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Daynotes: Week of 9 - 15 Oct, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 41
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* Updated: 16 Oct MM at 13:15 GMT+2.
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In the Land of LeufNet, where the Wikis serve.
As regular readers will note, I am definitely off my schedule. Sunday simply
got lost, in part because of little details like the car not liking the rain
and cold and so not starting. For years it's been used to a nice warm underground
parking. Now it must stand outside, and is used very much less than the almost
daily trips it used to have, so it sulks. And on a dark and rainy night,
it positively pouts, or should that be negatively?
No matter, I expect it needs replacing of distributor cap and plug wiring,
since these are the two things that age and begin to let moisture disturb
normal running. (money money money, must be running, from my pockets
out...)
Fascinating experience. The wiki book's not published yet, and already it
has inspired applications that end up becoming case studies in it.
Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a
few. -- Pythagoras
Rain. Dark. Cold. Forecast says about the same for the rest of the week.
Hmm.
Lots of unscheduled things messed up the day. Apart from that, making nice
progress towards the submission deadline agreed on. Biggest headache is to
re-verify that quoted web-resources are where they were last spring and summer,
that the tools mentioned haven't changed versions, and that new important
developments haven't been missed.
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look
so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones
which open for us. -- Alexander Graham Bell
Ah, the text was flowing so well... Hard to stop, read, polish, read, edit,
add, read.... No time for posting here, as it is very late, and tomorrow
I have to be "out-of-office" a lot.
Hmm, I haven't even made the rounds of the regular sites for a few days.
How uncharacteristic of me. For shame.
People forget how fast you did a job -- but they remember how
well you did it. -- Howard W. Newton
News in that Exchange 2000 was officially released. Apparently you can build
entire XML web-based collaborative applications in it now, not just use it
as webserver. This might get a short mention in the book, because of the
"collaborative sever" part. We'll see when I get more detail.
The afternoon went to another school visit with Edward, this time across
town. This high school was very interesting because it was smaller and has
profiled itself by arranging for some more unusual offerings for next year
-- Virtual Reality and New Music to name two that seem in line with Edward's
interest. Across town isn't too bad either, because a tram line goes directly
from here to there in 35 minutes.
The object of education is to prepare the young to educate
themselves throughout their lives. -- Robert M. Hutchins
The morning started early -- a bit too early, to my liking -- for a repeat
visit to the school across town. This time I left Edward there and attended
to some of my own errands, one such being a meeting downtown to work out
some details about a 4-week teaching project in a month's time. Ironically,
this course, and several like it, is located closer to Malmö (where
we lived before the recent move) than here. Oh well, it can't be helped,
a lot of interesting work involves travel these days... The absence from
home will be sweetened by the agreed on compensation. More about this project
when the time comes. The course is reasonably timed at least: I will have
submitted the final manuscript by then, and will have a respite before review
of copyedit returns starts. I expect to have connectivity throughout, even
if I'll be full-time busy during the days, so expect updates along the lines
of the Arvika weeks last year
On a related note, I had a long and inspiring talk this evening with an old
friend, Clas, who works for the same company. He thought the theme of
relational economics I brought up inspiring too, but unfortunately
for him, in the course of our talks I happened to render obsolete his carefully
prepared speech for a conference next week. Insight never comes for free
:). Hehe, so it goes in the IT and E-biz: what's up to date now
can become history in just twelve short hours. We kicked the topic about
for a while, examining different contemporary and historic perspectives.
He said he would rewrite it all on the train up to the conference, based
on the sources I pointed him to, while hoping it wouldn't be too controversial
for the audience. Well, you can always put the blame on me if it is,
I advised, and give me 10%.
As usual, it is really far too late to write these postings. Have a good
weekend, all!
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
-- Wilson Mizner
I'm trying to avoid slipping in my posting schedule, but it's hard these
days not to end up in every-other-day, leading to every-so-often, leading
to who knows what. The main problem is that my daily routines have become
badly dislocated, so when I get up to full speed on edit review, I tend to
surface much too late for intelligent and thoughtful commentary.
Anyway, the flow is still there, and the review-and-polish process has now
covered about half the book, including writing chapter summaries and adjusting
some heading order and levels. It's always tricky to reorder things late
in the composition process, because transitional text can easily get mangled,
and other logical flows disrupted. It's nothing I care to do "cold", but
only after many hours of being "inside" a chapter so that it's familiar again.
Thus the evening to late night hours are best for me because they have least
risk of interruptions. The chapter summaries turned out to be a good suggestion
since writing this allows me to examine chapter structure in a different
way. Even if they should get cut out by editorial decree, although I doubt
that, they will have served a purpose. Included, I think more than a few
readers will like that level of overview.
In the review, I'm refering to a newer version of perl, which turns out to
have some minor changes and additions to the documentation that affect the
text. (Or else it's just that I'm discovering more this time around, but
then again, none of the tech reviewers took up these issues ...) I also have
to decide which changes to the source code will become "the final cut". There
are more things I want to try out, but I really have to draw the
line about here. Then it's time to start defining the CD content with all
the relevant files and versions.
The real object of education is to have a man in the condition
of continually asking questions. -- Bishop Creighton
If anyone is interested in firewalling an NT/W2K environment and doesn't
want to go the Linux-box firewall route, I'm informed that
CyberwallPLUS is the product to consider. This is a really a packet
filter that operates like a Bridge, not a Router, hence it does not affect
any IP addresses, nor does it have any IP of its own. ISCA-certified for
reliability. Eval download page
with links
to the different variations (WS, IP, LAN, server). They don't state any pricing
openly that I can see, however, but instead require you to submit a request
for a price quote. Maybe it's easier to set up a Linux-box after all
:)
Hmm, the trouble with moving is that some things kind of "vanish". The old
memory image of where they are is invalid, because that's in the previous
home; the image of where they were packed (assuming one has one) is no longer
valid either, because things have been unpacked; the image of where they
may have been placed (again, assuming) is likely not the right place either,
because things have been shifted around several times since then -- so
where, oh where, can they be? Just now, I was looking for my EPP-SCSI
adapter cable. It has been floating about earlier, I'm sure of that, so clearly
I've just put it somewhere to be out of the way. Argh.
We found the bicycle locks as it happens. The "safe" place during the move
proved to be a mini-suitcase belonging to the kids, padded with some other
inconsequential stuff so there was no clue to indicate such items were there.
Didn't even rattle or clonk -- the suitcase is solid and heavy enough by
itself that I didn't think anything was in it. Only discovered it because
one lock turned out to have been damaged, so I had to open it and see if
it could be fixed -- tada!
Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress
in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource. -- John
F. Kennedy
(later) Off on a tangent, I had reason to look if any of the
"Powertoys" utilities had been updated since the Win95/NT4 era. One component
had in fact come in a new version for Win95/98/NT4/2K/ME:
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NT
Tweak v1.33 (direct link to ASP page, scripted dl button) --
Adjust your Windows user interface by customizing menu speed, window animation,
and Internet Explorer -- includes the "paranoia settings".
For reference, I note the older Win95/NT components as well. (Not
usable on Win98!)
I've not tried any of these on W2K. The original Powertoys package had other
stuff too, but clearly these are not available individually in this way.
Browsing through some of the other Daynoter pages, I caught the tail end
of a discussion between Bob Thompson and Dave Farquhar about the rarity of
meeting younger folk who know what building with discrete electronic components
means. Yours truly also belongs to the older generation predating motherboard
kits, and I have in fact once upon a time built my own FM radio transmitters,
stereo systems, and microcomputers from discrete components and TTL logic.
There came a time when it was no longer worth the time and expense to do
so, not to mention the fact that components started to get too small and
be surface-soldered, but assuredly the experience left a better understanding
of all things electronic.
I note that the high schools (apropos recent visits) around here, in the
more technical CS lines, do at least give the students some hands-on experience
of component-level soldering in the guts of replaced computers (486s and
older PI-PII systems). So it's not a dead art yet...
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