Leuf Daynotes MM week 15

Daynotes: Week of 10 - 16 Apr, MM

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 15

* Link to: last modified 16 April MM at 23:50 GMT+2.

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Earlier weeks, see the Daynotes index. --

Monday 10 April

The week is starting in a flurry of activity. I may even have to go to Oslo on business for a few days -- that's like outside the EU <grin>. I'll keep you all advised...

Needs be a short posting ~~today~~ tonight. It's midnight and I'm too weary and bleary to type straight. All my energy went to following up various things during the day, and I do believe coping with a touch of some flu or other. The kids were also complaining of feeling sick today, and both came home after only half the schoolday -- which if course muddled my plans a bit.

Tuesday 11 April

Zipping through the usual haunts, I found...

The company behind Dolly the sheep and five cloned piglets announces annual losses of more than £14m. At the same time, another report says that genetically-modified salmon, which can grow up to 10 times faster than normal, could be cleared for human consumption within a year.
Astronomers are analysing data and images of last weekend's intensive auroral display and geomagnetic storm, said to be the best for over a decade.
Web Standards Project Blasts Microsoft's "Arrogant" Break With Standards (see WaSP press-release), denouncing the new Internet Explorer 5.5 for abandoning the Web standards Microsoft publicly committed to supporting. Once again MS focuses on proprietary technologies which are certain to fragment the Web community. "
We are incensed by Microsoft's arrogance, and perplexed by its schizophrenic decision to support standards on one platform while undercutting them on another. ...
By 'innovating' ahead of the W3C in areas like Cascading Style Sheets behaviors while leaving large chunks of standardized processing and styling unsupported, Microsoft risks creating even more complicated browser incompatibilities than already exist."
The group notes with bitter irony that Microsoft's newly released IE5/Macintosh Edition does a masterful job of supporting key Web standards, and ask: "Do they want us to code for the standards-compliant Macintosh version, or the incomplete -- but dominant -- Windows version?"
Big companies are always schizophrenic, with insular and competing groups doing conflicting things. Really big ones are really schizophrenic. Nothing new there. I've seen this kind of thing in other contexts. IBM, various national telcos. Where MS excels is applying this to the "embrace and extend" attitude to public standards, all in the name of providing more sellable features. This comes across as more consciously sinister and premeditated than I think it is. Unfortunate nonetheless.
Netscape 6 seems to want to be install-once-never-remove. Several reports in note that there is no uninstall provision, apart from manual delete and twiddle in registry. Ugh.

Wednesday 12 April

Sorry I missed to post yesterday's update to the web. It was a by turns hectic and engrossing day (unrelated notes are above).

And by the time I surfaced from writing, taking screenshots, researching and dealing with email exchanges about the book material, it was 2 AM. (Funny, I recall thinking, last I looked the keyboard was not a 202-key one...) There are, I admit, a few disadvantages to doing business some 6-9 hours out of step with just about everyone else on the contacts list...

At least I did the bookkeeping and taxes two weeks ago -- one less thing on my current desk. Heartfelt sympathies to my American colleagues staring at the April 15th deadline. Pity one can't bill the tax authorities by the hour -- well, one can (people have) but they ignore the reminders with impunity...

Today, I am seriously thinking of sweeping out harddisk bitbunnies... There's a lot of accumulated dross that can be cleared out , at least when you don't do weekly reinstallations of the system, which I don't -- but, where do those Gb go to? I mainly need to relocate a lot of files, get stuff out of the way, a lot being all the Outlook book material, zip and archive the lot and free space for current projects. Then let's see, there's this huge collection of worthless files in a folder called winnt... oops...

Installing a new version of Adobe Framemaker (v5.5.6) is just one aspect of it all. I've worked with Framemaker 4.x and 5.0 before, and it always gave a very solid and competent feel, if a not so very flashy GUI then -- ok, a box is a box, a button is a button. Above all, Fm is so much more suited to book production than MS-Word. I'll report impressions of this version over time.

Hmm, I suppose I can uninstall Powerpoint again. I had to install it last year when I got in some ppt files to translate, but not used it either before or after. That'll free up some significant space as I recall. Ok, if don't update tomorrow, then I'm either travelling or have totally screwed up the system (like deleting winnt...).

Ta.

Thursday 13 April

Thursday was spent on research and programming. Also re-acquainting myself with Framemaker. Largely the same in GUI terms, I still needed to play around with some extra templates I downloaded from the Adobe site to regain a feel for the possibilities. I was reminded that MS-Word may have a lot of flashy, and sometimes genuinely useful features, but it is an essentially simple writing (wp) tool with add-ons, not a publishing tool as such. I've produced a lot of text in MS-Word over the years, various versions, and Word2000 has got a lot of the basics right, but real "control" of the result is still elusive.

Like any good "publisher" tool worthy of the name, what you get in Framemaker is control -- absolute control to virtually any level of detail you care to tweak. However, the defaults are overall sensibly chosen, so you can ignore the details until you want to do things differently. Unlike MS products, you don't see a lot of moving things about between versions. Most controls were about where I remembered/expected them. Everything in Fm tends to be clearly categorized and collected to specific tool windows (and menus). Put another way, things are not buried 6 levels down in three different hierarchies, with 3½ variants of adaptive automated dodginess applied...

I just realized today that Framemaker v6 is due out in a couple of weeks. Oh well...

There is a version for every season...

I made some script changes to the wikis -- nothing dramatic (and not everything went into the production wikis, yet), just some rendering and control tweaks occasioned by a few comments by Mrs L. I value her comments. As a non-programmer type person, and especially when a bit bleary-eyed from her late-hour studies, she had no patience for nerd-type non-obvious functionality. Thus with her help I get unbiased views on how the casual user may see the wiki.

Friday 14 April

Another late update. I've been discovering yet again the interesting side-effects of moving content in MS-2k-format to other applications. In this case Framemaker. Most of the filters for import are in the 10²Kb size range. The third-party MS filter is a whopping 4 Mb, and while it may work admirably with Word97 files or earlier, it chokes on files saved from Word 2000 -- no matter what "compatible" format the file is saved in. (I assume Fm v6 resolves this, but you never know...) All this has consumed a lot of time.

Therese has joined a local chess club, just relocated to new premises around the corner. She shows remarkable enthusiasm for the game, and the club officials think she has remarkable aptitude. They want her to go competition. Hmm, we'll see how it goes. For now she gets to spend free time there and practice.

Saturday 15 April

Things got a bit hectic today. Deep clean, and Edward has two friends from Gothenburg visiting. The place is turning into an arcade...

Then there's this, the continuation of the IIS security hole revelation from yesterday. At first denied by Microsoft, and then qualified in this MS security bulletin, other reports have been less forgiving (e.g. msnbc):

Microsoft engineers deliberately placed a file in some of the company's Internet-server software that could allow hackers to obtain Web site management files from thousands of sites, the software giant admitted yesterday after two security experts reported the flaw. The secret password violates Microsoft's policy and is a firing offense for the still unidentified programmers who wrote the code, said Microsoft security response center manager Steve Lipner. Microsoft will warn users through email and on its Web site to delete the file named "dvwssr.dll" that is installed on the company's Internet server software with Frontpage 98 extensions. ... Security experts say the file is a major security threat, especially to commercial Internet-hosting providers.

Affected are Frontpage98 extensions, NT4, and W9x with server components. Windows 2000 is said to be safe. (Nothing like a timely security scare to get people to migrate, eh?)

Late footnote occasioned by MS update to security bulletin: Evidently FP2000 extensions are affected as well. So far I've not been asked to put up FP extensions for any of my hosted sites, and don't use them myself.

Sunday 16 April *

What? Time to put up another week's page already?

Let's see, what did we do today? Edward got properly introduced to Metacreations Bryce (terrain generator) -- he thinks that's one cool piece of software. I agree, one can do some very impressive (animated) scenery with that. Here's an early test image he created after only an afternoon of playing around...

I found that impressive.

We went to our local IKEA furniture shop for lunch (good) and to look for some Easter curtains. Well, not much to see in Easter theme, but we did pick up new shower curtains and a pair of nice table lamps that turned out to be perfect for a dark corner of our livingroom. We used to have an aquarium there, but we discovered we never looked at it. An odd corner, it is, flanking our inset balcony, so you never properly see what's there.. You do however notice how dark it is.

Therese spent time later at the chess club. They were tearing down a partition wall to expand the useful floor area, and after a few minutes of watching some futile attempts at this using inappropriate tools, I went off to a local shop open Sundays where I knew they had crowbars and bought one. You simply have to have decent tools, no matter what you want to do. With that, work progressed much better. My good deed for the day.

While doing ear treatment of one of the cats (Nurmal) this morning, my wife got a deep bite. By afternoon, it had swollen noticeably and was quite painful, so we got her to the weekend-duty ~~vet~~ doctor who prescribed some penicillin. We don't blame the cat exactly, for clearly she had a very sore ear and didn't know what we were doing, but an unnecessary (and costly) incident to be sure.

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