Daynotes 1999 week 25

Daynotes: Week of 21 - 27 June, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 25

* Link to: last modified 01:50 GMT+2 on 28.06.1999

Hi, welcome to this 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.

Associated links:

Write me at: bo@leuf.com -- if private, mark it as such!
Posted mail/discussion, see the WikiForum LeufNet
Occasional thematic articles, see "DisISay" LeufOrg

Monday 21.06

(summer solstice day) (some short retro posting)

The day was consumed by a visit, and later by a session of Baldur's Gate. The kids have been playing BG networked most of our stay here. I had to try it out, if only for a while. This session, we had the rabid chickens of the Great Gonzo along...

Childhood, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth -- two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age. -- (tDD, Bierce)

Tuesday 22.06

(travel day)

Tuesday we experienced a remarkable event. We had been to a park for lunch, and on the way back, suddenly a pigeon flies down on Edward's back. Given the type of pigeon and the many pigeonries in the city, it was perhaps not too surprising how tame it was, but even so, the way it adopted us was amazing. The kids were enthralled. It wandered unconcerned on our hands, arms and shoulders, and quickly headed for Edward's ice cream cone. Things abruptly got messier when the pigeon decided to fully concentrate on the ice cream and planted itself with both feet squarely in it. This was a large waffle-style cone, which the bird ate with evident enjoyment.

Wednesday 23.06

(Short updates for the past few days put in above.) Back home and catching up on things, including this webpage. For various reasons, my original intent of keeping the Daynotes page current even when away from home came to naught. The moments I had on the keyboard were always co-opted by other, more critical issues. Then too there was the matter of not being excessively anti-social when visiting others. Plus the wishes of the family, which in the case of the kids generally meant letting them use my computer on the network in one or another game. So it goes...

Christian, n. ...One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin. -- (tDD, Bierce)

Thursday 24.06

I hear that numerous readers missed me during the days this page was not updated. Thank you all for the concern you expressed, either directly to me or to my "daygang" associates.

I was going to write that now things are getting back to normal, but life is never like that, is it? And then there are of course numerous black holes just waiting to pounce. I have both Linux and NT5 waiting for my attention here, not to mention a pile of other matters, plus a lot of books. Looks to be a busy summer in other words.

Browsed through the local newspaper today, for a change. There was for example the court case against a policeman who had broken up a demonstration against a porno club. He had been video filmed using his baton to break into the chain of women and men. Later he had verbally threatened those detained in the police van, and called one woman a whore. The physical abuse (including hitting one woman on the head) was found by the court to be commensurate with with doing his job, and not primarily with intent to injure. That his superior officer did not react was taken to confirm this. The verbal abuse was oddly seen as more serious, but still not conclusive. What he in the end risks losing his job for is an unrelated incident two years ago when he hit a child who stole an electronic speedometer from his bicycle. The curious workings of the justice machinery...

Anyway, that was just an aside. What I had really thought of commenting was the sentence I found in this week's Newsweek: "Increasingly, the great world wars of this century -- wars in which national survival was genuinely at stake -- look like aberrations rather than the norm." The point being made is that we these days fight "wars of values", there being a distinct lack of conceivable threats to most countries' national security. Specifically, the values often called into question are those concerned with human rights, but of course this begs the question of who defines these and for whom. Bringing "the light of reason" to perceived darker realms is not a new precept, and has seldom been particularly well received even on the best of days. These days one hears the phrase "humanitarian war" a lot. Once, "holy war" was a common Western term, sometimes motivated for much the same reason. Interesting perspectives...

Friday 25.06

(Swedish Midsummer 's Eve, something between a Saturday and a public holiday, see last year's DisISay Midsummer musings)

One of the positive bits of news waiting for me when I returned home earlier this week, was the notification that one of my ISPs was cutting its prices significantly this year, so my renewal invoice will be much less than expected. Thank you kindly.

An amusing note this morning... I went down to the corner convenience shop for some fresher morning bread and exchanged a few words with the owner, one of the many immigrants who have taken over most of the small local shops that used to be so common before they all went bust or just closed. Lately, these have revived to some extent, and become more interesting now when they they direct-import food from Germany (typically). They keep significantly lower prices than comparable items in the larger shops, and the selection is anything from odd to interesting, with many brands never seen here before.

Anyway, I asked him if he was open over Midsummer. His reply was to stress that "although a Christian", he would in fact be open. Evidently he had the impression that Midsummer was a serious religious holiday in Sweden. I am not too surprised, just amused.

Given the fair weather, I will in any event bow to the wishes of my family and religiously observe some time off today. I have spent the morning (to protests from several directions) doing a hopefully "final" edit pass on a chapter. There are still unanswered issues open, but perhaps now the actual tone and content is submittable so that we can move on and try to reclaim some lost schedule time.

Saturday 26.06

(Offical Midsummer's Day, public holiday -- However, this year actual solstice day was Monday 21 June.) Rain, cool, gray.

Yesterday evening was devoted to a family picnic and grill down by the seaside. Just a tad on the cool side as the sun went down, and one did want to stay out of the breeze, but a good time was had by all.

Lacking any great hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing, system-scale projects at the moment <grin>, I the night to Friday slipped in the NT5 (a.k.a. Windows 2000 professional) CD in my notebook and told it to proceed. Well, it was a bit more qualified an imperative, in that I politely declined to have it update my current NT4 system (the "recommended" option on a time-limited beta install, yet), and pointed it to a clean partition that I had originally allocated for temporary CD copies on harddisk. It obeyed.

This is a leaner-meaner install from the user perspective, largely automatic. The first install however screeched to a halt on "fatal" when it was about to install various drivers, but this was of course due to the fact that my CD is normally locked to drive-letter R, and after the install reboot this evidently reset to the nearest free letter instead. The dialog for files not found seemed more clever than it actually was and would at the fatal point not accept any drive or path as valid for the I386 folder, even when directed to where the CD ought to have been. Note that after a reboot, the partial installation would actually start and resume installation where it left off, but it still couldn't access the CD.

I had noticed the option to copy all setup files to harddisk, one solution perhaps, so I restarted setup with this in mind. This of course detected the incomplete install and wanted to repair it. Hmm, no, not this time -- with all the unknowns of a totally new system, I preferred to start clean. But then naturally it told me that it needed 650 Mb free to install, so I had to pause to delete everything on partition K. Which I should have done to begin with when the first setup failed. So it goes...

This time around, I selected the harddisk option (as always telling setup to please not upgrade my existing NT4), and realized after a while staring at the progress bar that this attempt was going to take a lot longer. Setup files means some 5000 "I386" setup files, and who knows what else. These were distributed throughout the existing partition free space.

In due time, the copying process was completed and the then installation proceeded without a hitch. All hardware was detected and everything was set up with no discernible problems. As has been noted by others, this time we have PnP that seems to work. A swapfile was automatically placed on the partition with most free space, starting size 128 Mb...

For a time I was a bit lost trying to find certain things to check settings and configurations, such as Devices and Drive Manager until I right-clicked My Computer -> Manage. For starters, I wanted to move that swapfile to the dedicated swap partition, and reassign the CD drive letter. This started something called Component Manager -- a long overdue central point to find and change all component settings. There is a penalty associated with this, of course, in that RAM usage went from the idle 55 Mb to over 80. On a 64 Mb machine, this added significant syrup to performance, and had the component manager stepping on its own toes when trying to show IRQ, Memory and other info. Nothing crashed, but a few warnings kept being thrown up.

Other NT5 musings and asides:

444 day evaluation period from date of installation -- expected.
Interesting... The user profiles have been moved up to a root directory called Documents and Settings. No more drilling down x levels of \WINNT\PROFILES\...
Again interesting, NT5 allows you to remap any partition to a "mounting point" in a NTFS folder -- shades of Unix/Linux.
Hmm, never noticed that before, although recognized in NT4 (IE5?)... .CHM file = Compiled HTML Help file.
Must not forget SUPPORT\RESKIT on the CD. Some useful extras there that have to be installed separately.
Almost all supporting documentation these days comes as html.
IE is pretty much integrated "under the hood" now in NT5.
Active desktop was sort of neat (nothing new to users of Win98), and I soon had an html page running a java applet (water ripples and midi music) as wallpaper.

Overall, initial impressions are good enough that I may one day try to "upgrade" NT4 just to see how this works -- making damn sure I can restore the whole partition if it doesn't.

Further NT5 notes:

A defrag of decent design is included -- I'll have to wait until some disk is fragmented enough to give it a good workout.
Explorer now views CAB-file contents via the context menu -- I've had this as a tweakUI add-on in NT4. The Explorer mode allows selective extraction in the view window, again context menu.
Of course, the CHM files constitute the Office2000 style tabbed online help.

I've put these and further notes on the wiki. This seems to be the best place to collect them. As always, reader comments and additions welcome.

Hmm, another interesting item buried in a readme...

If you're upgrading a dual-boot computer, you can't gain access to NTFS partitions from any operating system other than Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 4 (SP4). Also, if you modify or create new files on the NTFS partition, you can't use those files with any other operating system, including Windows NT 4.0 with SP4.
(my emphasis)

That seems to be a convoluted way of saying that NT5 NTFS is more or less incompatible with NT4 NTFS.

On NT5 backup, I note with some satisfaction that this version allows backup to file, any media, not just tape. It should be noted that the backup file (now .bkf) is uncompressed, equivalent to (but not compatible with) Unix-style tar. Just for fun, I ZIPed my NT4 installation and achieved 50% compression. You would get the same result ZIPing most mixed-content bkf files.

Sunday 27.06

* Tom had me doing edit review all day :)

Anyway, since NT5 gave me no grief, I yesterday also went ahead and installed Linux (RedHat 5.2, which I have had on my desk for some time) to a couple of other partitions reserved for this purpose. Again, this was rather late at night, so when I reached the curious situation of not having any defined PCMCIA devices and yet repeatedly getting stuck in the startup sequence after install at a status line that tells me "starting PCMCIA services, module", I guess I have some exploring to do. But not, as noted, today. Or tonight, as the case may be.

At 1:50 a.m, it is rather late to become too verbose here, so I will simply refer you all to next week's page and start fresh.

Prevaricator, n. A liar in the caterpillar state. -- (tDD, Bierce)

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