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Daynotes: Week of 20 - 26 Dec, 1999

Monday 20 December It was clear last night and the moon is just a few days shy of being full. Even in city glare, this was impressive. Yes folks, we are heading for the brightest full moon in over a century -- if you can, take the chance to get out at night and see it, because this won't happen again for another century. Two factors coincide on Dec 22, 1999: Earth's closest approach to the sun at midwinter, and the Moon's closest approach to the Earth at full moon time. This last happened 133 years ago. Meanwhile most people ignore this, as the Christmas panic sets in. I would have to agree in part with Tom, that there is a distinct lack of Christmas cheer in the air when one goes out. I've had little old ladies brutally shove me aside because I'm not walking fast enough or standing in the "wrong" place on the sidewalk, people irritably and pointedly ask "are you done" when I'm in fact already moving away from the ATM (which is in any case barely reachable through the crowd waiting to get into the bank itself), and clearly harried shopclerks first attend to those who elbow in front ignoring the usually strict Swedish queue protocols. Yes, well, and a Merry Christmas to you too! I mutter ironically 'neath my friendly and forgiving demeanor. However, I tend to avoid the crowds this time of the year, whenever possible. I note that Svenson somehow found a three-button PS/2 mouse. I assume he means a regular left-middle-right one. They seem to be practically extinct here in Sweden, except in the guise of scrollbutton-multi-function-quasi-MS-made-for-Win98 thingies that cost twice or better what I am prepared to invest in a mouse, and feel utterly hopeless in my hand. Oh, Svenson, what I wish for Christmas, New Year, or even Reyes is... <grin>. Following this link from Jerry's Sunday page, I suggest that you only read it if you are in a cheerful and positive enough mood. To summarize: On May 13, 1997, United States Patent Number 5,629,678 was granted for a "personal tracking and recovery system," consisting of a miniature digital transceiver -- implantable in humans -- with a built-in, electromechanical power supply and actuation system. These features enable the device to remain implanted and functional for years without maintenance. This transceiver sends and receives data and can be continuously tracked by Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology. On December 10, 1999, Applied Digital Solutions, Inc. (ADS) acquired the patent rights to this technology, which the company refers to as "Digital Angel™." ... ADS is actively seeking joint venture partners to develop and market this technology. We expect to produce a prototype of the device by the end of 2000. We believe the potential global market for this device - in all of its applications -- could exceed $100 billion. ... ... When implanted within the human body, the transceiver is powered electromechanically through the movement of muscles. It can be activated either by the "wearer" or by a remote monitoring facility. ... provide a tamper-proof means of locating and identifying individuals... Hmm... Yeah, I see a lot of regimes that would be interested in easily tracking their citizens, or select subgroups. And as for the rest of us in the so-called free world, Jerry makes the valid point that however well-intended/motivated at the time: "All temporary measures trampling on freedom are permanent. There will be more." Cookies and PIN today, implants and remote activation tomorrow. It's like temporary taxation measures -- "here for the duration". Duration of what? one asks. The duration, they repeat, subtly entering your ID readout into some tagged file. Some Win2K stats after 4 years of development and over a MS-$billion in cost. Final build was 2195. It was known that some 2000 bugs were still in the first NT4.0 release when it went out the door, see book ShowStoppers (by G. Pascal Zachary, 1994?), but Win2K 2195 is supposed to be much better with no major bugs left. (Beta 2 had over 100 showstopper-class bugs). "Minor" bugs still exist, reportedly 530 known ones of severity level "D" or lower. Over 30,000,000 lines of code folks -- what a nightmare. Win2K Pro is 39% faster than Windows 95, 30% faster than 98 and 24% faster than NT Workstation 4.0. Or so says MS. MS has been analyzing "very thoroughly" what caused BSOD to occur in NT4 over the last 4 years. The published breakdown: 43% Core NT 16% Device drivers 16% Other Third Party Drivers 13% hardware Failure 12% Anti-Virus Software A major improvement in Win2K is that it monitors the system dll files so that they are not quietly overwritten by older versions when installing software -- and a log is generated detailing any changes made. This kind of begs the question why system dlls should be overwritten at all by application software. After all, this meant that e.g. SPs needed to be reapplied both when installing and removing applications. Oh well... oh-hohoho, i am so devious. with the png format on the pictures, bigguy hasn't noticed a thing, because this old editor doesn't show png. anyway, a serious reply dropped in, evidently from a fellow friend in fur: From: 7825706@mobilemessage.com Date sent: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 11:53:45 CST To: salem@leuf.org The fool thinks hes safe because I cant get the modemthingie to work. He forgot his pagerSends email too. But its hard to type here the keys are so small. I want to talk about pursuits intellectual and otherwise. For example how do sliding glass doors work theres birds out there. Dumb ones. Oh oh hes coming bye. Doorstop Matt Beland iTOOL.com 888-782-5706 SysAdmin well doorstop -- your name or his choice<q -- sliding glass doors slide. basically you have two choices... push or use catudo... if you're not familiar with catudo, this is ancient art of using human's own height and weight against them... select your optimal target position about half human height away from sliding door. when target human is in correct location and in motion in correct direction, dash quickly out of hiding and between legs to cause stumble, ensuring with teeth and claw that sufficient distraction occurs for human to lose balance in direction of door. when glass shatters, ignore all else and go for it<e so apart from birds, are you interested in world domination<q pager was a good move salem

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Tuesday 21 December Right, school's out for the holidays. Turned into a much messier day than expected -- I will withhold most of the reasons so as not to at length rant and flail, but suffice it to say that I for example missed daughter's school Christmas assembly because I came a few minutes after they locked the doors. That proved symptomatic of a morning of dashing about like white rabbit out of sync with the rest of the world. I also find I have missplaced various important papers -- darn it, all I find is more dustbunnies and cathair. Some webpages are odd. You might these days just run across weird ones that contain a multitude of transparent 1x1 pixel dots, each a link to another site/page, and if you notice this wonder wtf? Apparently, this is a way for sites to try and gain greater search engine exposure. Kind of interesting in a perverse sort of way. The reasoning behind it all goes like this. More exposure means more hits means more opportunity to earn money (ads, sales, whatever). Mirroring, page splitting, and product profiling means ever more pages to generate hits in searches. However, many search engines these days disqualify submissions that are too similar to other ones. On the other hand, the actual bots that do the indexing will follow links from accepted pages. Sooo... some people try and saturate their pages with a gazillion invisible links in the belief that even if 90+% of their submitted pages get thrown out, the few remaining ones will still be able to direct the bots to index the rejected pages. As one advocate says "It will also create a self maintaining "stickiness". Now it doesn't matter if the engine tosses out all your pages except two of them." Hmmm... The same helpful "consultant" gushes: "SET UP 150 DOORWAY PAGES (I CALL THEM HOOK PAGES)" and speaks at length about "funneling in" vistors to the site. I noted a slight increase in "newsletter" emails that appeared empty, but still had a significant body of some sort, so I enabled the HTML rendering for a couple via the browser. BaBOOM! Immediate fetch of huge graphic/banner pages from a website. No thanks, I think I can live without this service. oh-nonono. dorrstop, either you are a cat or you have been changed into one far too long. understand my position here, i am only a cat because i got caught out. course if you are a only a cat you wouldn't understa-a-and... From: 7825706@mobilemessage.com Date sent: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 08:02:02 CST To: salem@leuf.org Fool - we already HAVE world domination. These pitiful humans feed us, provide us with shelter, work amazing hours accumulating something called money - don't know what it is, but they spend it all on us. I got food from a can last night! Tuna. Purr. Doorstop. strangely, doorstop is not responding to the pager number i got. i have a bad feeling about this. plus when a human brings out the tuna, there's often foul play afoot. i had better move to phase 3 of this little scheme.

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Wednesday 22 December Centennial Moon Howling Night <g> -- howl out the old year, old century, old millennium! Yes, I howl, and yesterday ended with a lot of (possibly wasted) work, plus some unexpected and very depressing midnight news, to add to what had already become a pretty depressing day for other reasons. In fact, I think I will terminate the Tuesday process completely... There. Gone. I got this from a snazzy website, by going for the "Organization" link, which I shall let remain nameless: Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01a8' Object required: 'HTML' /framework/libraries/server/stringdictlib.asp, line 26 Duh. This came hot on the heels of another pre-IPO company website where every single sidebar link on their main page only generated the following: "We are sorry, the document you have requested does not exist on this system. Please check the URL and try again. If you believe you have received this message in error, please contact our webmaster, ..." Double duh. The Web is a developing technology. Cats have been bothering me all day, Nurmal distracting me by hunting in the paper bag filled with empty envelopes and waste paper, Salem wanting to get at the keyboard for some reason every time I went to extract Nurmal. Must be the full moon affecting them...

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Thursday 23 December Daynoter Brian has an excellent ongoing posting about installing Debian Linux which should help more than a few who wish to work with this distribution. Good Christmas reading. Great work! Otherwise, a number of the gang have more or less closed shop for the holidays, with no postings promised unless something really interesting happens. Fair enough, Christmas is after all traditionally a time for family and friends in RealWorld, not a time to be hunched over the keyboard. Apropos all these web postings, your collective info and wit are much appreciated. This collection of daily readings has indeed come far from the initial core sites of a year ago, representing a remarkable collection of articulate and knowledgeable people. Kudos to you all, and I hope you all feel the same. Just to "add" to the local Christmas spirit, the weather decided to give us pouring rain and storm winds today. Ah well, it's good to be indoors, and as we are all more or less feeling the effects of yet another variant of the flu, I guess the weather outside is not going to matter much one way or another. However, had this been coming down as snow, it would have felt a lot more attuned to the season. I expect postings to be regular if perhaps shorter during the holidays. But drop by, click around and make yourselves at home. I can only offer virtual refreshments, but have some e-glögg! The latest web-trend for scoring on search engines seems to be long domain names. Apparently competing registries have upped the limit from Internic's 26 characters to 63. One advocate says "To get on top of the search engines, one of the critical keys is a good domain name LOADED with keywords." Some examples: CellPhone-CellularAccessories-CellularBatteries.com and Internet-Hosting-Services-Email-Marketing-Search-Engines.com Urk. That's one trend I'm staying away from. Our daughter felt hot today so we took her temperature: 40C -- The joke in this family when we're feeling poorly is that we're at thirty-sick-point-sick, since our normal temp is around 36.6C. So pushing 40 is no joke. I on my part seem to be suffering a mild stomach flu. Christmas is going to prove interesting. To distract myself from flu symptoms, I installed DragonLinux on the 486 notebook, where I recently experimented by installing Win95. Since Dragon installs in vfat (all in a Linux subdirectory) and is run from DOS via a BAT-file, it's a snap for those who want to experiment without repartioning and making ext2 partitions. The whole thing, including KDE, installs from 33 HDD-sized setup files from Windows -- diskette is possible, but you're likely to prefer a temporary directory for these on the harddisk. Apart from some trial and error with the video configurations for X, mainly due to the fact that I lacked hardware specifics, everything installed perfectly well, if slowly. However, KDE in X was so slow as to be totally unusable, even in 16 color VGA -- but with only 8 Mb RAM, maybe that's not so surprising. Then again, Win95 does a decent job here, so perhaps I've misconfigured something. I'll have to check up on that some other day.

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Friday 24 December Christmas Eve. ... was a nice and quiet immediate-family affair this year. Just as well considering the fould weather, and by the reports foul traffic. Internet largely ignored for the day. Hence a slightly retrofitted posting here, reflecting odd moments of.playing catch-up on some postings on other web pages. Daynoter Dave Farquahar posted a sidenote about Digital Research's GEM: "it was good and dead by that point (unless Atari was still using a variant of it in its Falcon line--Bo?" The history of GEM is somewhat convoluted, but the summary points are somthing like this: Atari had a license to use and develop GEM for its ST line of computers from back around 85. The settlement between DRI and MS that forced PC-GEM to use fixed dual windowing and other crippling measures to avoid look&feel conflict never applied to Atari GEM as expressed in GEMDOS. DRI GEM development was however locked during the critical ST years, so many parts of Atari GEM were locked into a "beta" version of the GUI code for a long time, until Atari could eventually buy out the development rights from DR. This led to TOS 3 (TT), 2 (enhanced ST/STE), and 4 (Falcon), the latter two with more significant GUI changes. The "locked" years in TOX 1.x drove third party programmers to develop and successfully market augment/replacement GUIs/OS (desktop shells, Geneva, MagiC, NAES, etc), and work towards MiNT and other *nix-like OS variants. The Falcon/TT 68030/68040 clones still today being developed in Europe are based on derivatives of the GEMDOS OS. PC-GEM 3.x is still available in Europe via Siemens I believe. GEM gave overall a very user-friendly system, revolutionary in its day, especially because it was ROM-based, instant-on. Font support lagged, because of Atari's early proprietary attitude towards GDOS, and decent (fast) vector-based font rendering really only came with German developers releasing the NVDI add-on. As usual for the field, Atari killed a lot of early development with insanely priced (kilodollar) "developer kits". A lot of users moved during the 90s to PC, but still ran their Atari software using emulators like Gemulator. See for example Atari Emulation Support: AES! Given anything better than Pentium 166 MHz, emulation runs significantly faster than the original ST, and can easily be tweaked into large screen VGA display. What's lacking at the moment is 68030 emulation, i.e. Falcon. (Interestingly, GEM as such never really had any inherent screen size or palette limitations, these were hardware/xbios related -- you could even on the first models run huge virtual screens, and hack in new video cards, assuming you had the RAM for it.) My original rule-of-thumb Atari-PC still holds for performance. When comparing resources, use factor 8 on all parameters. An ST with 4 Mbytes RAM is roughly equivalent to PC 32 Mb. A 33 MHz Falcon can perform roughly like a 266 MHz Pentium, except of course in register/cache-instensive situations like compression algorithms (e.g. ZIP or JPEG), where the instruction sets come out perhaps as factor 2 better for 680x0 at same CPU speed. A Falcon 14 Mb with 1 Gb harddisk is like running a PC with 128 Mb RAM and an 8 Gb harddisk, in terms of resource usage. Applications tend to be a factor 8 smaller, with factor 8 fewer files. Plus of course any Atari system is esentially plug&play without the "MS musical chairs" effect, and has SCSI and MIDI support built-in. Falcons also have the DSP, which makes a difference in many situations. That said, yes, the Atari/Falcon line is obsolete -- so who cares? -- they're still fun. I've used my STs for more than a decade and can still upgrade to the newest software versions. My Falcons are younger by a few years. Admittedly I mostly use my PC for Web surfing only because rendering graphics on the pages is still painfully slow on this platform -- the fast Atari clones on the other hand don't have that problem. Anyway, Dave as usual had lots of other interesting notes and links on his page, this time about computer history and philosophy. Interesting note about the difference in attitude of Mac users versus Windows users. Back when, I found the same generally true when comparing Amiga users with Atari users. I think it says something about why most users gravitated to the respective platforms, and about the underlying system design, but I can't formulate it clearly enough here and now to make it interesting. Dave admits that Amiga was his "religon" at the time though perhaps not a true "zealot", and this was perhaps in part due to the technically better if quirkier graphics hardware. Atari was by comparison a bit boring, since it built on the philosphy of off-the-shelf technology and had totally unoptimized VDI code. Software VDI code soon appeared that after a while shocked the daylights out of you the day you forgot to include it at startup -- everything suddenly seemed so slo-o-ow. A considerable amount of computer dogma tends to be outdated myth these days. Not surprising, given that it's hard enough to keep up with your own niche, let alone compare what's happening so rapidly in all the other niches for other platforms than your own. I agree with Dave when he says that hardware is becoming less relevant -- computing power is already now beginning to receed into the woodwork and cease to be something specific on your desk. Ubiquitous gflops is where we're headed, available at a word or gesture, embedded into most every tool we use.

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Saturday 25 December Christmas Day. I'm pleased to see that Bob Thompson now considers himself Y2K secure against all comers, whatever their mode of transportation. That is a relief, because his presence is such a cornerstone in my Web world these days. (About those reindeer, it's only once a year in any case, and I have seen evidence that Santa has had other serious problems with them -- plus he might not care too much if Rudolf gets blown away before that allowable-nose-case comes to court. Not to mention the pig temps.) Some of you may wonder why I've taken to linking to the Daynoters indirectly via the respective wiki page. The thought is that any changes to e.g. mailto or webpage become centralized to a single location. For example, when some members went to their own domains, this required extensive backediting each time to update a lot of links to his old URL. This way, either I or the members themselves can do an update in one place to reflect any relevant changes -- sort of like how you manage your own membership in (some) mailing lists. Merry Christmas to all (most) of you who celebrate the Day. Sweden mostly celebrates the Eve.

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Sunday 26 December * So, that was Christmas 1999... This year pretty much a family affair, which was nice and low key. We expect New Year to be much the same, apart from the humongous explosions outside. This Christmas we invested into restoring some of the music ambience of our home -- the kids each got a portable CD player, and a number of music CDs were given in all directions. In odd moments during the day, I've been trying to clean up the office space. End-of-year generally means a lot of the paper drifts can be dumped without looking too hard at the individual items <g>. This year it seems everyone is trying to get me to use their particular issue of credit card, and now in December the offer is to waive the first year's fee. Also this year a lot of foreign based banking has been trying to sell me quick loans -- so of course the local banks have to respond with similar offers. Then again, it's pretty much the same as usual in that if I had a regular income and some money in the bank, I could borrow, but if I had that why bother? (Yes, yes, I know, tax reasons.) Oddly I've been getting a lot of offers for "free" ISP connectivity and "free" webspace lately as well. Of course if you start looking into details, it turns out not to be all that free, or to have other inconvenient strings attached. TANSTAFL, as someone once remarked. Web updates have been managed during moments when the rest of the family have been seated in front of a movie on TV. (No one really misses me then if I'm sitting over by the other type of screen...) Another week is in store, last of the year. May it be a good one for all of you. I'll be planning for the new year ahead.

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All rights reserved. Copyright 1999 Bo Leuf. Comments and discussion welcome (bo@leuf.com).

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