Daynotes 1999 week 39

Daynotes: Week of 27 Sept - 3 Oct, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 39

* Link to: last modified 19:10 GMT+2 on 3.10.1999

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Monday 27 September

This afternoon I followed my co-author's advice to after a prolonged effort grab a beer (or was that a bear (growl!)?) and go off to the back porch to contemplate one's place in the universe, but I stopped short realizing that I didn't have a back porch.

About then things started to seem, well, a bit fuzzy around the edges -- a bit like when the transporter coils get misaligned or the holodeck malfunctions. I found a horizontal, padded surface -- my bed I believe, and returned to consciousness only many hours later. 9 p.m. to be precise. Feeling somewhat better, I staggered up and took my temperature, just to verify from where the heat wave was coming. Yup: well over 38C -- which for me is pretty serious. The family joke around here is that when I'm feeling poorly, I have "thirty-sick-point-sick", since I rarely go over 37.

Anyway, I have some fragmentary memory shards from the day... I pretty much finished the chapter I was working on this morning. I also caught an interesting item in the news about Antarctica. Hmmm... a quick search and here is the full article from the BBC. Excerpts...

Scientists believe there is a strong possibility they will find new lifeforms if they drill down into a lake (Lake Vostock) buried four kilometers under the east Antarctic ice sheet.
... "Everywhere we go, we are turning up new micro-organisms," said Dr Cynan Ellis-Evans, a microbiologist with the British Antarctic Survey. "It doesn't matter how extreme the environment is, we find them. We can go to hot springs, or situations that are poisonous, and we still find micro-organisms."
... The US space agency Nasa is taking a close interest in Lake Vostock because it is keen to develop technologies that might help in the search for life on extra-terrestrial worlds. A prime candidate would appear to be the Jovian moon Europa, which is thought to have giant oceans beneath its ice-encrusted surface.
... Lake Vostock is about 230 km by 50 km in area, and 500 m deep. (Comparable to Lake Ontario)

They figure that the lake was isolated from the rest of the environment about 2 million years ago. (Though I take that with a pinch of salt, since there is no real consensus on the age of the antarctic ice cover. The ice cores of the region have been dated back to about 200,000 BP.) BTW, the October 1999 issue of Scientific American has a feature on Europa's oceans.

Another interesting read from yesterday was an article about fuel cell technology, recent research being focused on miniature cells suitable for cellular phones and notebook computers. Intriguing thought to be able to pour in half a liter of methanol in a computer "powerpack" no larger than today's battery packs and run the notebook for 100+ hours straight. One envisions small ampoules you could buy in packs at the local shop, and stick one in the phone to provide a week's standby and perhaps 20 hours of talking. Related article: SciAm July 1999: SPECIAL REPORT The Future of Fuel Cells (quick summary)

Tuesday 28 September

Fever-induced fantasies...

I am standing poised on the edge of the bedroom rug, determined to end this misery. Given my condition, that jump to the unforgiving floor would kill me.
Investigating why my throat is so sore, I fish out the Office 2000 install CD, badly crumpled. Tom suddenly appears, madly hopping around in a war-dance, juggling lit candelabras (yeouch! hot wax splatters), and cackling: "New Outlook Whatever release, must rewrite everything."
My website squirms. The server has been infected by MS FP extensions, and nothing works as before. Worse, the extensions are copying themselves all over the disk free space, serving all requests with "404. Anywhere. Any time.".

Gah! I hope to get back to you all with something useful later in the day.

Wednesday 29 September

Matt Beland commented the yesterday's entry with a message that simply said:

What're you trying to do, cut in on my turf? <g>

The turf is always greener on the other side of the web.

How about this profound thought instead:

A study of office workers found that email increased employee productivity by an average of 1.8 hours a day each because they took less time to formulate their thoughts.

Kind'a makes a guy wonder... Anyway, seriously, grammar and style are bottom-line determined by "consensus" current usage -- and if current usage is anything to go by, grammar and style have really gone to the dogs. Clearly, we could use some new html content tags here: <ui>, <gi>, <pi>, <ti> come to mind. (usage incorrect, grammatically incorrect, politically incorrect (aka please ignore), and totally incorrect)

Thursday 30 September

I've been coughing my guts out the past few days, and this coupled with the fever has cut deeply into any productivity, including web updates. Just for a change of pace, our daughter became really ill last night. Oh joy... Isabel took the worst of it, staying up a larger part of the night.

Yesterday afternoon, I managed to process all the end-of-~~money~~ month bills and send off payment orders. Each time, I get this bleak vision of the not-so-distant financial horizon. A "financial horizon", by the way, is the economic world equivalent of what science knows as an "event horizon" in the physical. Anyway, I am fast flinging off available financial reaction mass to generate enough delta-vee so as not to be swallowed by the black hole of debt hidden behind that horizon. Trouble is, the closer you get, the harder it is, and the more you must expend. Money has mass, and there is a horrendous amount of imploded money trapped in those fiscal holes. Lost forever.

I was looking at www.syroidmanor.com earlier. Some nice features, but as I wrote to Tom, "I would have to add to the choir that I generally dislike white-on-black -- and I don't care that some say that this is the most readable color scheme for LCD displays, such as I use -- in fact I disagree."

Something I had on the legacy Atari/Falcon machines was a software toggle that could switch from black-on-white to white-on-black -- actually inversion of colors in case I was in yellow-on-blue, something I preferred when working evenings with a CAD program (that had its own toggle). Line drawings were in a dark ambient lighting easier to work with when one could periodically swap color schemes like this. Even writing text could be less tiring with periodic swaps and lighting changes (some wp still provide a white on blue option). That particular issue has however receeded as displays have got better and given higher color and resolution capability.

I could probably figure out some way of doing this on the PC, but e.g. swapping Themes is so incredibly slow with several app windows open. The Opera browser with its "toggle document settings" is however the next best thing for web context. Partly I can disable the webpage settings (and so toggle white-on-black to black-on-white, albeit I lose formatting info as well, partly I can set up local CSS sheets for preferred format. The latter would be much more useful if sites used CSS consistently in a way that really was cascadable.

Friday 1 October

The day was consigned to the dustbin of history, so I spent part of the day watching the historical dustbins of others -- i.e. the news. The nuclear power sector in Japan is looking pretty battered at the moment, but Japan is of course highly dependent on power generated in this way. I see figures like 30% quoted. But that is actually a minor worry, because the ripples in other sectors are more interesting. Hitachi apparently had to close 12 plants in the region during this incident, and the consequences of that are only now beginning to felt downstream in the modern JustInTime supply chain. Factor in the Taiwan earthquake, and we are getting major disruptions in the semiconductor business.

This is not the cost-optimal time to be upgrading memory. Informed guesses suggest that Q2 next year is when prices will come back down to normal, assuming nothing else happens to screw things up further... Y2k, West coast US quake, etc.

Western Digital issued a recall for almost half out of a million unit production run of drives. Defect chip can cause a failure of the drive after a few months use. Nasty. Once, I heard good things about WD drives, but the few I tried then (92) were failures in the context of where they were to work -- couldn't disable parity check on the data bus. Actually, what bothered me most about them was the surprising noise level as they spun up. I never tried WD again.

Neat! O'Reilly made the cover art for the book and our editor sent us a capture of it. Adds a certain extra dimension to what Tom and I are doing, to see a cover layout with our name on it.

Saturday 2 October

Slow start to the day. Some cleaning, but not enough, so tomorrow sees a continuation plus wash day. Despite the dark and threatening clouds, and a stiff wind, we made a sort of outing during the afternoon. One issue was to pick up some kind of solid branch to make an interesting scratching pole for the cats. Our wallpaper has been suffering a lot lately.

Bob Thompson mentioned a DMA-check utility on his site, which reminded me of this easily overlooked detail. I had reflected only the other day that my system tended to feel somewhat sluggish lately, but put it down to all the temp file clusters generated by Word. However, when I ran Dmacheck, it reported that DMA was turned off. Aha! I "turned on" this feature, which simply tells NT to try and detect and use DMA instead of PIO on the next reboot. Sure enough, things were much snappier afterwards, more like what I expect from a machine of this capacity.

Several intriguing bits of news today:

The explanation of what happeded in the Japanese nuclear plant: Employees apparently used buckets to transfer a uranium solution into a mixing tank, officials at the firm running the facility were quoted by Japanese newspapers as saying. Because they were doing the job by hand, instead of using a required apparatus, they mistakenly loaded 35 lbs. of uranium into a container, nearly eight times the normal amount, the officials at JCO Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Metal Mining Co, were quoted as saying.
And... Human error stemming from space engineers using two sets of measurements -- one utilizing miles and the other kilometers -- caused the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft last week, NASA said Thursday. At the time the spacecraft was lost, Mars Climate Orbiter Project Manager Richard Cook said scientists had expected that the orbiter would approach Mars at an altitude of between 87 and 93 miles when it fact it came in at 37 miles above the surface of the planet. He said the minimum survival altitude was 53 miles. Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Edward Stone said, ``Our inability to recognize and correct this simple error has had major implications. We have underway a thorough investigation to understand this issue.''
Europe may be in luck, however, as far as climate goes, because: A phenomenon described by scientists as "the cold heart of the oceans", a huge underwater pump pulling some 30,000 cubic km of cold water to the bottom of the Greenland Sea every year and thus maintaining the Gulf Streams momentum, stopped in the early 1990s. Some scientists say this stoppage might weaken the Gulf Stream, causing a new Ice Age in Europe as the flow of warm water into the North Atlantic ceases. But new research showed that two similar pumps, one in the Arctic Ocean and another in the Labrador Sea, had replaced the now defunct Greenland pump, and the total volume of cold water pulled down to the bottom of the ocean was unchanged, Buch said.
And from the fringe: The legendary lost continent of Atlantis, which was thought to be buried in a torrent of water, may sit 12,000 feet (3,600 meters) above sea level in Bolivia, Jim Allen, a British explorer said Friday "South Americans shouldn't call themselves South Americans, but rather Atlantians,".

I've noted that my server is receiving some pummeling lately by extensive robot probes -- probably an email-address scavanger ("miner" is too neutral a word). This is bad for two reasons: it could block legitimate visitors, and the scavanger ignores robots.txt. The latter is particularily resource costly, because it means that the robot is hitting the wiki servers thousands of times in rapid succession. One of the wiki links is the title at the top, which starts a fulltext search of all pages. Spawing a whole set of such searches, one for each page hit, can really bog down the server for a while. I have changed the functionality of this particular "backlink" search to deny it to such robots, without making it more difficult for legitimate users. Actually, it becomes easier, since you see a button labled "Backlinks" instead.

Sunday 3 October

The trouble with weekly timekeeping is that one barely registers Monday before one has already reached Sunday. This week has been especially bad because of the fever and cough haze. A number of things that should have been done were simply pushed into next week.

The week's site worthy of mention is still relatively little known The 1999 Ig Nobel Prize Winners, which awards were presented on Thursday by some real Nobel prize laureates.

The annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony honors individuals whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." Ten prizes are given to people who have done remarkably goofy things -- some of them admirable, some perhaps otherwise.

Anyway, the different awards this year were:

SOCIOLOGY: Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, for doing his PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut shops.
PHYSICS: Dr. Len Fisher of Bath, England and Sydney, Australia for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit.
...and...
Professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia, England, and Belgium, for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.
LITERATURE: The British Standards Institution for its six-page specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup of tea.
SCIENCE EDUCATION: The Kansas State Board of Education and the Colorado State Board of Education, for mandating that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution any more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease.
MEDICINE: Dr. Arvid Vatle of Stord, Norway, for carefully collecting, classifying, and contemplating which kinds of containers his patients chose when submitting urine samples. (REFERENCE: "Unyttig om urinprøver," Arvid Vatle, Tidsskift for Den norske laegeforening [The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association], no. 8, March 20, 1999, p. 1178.)
CHEMISTRY: Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.
BIOLOGY: Paul Bosland of The Chile Pepper Institute, at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, for breeding a spiceless jalapeno chile pepper.
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION: Hyuk-ho Kwon of Kolon Company of Seoul, Korea, for inventing the self-perfuming business suit.
PEACE: Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower.
MANAGED HEALTH CARE: The late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California, for inventing a device (US Patent #3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth -- the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.

Do visit the site and look back on previous years' awards as well.

* I spent a fair part of today redoing some of the screen captures from the chapter I just finished rewriting. Tom wrote me after his first look at it asking if there was any particular reason I was doing the captures in black and white. Gee, no... oops. Somehow the save settings on the capture program had shifted into 4-bit gray-scale instead of the 256-color mode that was required. I hadn't really reacted at the time to how gray the shots were.

Unfortunately, some of those shots were kind of "cunningly crafted" and optimized to show numerous interesting features. And since this was about Outlook's Calendar component, everything was tied to specific, now past dates. As you can imagine, I had to drag around and recreate a number of example appointments, and also reset a few reminders to get back something close to the same contexts that I had so carefully set up. Even so, there were some changes required in the text because of the way the new captures turned out.

Anyway, the extra work was perhaps useful, because I could make a few improvements in the new versions, and it also gave me an excuse to do the image filelist that should go with the chapter.

My NT no longer creates Emergency Repair disks. It appears that the system configuration file SOFTWARE is too large (7+ Mb, over 1.3 Mb compressed) so that the repair utility just reports disk-full when trying to create the diskette.

I've seen a couple of tips on how to "compress" your registry, but as I recall, they were all arcane manual operations characterized as moderate-to-high-risk. Absurd. RegClean finds nothing wrong with registry, and I have heard of many who have larger registry hives than I have (10 Mb total of 19 allocated) -- 20-30 Mb are figures I've seen. Unfortunately, I have no idea if they can create a repair diskette or not.

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