Daynotes 1999 week 26

Daynotes: Week of 28 June - 4 July, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 26

* Link to: last modified 22:30 GMT+2 on 05.07.1999

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 28.06

Co-authoring is a lot like a marriage. It can get pretty "intimate" reworking each other's text, especially under pressure. Serious, under-the-deadline authoring is also a growth process, and as such is often a painful experience. We adapt. Most of the rough edges should wear down in the first seven years, as they say of marriages.

With a family, authoring of this nature, working from home, becomes painful in other ways too, which both Tom and I have experienced as chapter work stretches far beyond what was originally envisioned and encroaches on hours meant for other activities. Working evenings and weekends easily becomes the rule, no matter how good your intentions are otherwise to avoid this. Also, working authors get testy, frustrated, and down-right antisocial. They can growl and bark a lot, and may even bite :) -- feed with care. Retreats like Jerry Pournelle's "monk's cell" and beach house begin to look eminently attractive.

In fact, I know that some people flee to monasteries that do a thriving business renting out real monk cells for this very purpose. Hmmm...

Tuesday 29.06

Web updates sometimes slip a day or so lately. Please bear with me, the lapses should be brief. Trouble originates with reality, please do not adjust your mind.

End of month again. Bill paying and all that.

Ok, did all that, and still have some cash left over. I guess I'm ahead for now then...

For the next few weeks, my plan (such as it is) is to seriously schedule off-keyboard time and religiously follow this. Too many complaints from family members due to excessive hours lately to be able to ignore this pressing issue.

Tom and I are moving into new chapter material while our editor looks over the work so far, and the hope is that despite the need to produce many more pages in far less time than the first chapters have taken, we can avoid the grueling hours this has meant.

Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl. -- (tDD, Bierce)

Wednesday 30.06

The family has been watching a two-part film about Odysseus on TV the past two evenings, and I admit to getting stuck in front of most of it. It was the 1997 Francis Coppola mini-series version -- in other words it had its unexpected sides. My wife exclaimed in the beginning "Why is everyone dressed like cavemen?" Good point. At any rate, she immediately pried Edward off his computer and plunked him in the sofa, saying "this is culture, watch it!" -- in part because he had just studied some Homer in school this spring, and not really grasped what it was all about. For TV it wasn't bad, and touched on the story essentials (in a Reader's Digest sort of way).

The story is classic, and like Shakespeare's plots, gets retold in many different guises (just as Homer's version was at the time a "modernized" retelling of yet older epics). In this film, Odysseus (Armand Assante) is portrayed as the strong, silent, stubborn yet canny Greek -- at root worried that his wife Penelope (Greta Scacchi) might not remain faithful after all the years he is away. She does, but the irony is of course that Odysseus is seduced with no visible resistance by two goddesses in turn (Circe and Calypso) who end up costing him many more, evidently enjoyable years delay in returning from the Torjan wars.

The small sets (faux-Minoan and faux-Pharaonic) do at least give a consistent "look&feel" of the times, in other words very small "family" kingdoms, with little distinction between living areas for animals and people. That the main characters dash around the palace with servants, guests, sheep and goats constantly underfoot does undeniably give a distinct atmosphere.

It was all a bit over the top in terms of some of the acting, and I've not even mentioned either the monsters or the gods, but overall strangely viewable nonetheless.

Read the book :)

My daughter has been nagging me today to move my notebook into her room and work there. For some reason, I find her suggestion somewhat less than altruistic, because I can see the gears turn in her mind as she comes with all these great motivations -- I won't be disturbed as easily; her desk is very good (as she tides it up to make space for the computer); it's a very quiet room; etc. I do believe she is simply figuring that I will leave the machine there times I am not busy with it, all the more convenient for her...

Nine-year olds can be very clever.

There is growing pressure to get a mobile phone I find, partly because this society some time ago passed the threshold of people starting to take it for granted that you have one (i.e. reachable at all times), partly because it is becoming very hard to find a public phone to use when you need to call when not at home.

It was many years ago it became virtually impossible here to get by without an ordinary phone; so many services became tied to you being accessible by phone. Foreigners can be taken unaware by this, unless they today have their own GSM mobiles with them. I have spoken with people who for one reason or another do not have a phone of their own (a rare thing), and some aspects of their daily life can become very complicated because of this one lack -- a bit like being physically disabled.

Kind of makes you wonder if soon the same will be true of ISP access. What happens when the last local Bank branch office closes, referring customers to their online web? What happens when official forms can only be had as pdf-downloads? Sound far-fetched? Sweden has a tradition of having an all-or-nothing approach to reforms, so one has to be prepared for the far-fetched.

So live that you won't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip. (attrib to Will Rogers)

Thursday 01.07

It's a grand summer's morning. Well, actually, it would have been grand for early June. For July it is cool.

I often appreciate the fact that "organizing everything" on the computer gives me a far less physical stacks of paper on the desk. However, there are times when I wonder if there shouldn't be some sort of desktop emulation for this visual reminder of work outstanding -- a vertically growing icon-bar that shows a stack of paper for example... To-do lists are all good and well, but they just don't convey the urgency of the matter.

Something that can drive me to distraction is the "adaptive menu" concept. I may have mentioned this before, but in Office 2000, it was with great relief I found and disabled the option for this (just as I generally disable most "animation" features -- though I note that the NT5 "fade" does not bother med as much).

An adaptive feature that is beginning to really bug me lately, is the constant reshuffling of the active application buttons on the taskbar. Given the many windows I tend to have open when working on book chapters, for example, I more and more often found myself at a loss to find the one I want. Then I realized that there was a reordering going on behind my back. At least what I think is happening is that e.g. the buttons are sometimes reordered to present recently accessed Office instances "at the top of the heap". The trouble is, I can't figure out under what circumstances this happens, or how to disable it. Every so often, however, the button order is different, frequently inverting the order of the opened document buttons (and shuffling other buttons). Usually their legends are truncated to only the first few initial letters of the document name, and so not very helpful.

As a side issue, it is interesting how MS has degraded the "application instance" model by adding the Office 2000 "feature" of giving each document window its own taskbar button. In effect MS has thrown away the previous Windows "multiple document in window" application model, even so far as letting each Office document (and IE window) be listed separately in the Task Manager Application list. Contrary to the impression this gives, each "instance" is in fact just a child window to a single instance of the running application.

I am not happy about this new MS multiple window model, because it makes for a very cluttered taskbar, and can be confusing.

Friday 02.07

Here's an interesting problem: I have several, now legacy sites on Geocities, recently turned geocities.yahoo, and strongly disagree with the new Yahoo Terms of Service, i.e. their exclusive copyright rip-off.

Because the change to Yahoo closed off all owner access to the sites, I cannot myself remove the sites. To regain owner access, I must agree to their new terms. Finding some way to contact the new management is even worse than it ever was under geocities -- the few forms all require valid Yahoo identities -- old geocities identities only allow you to get a Yahoo one by accepting their terms for your site. In the end, I "shared my experience of Yahoo" with them in one response form I finally found that did not require a Yahoo identity. I also dug up an old geocities email address that might still work.

Anyway, this constitutes a final notice that all old URLs to geocities-based content (which shouldn't be used anyway) are now considered invalid.

As noted earlier this year, all content is now fully linked via one or another Leuf-domain. Thank heavens I decided to get domains and change my hosting situation in time.

Owe, v. To have (and to hold) a debt. The word formerly signified not indebtedness, but possession; meant "own", and in the minds of debtors there is still a good deal of confusion between assets and liabilities. -- (tDD, Bierce)

Note: Ambrose Bierce is spoofing us just a bit here, because the Old English origin of "owe" is the same as "ought" (being present and past tense respectively) and generally signified a perceived duty or obligation, though this was to be sure once seen as something to be possessed and held. Ownership has in any case historically most often been defined as nine-tenths possession and one-tenth legal title, which for most translated as nine-tenths possession-of-debt/obligation. Things really change very little, only the names and current illusions.

Ho-hum, am unable to ftp to the com site this morning because this service is temporarily offline, a precautionary measure while the harddisks are being "seamlessly" upgraded -- i.e. even though website content is physically being moved about, the server continues to serve. I can live with that. I'll post this later, then.

A further on Yahoo-Geocities. My conclusion this far is that unless you accept the terms and so gain the new yahoo member identity/password, you are effectively screwed: cut off from any meaningful contact with the hosting staff. Example:

To: bo@leuf.com
From: help (auto reply) <help@geostaff.com>
Subject: Re: immediate termination of sites
Date sent: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 03:22:44 -0700
To send e-mail directly to GeoCities Member Support, please use the Help Form at: http://www.geocities.com/main/helpcentral/form.html
Thank you,
GeoCities Customer Service and Technical Support

Of course, to do that you need the new yahoo identity to be identified as a valid member. In any case, that URL just returns:

Whoops! We can't find your page!
The web page you are trying to access doesn't exist on Yahoo! GeoCities.
Check our system status to see if we're having trouble or the Info Center to find out about recent site updates.

Bob Thompson notes in an exchange (see wiki):

... It seems to me that the safe thing to do is abandon your GeoCities sites entirely. Of course, given their recent grab, Yahoo is likely to say that they own anything that's abandoned. ...

Abandonment is sort of forced, in that I can't do a thing with the sites as things stand. They might of course be deleted for space reclaim when there are no updates for a number of months -- the old Geocities had that policy.

Yahoo, n. A coarse person; a lout, a hooligan. -- Oxford Reference English Dictionary.

Still no ftp to the site. A host status report explains all...

1 July 1999
The servers are fine, but ftp is temporarily turned off. We are upgrading some of the hard drives on our servers and doing so seamlessly so that your web site keeps serving. Since we are moving files, we chose to shut down ftp so that we do not overwrite any new files that you might put on the server during our upgrade. We estimate that the ftp for all accounts will be restarted by 6 AM 2 July 1999, although your ftp may be available earlier as we restart each one by one.
2 July 1999
That did not go very well at all. We have suffered failure of the FTP software on one server that handles some 400 domains. It is serving web pages just fine, but fixing the ftp server will require some downtime of the server. Therefore we will be monitoring the machine all day and will address the software failure later this evening when the machine traffic slows down. We're aiming for no more than 15 minutes of server downtime in the middle of the night (tonight). Thank you for your patience while we solve this issue.

So it goes...

Saturday 03.07

(See above for why no update was posted yesterday.)

Ftp service on this site resumed, and I was notified about this as it was happening, so the page got posted this morning. As far as I could tell, there were no longer interruptions in page serving during this time when ftp was down.

There have in the past few days been two car bombings in Sweden. This is unusual to say the least. The first was against a journalist family outside Stockholm, whose car exploded when the father and son reached it ahead of the wife and daughter, on their way for a family outing. Police said things about neo-nazi reprisals for articles published. The second occurred here in Malmö, where a stolen car was found and approached by a couple of policemen. It blew up when one policeman opened the door. Both survived here, but with serious injuries, and the one who opened the door lost his eyes. Police are apparently trying to link this with a string of arson attempts, though the reasoning behind this escapes me.

The Daygang inspiration spreads, as more readers link their own sites with day journals to ours. Earlier there was Shawn Wallbridge, as noted on the week list page. Now, Sjon Svenson recently posted a link on the wiki to his site.

There are three possible forms of user termination from within an application: Ctrl+Q for normal exit, Alt+Ctrl+Delete for abnormal exit, and OutOfCtrl+C for panic exit. The last should be interpreted as frantically and randomly hitting keys until the running task dies. -- the Progamatic User Guide to Windows

Nostalgia news: I was interested to note a report that GEM, the original Digital Research develpment of which was the basis for the Atari GEM operating system, had become (GEM/3) Open Source under GPL. After DR's PC version was turned into "crippleware" because of look&feel lawsuits by MS, GEM lost out against Windows 3 on PC, except in a few niche areas, and of course on the Atari 680x0 platform. Subsequently, the rights were acquired by Caldera, originally to run a "thin client" model, but now released under GPL. Some relevant links:

The IntelGEM resources site.
The current USA site for sources and binaries, which includes both Intel and 68k versions (GEMDOS plus sources), and a selection of software.
An ongoing project to port GEM/3 desktop to Linux.

Most is probably of interest only for those with serious GEM or GEMDOS nostalgia (original DR sources and development kits for example), but there are some interesting things to be found, such as this from the resources page:

ARTLINE v 2 for GEM/4: 3mb This archive Artline is made up of 79 files some of which are already compressed and need the Artline setup to uncompress them. As well as the Artline applications there is a complete copy of GEM 4, an updated output application, a few sample files, etc, conversion utilities, memory managers, and so on. This realy is a very major piece of software which in some respects can hold its own against todays software, for instance it has an outline bit image trace facility which I have not seen elsewhere.

It's all free now, and with GPL-hackable sources.

Sunday 04.07

Happy 4th of July to all you Americans!

* The day was devoted to a family outing to Steve's Western Riding, for an Independence Day (sort of) grill&picnic. A good, really good, time was had by all. Thank you, Steve!

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