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Daynotes: Week of 30 Oct - 5 Nov, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 44
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* Updated: 4 Nov MM at 23:55 GMT+1.
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Three domains for the webmaster under the sky. ...
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In the Land of LeufNet, where the Wikis serve.
We woke up to a full scale storm this morning, with lots of water sloshing
along in streets and, judging by the radio news, also into shop basements
downtown . Low pressures and storms pile up the seas against the coast, funnel
into the harbor, and thus tend to flood parts of the low-lying city center
areas. Old problem, but one becoming worse over the years as storms worsen
and average sea level slowly increases. During our eight years away, I noted
several occurrences in the news of excessive flooding here. Where we live
is considerably higher ground than downtown.
Unfortunately, I had to take Therese to a dentist appointment today. We'd
already missed one, so there was an additional fee to pay. We got good and
soaked, coming and going through the rain and gusty winds, but despite it
all, it wasn't a bad experience, just a very wet one. The appointment was
just a checkup, all five minutes long, so the whole thing seemed kind of
pointless given the weather. It's very mild for a late October storm, so
it's clear this is the remains of some hurricane or other. I've not been
tracking the weather as I used to. It's been an every-other-day cycle recently,
as storm centers pass just North and the front complex sweeps past fast and
furious.
On and off, I've been following
Jonathan Sturm's
typogrumblographical wonderings, and also checking standards adherence
by various browsers on things like proper quotes and other niceties. It's
been a while since I did that, and I must say I'm not amused by the continued
lack of uniform support for existing character code standards. Doesn't matter
which way you encode non-ASCII characters and special punctuation -- somewhere,
somebody's system and client is going to mangle it.
Lately, when I've been moving text from Framemaker to web, the curly-quoted
markup has been preserved: “ like this”, and I hadn't reflected
much on the mechanics of it, but checking, I've seen that it's the
“ and ” ISO-value coding. As
it happens, this is defined in the particular fm document's master
page, and can be changed. I didn't worry about it, because it was appearing
correctly in the browsers and editors I was using. Like many so-called
standardized solutions, it doesn't bear too much scrutiny, because support
for any one encoding is very uneven -- more than one would expect given such
fundamentals.
Sometimes you have to get to know something really well to
realize you really don't know much about it at all.
The storm continues into the night, and whatever happened to my scheduled
tasks? Hmm, too many distractions with both kids home for a week's holidays.
As the news reports today, yesterday's storm was pretty bad, and dumped a
lot of rain on us. There were some very localized power outages due to flooding,
but most of us didn't notice a thing except the windows being buffeted by
the gusts. England and the continental was harder hit, as usual, with hurricane
force winds creating much havoc.
I just read that Microsoft is launching a trial balloon of its future
dotNet rent-an-app model through an agreement with something called
easyEverything, an international
chain of budget Internet cafes (so far 9 very large ones in major European
cities, 24/7, and each seating hundreds). Hewlett Packard is the hardware
partner in this venture, which is part of the easyGroup. The chain
has a new 800 seat place in Times Square in New York City.
From Nov 28, customers will there be able to rent MS-Office applications
for "as little as" USD 1.50 to 2.00 per session, on top of the sliding scale
access time where a dollar buys you anything from 15 minutes to 4 hours of
high-speed Internet time, depending on demand. The easyEverything
press-release is
here, which
promises that the other locations will be fitted with the same services over
time.
Now back to the final review pass...
Human history becomes more and more a race between education
and catastrophe. -- H. G. Wells
Deadline day, and I think I neglected to upload yesterday's update. Got trapped
in an unproductive attempt to link more perl modules into a script. "Out
of memory!" -- huh?
Wiki book: Final, final pass :) -- before generating the submission
files with all supporting lists. I lost time previous days due to errands,
cooking, translations, and other detail, so this needs be short. Nothing
new; life is rarely possible to reduce to single tasks for any length of
time.
Hence resist temptation to make the Daynote rounds, surf the science sites,
check the news, and do anything but the essentials today.
Performance is your reality. Forget everything else.
-- Harold Geneen
Phew! It's done. The Wiki Way is officially submitted to the publisher,
Addison Wesley. The last few hours have been a blur of final checks, generating
the requisite document and support files, and creating PDFs for visual follow-up
at the publisher end. The original contractual deadline was Sept 20, but
the TRs didn't come back until Sept 19, two months after I submitted for
Technical Review, so I figure I did well. After TR, we agreed on Nov 1, so
in one sense I was only a day late.
Anyway, the delay meant that new material, including interesting stuff about
the language Ruby and Japanese wikis could get mentioned. I also got in more
case studies of wiki at work.
Right to the end, I kept finding interesting stuff to add, and less and less
to cut, so the page count kept climbing. The final count will depend on the
publisher and any format changes, but we're in the high 400s, not counting
index. That's about double the amount of material I estimated I had when
I worked up the proposal early this year.
So goodnight to all. I'm going to sleep in tomorrow.
Practical software design: doodle, sketch, crumple. --
Ward Cunningham (paraphrased)
Quality Assured software design: doodle, sketch. crumple, toss.
-- Bo
Some days it's just not worthwhile to visit sites hosted by Microsoft IIS.
After going through a few that seemed slightly erratic about responding,
I popped up a log window to see what was going on. The servers were responding
initially to requests, put through the usual header stuff, but then sort
of died in the middle of content ASP-sessions. The number of keep-alive
connections just kept climbing for each new request, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so
on. A Slow Process...
After the mounting pressure of deadline is gone, today is just a bit strange.
Think of pedalling furiously uphill for a long time and then suddenly going
off a cliff at the top -- the sudden silence and lack of contact with anything
solid... :)
So... I guess I have to get back on speaking terms with my family.
No, it's not really been that bad. I'm exaggerating greatly, but it's still
true that I've been "absent" many days/evenings when I've been very much
into one chapter or another. Working from home -- especially writing -- has
this paradoxical here/not-here aspect from the point of view of others.
The weather is now on half-day cycles: sunny mornings and rainy afternoons,
and of course neither here-nor-there inbetween.
Friday, and Hallowe'en -- this trick-or-treat day that is gradually gaining
recognition in this part of the world, despite vocal opposition from some
who fear its pagan encroachment on what they see as a Christian All Saints
weekend (now always a weekend, in the modern no-holiday tradition
-- I wonder what the saints and lost souls thought about that Tuesday/Wednesday
past). After a couple of years of pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread,
we're not getting and carving a pumpkin this year. Anyway, it's hard to find
good pumpkins, let alone not expensive ones.
What difference does it make how much you have? What you do
not have amounts to much more. -- Seneca
Since the word has been bandied about in some quarters, much to the evident
confusion of those who can't find it in their favorite dictionaries, I quote
the Oxford English Reference Dictionary...
Shill, n. (N Amer.). A person employed to decoy or entice
others into buying, gambling, etc.
(Probably from earlier shillaber, origin unknown) -- That
was interesting, shill was in my otherwise unremarkable
AOLPress spellcheck dictionary.
Hmm, I see that PayPal has gone international, that is to say list a good
number of countries outside North America who can use their payment transfer
services. It was mentioned elsewhere that they've implemented transaction
fees (25 cents plus some small percentage), which might be acceptable in
most situations. International customers must register with a credit or bank
card, to which account they can credit payments as well as charge for what
you send to others. Hmm again, would I trust them with my card number? Hmm
a third time: perhaps if I did enough transfers, it would be worthwhile to
have a card and account used only for this. Hmm...
Nope, not transparent and ubiquitous payments infrastructure yet, but they
are trying to provide something, I'll grant PayPal that.
After some experiments and updates of the wiki codebase, I've changed Daynotes
from static page to Wiki, integrating it with the comments and discussion.
To find the latest daily update, see
CurrentUpdate. Those
who have bookmarked the redirector page will end up in the right place
automatically.
From now on see
CurrentUpdate.
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