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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

March 15 - 21, 1999

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

Day-by-day...
Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday

 

 

Previous Weeks of The View: For an index of previous pages of view, see VIEWDEX.
See also the New Order page, which tries to make order of chaos. These will be useful.
For the rest, see What is this place? for some details on where you have got to.

Boiler Plate:

If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money. I'm making up a the mailing list. There are enough that it's a chore, which is not something to complain about. Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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If you subscribed:

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If you didn't and haven't, why not?

If this seems a lot about paying think of it as the Subscription Drive Nag. You'll see more.

For the BYTE story, click here.

The LINUX pages are organized as the log, my queries, and your responses and advice parts one, twothree, and four. There's four pages because I try to keep download times well under a minute. There are new updates to four.

Highlights this week:

 

 

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Monday, March 15, 1999 THE IDES OF MARCH

Today was the birthday of the late Dr. Stefan T. Possony, who was I think as influential as any man who lived in the survival of Western Civilization in the Seventy Years War that began in 1917. Not many know who he was, but those who do will, I think, agree.

This week I will begin a new weekly report that you will find over at www.byte.com but don't look just yet, because I haven't done it. It will take up some of the musings I do here, but not all that much, and this place won't change a lot. For instance, although I probably will not choose domain names and legalisms for this week's topic, if I did, you would have seen the origins of it here in the mail that erupted over the use of the term hyperspace and HyperSpace(tm) and such like last week. If I chose that for the week's topic I would boil that into something shorter and digestible. I'll think about topics as I go out to the bank in a few minutes.

Still fighting a cold. The  doctors say is is no more than that and I should learn to live with it. Which I will, reluctantly.

One of my new large disk drives began making funny noises last night, whirring to super high speeds. Clearly I will be learning about the return policies for that company's drives (I regret to say I don't recall which it is although I'll find out and record it next time I reboot that system). I have had good luck with Maxstor and Western Digital, returning drives no questions asked no warranty data needed, just call or fax and get an RMA number; it takes about two weeks, and the shipping costs UPS ground including having my local Mail Boxes Etc. package it were under $5.00, clearly worth the effort to get a new drive when there's any reason to suspect problems with the old. The one I returned to Western Digital I couldn't give any diagnostics on becsause it wouldn't even spin up, and it was about two years old, too. I have no idea what happened to it: it came out of an older system. Older than that might still be under warranty but who needs drives with less than a gigabyte now?

For Baldur's Gate Players, a question: I have gone to the gnoll fortress to rescue the witch, but I can't find her. I have cleared out the fortress including two small caves to the south of it (some very good stuff in those) and I have some boots given me by a traveller I saved from a bear. I don't know what the boots do, and I don't know where the witch is imprisoned. Anyone who knows, I'd appreciate mail. For those who don't play Baldur's Gate, if you like role playing fantasy games, this is the best one I know of. By a lot. Highly recommended but fair warning, you can waste a LOT of time with this. LATER: I am told she is in a pit, and I will go look. Thanks for the help!!

I should have a new MAILDEX which indexes mail up shortly. Courtesy of John Rice who does New Order and Viewdex, both good indexes of what's going on here. Darnell swears we will have the Front Page Extensions working on his server Real Soon Now, and that should give us search capability at Chaos Manor.

Outlook now says my pst file is not accessible, cyclic etc error. I can open outlook, I can see my mail, and I have been able to export my contacts, and all the NEW people who have subscribed. I believe I have all the old subscribers in csv files I built over time, since I never erased any of them, so I can rebuld that list, although it will take some time. The mail will I think all be lost.  That's all the mail between last backup which was I fear, about a week ago, and now. This isn't as bad as it might be since I can apparently continue to answer mail that has come in. I can see everything. I just can't DO anything with it, like save it or export it.

{Please do not send mail on this until you have read all of today and the first part of Teusday's VIEW}

Does anyone know of a tool that will do anything to clean up an outlook file, or must I simply bust it, try to import what I can save, and forget the rest? I don't need speculations, because I can try various things myself.

I can't copy the outlook.pst file either. Attempting to gets a little way and I am told that the disk is full. Of course the disk is not full, but that' what it says.

If all else fails I will simply overwrite the PST with the last backup I made, and go on from there, but this seems a pretty drastic thing to do. One thing is certain. Always backup the PST file.

I cannot read all the mail, either. If you have sent me notes in the last couple of days, SEND THEM AGAIN. There is no guarantee that I can read them.

I think there is going to be nothing for it but to throw it all away and start over. Sigh.

I cannot even send mail to answer the incoming mail, so I cannot wait any longer. I will have to kill this thing and start over. Since I cannot copy the file, it loks pretty grim.

I have also LOST MANY ADDRESSES. I am not even sure I have the new BYTE EDITORIAL EMAIL ADDRESSES>

 

All right: I did manage to export the contacts, although not the subscriber list. That, fortunately, I can rebuild. My last Outlook backup was two weeks ago. All mail between then and now is GONE, along with all addresses. If you sent something important enough to send again, then send it. Otherwise, it's in the land of lost bits and electrons.

It is in many ways my fault for not backing up and archiving and all that, and I may even have caused the problem; but Outlook is much at fault for putting ALL eggs in one very large and very unparsable basket.

Let me repeat: I have NO MAIL that was sent to me in the last couple of weeks.

On the other hand, I have everything up to then, I have my contacts as of today, and I have enough data to rebuild the subscriber list. It is not as bad as it could have been.

new MAILDEX and VIEDEX are up. There was no NEW ORDER in the file I was sent, and I don't have the return file to send back as I received that in an intermediate stage of the disaster. so Mr. Rice won't know that until he sees this...

 

 

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Tuesday, March 16, 1999

 

I have tried scanpst.exe, which I am told has fixed the problem in everyone else's case. Not this time. Scanpst.exe reports that it cannot open the file, and suggests I use chkdsk.exe, which does not in fact find any problems. If this doesn't mean anything to you, read yesterday's view.

My situation is that the past two weeks don't exist. I can rebuild the subscriber list since I have it as of 2 weeks ago and I have all the additions since, with some exceptions. The exceptions are people who have sent mail saying they should have been on the list for a long time, but have not got any mailings (possibly because they forgot to send me a change of address with the return address at which they want subscriber mail to be sent). I will rebuild the consolidated subscriber list, write something of interest (I hope) and send a mailing to subscribers in the next day or so. This is complicated by my head being all stopped up, making for difficult thought processes; it's amazing how little you think about anything but breathing when breathing is difficult and I now have a deeper appreciation for asthma sufferers.

I am told there is a "corporate" version of Outlook that allows you to open many pst files, one for each folder in Outlook if you so wish, and keep each as a separate file, making backups a little more complicated but also insuring that if one of the files dies the rest are in good shape. I would love to do that, but the installation requires apparently that I nuke what I have removing all registry keys and start over with reinstallation. I would love to do that, but I am not up to it today. This leaves me with an enormous pst file that I must find a way to automatically back up. These are serious design flaws in Outlook. I like much about Outlook, but this is a very serious defect. This will be in next month's column, and I'll send the resulting writeup and conclusions to the Microsoft Outlook product managers. They need to fix this thing.

There is also in NT Administrative Tools a thing called INBOX REPAIR TOOL. It gives the same messages as scanpst.exe and my guess is that it is really the same program. in any event it refuses to open the file and gives an 'unexpected error' precisely as does scanpst.exe so my guess is I am hosed. I could play games with a hex editor but I won't. It does mean that all mail for the past 2 weeks is dead and gone, but I guess I can live with that.

It is my own fault for not doing backups the past two weeks. I plead my bad cold; but more than that, OUTLOOK will not let you COPY the pst file if OUTLOOK is open; meaning that you must CLOSE OUTLOOK, copy that big file, then open it again. This is a SERIOUS design flaw that Microsoft must be made aware of. I'll have a lot more to say in the column. I like Outlook for a lot of reasons, but this is a good reason to look for another mail handling utility.

It will ARCHIVE older files all right, to an archive file, and that's good; but the active file should be copyable, or preferably there should be an automatic backup command. Incidentally, archiving does not change the size of the pst file.

I am supposed to go to Niven's today to work on a book, but my wife isn't going to let me out of the house.

 

I have learned more about restoring Microsoft Outlook files than I really wanted to know, but the short version is, I'm whole again, if not completely recovered then very nearly so. The story is interesting enough to be the lead in next month's column, so I won't go into all the details here. The important points are that there is more than one way to install Outlook, and you may well want the "corporate" rather than the individual installation, even though you ain't a corporation and you don't have more than one user. Second, chkdsk.exe when run from within NT does NOT do the same things it does when it is run by AUTOCHK on startup. When it runs on startup, it can, or at least in my case did, find and fix a bad file, namely the old.pst file. That file had previously been uncopyable. Now it could be copied. Moreover, now scanpst.exe could run against it, and after considerable trundling, report that the file was fixed. Well, sort of fixed. Problems remained, but at least it could now be opened.

I could then rename the current outlook.pst to new.pst; rename old.pst to outlook.pst; open outlook; and use the import tools to get (import from new.pst) all the stuff that came in during the 16 hour hiatus when all new mail went to what is now known as new.pst. That seems to have worked. The trick was making chkdsk actually work on old.pst, which it would not do unless I shut down. Interestingly, although I did a normal shutdown, autochk decided that it was needed.

If none of this makes sense, it doesn't really to me. Diskeeper has a way to force autochk on startup of NT, and I suppose there is another way to do that; I will have to investigate. Why chkdsk repairs files -- the message was "replaced bad clusters in old.pst" on startup but can't or won't do that when run within NT is another mystery. Enlightenment appreciated, but please, not speculations. I can speculate too, and I have my guesses, but I would rather know.

Incidentally, the NT Input Repair Tool and scanpst.exe are very likely the exact same program, since scanpst.exe opens a message box that has the headings and icons you find when you open the input repair tool from NT Administrative tools.

I now appear to have normal Outlook operations again. I repeat that Outlook needs a way for individuals as well as corporate users to break up that enormous pst file into some smaller ones; and the fact that you must shut down Outlook to back up that file is a major annoyance since it means you can't schedule a batch file backup to run at odd times.

Then there was the matter of ALL. I have a folder called ALL. The first thing the rules wizard does is send a copy of all mail to that folder. (This swells outlook.pst something awful, but it’s the best way to be sure that I haven’t done myself in with a silly rule.) My new and improved and restored system was having a big problem with ALL, so I exported it to a csv (comma separated value) file, which worked just fine. Then I wanted to delete most of the files. "Unknown Error". OK, make sure I don’t really need anything from it, then delete the folder. Well, try to delete it. Outlook moved ALL and all its contents into the delete folder all right, but then wouldn’t delete it from there. Emptying the DELETED folder didn’t work, nor did EXIT which is supposed to flush that folder. Open Outlook again, and there was that pesky ALL folder full of message, not one of which I could delete. Finally I made a folder called GUP as a sub to Deleted. That gave GUP and ALL as subs to Deleted. Then moved ALL into GUP. Then shut down. Lo! When I brought OUTLOOK up again, there was GUP all right, but it was EMPTY! ALL was gone with all its messages. So. Delete the empty GUP, which did in fact go away.

None of this changed the size of that obscenely large pst file, but I am hoping that at some point OUTLOOK will look through that file and compress it and clear out unused space. I sure hope it will. This is getting ridiculous.

I have mail showing that it may not be as hard to convert to "corporate" accounts as I though, although I'll have to set up the mail again. If I can do that, and compress that hideous obscene 140 megabyte pst file, it will be worth it, although given my head is stopped up it may be harder than it looks. We will see.

This isn't so much all's well that ends well as all's well if I learn enough to get a good chunk of a column out of it. If it happens to you, you will not have that consolation. Back up that Outlook.pst file NOW, while you are thinking about it. And read the column, in which I will boil all this into some kind of conclusions.

Microsoft, are you listening? You have some serious problems with Outlook, which is a pity because in many ways it is a very good product indeed. First and foremost, fix that huge unparsable pst file! Make it easier for ordinary users to have multiple pst files with different data in each, and make it possible to back that sucker up even when Outlook is open. Please?

My thanks to the many of you who wrote with suggestions. Eventualy one of them worked, namely scanpst, but not until chkdsk had worked on startup, it having failed to do diddely when run inside NT. That's another thing I don't understand but I intend to find out. Why is something as simple as maintaining mail files, which are after all mostly ascii and could all be converted to ascii now a major arcana, to be learned as part of an advanced course in care and feeding of sick Microsoft Products?

Queries: Is there a tool for Internet Only users to force Outlook to compress the pst file? Is there a way to export a backup (not archive) file from within Outlook?

As it happens, many of those questions are answered by readers: almost none of the answers are either intuitive or in the help files, but most of what we need to do with Outlook can in fact be done.

 

 

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Wednesday, March 17, 1999

Has anyone heard of pidgen.dll? See Mail.

Last night I forced compacting of the files in Outlook by clicking at the top of the files tree, right click, properties, advanced. The PST file went from 140 megabytes to about 100. Clearly I need to do some more archiving. Also, one needs to back up the archive file.

Let me once again urge you not to use any kind of fancy formatting for mail that might be published here. I can handle cariage returns at the ends of lines IF YOU WILL DOUBLE SPACE at the ends of paragraphs. Don't use tab to move your closing way over to the right, and if you do block quotes keep them to one level. The reason for all this is the need for these pages to be readable to people with fairly primitive systems. While I don't intend to cripple myself or require everyone to conform to some unacceptable least common denominator, there is reason to keep things simple when it comes to mail. Please.

Moshe Bar moshe_bar@hotmail.com is back and we'll have a report. He says it is easily possible to connect to cable modem with Linux, but he doesn't know anything about Windows. There are times when I think he is extremely fortunate. No, I haven't joined the Windows bashers; not completely. I want things to work better, not to harm Microsoft. I keep reminding myself, if Microsoft hadn't made it fairly simple to use these things we would not have $600 machines in Fry's that are better than anything anyone had 5 years ago, better than the supercomputers of ten years ago. Without Windows I do not think that would have happened. I just wish NT had been what Microsoft wanted to be, the actual mission critical system; alas, it's not, and Windows 2000 looks even more frightening. Windows is the consumer's OS and for that it's pretty good, but it's not a mission critical OS, and neither is NT. Linux can be, IF you can get it set up and stable. I have few reports of mature setup Linux systems doing anything but working reliably month after month. On the other hand, you will WORK to get it going properly.

I sent a brief mailing to my subscriber list yesterday. About 10 were returned as undeliverable. I hope I left no one off who was subscribed as of Noon yesterday. Some have come in since then, and they will not be processed until weekend, since Roberta, who has to do it, is both busy and has the same doggone cold I have.

I am off to Ohio to speechify, back end of week. I am unlikely to log on Thursday or Friday.

 

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Sunday, March 21, 1999

Just back. Tired. Hundreds of mail to look at. I'm dancing as fast as I can.

I have read all the mail from subscribers, and I'm working on the rest. There is a lot here. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. I'll be sorting through it for tomorrow. I'm sort of out of it tonight.

I see that the Web Sites That Suck people are still at it, but now he has removed the email addresses and web site addresses of the people who feel they can sit in judgment; now it's merely noises from a largely anonymous crowd. Apparently he was enormously unhappy about my listing the names and email and site addresses of the commentators, because, he said, my readers would mail bomb those people. Clearly he pays little attention to reality. I hope I don't have any readers with nothing better to do than pointlessly annoy others.

He was also unhappy that I carried out what I thought was a polite exchange of views with one of his contributors. She did not seem unhappy about it, and at one point even offered me design help, an offer I appreciated but felt I ought to decline under the circumstances. A laborer is worthy of his hire, and while I don't have any hesitation to accept help from readers and subscribers, she had already made it clear she wasn't much interested in the content here; that being the case it did seem to me she would understand the requirements, and there was a real likelihood that we would both be wasting time neither of us have.

It is also clear that one cannot win. Having taken a few of the "that sucks and here is why" comments seriously and made a few changes, I am told that this place is even worse than before. One chap says he had to click randomly to find anything here. One wonders if he reads? Surely mail and view, which are easily the most representative parts of this site, are easily found? As well as the lengthy "what is this place?" which I would have thought reasonably self-explanatory as well as fairly complete in answering the question it asks. Yes, we certainly do have more than instantly meets the eye here; that apparently is now a fault. I would do better to offer less? Well, so be it. I have no more time to waste on this.

While off in Ohio I discovered that the Center Director's wife has been teaching herself web design and has in fact made considerable money using Front Page to set up web sites for some local businesses. She had made use of the book on Sites That Don't Suck or whatever it is that is promoted by that experiment in encouraging bad manners, so apparently it can be of use; although I would presume, since she used Front Page, that she will not be considered professional, or indeed competent; as far as I recall, the sites that suck sycophants consider that anyone using Front Page has already confessed idiocy and incompetence. Real page designers download the HTML specifications and learn from those.

And in fact one of the new discussants seems obsessed with the notion that I shouldn't create content, because I ought to learn HTML first. For some the goal is learning HTML and using it well. That can, I suppose, be a noble goal, but it is not mine. I started this place to create a mechanism for publishing some materials that weren't likely to be published by anyone else. Space pictures, Strategy of Technology, social pictures of my wife and operatic events. I was able to do all that in WORD. It wasn't done well, and I suppose you had to be determined to find what you were looking for, but that wasn't all that important either.

When BYTE folded, I wanted a place to continue the column, which meant I had to learn more about the mechanics of publishing. I said then as I say now, learning those mechanics was not a large part of my goal; I just wanted to learn enough to keep things going. I must have done, since enough of you subscribed to keep me going, and some of you were very helpful in showing me what I was doing wrong. I don't recall in those early days getting any kind of mail that wasn't helpful and intended to be so.

The sites that suck site doesn't have the purpose of being helpful. It is rather a way for people to feel superior. I doubt quite seriously if any of them have as many readers as I have here. I don't know about the sites that suck site itself; but if the quality of English of his contributors is any guage, then my readers are far more literate than his (and oddly enough the letters in my support over on his site are much better written than the ones in his favor, or for that matter, of his original critique of me. Many of the criticisms can be put down to petty jealousy: how dare this Pournelle have access to the top people in the industry? As if I had not earned that by hard and painstaking work over many years. I did not ask the Smithsonian to display my original computer in the Museum of American History: they asked me. I am quite proud of being chosen that way, and I do not at all apologize for knowing, and sometimes having as personal friends, many of the giants and pioneers of this industry. If that causes my site to suck, then so be it.

Many of you admonish me to pay no attention to this person, and of course that is good advice. On the other hand, I like all writers have a morbid fascination when I am panned; and being quite aware that this place can be improved, I have looked for useful suggestions on improvements. I have found few; what I have found is mostly boorish vituperation. I do not consider "it sucks" to be elegant language, and in fact the old BYTE did not permit the use of that phrase. I would sometimes go so far as to say that something "sucks rocks", but even then only when much provoked. Surely there are better ways of suggesting that something needs improvement than through what amounts to unrelieved condemnation? If something "sucks" it does not deserve attention; this is a judgment that, applied to this site I do not accept. Or rather, I don't particularly want as readers those who think that way.

As to specifics: those of you offended by this Times Roman text, note that it is in fact the DEFAULT, and you can change the default in your browser to some other font which you prefer. Why blame me for not choosing something more congenial to you when you can change it to precisely what you like? Those who do not care for the use of color to separate topics and emphasize headlines are entitled to their views, but why are you so offended by them? I don't particularly like the layouts of some of the magazines I subscribe to, particularly when they use combinations of print and background color that make them hard to read, but I don't obsess about it.

I know that some "experts" like text in narrower columns, with solid colors on both sides of the text to wall it into a particular column width. I don't. Why are you offended? Do you really believe you have discovered some laws of web design, some immutable principles which must be used so that everything looks the same, and a site that is primarily text and content oriented must look exactly like one whose purpose is to display the latest visual whizbangs? If you truly believe that you have this knowledge then think again: I have been in publishing long enough to know that publishers have for decades and possibly centuries hoped to discover the magic secret of cover design that would make books leap from the shelves, and they have yet to find them.

I am aware of some of my faults. I like my blimp. I probably would not like it as much if it were not subject to such absurd abusive attacks. I now keep it as much for an act of defiance as anything else. I like my soft color backgrounds. They are easier on my eyes and whether you read everything I post, I certainly do, and I prefer not to develop eyestrain in doing it. And yes, it would probably marginally improve this place were I to develop a consistent set of buttons and apply them uniformly as a style. I know that, and I also know that it would involve two or three days work, and I have not yet been able to find the time; which is to say I do not consider that as urgent as getting out the chapters of the new O'reilly book.

Well, a day. I should have used this time developing another report, but I continue to have this sore throat and stuffy head, my airplane trips haven't helped, and I am tired having been awakened at 6 AM Eastern Time in order to come home from Ohio. I doubt I would have done anything more constructive with my time anyway.

I would have said some of this over on the sites that suck discussion, but if there is an easy way to add comments to that so-well-designed site I wasn't easily able to discover it. Presumably my fault. I do note that I have caused more change to his place than he to mine: he is now in the business of posting what amount to anonymous denunciations. At least in the past one could go visit the sites of the people denouncing me. If they had any. Now he has removed them, and his site has become a sort of Lion's Mouth. Fascinating. I note also that he hopes to get paid subscribers, sell books, and be paid to make speeches, and he assumes that is my goal as well. Of course it is, although I turn down more speaking engagements than I can accept. And I am very grateful to my many subscribers.

 

Today I received the release candidate CDROMS of Office 2000 and IE 5. This includes Front Page 2000, Outlook 2000, and Publisher 2000. I'll experiment with those and try to have a report in the column.

 

On column dating: what I would call the February Column, BYTE has released as the March column. I have turned in to them a March column, which should be out shortly. In the interests of continuity I may yet write some short essay and call it "February" only that would not make much sense, would it? I see no way out of this, but I have in fact written a column every month since 1979, and I didn't miss February.

 

 

 

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