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Daynotes: Week of 7 - 13 Aug, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 32
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* Updated: 13 Aug MM at 16:15 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.
Yet more puzzle pieces for our ongoing plans in place, this time concerning
the kids' schooling after the move. The initial response from the new school
was good, and we're to meet key personnel next week, the day before the term
starts. That all locks in another week of our emerging schedule -- tight,
but doable.
Now I have enough firm details to fit in that trip with my daughter. Because
of the meeting, it won't be a return trip, exactly, but start from here and
end in Gothenburg, saving both the time, cost and bother of some extra miles.
This excursion just barely fit into an available timeslot -- amazing. We
even manage to ensure the regular care&feeding of the cats
throughout. -- thank heavens -- Not to worry, Salem and
Nurmal. Ok, tickets are booked, and another checkmark on the list.
On another front, it appears I may soon be doing some teaching concerning
Linux systems, so that puts my Linux experiments on the fast track as potential
revenue earner. I always enjoy when my interests intersect with customer
requests. Never know when and how it will happen, but sooner or later someone
invariably asks "by the way, you wouldn't happen to know about (fill
in subject of choice), would you?".
I even remembered now, before the coming trips, to renew the domains that
would have expired next week. Remarkable how quickly a couple of years go
by. At the time I had no idea I'd get into webhosting with my third,
net domain. Yet when the time came, it seemed the natural and logical
next step.
There is no security on this earth; there is only
opportunity. -- General Douglas MacArthur
Ok, another day of "do the rounds". It was actually a pleasant enough walkabout
with son, while Isabel and daughter did other errands in another part of
town.
Tickets got purchased, which means that I'm on the move again as of tomorrow
night. This time, however, I'm packing the notebook (with 3Com card) for
my extended trip, so I should have regular connectivity throughout. Thus
I expect to post day-by-day comments whenever I get near a phone.
I hope for some decent weather as I get further North. What I've seen around
here is absurd for August. The cats don't like it either -- they both complain
about it when they get out on the balcony.
This evening, I took the step of blowing away most everything on the secondary
spindle and rebuilding that as a primary Linux, and an extended partition
with for now some logical FAT partitions (later this will all become Linux
partitions for testing new distros, but until then I'll use it for some gaming
files). On this cleared space I copied the contents of the 3 CDs that belonged
to Sierra's RAMA, seeing as how these don't play on my built-in
player, only on the external SCSI one. I expect during the coming week to
pry the notebook away from my daughter and The Sims long enough to give RAMA
a try. Finally. I did get a peek at it once using the external SCSI CD-player,
but my legacy Tratnor parallel-SCSI adapter proved too severe a bottleneck,
so almost every scene quickly developed a "stutter" that made the game
unplayable. I've not had the space until now to make a harddisk copy of the
entire game.
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is
to find out what they want and then advise them to do it. -- Harry
S Truman
Travel day, so I must be off. Haven't been up to my parents for
a long time now. If it's not been one thing coming in the way, it's been
another. This is only a "half-family" trip, since even now we can't be off
all of us at the same time. By train this time. It'll be a night train to
Stockholm, where we wake up around 7 AM, then a further half day up to
Härnösand (half way up the Swedish east coast), so we won't be
sitting down at the table, so to speak, until mid-afternoon.
I would have taken air (though that too would be most of the day in transit,
counting connection waiting, and ground travel to and from airports), but
the only decent price meant booking at least a week in advance and committing
to at least a week away. Didn't work out; too many puzzle pieces in the air
at the time. Even at 50% off standard rate, special family fare, the plane
fare ended up not much less than a trans-Atlantic return trip to New York
or Miami from here, then with dinner and films both ways, so I sure don't
know what we're paying for on the domestic route. (I do, actually: lack of
competition.)
Apparently, it was a bad day for shopping today. Shelves were bare, a lot
of products were expired, and in general there was little to get excited
about when looking for food.
Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick
themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. -- Winston
Churchill
Our daughter suddenly became ill last night, so we had to cancel the trip
at last minute (literally). Life does that to one's plans from time to time...
Interesting to note that the US patent for the RSA algorithm will expire
on September 20, 2000. The algorithm will thereafter be in the public domain.
RSA Security is downplaying the importance of this loss of control and source
of licensing royalties, saying that it is the quality of products that use
the algorithm that determines market share and revenue.
In the Swedish news, it's noted that IT company bankruptcies increased by
over 50% from last year, comparing first two quarters of each. Part of the
reason is thought to be that venture capitalists and investors are less inclined
to continue pouring money into start-ups in financial trouble.
Swedish tax authorities seem to be aware of the problem that increasing
globalization and e-commerce drives business to avoid countries with high
taxes, in particular away from Sweden. Whether this will actually cause
(corporate) taxes to be lowered here is an open question, though there are
more voices at higher levels of government demanding that.
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change
the subject. -- Winston S. Churchill
Notes from the edge...
I messed about with the primary spindle today, juggling around some of the
partitions with Partition Manager. I have both the old v2 and the newer v4
that I bought last year, and there are some moments when v4 seems far less
than safe. After a move and/or resize with v4 twice did structural damage
to partition data today, I reverted to v2 for the rest of the process. That's
four or five times PMv4 has done something ungood to a FAT partition, while
v2 has always been solid in what it does. It's a bother to upgrade from here
however, since I always get referred back to European reps who somehow "can't
be bothered" with mere customers, if I put it as nicely as I can.
Anyway, I'm redoing the partition scheme to reduce some of the redundancies
now that I can run two drives on the same notebook. This frees several Gb
of space, plus a bit extra due to the unintentional clearing out of some
files because of the PM faults. (Nothing serious, I do have backups and links
to source sites.)
Dan Seto sent the following tip (I let Salem answer for himself)...
By the way, salem may be interested in
the
following
from MSNBC. It talks about MeowMail.com and Paw held Data Appliances (PDAs).
thank you for the tip, friend of the islands,
the site
was truly an excellent resource for us of the feline persuasion, albeit somewhat
overwhelmed by the response engendered by the news article -- it took many
minutes to get in -- and in places a tad tabloid-sensationalist in style,
surely human editors at work. -- salem
Today's weather? Forget it.
Finally, dedicated specially to all the busy Daynote colleagues who have
as their primary goal in life to "do all these silly things so that their
readers don't need to"...
A life spent making mistakes is not only most honorable but
more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Funny thing about clocks. They're circular, so that old midnight keeps coming
around, regular as... (hmm)
Today was spent in various ways, among others dropping in on friends who
were clearing out their house before moving back to the US. They had friends
there, who were also moving, back to England. And we're moving this month
too. I think we all well knew that panic feeling of packing down or getting
rid of the last piles of stuff. We all have so much stuff, always. It's the
human condition, I guess, and it does make for interesting digs a few millennia
down the road...
The yearly Malmö festival -- all cities with any pretensions have a
summer festival now it seems -- is in progress for a week or so. Guess we'll
take some time off to take a look-see tomorrow. Things will otherwise be
shifting into high gear for the next few (w)eeks, and we'll be here, there,
and I-know-not-where pretty much on a day-by-day basis from now on.
Apropos moving, and moving boxes, and tape to hold these together...
Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, and a dark
side, and it holds the universe together.
A discussion thread
about forcing new windows and internet standards is on the wiki.
The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that
it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
-- Webster
I got referred to
a
new MS page
(posted August 10, 2000) about the dual licensing issue mentioned
earlier last week. (The page is asp and scripted, so don't
bother unless you're running IE at somewhat less than maximum security, or
you won't see a thing.) Microsoft's current Volume Licensing practices
are explained, sort of. At root, MS is making an analogy that its various
licenses as applied to end users are similar to the various seat tickets
offered by airlines, with analogous ranges of rights and restrictions of
use. I suppose this makes MS-sense (TM), since MS is more and
more profiling itself as selling access to services, not software
products as such.
Putt's Law: Technology is dominated by two types
of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage
what they do not understand.
A day of... can it be?... summer. Appropriate in a perverse way.
In this region, school starts tomorrow (where we're moving it starts on
Wednesday), and the forecast is for rain. Only fitting the kids get a glimpse
of what they've missed this year.
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