Daynotes 1999 week 30

Daynotes: Week of 26 July - 1 August, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 30

* Link to: last modified 11:15 GMT+2 on 02.08.1999

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Monday 26 July

Well, that sure was a glorious waste of time...

Just after finishing last night's posting to the web, the "smooth as silk" NT5 system tied itself into a royal knot.

I first noticed something was amiss when I tried to open network properties and only got an alert telling me that the properties window was already open. Control panel applets refused to start, at which point the start task bar died as well. A three-fingered salute let me shut down, but several instances of Explorer.exe were reported as not responding. The whole system ground to a halt at the "saving settings" stage. No activity.

After power-off, start-up appeared normal until when desktop icons were supposed to appear. Nothing -- I had start task bar, time and icons on this, and the background image, but that was all. Again, control panel applets were dead, whether by menu or context (e.g. right-click desktop). Explorer seemed to start up, but hung before anything showed. NT5 lets you put up a desktop toolbar, and from this I could access the shortcuts. Some applications ran, but no dial-up and network connectivity.

Well, I fussed with this and that, but got nowhere. I tried the installer's emergency repair option (reboot, wait for files to copy, do-da), which trundled a while and then cheerfully informed me that repairs had been made and please reboot, but nothing changed as far as I could tell.

Since I was messing with installer, I then tried to "upgrade" the faulty installation. This it did -- in other words a complete re-install but with preserved settings (so it said). When in due time came that final boot and start-up... everything looked exactly the same (except of course the partition was seriously fragmented -- defrag program could be launched.

By then 3 a.m., I gave up for the night. "Mission critical"...

Nothing to lose, so I continued experimenting in the morning. I had a hibernate file valid from earlier on Sunday -- an image of RAM from a functional system. I thought it an interesting exercise to copy this out, hibernate the faulty system, swap in the earlier file and see what happened. Might be possible then to have a normal shutdown save to disk a correct copy of whatever was broken.

Minor complication... hibernated, there is no startup boot menu to go to e.g. Win95 and do the swap. I could boot from diskette, but I decided to be creative and go via BootMagic to Linux. That was fun, but of course took longer, because I got distracted.

Anyway, I messed up somehow, because all that got copied back in was a 40 byte hiberfil.sys file, not the 64 M hiberfil.sys image I had copied. The only thing I can imagine is that the hibernate shutdown somehow killed the copy, because I know that it was a 64 Mb file on another partition before the shutdown. Needless to say, that killed any hope of start-up again, because the system hung before even getting to the "space to abort" screen. Oh, I could have replaced Boot.ini with Boot.bak to get back a normal start-up, but then what?

Ah well, hours later, and I needed to get productive again. I scrubbed the partition and tried again for an NT4 restore based on the backup I had used to transfer the NT4 system from the smaller harddisk. This worked for a change (took time as usual), and I got back that incarnation of my working system.

I took a few moments to check what might have changed in the apps partition in the past two months -- hardly any as a matter of fact. Only a few desktop shortcuts to change.

I then could relatively easily remove references to the beta Office and install the final Office code. My latest Outlook database file was safe and easy to restore after this. So too the latest chapter template file. Could it be that easy...?

Maybe. Almost. Office install ended with the curious alert that it could not find olfsnt40.exe for a shortcut it wanted to make. Sure enough, this was still on the CD. Wonder where it goes? What it does? Word runs. Outlook runs. What more can I ask? <g>

Local web-serving with Apache32 works again, now that I'm back in NT4 -- significant? One thing I discovered while doing all this: I checked using the trial installation whether NT5 could use my SCSI-EPP with the NT4 drivers. Evidently not. It now does a "critical stop" with page fault in start-up.

Final conclusions? Much wasted time, but also much time saved thanks to backups, copies of critical files, careful notes, and last but not least separate partitions for system, apps and data. Having several OS versions to boot into helps too, especially a completely Windows-invisible Linux that can access everything.

Tuesday 27 July

A careful start to the working day. I made a new "adjusted" backup of the working NT4 system. This is with the new version of Office installed and some minor changes that reflect how things are set up now as compared to two months ago on a smaller harddisk. And of course after the usual disk integrety checks.

Day turned hot, but I stuck to the keyboard. After all the system misery of the past few days, I was determined to get a decent ways into the next chapter. A "simple" chapter, but as usual, there may well be functionality-traps waiting to be discovered that will eat the days as I try to figure out where to draw the line.

The re-installed and updated NT4 is stable and all's well with the system. I do miss some of the NT5 features and more seamless management of preferences, however -- especially for international settings. Not to mention the very good PnP management.

There were some worrying indications of fundamental problems, such as the way Apache could not serve locally .(Significant that IE5 cannot access it even under NT4, while Opera manages just fine?) And the fact that installing the miniSCSI EPP driver drove NT5 into the page-fault stop screen at boot. I really want to try the next version (RC) and see improvements.

Kittens need attention. Both have colds it seems; they sneeze and they wheeze, and periodically we need to clean out their eyes. We do hope this is not serious, because another 100-dollar trip to the vet we don't need. Kittens grow fast, literally doubling in size before your very eyes...

Wednesday 28 July

Outlook has numerous "automatic" formatting, conversion and "quasi-intelligent" parsing features, which we are in a sense making an inventory of as we systematically work our way through the program. These are not easy to document in a clear and consistent way, largely because they are not implemented in a clear and consistent way. I have today observed that "1 day" or "1 week" can mean two entirely different durations in hours depending on what component context you are in. So, ok, time is relative and experience of duration is even more so, but things like this are not intuitive. If a program converts one time unit into another, the expectation is that it does it the same way in all situations. Nope, it converts like the tax authority figures taxes...

Mostly, I see that the programmers went a bit feature happy at times, throwing in this or that nifty enhancement without necessarily checking on the consequences. I really dislike listings where for example duration time units vary at apparent random between minutes, hours and days, with no regard to the absolute length of time (i.e. 2 days, 2414 hours, 359 minutes, etc.) -- but one consequence of this iffy automatic conversion , which turns out to have hidden "rules" -- Snap quiz: which is longer, "40 hours" or "1.75 days"?

Anyway, progress. I am about to wrap up another chapter, albeit a much shorter one than the previous.

No computer adventures to report. System is running smoothly since the rebuild of NT4 with Office2k, and I am not inclined to experiment just now. I was going to bring my Linux partition up to speed with more apps and configurations, but later... later...

Better late than before anybody has invited you. -- (tDD, Bierce)

Thursday 29 July

A day to pay bills and help mother-in-law with her computer. So where did the afternoon go to...?

Anyway, I tied up a few loose thoughts in the chapter, and now it is up to my co-author Tom to ponder and highlight where my thoughts or formulations were led astray.

Tom notes today apropos his page layout experiments that he will "write things off to an interesting exercise in page design and leave things as they are for now". For the most part, I agree that text should flow freely whatever the width of the viewing window. I still recall the early days when he was tearing his hair about when the page would for some inexplicable reason suddenly assume a large fixed-width. His 13%-87% relative column split is a very workable solution however, as long as the text formatting does not force any particular width.

That said, readers here may notice that I in these pages use a fixed-width table (80px plus 480px) to format these daily notes. The main intent is to hold to a "column" format and avoid rendering longer lines even in a wider window. I would like to do it in a cleaner (CSS) way, but browser handling of CSS-styled tables leaves much to be desired. In fact, browser handling of width parameters even in body text is still patchy at best. Pixel width is the least problematic to specify, although I would much prefer to use "em" since this follows the default font size. Unfortunately, anything other than pixel specification in table messes up one browser or another.

Maybe XSL/XML...? Only the future will tell.

In layout terms, I only track actual rendering in Opera, and sometimes IE5. The formatting is simple enough that there should be few problems, except the odd missing "feature" (such as IE not holding CSS-specified maximum page width, as I often set in non-tabled pages).

Friday 30 July

Start with a quote today:

The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Try not to insult her intelligence. -- David Ogilvy

One of the few sensible things ever said in the advertising business, but then Ogilvy was not your average kind of ad-peddler either.

I would like to see an apt paraphrase about computer users somewhere...

Euro-harmonization continues. We have already changed the Swedish emergency telephone number from "90000" to "112" From September 11, we must reprogram our dialing software (and minds) to use "00" as foreign-country number prefix instead of "009". In addition, the country dial-tone pause also disappears. Some years ago they removed the dial-tone pause after area code, and this caused much grief for people, senior citizens in particular, who thought their non-local phone service had been disconnected. (I suppose it was just a precaution against overload that they have recently changed the customer care numbers too.)

I started going through my bookshelves again. Every few years <g> it's time to take down all the books and carefully vacuum them and the shelves. (Probably 99.9% of the solid matter in the universe is in the form of dust, but why does it have to collect so... ?) There were books I had forgotten about, partly because the paperbacks have lately needed to be in double rows. This time I intend to make a full inventory on a wiki. I've had lists for the former shop's selection, but I never quite got round to making lists of my own. I might even make these pages public (... come web-browse my bookshelf...), but the main point is to have a (searchable) listing.

I have some 40 meters of bookshelf, overfull with books, plus numerous boxes and bags. I sold off just about as much a couple of years ago. It's a lot of reading material...

Medium priority, that list, so I hope events don't push it too far back in the tasks pending queue.

Saturday 31 July

An observation made on a swiki mailing list I subscribe to:

Since many web browsers fire multiple connections (typically up to 4) to pull the images in parallel to the html, you get the effect of 4-5 people (or more) hitting the server at the very same moment.

This is similar to the effect of using frames. So imagine the deluge of connections in "popular" framed sites with many images... Then add banner ad scripting... Is it any wonder that some sites feel like syrup right out of the fridge?

For those who don't frequent Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox too often, his latest article is Metcalfe's Law in Reverse. He explains some non-intuitive consequences of splitting up the web into proprietary segments. The whole is very much more than the sum of its parts.

This year has seen several disturbing trends to fragment accessibility, especially due to AOL, but there is a more general scuffle going on where e.g. cable Internet providers are becoming more insular and restrictive in their access policies to the rest of the web. So far, it is mostly a question of "pipeline" capacity, leading to various strategies to "throttle back" bandwidth for the users (typically to 128 kb/s), but already there are signs that cable users are being guided to use in-domain resources in preference to general Internet ones.

One of the strategies I see on the European side of the Atlantic is ties to the struggle for market share by the many "independent" telcos that formed after deregulation. The qualification of independent is because these are really only "bulk-rate intermediaries" -- they purchase call capacity in bulk from the former state telco (that owns the lines and exchanges), then parcel it out to "their" subscribers. While their rates may then seem significantly cheaper, there still remains the opening charge (here about 6 cents US) on each call that is billed by the "state" telco. Not to mention the usual quarterly subscriber and active services fees, also still an effective monopoly.

Anyway, the next step in this development has been to offer extra incentive to make "independent" telco X your "preselect services provider". Doing that means all your calls automatically route via X, instead of as before having to use a special prefix. The wording X chooses in this context is to "exclusively use" for all calls. The incentives can take various forms, but a popular one is to offer seemingly much cheaper ISP subscriptions (but note the comparisons used: "only xx per month!", compared to "xxx per year" if you don't apply preselect). And if you just ignore the offers, your ISP rates remain at the old yyy per year, which is about twice the new xxx rate.

Browsing around the new "selfcare" site of an ISP, I studied the offers (only available via personal login), and checked out some other "features" that have been growing apace. "Membership" is a big thing these days -- all free and optional -- club for this and club for that, but of course certain services are only available to members. The aim is clear: tie up the user as much as possible to telco X as a one-stop provider, give rebates for service A if user also agrees to exclusively use telco service B, and make it minimalistic or at least expensive for customers who elect to remain "non-members" of the package deals. Significant funding is clearly (envisioned) via advertising, and the ISP does not hide the fact that membership registry information, detailed to assist making a personal usage profile, may be (read will be) sold.

The main target group is blatantly teens to young adult, and it is so transparently rapacious. Have all your email collected to one web page in our membership area, use our chat rooms and ICQ channels, use our (filtered) newsgroups, use our customized search engines, use our recommended links, use our free member webpage to link to your websites elsewhere... It's the portal thing in spades, translated and localized about half a year after the US.

Used to be one talked about "homesteading" on the Internet. Clearly we have progressed well into the "mega-landlord" stage where cyberland has been partitioned into cybermall development areas, and where users are to be pigeonholed into transparent little boxes in high-rise residential districts.

Sunday 1 August

* (Day spent largely offline -- family matters and a dinner with friends.)

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