Daynotes 1999 week 42

Daynotes: Week of 18 - 24 Oct, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 42

* Link to: last modified 19:30 GMT+2 on 24.10.1999

Hi, welcome to this week's journal.

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himself The update-link (above) points to where I last added some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, this assumes I remember to move it, and 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

Earlier weeks, see the Daynotes index.

Monday 18 October

So, the news in over the weekend suggests that the actual earliest Windows 2000 Professional shipping date slides into February next year, possibly to be announced at the IDG show in San Francisco starting the 15th of that month. Maybe they're just waiting for volume quantities of the new IBM 73 Gb drive so we have room for the sucker :) No, but seriously, apparently there are still "a few serious and nasty bugs that need to be solved" -- I saw a reference to 809 of them classed "priority 1" in RC3, never mind the lesser categories. Is this code complicated or what? I didn't know it had that many features, let alone bugs. Rumours that the initial release will be accompanied by SP1 on the CD are unfounded, untrue, unfair, and unverified.

Meanwhile, NT4 SP6 is said to be "imminent". My bet is that I will have to do the "Y2K-rollover" with NT4 SP4 as installed now. I checked the hardware and BIOS some time ago, however. Apart from needing to "manually" advance the RTC to/past 1 Jan 2000, the system as such is compliant once ticking away in 2000.

For anything that fails Y2K, there's always the fallback position of resetting the clock to 1 Jan 1972. For example, some date-programmable video recorders can fall into that category. The year may then be retro, but the weekdays and leapyears will match at least (the 28-year cycle). Automatic shifting to and from daylight savings time may be another matter however -- already broken in some situations as Europe already "harmonized" this to a common date. I go off GMT+2 and back to GMT+1 at 2 a.m. on 31 October this year. Actually, I should run this system in Linux and under GMT, period, and be done with it.

Parsing my error log for the site today, I ran across some mysterious entries. Somewhere, there are links with DOS-style slashes, as in for example "...daynotes\1999w09.html". From time to time the site takes a pounding by a robot (Infoseek's) that seems to walk my entire daynotes directory using the DOS-slash. Then on another day, it tries to walk all my LeufNet subwebs as if they belong to the LeufCom domain, and so on. Is the Infoseek robot seriously addled in its recursiveness, or what?

From time to time, I run my own link checks on the sites (or subwebs in them) as they appear on the server (not just locally). This is somewhat resource intensive, given the number of links that by now exist, but is necessary given the way the NT filesystem ignores case and slash mode. Given these tests, it makes me wonder where those invalid URLs come from.

Ended up with another late evening stirring the noodle-like pot of writing that represents the current chapter. Trouble is, after a long session, or long series of long sessions, one gets blind to the overall drift of the material. Writing about VBA in Outlook is doubly tricky, because on the one hand, I don't see this chapter as a detailed tutorial. On the other hand, it is not a chapter in which to waffle on about VBA and VBS in general terms either. Thus a lot of effort is going into selecting and distilling code extracts to serve as clear illustrations of some of the more obtuse points.

Then again, some sort of overview and lead in to the subject is required, because I cannot assume that the interested reader is necessarily familiar with talk of object models and instances, and thus how to code. I think I am getting it right, but only co-author and editor viewpoints will tell when the material reaches what I feel may be submission status.

Tuesday 19 October

Here's an interesting correlation for you: Swedish municipalities with the highest tax rates also turn out to profess the greatest difficulty in making ends meet, most run large deficits. They also complain about the unfairness of the current system with state subsidies and redistribution. (Municipal tax is the largest single visible tax for the average person -- about 30% flat rate on taxable income, although there are significant variations depending where you live.)

Given this, I look around at for example some of the massive work being put into what in effect is just cosmetic modification of the streets lately, and the moving/renovating of municipal offices, and I wonder...

Streets, yes. The current trend is to "landscape" traffic flow. This means digging up chunks of asphalt, trucking in sand and stonework, and creating islands and barriers to impede through traffic in various (unsynchronized) directions.

The other day, I saw a bus driver who was apparently driving on autopilot with an empty bus. He had turned in towards the local square on the side street where the interurban busses.used to stop, which also used to be an alternate entrance to the square's bus stops. Of course, now the continuation of that street was a blocked off pedestrian-only street. <Screech!> The previous stops had been moved to a parallel street, which was now also the way to reach the square, so his next move was to rapidly turn left to reach this. <Screech!> The connecting street had recently been endowed with a raised middle separator, which along with the signs made it impossible for the bus to negotiate the corner. By now I was fascinated to see how he was going to manage this. The driver did a bit of back and forth, figuratively burning rubber and clearly fuming, and got the bus turned onto the wrong (left) lane. No meeting traffic, so he tears off the wrong way and snap-turns right onto the proper street. <Screech!> Oops, same problem. Yet more raised separators with signs at the ends. Further back and forth to straighten up the bus. Amazingly, the driver managed to complete what I initially would have thought impossible, just millimeters to spare to sign posts on either side.

I'm not much of a sports fan and don't even pretend to follow the recurring, nay continuous bouts in the national divisions, but even I could not avoid noticing that the local soccer team dropped into the sub-basement of Div I last night. Local news had nothing-but this morning. So-called grown men everywhere were in full tears and quavering voice at the likely prospect of Malmö playing in Div II next season, after how-many-years? in Div I. Oh, the sha-a-ame of it all... Like I say, I don't even pretend to follow this, which is lucky. -- Otherwise , to go by others' reactions to this, I would be declaring a month of mourning or something, put the website in theme black, pour ashes on my head, and generally resign from life.

Tom asked for help on how to code what I call referral or redirection pages. In other words, someone comes to an old URL, but the webmaster has moved the content elsewhere. The ideal is to automatically refer the user to the new locations. Since this has some general interest, I post the info here as well.

The easiest way to do this is to replace the old page with a referral one and use a page meta tag for refresh. Because this is just an ordinary html page in other respects, it is easy for anyone to set up. The page should have two parts:

a refresh meta tag just after <HEAD> that looks something like this...
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="10; url=../newfolder/newpage.html">
.
In the example, I am redirecting to a parallel folder in the current site. The URL can of course be a fully qualified http to any site and page at all.
The content parameter "10" here signifies a 10 second delay (to allow the user read the short referral page text)
.
Not all (older) browsers support auto-refresh, so the referral page should also explain what the situation is, spell out the new URL and remind to change bookmark, and provide a prominent manual link to the same URL
.

Here is a practical example on one of my sites that refers a user with an old bookmark to the new default entry page.

Clearly, which old pages to replace with referral pages depends on which ones you think are deep-linked/bookmarked by others.

Oops. The non-email side of life makes itself reminded in the form of stacks of paper requiring attention. Some of a stack on my desk had slid to cover the powerbrick for the notebook. Hmm, paper insulates, you know -- that brick was kind of hot when I exhumed it. I wonder how many days it has been running with inadequate air circulation.

I freely admit that the more I have things organized in my virtual office, the worse I am getting in the paper one. Not quite as bad as some people I know, but definitely headed in that direction. More and more often I find that I have not looked through the paper midden for an uncomfortably long time, considering there might be items that need responses. Clearly I am starting to need formally scheduled times to push current work to one side to clear up the accumulated papers.

I ordered some books from amazon the other day and got a shipping confirmation. Only, WHY is everyone using DHL instead of something a bit more... reliable? I quote...

We thought you'd like to know that the following items have been shipped ... using DHL WorldMail (comp. upgrade) (Averages 2-12 weeks).

Up to 12 weeks? Give me a break! Averages?? Geez, an "average" with that range sure suggests some really awful waits sometimes, like Q2 2000... I remember faster delivery back when the norm was surface mail, slow transatlantic freighters, and 3rd class bulk no-priority mail (e.g. newpapers and magazines). I suppose we can be glad that DHL weren't around to run the convoys supplying Europe during WWII.

Wednesday 20 October

In the news...

The United States secretly deployed thousands of nuclear weapons in 15 foreign countries at the height of the Cold War, the Washington Post reported, citing a study to be released Wednesday....

Not really "news", except perhaps as to the extent of not telling the host countries, and of having it collected in one report. From "incidents" (i.e. accidents that could have gone terribly wrong, such as when live A-bombs got dumped on the tarmak in Iceland, or ended up in Spanish soil due to a bomber crash) we have long "known" that US nukes were to be found deployed pretty much everywhere. Not to mention all the ones on cruise throughout international waters and in the air.

We can all count ourselves fortunate that (in this timeline at least) none of the many incidents caused an explosion -- Any bets on the gut-level reactions at the height of the Cold War had half of Iceland suddenly become a fireball? (Lucky, too, that we never had any serious meteor/comet strike during this time.)

Happiness is figuring out how many diskettes it would take to install Windows 2000 Professional from A:, and then looking at the CD-player on one's system.

Feedback on DHL shipping comment posted on the wiki, along with some further observations about the Swedish PO.

I note that the Windows32 version of the Squeak Virtual Machine (VM) has a new release, much improved, as of the v2.6 image. The whole package, self documenting, is available from the German archive (ZIP 5.8 Mb). Unzip and run.

Squeak logo Squeak is Smalltalk and the home site is at squeak.cs.uiuc.edu, where you find all the facts, tutorials, and links to all VM ports. Squeak philosphy can be summed up as "everything is available to see, understand, modify, and extend".

Thursday 21 October

The 1 GHz processor will be on the market next year. The proposed tower case will also include a coffee machine doubling as cpu cooler, and a 1 GHz microwave bay for those quick snacks.

Seriously, however, the reach from motherboard 66 and (sometimes) 100 MHz to the processor speed is getting extreme.

(post errandum <g>) I went into my bank's branch office today, and noticed this new discrete-ugly screen-endowed box in a corner. My my, it was an anti-ATM, I guess you could say -- an automated cash deposit machine. On the touch screen you enter your account number, then insert banknotes in the slot. When done, the machine (hopefully) issues a deposit receipt.

I could suddenly clearly visualize this office in the very near future -- a small vestibule with ~~three~~ two machines in different corners: Cash card recharger~~, ATM dispenser,~~ and cash deposit machine. Behind the locked inner door, curtained off, the former customer and clerk area, the few remaining employees busy doing other menial tasks as yet not automated or web-based.

Apropos exchange about encyclopedias, see thread on wiki.

Friday 22 October

The debate over global heating or not is heating up. One of the things that always pops up, and which I wondered about when I was a kid, is the inconsistency I detected in descriptions about the ice ages. The overall description always suggested that ice ages were global, but when you dug down to the nitty-gritty details and really looked at what datings were given for different areas of the world for different conditions, you invariably ran into contradictions in the same timeframe -- mile deep ice in one region, warm or even semi-tropical in another.

Later, the theories were modified to suggest that northern and southern hemispheres alternated, so that an ice age in say Europe and North America corresponded to a warming in Antarctica, and vice versa (as today). Yet all along, the evidence of say mammoths indicated at least temperate conditions in far northern Siberia, more or less contemporous with ice age in western Europe. So...?

Clearly, much remains to be learned about the mechanisms of climate. I personally lean towards seeing the Gulf Stream as a key player here. If nothing else, changes in this heat transport mechanism are perfectly capable of giving Europe an ice age while correspondingly warming up some other region of the world at a comparable latitude. Geological evidence also strongly suggests that the "instability" of this warming effect is linked to e.g. the distribution of continents and undersea ridges, which explains the periodic ice ages during one interval of the earth's history, and the absence of ice ages during much longer periods when continents were placed differently. We see the significant changes caused by the comparatively small fluctuations we know as el niño - la niña.

The following paraphrase picked off Jerry's site. Very relevant.

Appropriate use of data...

novelists need only plausibility, and can make up their data;
lawyers want proof and can select their data;
scientists are supposed to take all the data and deal with it.

-- Jerry Pournelle, The Voodoo Sciences.

Unfortunately, most so-called scientists and researchers are practicing as "lawyers", and the more vocal advocatists are peddling novelizations.

Saturday 23 October

Cleaning day, but I also took a few hours to go around town with my daughter. She has a class Halloween party on Thursday, so we were looking for costume ideas. Small town, small ideas <g> -- and Halloween is not an especially notable event around here, even though the American style party is catching on. No matter, a few accessories, a yard of black cloth, and we should be able to make a decent bat out of her.

I rectified a small thing on my system today. The perl scripts I use refer to "/usr/bin/perl" on the server, but when I installed perl for Win32, the path for this is set so that the local scripts just refer to "perl". This configuration is handy when running perl scripts from file or desktop. However, moving a script from local to server thus meant I always had to remember to change the path at the head of the file. Being just one more thing to remember, sometimes I would forget and the script not run after uploading.

Simple enough to fix, really (thus something that never gets done for some reason). My choice this time was to copy over the perl binaries to a /usr/bin directory on the system partition. One less thing to think about. I've tried to make all my scripts pretty much one-line-edit to run on either NT or Linux server. In brief, this means including a location parameter, which in turn sets up any required (path) changes at run time with a simple if-else branch. If I thought about it, I could probably figure out a way to set this parameter automatically at runtime as well, but I can't spend too much time with perl just yet. Must focus on Outlook and VBA -- a totally different flavor of coding.

Sunday 24 October

Corporate email monitoring (and censoring) is becoming a major issue. Companies often defend their position in terms of protecting themselves against potential lawsuits due to content originating from their servers. Then again, it can just boil down to the bottom line, as in:

... of course reading any kind of email costs money. A large corporation did the math and found that a Monday Morning Joke sent to their employees cost them a whopping $60,000 for just that joke.

Most companies today have some sort of email policy, which ideally should, but may not always be clearly documented. Typical (US) corporate email rules are formulated as:

Corporate computer systems are the property of the company and are only to be used for business purposes.
Examples of what is allowable use and what is not.
A declaration to personnel that email routed through corporate systems is not private, and that all such email can be monitored
A declaration that violations of policy can lead to disciplinary action

This is all fairly clear and aboveboard, makes sense from the corporate legal exposure, even though many object to the fact that their email can be monitored at any time.

Most people don't however realize that all email sent over the corporate network is archived and particular messages may be dug up many years later as "evidence" of one thing or another, long after the context is forgotten. Even top management can be burnt by this long after the fact -- witness the PMs dug up in the case against MS.

When things get infected is the tendency of some companies to monitor their employees e-activities off the job. People have been fired for having "inappropriate" content on private web pages, or for having private email published in what is deemed "unsuitable" contexts as far as the corporate image goes.

* Is your computer depressed?

Do you know? Do you care? You should. Here are the 9 common symptoms of computer depression. If your computer's situation seems to fit at least 5 of these, then your system needs special, professional help ASAP.

Significant lack of system resources during most of the day.
Clearly lower task willingness, hesitancy in starting processes or services.
Significant and recurring drops in free RAM.
Task disturbances -- processes that run too long /often or too short/seldom.
System thrashing or blockages, refusal to start applications.
Sluggish response, response not commensurate with machine characteristics (MHz, Mb).
Constant profession of inability -- frequent alerts about low resources, incorrect file/document type, incorrect associations, disappearing desktop icons.
Reduced processing power and degraded retention of data. Interminable installation runs with inconclusive results.
Recurring morbid thoughts about reboot, BSOD, YANTI, YAOI, lost data, trashed system partition...

This symptom checklist is generally known as DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Machine Disorder).

The following treatments can help alleviate the symptoms, but have varying effects and are not equally recommended by all professionals:

ECT - Electroconvulsive treatment. One model is to run the system during severe thunderstorms without UPS. Outcome of treatment is variable, may be terminal. Not recommended by more modern therapists.
MBLI - Multiboot Linux Installation -- allows therapeutic sessions away from YANTB (qv) in restful conditions. Not always compliant with productivity demands.
SBLI - Singleboot Linux Installation -- will invariably rejuvenate your system, unless running outmoded version of X-client. Slight risk of isolation from mainstream community, along with distancing from MSTD (qv).
MSTD -- Microsoft terminology dyslexia, a form of aphasia actually, where it become progressively more difficult to speak in terms that normal people understand.
YANTB -- Yet another NT bug (aka YAMSB), typical situation where computer and operator both sigh in exasperation over strange behavior.
YAGS -- Yet another gaming session. Alternative therapy, which does however often require suffering blues of another kind; those having to do with Win9x installation.

Have a good end to your weekend.

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