Daynotes 1999 week 33

Daynotes: Week of 16 - 22 August, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 33

* Link to: last modified 00:55 GMT+2 on 23.08.1999

Hi, welcome to this week's journal.

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Monday 16 August

Kids resumed school today. Short info-day only, different times both kids. Trying to combine this with chapter work and sick kittens is an interesting challenge. Successful, no. But interesting...

Well another attempt at constructive comments and editing (i.e. take out the virtual highlighter and draw mustaches on my co-author's work <g>). Seriously, though, we ran into major structural changes urged by our editor, here at close to the half-way mark, and it is taking its toll on our focus and productivity. Even when not directly looking at the suggested changes, the implications of such changes have profound and disturbing repercussions on every single section it seems.

Outlook threw another wrench in the works too, because we discovered some functionality that worked one way on Tom's system, and another way on mine. As Tom noted, there must be a hidden variable somewhere, but this sort of thing does make us both weary and frustrated since we cannot nail down that particular description until we get to the bottom of what is happening. Or unless we decide that it is not a major enough issue to delay the book, whereupon it may just become an interesting account for our website instead.

Tuesday 17 August

Small blessings. Although our son starts school earlier in the mornings this year, it turned out that this meant we beat the morning rush hour by about 10 minutes when driving him there.

I got my renewed bank card today, the Visa with a Cash chip on it. I recently learned a few things about these cashcard chips we are being endowed with:

The cards are in practice being handled as "trapdoor" containers. Fill the chip with virtual cash, and the only way you can use this is to purchase goods where the cash terminals are available.
Virtual cash is non-transferable, in the sense above, because it cannot be transferred to another card, or even back to the bank account the funds were withdrawn from. A card can only be recharged in the special terminals that the banks provide.
Virtual cash cannot be converted to real cash. You pay exact amounts and (in theory) the shop never gives back change -- in fact the ideal painted is that shops won't need any cash.
Virtual cash is volatile, at least the renewal text urges cardholders who already had a chip on their previous card to hurry up and use it all within six months, because of the non-transferable nature.
And as we know, virtual cash is (supposedly) non-personal, in the sense that a lost card can be used by the finder (no personal code), and no (public) way to disable the card short of destroying it.

The incentive to the shops is a lower cost than the usual card readers with connections to the bank, partly in cheaper hardware, partly in not needing to pay a transaction percentage.

Wednesday 18 August

Got back a processed film with pictures going back to last Christmas. I really don't take as many pictures as I used to. In the heyday of slides, I took a yearly minimum of 36 image rolls (with Nikon, that meant 38, even allowing for two or three blanks to start off the film. The only reasons this film lasted less than a year: kittens and an attempt to recreate for scanned use some macros of miniatures.

As for kittens, an indication of what we're dealing with:

kittens kitty2

Earlier in the summer, before the kittens had been decided on, the kids brought in a hedgehog.

hedgehog

No, as soon as I can set aside the cash, I'm pretty sure I will get an Olympus digital. The process lab scans were pathetic this time -- I had to do significant gamma and color corrections. The only redeeming factor, that they were "dirt cheap" when combined in a special offer with processing and paper copies, almost wasn't worth it this time. I actually think they botched the processing, because the negatives don't seem fully developed.

I was called off to help a friend this evening who is studying. His current course is assembly programming of industrial robots, and he was deeply mired in his "lab" assignment. These days, the chips are simulated inside software like HPLab, so you select a processor type, write your code, assemble it to hex files, and then run and debug it in this simulated environment.

All fine and well, but the course was evidently set up so that a rough analogy would be that you teach someone ignorant of math some excerpts of the plus, minus and multiplication tables, then hand them homework assignments on the level of solving second order equations. Anyone who asks about anything is met with the reply "read the book". Well, the book is no damn good for what they need. This poor guy was stuck because he needed to implement conditional loops, and all he had was a list of opcodes and some straight code examples. He didn't have the concepts for what he was supposed to solve. He barely knew what he was doing even in the easiest problems, because he was dealing with code several times abstracted from the proper context. Feh.

Thursday 19 August

After a while, one becomes blind to the look of the place, and Tom Syroid's recent site restyling gave food for thought.

I decided it was as good a time as any to flip the column placement. Having the navigational links along the right edge does make better sense in many ways. A left-edge column of links really just seems to be another of the many unwritten stylistic conventions that have little or no foundation in actual user convenience -- essentially a mimicry of the margin in a printed book page. I do like some (small) left margin in text. I generally achieve this with CSS specifications, and as here can place a narrow border image of some kind as a visual cue of unity within a particular section. Such as "notebook" image for these journal pages.

I took the opportunity of reviewing the fixed page width, and it still fits comfortably in a 640x480 window (Opera has an option to indicate the current window size, which is very handy when working in a larger resolution and wanting to check how pages appear in smaller ones. I could of course allow the main column here to resize, but my main intent is to "force" avoidance of too-wide text rows and have exact alignment of the multiple tables used.

Interesting with the Apache configuration I currently have, because I can via the dummy domain aliasing access the local pages exactly as if from the real server, cgi and all. Even IE behaves now and accepts this slight-of-hand. (Well, exact and exact, there are still some underlying differences due to the fact I am running NT. I will take some time later to set up the same under Linux, which will make a better local mirror.)

(Note that I changed the link to Tom's site above, to point directly to his "current week" page.)

Friday 20 August

Advance warning. I have started the process of moving the LeufCom domain to my own hosting. I have put the cutoff date for the current hosting site as 1 Sept. I do expect the DNS updates to reach everyone before then, but if you start getting server not found or 404 responses, that just means your DNS is not up to speed.

Anyway, don't despair. The "raw" subweb URL to the new location is http://www.leuf.net/leufcom/ and the pages will all be there by Next week.

Day devoured by seemingly minor distractions.

Saturday 21 August

(This update is on the new hosting site under LeufNet. If you got here via the LeufCom domain, then DNS has updated as it should.)

Seems the Internic to DNS update took less than 12 hours, at least as I saw it, so I had to scramble a bit with uploading all the files. Actually there is a slight glitch just now, because it appears that while the old site no longer responds to the domain, the new one does not yet either.

Hmm, both sites respond, but which depends on how I access the Net, i.e. which DNS resolves. For now I will update both sites with these daily notes.

Most of today went to spending time with our daughter, while our son was with a friend. Among other things we saw a couple of decent movies on TV, one Disney matinee (not animated), and one evening film which she enjoyed immensely (much better than expected). Everyone here, including the kittens, is more or less down with colds, sneezes and stomach uneasiness, so watching films was about our speed.

Sunday 22 August

* (day spent largely offline or doing data housekeeping)

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