Leuf Daynotes MM week 14

Daynotes: Week of 3 - 9 Apr, MM

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 14

* Link to: last modified 9 April MM at 23:50 GMT+2.

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Earlier weeks, see the Daynotes index. --

Monday 3 April

I'll start the week by re-iterating Sunday's spiel, apropos my forthcoming book The Wiki Way. 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)...

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.

Some thoughts...

When it comes to a choice between conforming and delivering, delivery always wins. This American business attitude can probably explain much of US corporate successes in general, and Microsoft's policies in particular. The same outcome is not however a given in the European business environment.

When it comes to a choice between size and right, size always wins. Well, maybe not always, but a case in point from this morning's traffic (it's been a while since my last incident report) ...

I'm in the left-turning lane, first car, middle of the crossing, waiting for an opportunity to turn. In the meeting traffic, a huge oil tank truck is also going to turn left and glides into his left-turning lane, which meets mine head on. Well, guess what? He pulls up smack in front of me, lacking only about a foot or so and goes "beep!"..Gee thanks, not only can I no longer see anything of the meeting traffic (flat-front cab, wider and higher, blocks everything -- I can't even see the driver, he's that close), but I can't turn either. And I know there were cars still coming, and a gaggle of bicycles, so I have to be careful. The truck's actually still creeping forward on me, so I have to back up, only there's cars behind me too, waiting to turn. A right mess, but I manage to creep back enough to negotiate my left turn, hoping no nutcase is zooming down the next lane thinking to skip through the changing light. Since I'm writing this, you know I made it.
Somehow a B road-movie comes to mind, where two women trick an extremely bothersome tank truck driver following them off-road and end up blowing up his rig. Bad karma, but I can see the attraction of the short-term satisfaction.

Today is shaping up with some fortuitous and serendipitous connections. For example, I was recently pointed at a new edition of a--, no, the reference work on CSS in a mail from "Mr. W3C CSS" himself, Håkon Wium Lie. The book is Cascading Style Sheets, Second Edition: Designing for the Web by Hakon Wium Lie, Bert Bos, Robert Cailliau, 2nd edition (July 2, 1999, Addison-Wesley) -- (Amazon link). I expect to be referring to parts of that when I deal with wiki and CSS.

Tuesday 4 April

So... "Microsoft guilty as charged" -- a US judge has thus re-defined "monopoly" as meaning "holding 80% of a given market". The term used to mean exclusive (i.e. 100%) possession of a commodity or market. Oh well, "permanent" used to mean more than short-term persistency too... I won't go on about this, because there will be much commentary by people more eloquent. As some would have it, the Imperial forces (US gov) struck the rogue rebel.

The immediate result of this landfill, sorry watershed decision has been considerable turbulence on the IT shares market, news program almost gleefully noting that Bill Gates himself saw a chunk of personal net worth vanish from his stock ownings. MS-employees must be nervously refiguring their stock options. (MS shares fell about 15%, although they subsequently recovered a few points.) Paper money... now that's what Monopoly really means...

On the personal front, there's apparently an odd virus going about. Over the weekend, I woke one morning and it was as if I had sprained an ankle. At the time, I figured I must have turned oddly in my sleep and somehow jammed my foot under my other leg causing loss of circulation and long-term strain. Now I'm not so sure, because this morning, both ankles were the same, if less so, and in addition my thumbs felt the same! (Yes, Salem, I know that you've missed your thumbs for 29 years. Yes, Salem, I know you think you're more disabled than I will ever feel. Yes, Salem, I know you can't open your own tins of sardines...) Anyway, the pain is slowly fading.

Jacob Nielsen is throwing mud now <g>, looking into yet another theory of web usability. His articles are recommended reading, even when you don't necessarily agree with his views or conclusions, or as now they come across a bit thin on substance (I thought). You might also interpret the term viral marketing in unintended ways for that matter -- I know I did a double-take on that one given the current security flaps.

(ach, I forgot to post this until late) Busy day, going with the flow as a number of interesting things coalesced in my mind and generated a surprising amount of coherent text. This stage probably the high point of writing a book -- when you're still floating on the tide of generating concepts and overviews without worrying too much about all the detail and page count. We'll see how this goes with time, but it has already gathered enthusiastic responses from people contacted who might have variant-wiki material to contribute.

My hands are better, apart from an increased tendency to transpose typed characters...

Wednesday 5 April

Scott Kitterman took issue with my definition of "monopoly" and sent me this mail...

"a US judge has thus re-defined "monopoly" as meaning "holding 80% of a given market". The term used to mean exclusive (i.e. 100%) possession of a commodity or market."
Not true. IANAL, so I can't get the words exactly right, but...
The legal definition of monopoly power relates to the degree of control one company (or a cartel) has over the market. This is measured in a number of ways of which market share is only one. One of the tests has to do with the company's ability to set prices independent of what a product actually costs to produce. I recall this being one of the issues in this trial as evidence was introduced to the effect that Microsoft was pricing Windows based on the degree to which the vendor in question played ball on other MS products vice what the product actually cost to develop and ship. I recall reading, but not where, that there have been companies held to be monopolies (effective control of the market) with market shares as low as 60%.
Bottom line is that I think the evidence that Windows is a monopoly is quite strong. The degree to which consumers have been harmed by that is much more debatable. It's not illegal in the US to have a monopoly. There are, however, things it is not legal to do to maintain or extend that monopoly once you have it. MS may well prevail on that part of the argument.
Scott Kitterman
Well, I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't think it's right to twist the definitions of terms to fit the special agenda of one or another group. The meaning of the word is quite clear in the dictionaries, and the standard economic definition is also unusually clear, however you wish to phrase it, e.g.: "A monopoly is a market in which there is only one seller."
What the lawyers do is play on the leeway given by how you define "market". If you redefine this narrow enough, you can depict just about any business as a "monopoly". Thus MS is a clear monopoly in the "market of selling Windows", but so in that case does "Jack's Pump" have a monopoly in the market of "selling gas in Hooky Hollow (Pop 432)". The "tests" you allude to don't alter this fact since they are applied to the market just defined to determine the degree of control.
From a quick search I also picked up a reference to the case when Office Max successfully lobbied the US Department of Justice to define the relevant "market" as "specialty office-supply superstores" when attempting to block the Staples-Office Depot merger. Such a definition excludes the de facto largest retailers of office supplies, such as Wal-Mart, Cosco, and K-Mart. Another case in point, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, and others, lobbied the DoJ to define the relevant "market" for Microsoft so as to exclude the largest software maker in the world, IBM.
All this sets unfortunate legal precedents and abuses sensibilities with absurd redefinitions in order to win a case.
This does not absolve MS of being a bully, "forcing" PC vendors to only pre-install Windows, and of engaging in a number of perceived "monopolistic" and deplorable acts. But really, MS is not the only seller on the market -- overwhelmingly dominant on the PC market maybe, oh yes verily, but you can easily obtain other operating systems on the market, both for money and for free.
As Jerry Pournelle expressed it: "... we have taught entrepreneurs that to be really successful in the US you must have a strong Washington presence. ... I look for interesting times."

Scott's view as set out here is fairly common as far as I can tell, but as noted I don't agree with it. I feel that the route of redefining terms to fit the current agendas is a dangerous one. The Swedish government and Swedish legislation does this sort of thing too, as does the EU and its member states. The trouble is that a lot of people evidently go with the implicitly or explicitly redefined terms without reflecting on it, reducing the formerly clear meanings into vague mumbojumbo. How many times have I not heard "but it's always been like this" for things that were changed only 5 or 10 years ago, and then meant something quite different because the defining terms still had the dictionary meaning. I suppose that's why humans have always moved on to new languages -- start afresh with new definitions when the old language finally collapses into semantic chaos. (My theory of linguistic evolution: survival of the freshest.)

Yes, we live in interesting times -- confusing at times, but interesting. There is a lot supporting of Jerry Pournelle's view that the US is becoming more "imperial" over time, and as that happens the world will also change.

The news this morning was filled with reports about the slump in US shares yesterday.

The world is as it is, but we perceive the relationships in light of our preconceptions.

Thursday 6 April

Grrr. My NT 4 system did something strange today and broke, and I haven't been able to undo it, yet. I run a Apache NT as an automatic service, because this lets me access local copies of my websites in a way that is almost identical to how they are served, including multiple virtual domains. Occasionally, I need to get Apache out of the way, and then I bring up the Services control applet and Stop the service. This time when I tried to Start it again, I got a lo-o-ong hourglass wait -- like 2 minutes. Followed by an error 2186 alert. Well, I tried a number of things, including reboot, uninstalling, reboot, and reinstalling Apache. The bottom line after an afternoon's recurring worrying at the problem is unchanged: the service won't start. In fact Apache won't start at all even manually. No way, and whatever has happened has also tied some knots in localhost response -- erratic access with random delays. So what has NT done to itself?

Meanwhile, some more interesting books were delivered, including Dave Farquhar's Optimizing Windows, Bob Thompson's WinNT Server 4.0, and a copy of the CSS book by Wium Lie I mentioned earlier. Maybe Bob's book has some helpful hints...?

A few notes from the wild yonder...

A shakeout among dot-coms seems imminent as startups continue to lose money and investors become disillusioned with Internet stocks.
Browser Wars, Version Two: Netscape's Back! Version 6 is released, but the backchannel reports in so far are very discouraging -- slow, instable and kludgey. It's an alpha in disguise... Also: "Users will be able to easily link to AOL's instant-messaging service, and the browser will also connect to the Netscape site, which will target users with ads and shopping opportunities." Thanks, but no thanks.
Another example of MS assimilate and extend as proprietary? Windows 2000 incorporates an altered form of Kerberos encryption that renders PCs running Windows incompatible with Unix servers and the original version of Kerberos, an open source and highly secure technology developed at MIT. Microsoft refuses to admit any wrongdoing and claims it will soon make the source code for its revised version of Kerberos publicly available.

Polite due bureaucratic process:

Please expect a response within 5 to 10 working years.

Eye in space, a Hubble photo.

(later) The hung service resolved itself as being a trivially mangled configuration file (lost a linefeed).

Lesson learned: always, always go looking for error log entries, or try to get error output to someplace visible. Most applications do report something, somewhere. Trouble is knowing where to look, even if one thinks to.

Anyway, now I can continue setting up new flavors of wiki locally as I continue to research the possibilities. And I learned a bit more about Apache in the process as I tweaked the config for running cgi scripts in other directories.

Friday 7 April

(Yawn) Friday again... I have to catch up on some errands that never got done yesterday for the simple reason that with one thing after another I never got out of the house. That happens now and then when working at home.

One repeatedly postponed errand has to do with visiting the tax authority, who also indirectly deal with business registrations. We moved my wife's company five years ago, in two steps, but something in those address changes went wrong somewhere. Despite explicitly and repeatedly updating the correct address in all the correct places, after a few months the oldest of the two invalid addresses starts automatically propagating through official channels again, "updating" various databases. No matter where we complain, we are referred to another origin for the data, not infrequently ending up with circular references.

Why not set up a permanent forwarding, you might well ask. Sadly, this is not supported by the Post Office. You are allowed, for a price, to forward mail for up to 6 months only. Twice. After that the PO won't let you do it again for the same invalid address! (The one year limit is comparable to what the telco applies to new-number info when you change phone numbers.) Some things are so transient...

Oh well, the PO is currently busy removing itself from the public customer interface and will soon only remain as a "back-office" service for various franchised mail fronts -- assuming anyone wants to take up that aspect of physical mail. Courier and freight services are already taking over mail-order package delivery, so I don't really see much of a snailmail market remaining.

I see from the newspapers that there were impressive displays of Northern Lights all the way down into southern Sweden last night. We're at the solar sunspot peak and flare activity is high. (Canadian residents should have had a better view -- right Tom?).

Saturday 8 April

Cold air, but very much an early spring day. Mrs L is doing an all-day test today to qualify for possible University studies this autumn, so that leaves me with kids and cats and dust-bunnies. We aim to dispatch the dust-bunnies, to hoover them as the English are still fond of saying, but the rest of the day is sort of indeterminate except for friends of our daughter's coming over.

Seen in passing...

... Keep in mind that very few features of Win2K can be actually realized until users begin logging into the Active directory, ... AD and W2K are the MS solution to really large scale network environments.

Well, duh. Is AD going to be the defining point for W2k utility or what? Also...

... Real W2K domain migration is a big job you want to attack with a team.

But another voice claims:

... Upgrading the corporate PDS to W2kS and AD doesn't involve more than about 2 hours of work on a weekend or evening when network use is at a minimum.

Nobody in either context mentioned the W2kS 51-IP bug, of which Tom Syroid posted a condensed version of background info written by Paul Thurrott. In this it is revealed at the end that the problem with Office SR-1 (now withdrawn) installed on systems with pre-release W2k code, when Office applications start up and then shut down almost immediately, is behavior Microsoft had specifically designed for those who pirated Office 2000. Unfortunately it instead bit reviewers and book authors.

Since I'm now writing a book about wikis, my approach shifted subtly in that I spent most of yesterday (after errands) creatively breaking a wiki script instead of just refining enhancements. Well, really I was throwing some new modules coded by someone else into a new framework coded by Ward, but it amounted to the same thing. I learn more perl this way... It makes a nice change from a year of creatively breaking Outlook -- with open source you can actually fix things!

Sunday 9 April *

Wash day and other distractions.

Call centers are an interesting development in Europe of late. Turns out that today you're very like to end up talking to support and customer care people located in Ireland, no matter where in Europe you are when you dial a domestic support number to a larger company. In fact, no matter where you are in Europe, if for example rent a Hertz car over the phone, the booking people are in Ireland.

We saw this development in a smaller scale in Sweden some years back, when for example booking train tickets suddenly was handled by a single national center somewhere, instead of the local station. Now the process is repeating, but on a pan-European scale. Ireland gets most of the centers so far (excellent telecom connectivity). As costs and other problems increase due to call center congestion and the influx of imported staff, the Dutch are starting to attract centers as well -- for one thing, the local workers know more languages, better.

Science news...

Satellite images shows arctic sea ice receding towards the North Pole at a rate of 5% per decade. American and British submarines have also been monitoring the thickness of the ice which has thinned by 40% over the last 20 years. This can mean a new time-saving shipping route connecting Europe to the Pacific, the North Eastern Passage. The Russians have been using the passage domestically for some time, and show signs of willingness to open it up to international traffic.
Mars is still being photographed and mapped. Some interesting results are found on the official Mars Exploration website, including a summary what's been seen at the much written-about Cydonia location ("face on Mars", "the City", etc.) so far. Worth a visit now and then. Some of the imaging is intriguing... weather effects, recent landslides, frost. More interesting from the scientific point of view is that some locations now have comparative images spanning the course of a martian year.

I ran across an article in Newsweek about the new kind of "business incubators" that specialize in Internet start-ups. Very interesting, especially the companion article about the US venture capital firm "In-Q-Tel", which is quietly run by the CIA with the aim of nurturing new Internet technologies. This relationship is not a secret, but apparently not everyone in contact with the VC company realizes it. The In-Q-Tel website is fairly open about it. In-Q-Tel got a bit more public exposure in the context of the Denial of Service attacks, see this Yahoo article from Feb.

It has been mentioned from several sources over the past weeks that further software and "concept" patents might get put on hold pending a reappraisal of the whole validity of granting patents for software, technologies and ideas such as "1-click" or "affiliate". Such a stop-and-think-a-bit is probably a Good Idea.

"What gets me is that I don't think they understand what they are getting into. They aren't a big company. They don't have enough patents to play this game. Do they know what patents they are infringing? Can they do horsetrading if someone hits them with a patent lawsuit? I don't think so." -- an IBM lawyer commenting the Amazon patent situation
Fairness can win you a lot of points, even with opponents who don't normally play that way. -- Tim O'Reilly

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