resuming the conversation by asking you to repeat what you were saying. Most of the time, however, you will have a slightly distanced person, and if you listen carefully, you will hear the steady clicking of a keyboard. Yes, you guessed it, the other person is not fully with you, but instead concentrating on a computer screen.

Other times, it may not be a computer at all, but you may realize that the other person is driving or doing something else that would normally take most of his or her concentration, but still taking or making a call.

Not a decent conversation in the lot. Strange times.

We really don't know yet, where this extreme accessibility will take us, and how it will socially change us.

In each human heart are a tiger,, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity in character is due to their unequal activity. (Bierce, tDD)

Sunday 30.05

(Mother's Day in Sweden)

Women in love are less ashamed than men. They have less to be ashamed of. (Bierce, tDD)

* Hmm, I see that Yahoo and Geocities merged on Friday (US time). Portal gains huge user base. I'll have to check who actually bought whom, or if it in fact was a more or less equitable 50/50 deal. Users are in for "adjustments" in services, we are told. I am rather pleased to have already moved my LeufOrg domain (me) to a reliable and personal host (me), before this period of inevitable confusion. It is however high time to further cut back nn the legacy pages there, replacing with referrals to the respective domain-based urls.

Apropos Windows 2000 Server reliability, and fewer reboots required... Microsoft gives their own view on this. Essentially, it seems that MS has managed to incorporate a number of the things Linux users take for granted in terms of reconfiguring and adding modules while still running. Excellent. The mountain comes to the molehill. It is a significant advance that MS admits, albeit indirectly, that rebooting is inefficient:

"... Common system management tasks such as configuring a Plug-and-Play device, increasing the size of the page file, adding a new page file, increasing the size of an NTFS partition, adding or removing network protocols, installing SQL Server 7.0, or changing the mouse no longer require a system reboot. Preliminary studies in Microsoft's Data Center show that these improvements can reduce downtime by more than 20 percent." (my emphasis)

Wow... :)

Seriously though, I read reports from several people now running W2k(NT5) saying much the same, that overall reliability is very good, PnP really works this time, and you really are not forced to reboot all the time when changing system configurations.

I suspect this simply proves the suspicion we have all had that the best thing for MS, and by extension all the rest of us, is that MS perceives some form of serious competition in the marketplace and so get their act together. The practical demise of OS/2, abandoned by IBM, left a marketplace vacuum there. Linux became the next best thing to that over the past year or so, a serious enough potential threat that MS allocated priority resources and time to meet that threat. I would have been very surprised and disappointed if this situation had not produced tangible results in products currently being developed, and the W2k features mentioned do tend to confirm this.

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