Leuf Daynotes MM week 13

Daynotes: Week of 27 Mar - 2 Apr, MM

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 13

* Link to: last modified 2 April MM at 20:50 GMT+2.

The update-link (above) points to where I last added some text. There is now a current update redirector page (current.html), which you can bookmark instead of the weekly page or the index.

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 27 March

DNS services are having problems on both ISP connections this evening. Very hard to connect outside Sweden it seems and many known sites return unknown domain. Ah well, it will pass and I'll do the daynote rounds later.

Anyway, this morning was a prime example of the dangers of messing with people's time sense (Daylight Savings). I saw several cases of pedestrians walking against red in front of advancing traffic and simply not reacting -- lucky for them the drivers did (red flare as panic braking propagated up the lanes). This kind of death~~-defying~~-wishing jay-walking happened not only on pedestrian crossings, but in the middle of high-speed lanes as well. Other drivers, fortunately elsewhere at the time, were not reacting especially well either, and one did well to drive with the paranoid mindset of "they're out to get me".

And curiously, we've seen an unusual number of non-responsive vehicles being pushed both hither and thither.

Much as predicted, the day's productive quota got compressed pretty much to zero.

Tuesday 28 March

Snowstorm overnight. An overambitious low pressure system got rolled back by cold air from the NE, which left southern Sweden under thick snow and drifts in the hard winds. As the sun breaks through during the day, things are slushing up and the forecast is for much warmer later in the week.

I downloaded Opera v4 beta (see wiki WebBrowserVersions page for more) and installed it into its own folder to try it out. The installer was clever enough to copy in the existing v3 bookmarks and preferences into the new setup. Runs perfectly well, albeit with a few preference quirks and differences from my usual v3.62.

Noted in passing...

The military wing of BAe Systems (formerly British Aerospace) confirms it has launched an anti-gravity research program called "Greenglow". BAe hopes the project, which will be similar to Nasa's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, will draw scientists from different backgrounds.
The Russian scientist Dr Yevgeny Podkletnov claimed in 1996 to have found a way of shielding objects from the pull of gravity by placing them over a spinning disc mounted above extremely strong electromagnets. News of his work leaked out before it was published and his paper was subsequently withdrawn from publication after harsh criticism.

One gets slightly light-headed considering the implications of a workable "anti-gravity" drive.

Therese came back from school with tales of marble exploits. Marble arcade has again blossomed among her peer group. I am relearning the fundamentals of marble economy. With today's perspective I realize that in some similar context may be how the concepts of a monetary economy were originally developed.

Children are not things to be molded,
but are people to be unfolded. -- Dr. Jess Lair

(midnight update) Tom Syroid had the good idea to post the deep link to a SR-1 changes spreadsheet provided by Microsoft, but heavens what fine-print MS uses on that page. I used the Opera button to kill the styling so as not to have to zoom&scroll, and was surprised that there were no ActiveX or other non-IE impediments to getting the file. Downloaded just fine.

Sort-of interesting reading...

For example, this sort of change makes me wonder just what was purged... "Removed politically sensitive terms from thesaurus and grammar checker in Office 2000 MultiLanguage Pack and Proofing Tools." along with a number of other "Removed/Updates politically sensitive strings in ..."
This one also made me think a moment: "The default bidirectional language associated with Email.dot has changed from Hebrew to Arabic." (Is this a reprisal because Moshe has converted Israel to using Linux?)
This one had me laugh: "Uses RTF WordMail correctly with Huhnersuppe (Chicken Soup) theme."
And this one was interesting too: "Outlook shuts down correctly after opening three or more Wordmail messages in RTF format."

A long list. In general we have found many quirks in Office 2000 components (especially Outlook and Word for obvious reasons), and the extensive fix list provides a few explanations as to what might have been the cause in at least some cases.

How critical it is to install SR-1 will depend on your user context and how much existing faults get in your way.

Wednesday 29 March

A bit strange, but I couldn't find a particular bit of news on the web. The BBC had a weekly round-up and included a story about a new state-of-the-art 150 million dollar high school in Los Angeles that was now almost completed, intended for some 11,000 students. Huge complex. Trouble is, it will never open because of a scandalous decision about its location -- on top of a disused oil field. The levels of toxic pollution are just too high, not to mention the risk from methane gas accumulation that could blow the whole place up. Various suggestions to the use of the site have been floated, including relocating the city council there <g>, but nothing seems acceptable. Weird...

(inserted later) Dan Seto came to my aid with several links to newspaper stories about the above...

Bo,
There are a bunch of links on this story. As you would guess, a good start would be the LA Times site. A search on the term "Belmont Learning Complex" brings up 17 hits.
Original BBC news where I started:
I then went to the latimes.com site and searched on "Belmont Learning Complex." Below are three sample articles.
L.A. School Environmental Chief Resigns
Bond Auction in Jeopardy Due to Problems at Belmont
Coalition Pushes for Reversal of Belmont Decision
---
Thanks, I caught the report only in passing and didn't have the names. "Belmont Learning Complex"... no wonder. I was searching for combinations of Los Angeles, high school, oil field, pollution, toxic, protest... and I note that these words are conspicuously absent from the headlines you cite. Again, thanks.

As Jerry Pournelle frequently says in relation to his website and readership: collectively, we know just about everything or know how to find out.

Scientology is invading Sweden... At least it's starting to feel that way. Clearly, enormous amounts of money are being poured into media presence, advertising ("branding", billboards, newspapers, tv, radio) and new editions of Hubbard's classic in translation. Now roving groups of three are pressuring all the small convenience shops and kiosks to carry the books "good for business". Soon I expect them to come knocking on doors like Mormons and Jehova's Witnesses. We are under siege here...

When you start referring to yourself in the third person, just ensure that your reference count stays above 0.

Thursday 30 March

I picked up a new version of the Amaya browser/editor, v 2.4 -- in part to get more reference browsers because Bob Thompson found that the contents page at Byte.com rendered badly in Opera v3.62. As my readers know, I often recommend Opera. YMMV, but... To put it bluntly, Bob dismissed Opera as junk software.

... What a pathetic product. If they expect people to pay money for a browser, they'd damned well better be selling a better browser than people can download for free. This ain't it.
(...and in a subsequent mail...)
... Any browser that butchers them (pages at Byte and AnandTech), as Opera does, cannot be considered a serious contender, at least by me. ... One mark of good software, in my opinion, is its behavior when faced with data that it does not fully understand. Good software does it best to make sane decisions, as IE does. Bad software, like Netscape and, to a much greater extent, Opera, just throws up its hands and punishes the user.

Well, I got curious, and noted that Opera v4 (beta 1) managed the page at least as well as IE. Now, any bad rendering in Opera has in my experience usually been connected with "layering", unsupported in 3.x (or sometimes CSS styling "optimized" for Netscape). Layering is a trendy way to do visual compositions in html. This was not the case here, instead I saw some complex tabled layouting with CSS styling, scripting, and what have you.

In fact, analysing the source html showed that it was badly mangled -- generating over 200 errors and warnings in a HTML verifier, many violations of elementary tag rules. The page probably only worked in IE because that's what the page was tested against to begin with.

Interestingly, FrontPage 2000 even refused to preview any text at all when given that page to chew on. Turned out that the page was a regular bomb -- fully capable of wiping most of the browser-editors I tried right off the desktop. I've rarely seen such an efficient client-killer. IE5, Netscape4Linux, Opera 4beta did a decent display without falling down, and Opera 3.6 rendered, but with the text far to the right.

Reminds me of back in IE/NS v3 days, when I first started coding html and had been led to believe that if the page rendered properly in e.g. Netscape, then it was coded ok. No way...

Anyway, it's clear enough that anyone not using IE on Windows is (today) in a very small minority, and thus risks problems with non-compliant pages that may work in IE, but not in another browser..Not to mention IE-optimized code.

I'm sort of surprised that such a high-profile site as Byte's would have such shoddy code that even FP refuses to show the text.

It's somewhat like publishing a paper magazine that's readable only in the fluorescent lighting typical of offices and printers, because nobody thought to check under incandescent lamps and so discover that the ink then has too poor a contrast. Imagine if books were published with little labels that read

"reading-optimized for GE 5000K 25W white tube"
or "best read under 14W halogen spot".

So, here ends the day's thoughts...

We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong. -- Bill Vaughn

and

If you can't convince them, confuse them. -- Harry S Truman

Friday 31 March

Morn'. As usual much good material on the various "daynoter" pages, reporting the serious, the absurd, and the sublime.

It's easy to get lost in thought if it's unfamiliar territory.

This observation (by the ever-productive Anon Y Mous) is easily verified by gazing at the cognitive results of e.g. public office, whatever country you happen to live in. Some places may however be more bizarre than others, Your Perplexity May Vary (YPMV). In fact we can easily show that your Mean Perplexity Quotient (MPQ) is inversely proportional to your knowledge of the subject at hand. Political and legislative thought processes often provide ample examples of the following maxim:

There's nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept -- Ansel Adams

My deadline for submitting our filled-in tax forms is midnight, but I got them inked in, signed and delivered this afternoon. Always a grim business declaring what the tax authorities are in any case going to claim for bureaucratic funding. I'm still paying off stuff from two years back... Give us this day our daily cash-flow...

End of month too, but I took care of the bills a few days ago.

Bob and I continued our exchange (and I've posted the whole exchange for reference and invite further comment on the wiki) about browser quality and webpages, neither giving ground <g>. He noted that his pages and those of some 30 other he tried did not validate, so the point is how well browsers deal with non-valid html. Given that his site (and many others) are made using FrontPage, this lack of strict html compliance doesn't surprise me, but my point (such as it was re the byte.com page) was that most people's non-compliant pages don't make even the stricter editor-clients roll over and die.

Anyway, in the most recent exchange, Bob notes about my Daynotes webpage that

... yours was the only one that was fully compliant. Although it's admirable that you take pains to make your page 100% HTML compliant, the fact is that almost no one else bothers to do that.

Since he brought that up, I checked that myself. I hadn't got around to doing any validation yet. Quite true and gratifying:No errors found! Congratulations, this document validates as HTML 4.0 Transitional! -- I get to put up the little W3C button, which I did just now. At least this week's page, just for fun.

As a matter of fact, I really don't take any great "pains" to ensure correct html, I mostly just write. However, I design my pages to be fairly simple to begin with, and when writing use reasonably compliant (and wysiwyg) editors. (I fully realize that people who have invested into FrontPage is not likely to change just to get validatable pages.) I just don't want visitors to stumble over the carpet edges as it were, no matter what their browser happens to be.

The whole bad-code/good-code best-browser issue isn't really worth an argument, but I took issue with what I felt was an unfair dismissal by Bob of what I view as a perfectly capable web client, and one I had no problem paying for. Furthermore, Opera Software provides intelligent and responsive support whenever there is anything I'm wondering about. Patches? Fix-packs? Nope, just download a new version -- a single ZIP in the 1½ Mb range! Hard to beat that...

In any case, I note that I am not alone in this view. Dan Seto and Sjon Svenson also use Opera and agree that it is capable and fast. But please note, I am not out to evangelize and convert anyone -- evaluation versions are out there: try&buy, or not as you wish. I have no problems with people using IE -- heck, in some situations you must with pages that rely on MS-specific extensions. But Opera is carving a potentially nice niche as a cross-platform product, and doing this in a better way than Netscape did.

What I said never changed anyone. What they understood did.

Saturday 1 April

I suppose I'll hear about all the good pranks later. The only one seen so far here was the local paper's attempt to convince readers of a new Internet contact line. "Just click here" it said beside a picture of a form button printed on the paper, "to send us an email." I'm sure some bleary-eyed, post-Friday-night person somewhere didn't get it.

I've been pondering the issue of evaluation software that tracks usage persistently enough that uninstalling and reinstalling does not reset the "x days left" counter. Numerous people have blasted this or that package for writing "hidden" info to their harddisks.

I wonder... The thought occurred to me that Windows itself provides such a "hidden" tracking mechanism, so that an application need not write a thing. This is evident in Windows 2000 when you look at the install/remove software applet. In its new version, you are here shown how often a particular application has been used. In typical MS manner, this is recast into vague terms such as "infrequently", but clearly more precise data is persistently kept by the system.

An application would therefore only need to peek at the system software usage log to determine if it has been run before, when the last time and date was, and how many times it has run. This satisfies the commercial software vendors in that the only way to "reset the counter" is to "reset the os", i.e. reinstall Windows.

The "browser cat-fight" is attracting some attention. However, Bob's posted comment that

... Bo Leuf's viewpoint seems to be that one can't blame a browser for not rendering poor HTML well.

is an incorrect extension or misinterpretation of my position. I have in our exchange (and in other discussions) agreed that a browser client should render even poorly coded pages as well as possible. And unlike the rendering editors I tried, Opera does not crash on the pages discussed. The problematic layout is furthermore managed "correctly" in the next (beta) version 4, insofar as its rendering of the byte.com page is the same as how IE does it.

Getting a browser to "correctly" handle mangled HTML is not trivial, and is very hard to test given the infinite permutations of bad code being published daily out there. A new bad page example can require rewriting core parser code to make further assumptions about e.g. tag nesting structure -- not something I would necessarily expect in incremental upgrades such as 3.60>3.61>3,62, but which is in line with the step 3.x>4.x (and has been addressed).

Oh well, I know I speak to a minority when I bring up Opera -- but I feel it a shame when the product is dismissed so outright as was the case. Others find IE "good enough", warts and all, just as they find Office and Windows "good enough". And granted that these MS products are "extensively tested" in ways that other software producers can't even dream of. It is interesting in this context to note that MS can these days get thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people to spend money to beta-test new releases. Now do these people outright dismiss the products when serious problems become evident? No, they await the next service pack, or the next, or the next...

Today is cleaning day, and I have many pages of work to at least glance through.

Sunday 2 April *

These items, reported yesterday (overnight) from a number of sources...

Installing Office 2000 SR-1 on Windows 2000 breaks the generic Search function and trashes the browser. MS says the problem is known but had no patches available at this time. There is of course no "uninstall" for SR-1. (Unclear if this applies to all W2k (sub-sub-)versions.)
NIPC ADVISORY 00-038 -- Self-propagating 911 script discovered. An FBI case has revealed the creation and dissemination (in the Houston area) of a self-propagating script that can erase hard drives and dial-up 911 emergency systems. The 911 virus is the first "Windows shares virus". The script appears to include the following characteristics:

Actively search the internet for computer systems set up for file and print sharing and copy itself on to these systems.
Overwrite victim hard drives.
Cause victim systems to dial 911 if it finds a modem.

The problem is of course that Windows installs by default with sharing over the network set wide open.

(evening addenda) I've desperately been reading through the QC pdfs of the Outlook book the past few days, trying to both skim (fast) and scan (careful) for critical mistakes or slip-ups. Phew! Thank heavens for my early (grades 5-7) schooling in Alberta during the 60's, where they taught the whole class efficient speed-reading. I recall we got up to a class average of some 900-1000 words/minute for serious reading, and significantly higher for fact-skimming. This skill often proved invaluable to me in various situation later. They seem to have stopped teaching such things shortly thereafter, and I rarely meet people who have more than your typical 200-400 wpm speeds, sometimes less. The conclusions of that early experiment did however imply that most people can easily at least double or triple their reading speed, while at the same time improving retention.

Anyway, this week has cleared the desk somewhat, and next week sees a return to serious writing on The Wiki Way, my next book. In this I take up the wikiwiki server concept from both functional (setup, tweaking, administering) and social aspects (the community that grows around such an interactive server).

Therefore I encourage all my readers to explore the wiki servers on this site (and elsewhere) and email me or post comments, reflections and questions, all of which may improve the quality and scope of the book.

Yes, I need user impressions from absolute beginners too, not just the already converted. Tell me what's confusing, what's awkward, why you hesitate to edit a page -- the good, the bad, the indifferent. I'm all Inbox...

If you do not feel yourself growing in your work and your life broadening and deepening, if your task is not a perpetual tonic to you, you have not found your place. -- Orison Swett Marden

That could be as useful a credo as any for an author to be mindful of, to reflect upon between books.

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