<= Weeks -- Comments
Daynotes: Week of 12 - 18 June, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 24
* Latest update modified 18 June
MM at 14:30 GMT+2.
The
latest-link (above/right) points to current date
(or latest addition). The redirector page (current.html) points there too
-- use this instead of weekly page or index.
Associated links:
Three domains for the webmaster under the sky. ...
One domain to rule them all. One domain to find them.
One domain to bring them all and in the webspace bind them
In the Land of LeufNet where the Wikis serve.
Whitsun Monday (bank holiday)
Last day of the big Bridge hoopla. Close to 100,000 marathon runners I
think -- only glanced at the TV in passing during the day. And stayed mostly
away from the computer too, so this update is very short. Haven't even done
the rounds of the usual Daynote sites today, just (barely) checked mail.
It was reported today that after Microsoft, the antitrust justice guns are
targeting Visa and Mastcard to force banks to chose to support one or the
other, but not both. The (BBC) report openly said that this was likely to
make things both more expensive and inconvenient for customers. This is
insane... Can't anyone stop this?
Windy. But nice, at least until the evening clouds came in. One can get
used to summer :)
The project of the week is to investigate wiki in some different server
settings. So far I've really only run locally under NT and Apache, and on the
production server from cgi-bin. There are numerous other configurations to at
least look at, including environments that control cgi on directory basis and
those that run perl as a resident module. A preliminary environment shift
showed up a few syntactical errors that had passed unnoticed up to now. In
addition, I'm trying some code that lets the script adapt automatically to
server environment. My ideal is a version that requires only two manual
configuration inputs:
- the wiki directory location if not a default
- a customized wiki name (front page title), if not default
Optional is to provide a custom anchor name for the server "home", and a
number of other tweaks.
--
- The Principle of Mass Market Dominance
- Create, inflate, and satiate.
So much for theory. Practicalities have more to do with money and its
proper application. Walking through town today was a somewhat dismal
experience in places where familiar shopfronts in choice locations gaped
empty. Mostly computer shops...
kinesthestics, n. the art of choosing your
blood relatives.
A remarkable "crystal cave" discovery, just
made public
.
Meanwhile, I revamped the css files for this part of the website, applying
some of the information distilled from Lie's definitive guide on the subject.
Turns out that some of the guides and tutorials I'd been looking at before
were, well, wrong -- or at the very least incomplete and misleading. Now
there should be closer layout rendering comparing the different browsers that
support CSS.
If anything broke again in the change, such as for Netscape, let me know.
There are residual issues affecting IE5, where some attribute inheritance is
clearly inconsistent.
Now to redo some of the wiki css files and work up a few paragraphs about
this.
Apropos this, I mistakenly wrote to Bob last week with regards to The
Register website that their use of point size was "by the book", since
it was specified in CSS. This is not quite right, because it implied that
point-size specification is ok in web contexts -- It is not. Except
in the very special situation where the HTML document is to be used for
physical media, such as printing on paper. The correct size specification for
general web use should whenever possible be in relative units (em, ex, %), or
with graphics possibly in pixels. However, many of the common
wysiwyg tools default to point-size tagging in their simulation of
the desktop publishing metaphor.
In that respect IE5 is responding "correctly" when it doesn't resize
point-specified fonts. At the time, I was confusing this kind of resizing
with the global zoom that the Opera browser provides.
---
Out of the blue, I got a letter from
GeoCities Administration advising me that "On July 15th, 2000,
we will be retiring the Geo Cities mail servers". Do tell... Finally
an end to all the spam spewing through that legacy forwarding mail account
that for 15 months. Good riddance! Could it be that the spam just got to be
too much for them.
Sign of the future?
Your software EULA has just been updated. Do you accept the revised
terms? You must answer Yes to continue using the
application. No will uninstall.
Seriously, however, there is considerable commotion in the business these
days about the issue of user rights to software they have "purchased" (I
quote this, because numerous companies, notably MS, want us to believe that
the only thing purchased is a sort of right-to-use, not a normal commodity).
Corporate users are only beginning to realize the consequences of the most
recent term changes for MS software. And there are all kinds of signals that
music and book publishers want to go in the same direction. E-books could
well end up with similar EULA terms, although there is by no means a
consensus among publishers about this. BTW, the new buzz-term for dead-tree
published works is it would seem "p-books".
I dunno... I've been on and off following the pros and cons in
the debates, but it's kind of hard to figure out what a lot of the advocates
on either side really want (apart from either more money or more
freebies for themselves). "Information wants to be free!" -- Info
"wants" no nuthin', it's all a question of personal interests.
Another day of split focus. Too many external interruptions already, and
more to come. I've been expecting a publisher template for the book, but all
I got back yesterday were some comments on things to adjust in the temporary
container I was putting the text. Awk, production seemed to think
that this was the format of choice, with carefully chosen fonts... Huh, I was
only using the single PS-font I could find on the system (from Acrobat),
stock basic Times, not my choice at all.
Oops, end of the workweek. Well, sort of. I tend to not make that much
distinction between the Mon-Fri segment of the week, and the Sat-Sun one.
The local newspaper reminded us this morning that many fake banknotes are
in circulation, and that it is the individual bearer who has to absorb the
loss on discovery, even if the banknote came straight from the bank or from a
shop. If the note is discovered during a transaction, then it is the
customer who is open to charges of passing counterfeit money, not
the establishment -- burden of proof and all that. The assumption is
that it is so easy for the customer to swap notes, while the establishment
staff are beyond suspicion. Huh...
Germany is now on an ambitious plan to decommission all commercial nuclear
powerplants between 2002 and 2031. It has 19. Sweden has decommissioned one
reactor so far. There is a lot of politics in all this, and decisions risk
being overturned at any time in a shift of alliances.
The bastion of Swedish defense, the armaments company Bofors, has
been sold to the American United Defence. This was the last wholly
Swedish-owned sector of the defence industry.
I ended up spending more time than I anticipated yesterday digging into a
Win95 system. It stubbornly refuses to make the connection between the
various Internet-aware applications installed on it, and the dial-up modem
and ISP. Weird. RAS dials up ok, and establishes a solid connection.
But as far as anything from browser to tracert is concerned, it's as if the
connection just wasn't there. I've dug through all the settings I can find,
but came up stumped. It's a pain to re-install Win95 on that 486/66 8Mb,
especially since I can't use the CD directly and there's little enough space
for the CABs on the harddisk (400 Mb), but I may have to.
My wife wants it working... (and I now sort of regret wiping off the
Win3.1/32 with functioning Trumpet Winsock connectivity).
reverse serendipity: when the functionality
you need is mysteriously absent just when you most need
it.
Bill and DOS bloated the code,
to define the PC market.
The Judge did rule, exceedingly cruel,
and consumers did suffer ever after.
(missed update)
I got carried away late last night, trying to remotely set up a wiki on a
server that implemented permission groups and directory-controlled access
(via .htaccess). I was far too tired to really do this, especially remotely
via telnet. And with the admin making own changes, intervening to chat, and
setting the files to his permission, not mine, things were somewhat
confusing. Confusing enough that I kept trying DOS commands, not Linux ones.
Eventually however, the wiki was running, apart from css and logo being
inaccessible due to remaining permission clashes. Anyway, that blew away my
window for updating yesterday's journal entry.
Weather is gloomy today -- windy, drizzle, cool.
Today is cleaning day. And we're having guests for dinner (Spanish
paella, chicken).
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