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Daynotes: Week of 3 - 9 July, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 27
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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.
It was a lovely summer's day today. Which was fortunate, since I had a banking
errand. Welcome to the new world of c-banking! (That's "c"
for cash, as opposed to the new paradigm of e-banking.) My local branch closed
on 30 June, so now the nearest branch is a brisk 15 minute walk across town
to either the main office (which I dubbed Scrooge Hall when
I first saw it's reception space with a bronze money bag tastefully placed
in the absolute center of the immense oval marble and mahogany space),
or roughly 90 degrees off, to their office number two. I chose main office.
Along the way, I noted the few remaining ATMs were not functional.
Arriving at this center of c-banking, I was understandably dismayed to find
that the reception space was empty, because the counters were all closed,
shuttered, and patently gone. WTF? The bank was after all open.
A guard at the reception desk helpfully said that the customer area had relocated
25 yards down the street, at another entrance into the block-covering building
complex where bank officials and traders discreetly slaved in their various
cubicles.
The guard also pointed to an ATM, new and shiny, tucked away in a corner.
Well, I could start with that. Hmm, talk about downsizing. Even the ATM was
a mini-version -- 5-inch diagonal screen, reduced size metal keypad. Only
the emerging banknotes were scale 1:1 -- for a moment there I was afraid
I'd see old-regime Ruble-sized notes issue forth.
After this I boldly walked past the new customer center... Oops,
where? Was that a public entrance? I stepped into something the
size of our kitchen, with two counters, and gaggle of sweating tourists
(down-sized airconditioning here too), another mini-ATM, a cash deposit machine
(Automatic Taker Machine? Cash Disposer?). The biggest
thing in the room was the wall-screen for displaying current share quotations.
Customer counters to fill in slips were replaced by dinky little stand-up
thingies that I wouldn't even have been able to park a book on. Two of them.
This from the main branch in the third city of the largest bank in the country...
I can't help but wonder what the rebuilt office number two looks like these
days. Crowded for sure, since it's near one of the major shopping
malls.
Yep, the bank sure wants me to use Internet banking. I get the hint. Trouble
is, I've heard from several sources that the software and hardware add-on
for e-banking (Windows 9x/NT only, I surely don't know how a Linux
user is expected to do e-banking) has a distressing tendency to kill
Internet connectivity with your ISP. Actually, the trend I see, is that people
with cards like Visa now use the larger shops for cash by rounding up the
card charge on each purchase. And more and more chains with customer discount
and pre-pay cards are offering "savings accounts" with some percentile better
than the banks.
Speaking of banking, I also heard that the four major Swedish banks just
bought the Post Giro payment system from the Post Office. Pity.
This was the only competition to their own Bank Giro, so now these
banks have a monopoly on domestic payment transfers. I can hardly wait to
hear the changes they will implement -- like maybe a ten-fold increase in
yearly fees to have an account number... This needs careful monitoring, since
I have three separate pg accounts, a fact that has complicated any transition
to Internet management of them (apparently I would need three separate
computer add-on packages(!?), since each package is tied to a particular
account, for three separate fees of course).
Ah well, life does go on. Three chapters in for review, and I hope now to
quickly wrap up the others. Then perhaps a week or so of real vacation, later.
I was mildly surprised to hear from a friend that
Outlook 2000
in a Nutshell had magically appeared in a bookshop in Gothenburg. So
soon.
Toastesterone: the male hormone which induces the sinking
feeling that your prospects are toast.
Happy 4th July to all my American readers! How's the state of the
Empire?
So, here's the official report about what an omission in backup routines
gets you
(PDF
).
Evidently, over a year's email to and from the Vice President of the US is
forever lost. I'll bet MS wishes that had happened to some of its email
archives... (You'd think someone could have corrupted a .pst at a
critical moment.)
Indicator of "degenerate" society:
when people are less and less inclined to take responsibility for their own
stupidity or, in some cases, dishonesty.
Speaking of email, here's a simple filtering tip to
painlesslessly remove most spam from your inbox. First you must set up your
filtering rules to take care of known mailing lists that you are a member
of -- although it's likely you already have such rules in place. Then you
simply discard anything addressed via BCC (blind-copy addressing).
What spam remains after this has been explicitly addressed to one of your
accounts, but should be only a few percent of the total volume. The vast
majority of spam is BCC-broadcast (and also likely checked by industrious
spammers to fail the Outlook spam tests.).
And here's an interesting add-on to prevent malicious use
of Outlook email functionality, more intelligently than the infamous MS patch.
Reliable Software Technologies has a new program called
JustBeFriends
.
It works with all versions of Outlook and Outlook Express, by controlling
how external applications access Outlook or OE hooks, and denies access from
desktop or attachments. Looks good.
Oh, and avoid sending native-format MS doc files over email.
The bandwidth waste is incredible. Zip them first, because MS docs have
inherently high text-space overhead (factor 6 roughly), don't compress included
images at all (!), and email encoding bloats all this further. With
for example included screenshots you can get compression gains of up to two
orders of magnitude by just zipping the file attachments fist.
Other (old) news...
Domain hijacking. There have been a couple of cases reported
of forged email being sent to NSI from someone in Jakarta, Indonesia. The
emails asked NSI to redirect all the designated sites email and website
information to a new location. The site registrations, one of which had been
registered with Network Solutions as early as 1993, were then transferred
to a Toronto registrar, and ownership switched to someone living in Hong
Kong. The original owners were, to put it mildly, shocked to find their sites
replaced and email gone, and more so when their registration particulars
turned out to be completely erased from the NSI database. Two domains named
were web.net and bali.com, both of which have subsequently
been returned to their original owners.
Domain oops: J.P. Morgan & Company (worth $21 billion)
lost its Internet connectivity on 13 Jun 2000 because they failed to pay
their $35 bill from Network Solutions for their jpmorgan.com domain.
This sort of thing happens everywhere. In 1999, Microsoft forgot to renew
a domain name necessary for Hotmail service. Then again, part of the blame
can easily rest with NSI (and other registrars) not sending timely notices
(email or paper) as the due date approaches. Keep track of those renewal
dates yourself, folks! And be especially careful if you pay through an
intermediary, like your ISP or webhost. They may screw up payments, but you're
the one who loses the domain.
Data havens. A company called Havenco has built
what it calls a "data haven" on an abandoned military platform in the sea,
six miles off Britain's coast, and declared it a sovereign nation in order
to offer communications services to clients who want to avoid monitoring
by governmental authorities. This may become a more important service
niche than so-called tax havens.
Death of income tax? Soon it will be impossible to
trace where money is and who has money, and that will eventually force
governments to move away from income taxes and toward consumption taxes.
Yeah, well, that move is already in progress.
Computerized cars hazardous to health? Electrical noise
from e.g. a windscreen wiper motor can cause some cars' central computers
to lock up, the result is anything ON will stay ON, anything OFF will stay
OFF. (one reference: Ford recalls Explorer.)
Wondering about software bloat?
Check this out.
Extreme perhaps, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Reports of CD-ROM disks "exploding" in 52x drives have been
seen recently. Have we reached a spin-limit for these cheap plastic disks?
I've experienced severe vibration myself in a 24x drive.
Here's a new thing to be aware of if you're writing that detective or
spy novel: At some hotels now, when you call a room number from another
hotel phone, say in the Lounge, the name the room was reserved under shows
up on the phone LCD panel.
Wise cautions of the day:
Even the most sophisticated simulation programs have assumptions built
into them, not to mention the designs themselves, and until you build the
whole thing you've still got a degree of uncertainty.
He who hesitates is sometimes saved. -- James Thurber,
Fables for Modern Times
You may have noticed a new link in the sidebar --
Comment.
This is a one-click passage to an append-a-comment form on the Daynotes wiki.
I'll be experimenting with some hidden features in this over then next while,
but the basic add a comment functionality will remain unchanged. Try it.
Faster than email, unless you with the communication to remain private.
Not much to report today. Hardware and software all stable and obedient to
my commands. Litestep still working fine. Domains alive and well. Wiki scripts
doing fine. Maybe I should try hot-swapping my primary harddisk to get something
to write about...?
I noticed in the news that the West has now agreed to more or less completely
finance the new concrete shell that needs to be constructed around the old,
cracked and badly leaking one at the disastrous Chernobyl reactor in the
Ukraine. With funding guaranteed, contractors will be sought. Meanwhile,
in California, authorities have reassured everyone that the two recent
wide-spread fires appear not to have spread any radiation from the nuclear
disposal sites there. (Y'know, I've always wondered if the story about
the Ark of the Covenant wandering from people to people, spreading death
and destruction, wasn't some remnant of a prehistoric waste disposal
problem...)
Speaking of cleaning up, I've disposed of some expired bits and bytes myself.
Looking through the shelves, to make some more space for current items, I
could get rid of both paper and CDs that had become irrelevant. Minor, but
every little bit helps.
Hot on the heels of the legal process against the oil-company cartel, comes
news that large amounts of gasoline and fuel oil have been sold in southern
Sweden adulterated with thinner or white spirit. In one case, they're talking
about over 12 million liters for an extra skimmed-off profit of something
like 6 million USD for one company director charged. Greed...
---
Wonder what it looks like around here? Check these
web cameras to the four cardinal
points on the local newspaper's building. Local time is GMT+2, summertime.
The daily "hmm": I've been tracking the memory usage of
Litestep a while, and I'm slightly mystified. Dave Farquhar wrote
in his recommendation of the shell that it took only slightly more than
EVWM, or about 1.5 Mb. However, already at startup, I see something
more like 8-9 Mb, and after for example a recycle or two, we're up to 18
Mb (!). That seems excessive for a shell. Rambooster doesn't reclaim anything
of this, so I'm wondering WTF (What The Falafel)?
I have a pretty bare-bones, out-of-the-box configuration as yet -- no themes,
no sounds, no fancy backdrops for the shell. Can this have changed so much
from the version Dave wrote about? An 18 Mb shell hit on a 64 Mb system running
NT impacts swap usage, this is clear.
---
I'm wondering if I should call Litestep for Leechstep...
I just tried removing it. And failed utterly. Says in the docs that for NT,
all users, you change the key
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell
back to explorer.exe. Easy enough, you'd think.
Amazingly enough, Litestep *still* starts up as shell. I've dug around for
any other references to "litestep.exe" that could cause it to start -- nothing.
I tried re-instating EVWM. It writes its own path into the key, as expected.
Reboot. And... Litestep!
Very, very, weird...
---
The afternoon was spent assembling a computer table for my mother-in-law.
Took a while to get a feel for all the different pieces, no two alike, that
made up the combo shelves and stand. I swear that some of these furniture
designers really wanted to make complex 3D puzzles just for fun, but had
to go work for the furniture company instead after design school. An acceptable
design, really, but I did have to get into the right frame of mind first,
and look at the exploded drawing with its cryptic 5-language assembly
instruction-bites with a certain detachment, unfocused, out of the corner
of my eye, to grasp the essential whole. The rest was pure 3D jigsaw, tighten,
tap, and screw/lock together.
Anyway, when I got back, I took another look at "Leechstep" and eventually
figured out I had to synchronize the shell keys in both HKCU
and HKLM. That finally dislodged the shell. Figured it had to be
something like that, when I thought about it from a distance while tightening
carefully crafted locknuts -- and yes, turned out I had only changed the
one, whereas installing Litestep had updated both locations.
---
Bottom line for today, Litestep was interesting, but it took too big a bite
out of system memory for my liking. This may turn out to be a configuration
thing, we'll see, so I may try again later. But now it was definitely getting
in my way. For the moment, I'm back to EVWM, now armed with a couple
of registry tweaks that make it run better on NT. (And 3.5 Mb in full deployment
according to the process list.)
Funny how I got sidetracked from what I had planned to do yesterday.
On another tack, I suppose I should plan in some book reading for rainy days
during the summer. I have some credit with amazon.com that I should burn
-- it being too expensive to transfer small checks across currencies, I have
gift certificates issued instead. There's a short list of books I've been
thinking of, and this might be a good time to order them.
Morning news items about the strange world we live in...
Less traffic. The Øresund Bridge's first
week has so far underwhelmed most everyone. Despite Swedes starting summer
vacations and the expected rush for the new bridge connection, only one fifth
of the projected number of cars cross daily. The bridge consortium is putting
a brave face on it, but the average 1000 paying vehicles per hour is perilously
close to the calculated break-even point, especially given the season and
expected novelty rush.
Unplanned round-trips. Still on the Bridge, surprising numbers
of Danes apparently take the wrong turnoff at the airport roundabout, despite
"perfectly adequate signs". They then end up in the tunnel and must continue
all the way to the Swedish side with the tollgates before they can turn around.
Having crossed the bridge, they must therefore pay the one-way fee, but are
then herded into groups and periodically escorted back en
masse to the Danish side. Bridge officials generously do not charge
for the return trip. Love this organization... (Swedish drivers
who get lost can turn back before the tollgates without paying anything,
because they never get on the bridge.)
Willing to pay. There have been few complaints about paying
the Bridge fees. In fact, some drivers are so conscientious and anxious to
pay, that when they mistakenly take the bypass lane past the tollgates, they
immediately perform an illegal 180 and drive against meeting traffic
to get back to the proper payment lanes. So far, no accidents, but assuredly
high adrenaline levels among shocked fellow drivers and bridge supervisory
staff. (Honestly, there are clear priorities in life about which rules
to follow when, assuming you're going to follow them at all...)
Unusual accident. Four Swiss tourists ended up in Swedish
hospital Thursday, all seriously injured when their car flew some 70 meters
out into a field off the main highway north of here. It was about 2:30 AM,
and the three passengers were sleeping while the driver sped them to their
destination. The passenger in the front seat apparently had an especially
compelling dream and, still asleep, grabbed the steering wheel causing the
driver to skid and lose control.
Numbers not always checked. In this country, everything
seems to go by our individual national registry numbers, whether motivated
or not. In an unexpected twist, it turns out that some places don't check
these numbers even when required, despite being prominently visible as they
are on all the forms. A pharmacy in Stockholm has been reprimanded for issuing
the right medicine to the wrong person, or was it the wrong medicine to the
right person? Two different, unrelated customers, both with the same given
and family name, had prescriptions filled there -- one injections for leukemia,
the other injections for an anemia condition. When the latter came to pick
up the prepared medicine, the pharmacy gave out the leukemia medicine instead.
The error was detected later by a nurse. Staff had simply gone by the name,
not the number.
Quick fix. Labor union representative is fired after reporting
that a colleague threatened to break his fingers and smash his teeth in.
(Was the firing perhaps because he went against the local division's
recommendation not to file a formal complaint? The union motivates
its action as due to earlier complaints of sexual harassment and "lack of
ability to work with others".)
Booster boots. A former Soviet, top-secret military project
from the 70s is now being launched as a fringe novelty product. In
Ufa, located in the southern Urals, production will shortly start
of "super boots". Originally conceived as a way for infantry to run faster
and be able to catch up to enemy tanks and destroy them, the boots have miniature
motors in the heels that boost each step. The normal stride is lengthened
to 3 or 4 meters, and it becomes possible to run up to 35 km/h. The boots
run on ordinary gasoline (sorry, mileage unknown) and the boots are expected
to cost about USD 400/pair (10,000 rubles). Looking for that unusual Christmas
present...?
No frills. The Swedish government is purchasing another
official aircraft to complement the existing craft for the EU-chairmanship
in 2001, which will require many more trips around Europe and elsewhere.
Unlike the "luxury" Gulfstream IV presently used by the PM and ministers
on official trips, the second Gulfstream will be more prosaically retrofitted
for work aboard. (The first Gulfstream was bought from a whisky company and
had an interior specially designed for its board of directors. This unusual
level of onboard opulence has raised eyebrows and caused criticism of the
PM and the government.) The purchase of dedicated aircraft is motivated as
being cheaper (and lower profile) than renting jets on a case by case basis,
at least when factoring in the expected resale value of the planes.
Higher cancer risk with altitude. Studies of Nordic airline
pilots and cabin attendants show a factor 2-3 higher incidence of skin cancer
(and breast cancer for female crewmembers). One hypothesis for the dramatic
difference is the higher levels of cosmic radiation at 10,000 meters, which
also increases further North. Another is that pilots often fly South and
thus get more sun exposure at high altitude.
Fake butter. Arrests made in Italy and France said to break
mafia-linked gang making and selling fake butter (chemical additives to tallow
and cosmetic-grade oils, yuck). EU subsidies for butter production
were in part used to finance the operation.
Subsidizing the rich. Municipal landlord earmarks extra
1999 profits to lower the rent by 20% on its exclusive, luxury apartments
built for the exposition in 2001. Many critical voices, especially from other
tenants. (Then again, why fritter away subsidies on the many poor
who wouldn't notice the minimal change, when you can make a difference to
a clearly identifiable and grateful few...)
Fleamarkets effectively free-for-all. Despite two years
of attempts to regulate fleamarkets and itinerant stands on the squares,
officials admit they are powerless to do more than charge a rental fee for
the market space used. There is no way, they say, that it can be determined
whether the mostly foreigners who operate the stands pay taxes or sales tax,
sell stolen goods, or trade in smuggled commodities. Having the stand operators
pay for a fixed location is preferable to driving the whole operation
underground. It's widely known that much stolen property and smuggled goods
pass through the fleamarket stands, and police agree with this based on the
fact that the goods don't surface anywhere else. Municipal supervisors say
their hands are tied since they are not allowed to demand identification
cards or passports to verify identity for further checks. Police have their
own personnel on the fleamarket beat, but say they have little to go on.
"Nobody rats in a profitable business."
Enough. Lunch and then work awaits. (if I can type straight that is -- I'm
stumbling over the keys a lot today for some reason). Have a good day all
as you head for the weekend!
A footnote to the "super boots" noted yesterday. On the late night broadcast
of the BBC, they showed a report about this, with running demonstrations.
It's a piston arrangement, where the legwork drives the multiple pistons
into combustion, forcing the heel up again. Weird, but it works...
In the shops the other day, I looked over some of current 500-800 Mhz PIII,
Athelon and Celeron boxes on sale. Nothing spectacular, and not much choice
-- each shop has its own line, but they're all about the same. Oddly, printers
are starting to look like the bubble-alien carry-to-the-beach stereo systems
of last year.
One thing that caught my eye was a roll-up rubber keyboard. Just the thing
for working in the shower or bath, or outdoors on a rainy day... :) (Actually,
it was more tacky than tactile.) Now I see in Newsweek a fabric-based
keyboard by Electro Textiles of the UK. You can roll it up, scrunch it into
a pocket, jump on it, blow your nose in it, and yes even wash and iron it.
I can see the "softwear" of the future, road warriors pecking away one-handed
on their e-jacket sleeve or typing on their e-trousered laps as they babble
into their e-tie un-handset.
Oh dear, I hear that China is going genetically modified (GM) crops in a
big way. Predictions are that in only a few years, almost all Chinese crops
will be GM. Chinese experts dismiss worries in the West as childish and
irrational, and are pressing ahead as fast as possible. We are witnessing
the biggest bioengineering experiment ever conceived, and almost nobody is
aware of it. The last big experiment in China was the attempt to eradicate
the common housefly. That quickly wiped out many birds as an unintended
side-effect. I've seen no further updates on that since the 80s.
Type-type-type... My writer's vacation will end in a few days, and
I'm not done yet. I found myself in a cycle of cut and paste to move a couple
of sections of text into other chapters. Partly to trim length, partly because
after all this work, it turns out that the text finally fits better in another
context. Then too, I got caught in a slight quandary "cleaning" the example
code: -- where to draw the line. Actually, I crossed the line momentarily
when a minor rewrite unexpectedly broke the wiki. After some inspection backwards
and forwards, I realized that a section of code I thought I understood was
being just a bit too clever for my own good, and thus did not take kindly
to me making variables well-defined in scope. A value was being "passed back
by intuition". I can rewrite that, now that I see what was going on, but
that ends up being a bit more major than I like just now. Oh well, tomorrow.
If you don't have time to do it right, where are you going to
find the time to do it over?
On this day, many years ago, your humble daynotes host opted in for this
earthly experience. Since I am pleased to note that a number of people appear
to have appreciated my presence over the years, I conclude that I've done
some things right.
(Prediction of the week: This prediction will turn out to
be wrong.) So, I was right, it was wrong, or...?
Hmm... One of those days. I broke a script again, then re-coded it until
it seemed to work again. But how weird. The changes turned out to be too
extreme considering what had worked before. A bit of visual diff
later, I found that I in an earlier clean-up had changed a set too many of
double quotes (") to single quotes ('). In that particular context, it made
a later sequence of perl expressions stop evaluating true or false,
because the variable got assigned a constant "non-empty" state. Fun...
The weekend has been a rather constant juggling of a handful of chapters
-- smooth and polish, plus the occasional emergency bridge to span chasms
of missing transitions, and less often missing exposition. Apart from that,
it's a matter of varying and livening up the text. I wrote up a case history,
which was interesting and a break from other texts.
The cats think I'm boring. Although I do remember to feed them.
Weather has been very cool, with showers. The heat is elsewhere, with 40+
across much of southern and eastern Europe, Turkey, and points east. We don't
have anywhere near that kind of heat up here even when the sun is out, but
there are nevertheless more reports that trees and plants are getting stressed
out by the intense UV. Actually, in many cases, there is now genetic damage
to trees and crops from exposure to the sun. This is a counterpoint to earlier
reports warning that coral reefs, plankton and other sea life have been hard
hit by increased UV levels.
Somehow I have a hard time seeing farmers going out to cover crops with a
layer of sun-factor 25, but you never know, these are serious matters.
If you don't know what you're worth, usually the people hiring
aren't going to tell you.
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