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Daynotes: Week of 17 - 23 July, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 29
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* Updated: 24 July MM at 00:26 GMT+2.
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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.
A short update on Sunday, but we got home very late so the page wasn't put
up until now. Another week starts, and I have to get the tech review chapters
up to the publisher. Most is done, but there are still a few sections that
I'm not comfortable with.
Over the weekend, we shared in the shock at the scenes of devastation at
Pine Lake in Alberta, Canada, where that tornado tossed about some 400 mobile
homes. It was an area I knew well, because my parents and I had been there
many times when we lived in the area. Canada is not known for tornados, but
they do appear from time to time in the prairie provinces whenever the
temperature contrasts and air flow are "right". Rarely are populated areas
affected, given the vast expanses of "empty" fields. Still, people remember
vividly previous twisters that years ago walked through Edmonton and Calgary.
Usually, however, you only see much smaller dust-devils or the occasional
waterspout over a lake.
Sorry, too busy with chapters to more than make short notes here.
Typically, I discover further interesting issues just when I'm about to wrap
things up for tech review. Tomorrow, I simply must draw the line
and save any further changes for post-TR. Bit one bullet and officially went
from 14 to 12 chapters. Content had morphed over the months so the original
14-division was no longer relevant, and the final 2 chapters never got content
for very long before it was moved elsewhere. Still over budget on page count,
although that count's a bit inflated due to extra line-spacing in the code
sections for easier review.
The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in
retrospect. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
Sigh, it never ends...
Alert for yet another Outlook attack vulnerability. Unlike
previous viruses or worms, the user isn't required to click on an email
attachment, or read, preview or forward the e-mail to activate the virus.
Simply downloading one's e-mail is enough to activate the
code! The vulnerability is a variant of buffer overflow, where malicious
code is inserted after a specially manipulated email time and date stamp
field causes the Outlook/IE component to execute the virus code. Vulnerable
are Outlook and Outlook Express. Reportedly, once that code is running, the
user's system is absolutely wide open and "anything goes", including remote
hijacking of a system that's online.
Microsoft says a patch will be available shortly, but suggests that users
upgrade to Internet Explorer version 5.01 Service Pack 1. Internet Explorer
5.5 is also safe for all users, except for people running Windows
2000, who should use IE 5.01 SP1.
In other minute news, Apple goes from the one-button mouse to the
zero-button mouse. I kid you not. Apparently the "clicking"
action is now achieved by rocking the buttonless mouse in a particular way.
This was one announcement among others when the new Apple "Cube" was shown
off, a miniaturized single-CPU G4. in a 20 cm cube box. Yes...? I never caught
which colors they would be shipping in :)
Busy day. Chapters submitted. Guests overnight. This posting will be short.
Condolences to colleague Tom Syroid, who's clearly been having a simply rotten
string of days as far as computers and DNS records are concerned. His site
will doubtlessly reappear in due time, once all the problems are sorted out
and propagation has reached our own respective DNS servers.
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering
my reasons for them! -- Nietzsche
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life.
It goes on. -- Robert Frost
Today was largely spent offline, offsite.
Lunch was a massive vegetarian affair at a restaurant downtown, followed
by a chocolate-layered cake some would kill for. Oomph. A long walk
was just the ticket after that.
I really need to send around the URLs to some of the review chapters. Later,
I guess. Publisher will get back to me about the expected turn around times.
Meanwhile, I have to keep myself from adding any more new stuff and focus
on trimming the parts that need some more attention in formulations. There
are always spots where a writer drifts a tad off course seen from the overall
structure. It may still be a sub-400 page book, but barely, and that's a
bit more than we thought.
Chris W-J posted some time ago, apropos curious search logs:
> ... it's clearly not intuitive to new users that you type
'www.chateaukeyboard.com' in the address bar of your browse instead of into
the search engine dialogue box.
Well, Microsoft has been doing their dangdest for some time to erase the
distinction between URL specification and search-query for the "greater good"
of user convenience, so I can't say I find that especially surprising. Type
anything into the URL box these days and you're thrown out to the first best
site that the multi-layered monstrosity complexity MS calls
"intelligent entry" figures matches your "query". (It's a great way to find
new porno sites, I'm told, and get a cookie that will thenceforward brand
your browser as "one of those"...)
Seek not, lest ye shall find. -- The Unrepentant
Version.
The northern half of the country has been getting a real soak the past week
or so, and flooding seems everywhere along the main rivers. We've has some
periodic soaking too, but nothing like that -- some places had only recorded
2 hours of sun the entire month so far. Maybe it's time to start looking
for that house on a mountain...
Serious disconnectivity continues for Tom Syroid, syroidmanor.com and
daynotes.com, at least seen from here. Not even going for the IP# directly
gets any response other than "unreachable". We can only offer sympathies
from afar since we don't run the services. That string of bad luck has been
extreme even by the gang standards of "we do this so that you won't have
to" and collecting info to write about.
At least I could make someone happy. A client recently transferred
their domain to me, and I learned later that the associated email addresses
had been a disaster with the previous ISP -- a year without any functional
email to that domain at all. Some sort of insane "policy" that only one set
of mail accounts could exist even when there were two domains. Clearly, nobody
there did aliasing or forwarding. Anyway, I could fix that right away once
I was hosting.
More and more people are talking about broadband (cable or DSL) around here,
though few have it yet. Fiber is being laid in holes all over the place,
but the waiting lists are long because there are not enough installers to
go around.
I did several searches for quotes about "rudeness" the other day, and remarkably
little turned up. Surely you'd think people would throughout history have
said enough pithy remarks about this topic, like all the others, that there
would be ample material. But it all ended up pretty dismissive. I did find
a remarkable dissertation about "logical rudeness" that went on simply forever,
but nothing of that was quotable, really. This was rudeness in a mostly
philosophical sense, sort of like how a Vulcan might analyse it...
I got volunteered into a role-playing scenario with my daughter and her cousin
today. Been a long time since D&D, and I wasn't really up to it.
Nevertheless, duty and all that. So I rolled out some stats, chose to be
a "snobgoblin" called Monty, and proceeded to do the best of it.
That brought back memories of decades ago indeed, and brought out a certain
whimsy humor that livened up things.
Speak the truth, but leave immediately after. -- Slovenian
Proverb
Bob Thompson commented on his site:
... How can (Nokia) bring up an e-commerce site and return "server
error" pages to people who are trying to order your products? Duh.
This goes for other "mission critical" functionality as well. I find that
it's quite common to run across sites that offer critical customer support
-- ticket booking, timetables, price look-up, trouble ticket, tech support,
and so on -- that are in part or in whole broken in this way. Server error,
faults in Java code, whatever, leaving the customer at best staring at an
error message, at worst crashing the browser. Commonly, there's no obvious
way to report the problem, and email to logical addresses (even posted ones)
bounce.
The only conclusion I can draw is that these companies are not serious enough
about e-commerce or their customers. (After all, they're usually using MS
server, ASP and other proven mission-critical technology... <evil
grin>.) Alternatively, they should have a heading-styled text on each
page proclaiming openly:
This is a beta-test e-site!
Do not expect your order or request to succeed on first
try.
(Orders processed on a first come, last crashed basis.)
My usual approach when encountering a site like this, that still seems to
partially work, is to fire up IE5 (I'm usually in Opera for casual browsing)
and feed it the URL. Sometimes this works (a IE5 optimized site). Sometimes
not, so then I back IE5 up to the top page and try again. A few more sites
that require cookie tracking and "proper entry" will then resolve functionality
properly. Others are still broken or require lower security settings on my
client, or me to re-enable scripting support. This is about when I seriously
re-assess if I really need the site's info, if I've not already
said to heck with it. I do have a couple of supplier or travel-timetable
sites that demand IE5 and medium security to which I grudgingly return until
I find better alternatives.
Then too, there are the sites that formally work, but from a design point
of view are really bad. I'm sure they look just fine in the corporate intranet
and a 21-inch or better screen -- if the intent is to "publish" something
approximating a fancy catalog or glossy brochure. But on a dialup at
<<10 Mb/s, these are just too painful for words. Not to mention badly
set up for navigation or split into 6-10 frames.
E-biz as a whole is simply not mature yet. Some sites are excellent
to be sure, but that is still (very) rare. Most tend just to be shingles
on the proverbial cyberhole in the cyberwall (real business conducted
elsewhere).
Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about
it.
A family day. We went for a long and peaceful walk to one of the parks, all
the while looking at a simply incredible thunderhead building and spreading
its anvil to eventually cover the sky. It rained elsewhere, luckily...
Vacation-time Sunday, sort of a suitable setting for Abandoned City.
I made a further few updates to the production wiki code, based on my ongoing
experiments. I'm contemplating recasting some of the LeufOrg sections
into wiki databases to achieve better cross-linking and retrieval. I'm also
going to start a support wiki for the hosting services, I think, instead
of a mailing list. I'm also trying to keep my daughter's role-playing campaign
going via a wiki now when her cousin is back home after her visit. We'll
see how that goes.
Lots of things to get done next week. Have fun you too...
If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get
done.
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