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Daynotes: Week of 8 - 14 May, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 19
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Well, now, they tell us the
Outlook 2000
in a Nutshell book is shipping. There will be several discussion forums
open for post-publishing feedback, including of course my own public
wikiOl2k. I'm sure
that Tom Syroid will open
a number of public newsgroups specific to the book on his nntp-aware
AIX-monster of a server box, but any such public notification is up to him.
Although the days are currently in the 18-25C range, the nights are still
dipping to close to freezing, so the air sort of reflects that instability.
The High seems pretty stable though, so things look to remain the same for
the rest of the week -- the greenery is already starting to dry out
unfortunately. Severe fire hazard out in the bush.
I'm still doing interesting things to the wiki scripts, mainly learning all
the myriad ways that coding order A..B..C..D..E does not give the same results
as A..E..c::Q..D..B, or whatever. (A real programmer never simply permutates
subroutine order, but rewrites random snippets as well in the interests of
expediency.) Let me qualify that. I'm in a sense stress-testing the scripts
before including the snippets as analyzed source in the book. The only proven
way of really understanding the code is to break it, in interesting
ways, then fix it again, in more interesting ways. Most of this stuff I only
run on local systems, or as server-but-private copies. But every so often,
I distinguish some interesting, working refinement by making it an incremental
upgrade to the production scripts.
Yesterday, for example, I took a mental step back to get a broader perspective
-- I had been comparing various ways to allow for "escaped" blocks of text,
i.e. sections that would be rendered exactly as written. This is valuable
if for example a wikipage is to contain bits of source code, or anything
else that must not be modified. In my case, I was writing syntax rules for
the very substitutions that the wiki does, both when rendering and at times
before saving an edit. Why? Well, the wiki is not only general notebook for
me, it is also self-documenting, so there was a clear need to be able to
write down the tag syntax in way that could keep it from triggering the
substitutions or actions it stood for.
Anyway, it hit me that I needed to be able to "escape" the "escape syntax".
I'd never thought about that before, at least not in the terms of allowing
the wiki to escape its own escape mechanism so to speak. While out for a
walk this morning, the idea came to me, subsequently refined at the keyboard,
that one needed at least two sets of escape tags. Perl made this very concise
in code:
$sic = "sic|esc|literal";
...
while ( s/<($sic)>(.*?)<\/\1>/$lmark$blk$lmark/si ) {
$blkLit[$blk++] = $2
}
...
The pattern substitution section follows, after which I replace the numbered
markers with the lifted text snippets, as PRE-styled paragraphs:
while ( $body =~ s/$lmark$blk$lmark/<pre>$blkLit[$blk++]<\/pre><p>/s ) {}
(BTW. Now we see the power of CSS to control layout. Long PRE-lines
such as these code examples would have really messed up my earlier table-defined
text width. Now, these lines simply extend past the right constraint of the
body text, without affecting the rest.)
This actually gave me three sets of tags. Whichever set gets matched first
ends up escaping any others that might be within the span. So if I write
<sic><esc>blabla</esc></sic>, the wiki
serves up <esc>blabla</esc> unchanged. The elegance
and power of that single expression was quite a high for the morning, especially
since it performs the process iteratively accross the entire page for an
arbitrary number of escaped blocks.
Not much work today. And now I need to work up some dinner for the kids --
Mrs L is on afternoon+evening shift -- Looks to be frenchfries and meatballs,
garnished with sweet corn and some other veggies. Mostly oven and fryingpan
work. Food is non-escapable.
Priorities...
All employees are by (Swedish) law guaranteed pause and rest after
a certain number of hours on the job. For example a professional driver
must have scheduled a longer pause after at most 10 hours behind
the wheel (though I hear this is often not followed in practice). A doctor
on the other hand may end up working up to 25 hours in a stretch without
any guaranteed pause.
I see that the Linux 2.4 kernel is delayed until next fall at least. Many
say that the W2k release should have been delayed at least as long.
Today is hot. I had more errands downtown, and I found myself actively
seeking the shady side of the streets. Weird, for early May.
(much later) I believe I've just about pinned down the set
of code tweaks intended for the "Customizing your wiki" chapter. This has
had the added benefit of driving me to fully test and implement some of these
features on the production wikis. One "major" usability tweak is to have
an append-to-page option, so that you can simply type in something into an
empty form and consistently have this appended to the existing page content
-- totally ignoring format syntax if you want. This is ideal for dialogue
mode, and quick notes (under h-rules) "to organize later".
I also discovered that web browsers have an annoying habit of resending older,
cached form values if you edit the same page again and some (hidden) form
value ends up being undefined the second time around. That "helped" me tighten
the code to a more failsafe version. (We hope...)
Otherwise, much of the re-coding has dealt more with potential administrative
functions than with visible user features. Although, given the nature of
a wiki, the defining line between administrator and user can be very ill-defined
indeed.
The major extensions to functionality implemented on the production scripts
are tracked on the
ExtendedFeatures
page of the reference wiki.
DHL dropped by today, with the author copies of
Outlook 2000
in a Nutshell. The book is real -- really physically real.
Amazing... (both the book and the prompt delivery)...
Free Trade as a policy demands that we be able to buy the products
after we export the job of making them. -- Jerry Pournelle
Another day with my wife working evening shift, so I must get out and think
of what's for dinner. Sometimes I cook, sometimes I don't (take-out) -- what'll
it be kids?
I spent the afternoon on a side trail, typesetting something in Framemaker
that had no connections to the current book. I wanted to build a template
from scratch (no, Salem, I said "scratch", not shred
-- figure of speech -- yes, I'm sorry too...). That proved enlightening
-- a couple of features in the pre-supplied template examples that I'm not
sure how they're done. Also an excuse to explore some of the more arcane
keyboard shortcuts more thoroughly.
I'm intrigued (to say the least) by the fact that running Framemaker
and a couple of chapters open actually shows less overall memory
consumption than the system at start-up, and way less than running Word and
a single document. I've pretty much concluded that the fastest way to recover
system memory is to run Fm and exit <g>.
Spam volume, while never excessive here, is down again, probably due to the
side-effects of ILY and ilk. Then again, email in general is also down.
Outlook 2000
in a Nutshell.-- Amazon.com Sales Rank is 96,571 and climbing as I write.
The news is getting around, and they have it noted as shipping within 24
hours.
World news is... well, on to the local news... Hmm, on second thought, forget
the news :) The weather is still summer, although it will be cooling down
towards the weekend. Balcony door is open most of the day, which makes the
cats happy. Ah, the smell of power-mowed lawns...
Hmm. The windows need cleaning, and my desk is once again getting buried
under various books and papers. Also a stack of receipts to go through. It's
a wonder one gets anything done sometimes. I really need to sit down some
day here and read some fiction again. I have a number of books scattered
about with bookmarks in them, and some of them are totally unrelated to current
writing, software, computers or anything else productive. Yes, real soon
now...
There was some ISP flakiness this morning, just as I finished writing to
Bob about the virtues of having two separate ISP accounts. The upshot was
that for several hours I had no connectivity on either, which was unusual
to put it mildly. Not clear why, since the phone line itself was working
normally. Of course, the telco is busy laying fiber and promoting broadband,
so there may have been some reconnections going on behind the scenes... sort
of like when they turn off your water for a few hours due to a leak. (I can
just see a flood of bits pouring up out of a street corner somewhere in town
as repairmen scurry to put in a new conduit...)
So I worked a while totally off-line. That works too, although more and more
it tends to point out how convenient it has become to use the Internet for
research. But mostly, I continued to recast some older material into Framemaker
to explore its features.
I'm well pleased with some of the new wiki functionality myself, although
wondering why I never got around to implementing these things earlier. (Well,
in a way, that answer is easy -- I was too busy writing about other things
for a living. Now wiki is a contracted subject. which makes a world of difference
for setting aside the time to )
BBC World had a good documentary today about the current RIAA vs MP3 mess.
It was clear from some of the interviews that many high up in the music industry
corporate structure do in fact see the writing on the virtual wall,
despite forging ahead to stem the flood with legal injunctions and by suing
individuals for piracy. It's also perfectly clear that some new form of legal
pay-for-work structure needs to be implemented on the Internet fast, with
small sums per track (not the 3 or so USD that Sony is trying for). But the
label companies (RIAA in general) are burning goodwill with both general
public and many artists. An interesting point was made somewhere along the
line that over 90% of the music in the world is not under copyright
or contract, but completely free to put on the Web. Hmm, I wonder how that
was figured.
Yesterday's ISP problems explained. Two main cables had been cut by construction
work in different parts of southern Sweden, which according to the news caused
major problems with mobile phone, Internet and ATM connectivity all over
the region.
The Dalai lama is in Sweden next week, giving a lecture in Lund.
Although other national leaders generally meet with Dalai lama whenever such
visits occur, the Swedish PM early on let his staff issue a statement that
he would "not have time". It's a pretty clear snub.
The "Bridge" (Malmö-Copenhagen) will have a pre-inauguration
thing on Monday 12 June (public holiday, but not because of
this), when at least 89,000 (now registered) runners will fill the
lanes for a 21 km long race. Already now, medical workers have noted a sharp
increase in running-induced injuries as your average 1-km-jogger starts pushing
his or her limitations with no clear idea of how to do this safely. Tomorrow
is a sort of warm-up for many, as the traditional Gothenburg-loop with 30,000
participants starts. I remember this annual affair from when I lived there
-- utter chaos for the day. In places you simply could not cross over to
another part of town for hours.
Another event for the "Bridge" is a Nordic cycle race, also slated for the
Whitsun holiday -- I suppose on the Sunday. There's been considerable
criticism of the fact that the usual race rule for compulsory cycle helmets
has been lifted for the race, largely because of the Danish lack of understanding
for such a requirement. Danes seem to think that the Swedish requirement
for cycle helmets, both for races and for daily use, is plain silly. So much
for pan-Nordic understanding. Maybe they should have mandated Viking helmets
instead...
Nice expression to remember:
(It) requires a considerable suspension of disbelief: in a few
scenes you must hang it by the neck until dead. -- Jerry Pournelle (about
film Battlefield Earth)
I agree with his implied criticism that it is all too common for films to
use the convention that a person can outrun an explosion front. (Examples
abound.)
Congratulations to Dave
Farquhar on the intense popularity in Canada of his book Optimizing
Windows. Clearly, Canadians will soon have the most efficient Windows
user base in the world <g>. Now if he just does Optimizing
Linux, he'll have covered his options well.
It would appear that there were more DDoS attacks yesterday/overnight.
There are various complaints that connectivity was really bad in places,
and at least one comment that the slashdot servers bore the brunt
of it. Anyway, another casualty may have been iTool, which hosts
a few of the Daynote gang and the portal site Daynotes.com -- I
find that today, none of the hosted sites, nor for that matter iTool itself
will DNS-resolve. The domains have dropped down the Internet wormhole, so
if you need to look up Daynotes members, you'll need to rely on the backup
sites, for example my
wiki.
Running in circles today. May get the chance to post more later. Then again
maybe not.
Wise words from Bob Thompson...
Microsoft has posted a beta version of SP1 for Windows 2000. It's 190
MB, which surely must hold the record for a service pack. It sounds as though
they're replacing a substantial portion of Windows 2000 with fixed files,
which is probably not a bad idea. I've taken flack for suggesting that the
release version of W2K is really a thinly-disguised beta. I think I can rest
my case on this announcement. Any product that requires a 190 MB service
pack three months after its initial release can't possibly have been a real
release version to start with.
... I wouldn't even consider deploying W2KS in a production environment
until at least SP3, if not SP4.
I seem to recall the phrase "betting the farm" -- just goes to show: don't
gamble... It will indeed be interesting to see how all this plays. With SP4,
NT 4 became more stable for me, and there is not really a lot motivating
me to invest prime time to moving applications over to Win2k as yet. I probably
will try more, but it's not on the top ten things to do right now.
Players of The
Sims
who have lavished attention on the virtual people for weeks, only to see
them cut down by a dirty guinea pig,
are
getting
annoyed.
It's a virtual virus introduced into the game via a computerised guinea pig,
a downloadable plug-in extra. Sloppy Sims who do not clean the cage of the
guinea pig and get bitten by the filthy beast are falling ill and, in some
cases, dying. Even if they recover, they can spread the "disease" to other
Sims. Talk about virtual reality... Wait until the Sims start mailing
you virus-infested love-letters...
The May 14 Alertbox
by Jacob Nielsen is a must-read for anyone dealing with website
design. There are several important conclusions discussed, and JN especially
highlights the fact that users generally interlace reading between several
different sites and spend very little time on any one. Clear, concise, scannable
text rules. Graphics are largely ignored by users, so main navigation links
should be given as plain text anchors, not icons or maps.
Web connectivity seems to have largely returned to those who were
incommunicado yesterday. Well, qualify that: Matt Beland's
rearviewmorror.org is still a "can't find", but Tom and others are
back. Everyone is rightly rather ticked off by all this.
Ever wonder why some parents bestow such weird names on their kids? You haven't
heard anything compared to what you'll find in
this
collection of "worst names".
Today was the cats' birthday -- 1 year old. They got a cod-cake with one
candle. I arranged chicken à la oven for us non-feline types.
Still summer. Enjoy your Sunday, folks!
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