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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 107: June 26 - July 2, 2000

 

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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.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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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.  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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This week:

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Monday  June 26, 2000 KOREAN WAR Begins...

Well, fifty years ago, anyway.

I am in New York. There are some pictures and comments in View106 for Sunday. Spent the morning with Compaq and SCO, and lunch with the Linuxmall people. Interesting how large a presence Linux has at this show.

 

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Tuesday, June 27, 2000

There are daily reports on the show at www.byte.com so be sure to look there. Spent the morning at PC Expo. It's raining now, but still hot, in New York. Peep Shows tonight. Never did see the Linux Pavilion at PC EXPO but it must be there; I'll find it. Crusoe AKA Transmeta AKA the House That Linus Built has one-watt power chips; they give away fans. More in the show reports.

 

 

 

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Wednesday, June 28, 2000

PCEXPO continues. It's late and I have to file my daily show report. Go over to www.byte.com and read it.  BYTE will also have show awards, but not announced at the show: they will be up on the BYTE site in a week after we digest things.

It's a great life if you don't weaken...

 

 

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Thursday, June 29, 2000

I could get out of here today, but airplanes are hard to come by, so I'll go over to the show floor for a few hours and catch the plane I have a seat on tomorrow.

Conferences with BYTE executives reveal a minor problem: BYTE readers generally aren't registering, so we don't have a lot of proof of the quality of our readership. We know the readers are there, but we don't know who they are, and most of our people being a private lot it's hard to find out. Certainly we aren't going to resort to anything sneaky. They have been talking about a contest, like "Win Jerry Pournelle's Surplus" (with them paying some apprentice editor to come over and box up stuff and ship it) just to get people to register.

Naturally already registered people will be able to play too, assuming it happens. Meanwhile you can do us a big favor. Go over to www.byte.com and sign up for the weekly newsthingy. It won't hurt you and it may help us, since big companies allocate their resources through office games that involve among other things ways to demonstrate reader quality....

Just a thought. 

AARGH: I thought they already had registration at the BYTE page. THEY DO NOT, so cancel previous transmission!  But they say they WILL have it in a few weeks and when they do I will tell you, and THANKS TO ALL OF YOU who tried.

 

My room is covered with melted images: Alex and troops used it as a staging area for their new company operation. Location-Connect (www.locationconnect.com ) sets up bandwidth for show events and hotels, and apparently they are very good at it. But it happened my hotel suite was next door to the Manhattan Ballroom where they had only a few hours to set up for a breakfast event, and guess where the crew crashed...   Housekeeping is going to go mad.

Now I am off to the show floor, but do think about registering over at BYTE. That's www.byte.com and if you do it now you won't forget it...

I'm back, show report 4 is posted, and I am exhausted. It's 2 AM in NYC although this laptop is still on California time.

Next you hear from me I should be home. And in case you missed it:

AARGH: I thought they already had registration at the BYTE page. THEY DO NOT, so cancel previous transmission!  But they say they WILL have it in a few weeks and when they do I will tell you, and THANKS TO ALL OF YOU who tried.

 

 

 

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Friday, June 30, 2000

It's actually Saturday in Dallas, where I am.  I'll have an airplane in the morning. Long story. Should be all right but a day sort of lost....

Good night all

 

 

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Saturday, July 1, 2000

Dawn in Dallas. To be precise, at the Dallas Airport Hyatt. Room service is said to be bringing breakfast in a moment. American is said to have an airplane that will get me to Burbank, and a seat on it for me.

There's breakfast now. Right on time and very good. The shock is the bill: not for breakfast, but $12.10 for a telephone call to Studio City last night. That's unconscionable. American is paying for the room, and I can afford $12, but it's a lof for a 5 minute phone call. I should have used my cell phone.

Anyway, I'm off to the airport in a minute.


Well, I am home. Hurrah. My luggage isn't, but they think they will deliver it to me at 2100 tonight. We will see. At least I'm home...

There is something horribly wrong with my networking connection. The Rebel box won't leave the connection: as soon as it has been done for a while, it drops. Then it has to redial. It was doing this when I left and I thought it might be an Earthlink problem. It may still be, and it may not be. I have gone into the scripts for the Rebel box and all looks all right, but it's a bit of a puzzlement. Things work but I sure am dialing a lot. A LOT. And even setting Outlook to look for messages every minute doesn't seem to do it. I just keep being dropped. Since I have tried different modems it can't be that. And interestingly, we have a lot of trouble connecting through outlook to mail servers, but the ftp program works. Connecting to the Earthlink mail server is a sometimes thing here. So is getting to the mail server at pair. I wonder if Earthlink is having DOS attacks? Whatever it is, it's clearly no longer good enough to keep me going. I am going to have to have a better ISP, and fairly soon, one that actually works. If ftp works, and it does, then I ought to be able to get to my mail server.

But the fact is that I am not receiving mail just now. I can't get to mail servers. But I can post this. But all attempts to get mail get "cannot connect to the server".  Earthlink seems to be broken big time just now.

Incidentally, see mail: I managed to do a good bit yesterday and it's up now.

Well, the mail server and dropped line problems just went away. Odd. Very odd. Nope. I spoke to soon. I was able to get to the server, but the line dropped problem is still very much with me. Rats. And now we are having problems connecting to servers. Rats. Rats.

 

Now I have to go eat.

Back. The Internet situation is impossible. Whether it's Earthlink or something wrong with the Netwinder, I was better able to browse the web from a hotel in Dallas than from here. My connections are dropped often, I can't even refresh my own web page, and I sure can't follow any mail links, because any attempt requires dialup and connect and...

 

Anyway, I fear I am not going to have much in the way of Internet connectivity until I do something about this, and I have no idea of what to do about it. Possibly connect directly with a modem from this machine and forget the Netweaver entirely; and see if the connection is dropped every few minutes then.  I still think Earthlink has done something clever, but I don't know what. 

I will now try a different connect number, in Burbank. Why is it connecting, working, then dropping the line?  That's what's driving me nuts. And it does that, and often.


Tried yet another telephone number. Still get dropped. Dialing like crazy. Do not understand this at all.

I got a long press release with this at the bottom:

This transmission is confidential and intended solely for the person or organisation to whom it is addressed. It may contain privileged and confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not copy, distribute, reproduce, publish or disclose the information, take any action in reliance on it or use it for your own benefit. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify us immediately by E-mail at info@hillandknowlton.com.

Later I got a message withdrawing the press release:

Meigan Terry would like to recall the message, "ELECTROFUEL INTRODUCES 21

HOURksalvatore@maximumpc.com RECHARGEABLE BATTERY FOR NOTEBOOK COMPUTERS".

which also had that screwy notice on it. Seems to me that if you send me your secrets without any prior agreement from me, they aren't secret any more.  I certainly don't unilaterally and without prior agreement undertake to keep confidences.  Sure, I don't blow sources, and things told me in confidence I'll go a long way to protect the source, but that's different.  Ah well.

My baggage has arrived!  I am whole again...

What with all the flight nonsense, my baggage didn't arrive when I did, but American just delivered it, all, safe and sound, to our door. And good night.

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Sunday, July 2, 2000

I suspect I was getting a bit hysterical about the line dropping nonsense. When I went to bed, I wouldn't be connected for more than a minute or two before the line connection was broken, and the Netwinder would wait a minute or so and dial. Again and again. 

This morning the problem seems to have fixed itself. Since I did nothing and nothing here changed, it's pretty clear it's on the Earthlink POP side. It happened with three different local access numbers, so this whole area must be overloaded, and possibly Earthlink has set things to drop connections when that happens?  I don't know. As of 0745 there is no trace of the problem. It fixed itself while I was asleep...

Incidentally, I can't answer individual questions about what's wrong with your system. Obviously I try harder for subscribers.

I have a ton of pictures of the show, and many adventures to report. More later. And I will, I will, get a mailing off to subscribers sometime this weekend.

First I have to unpack and sort all the stuff I brought back, including Plextor software that swears it will work with CD-R/W and Windows 2000. Let's hope so. And there's the column to get done.

No rest for the wicked...

Does anything useful ever come from psi.com?  So far it is ALL spam. All.


On the registration fiasco: we don't have true registration and info for BYTE.com readers but the editor hopes that will change Real Soon Now. I'll let you know. We do have a newsletter signup that mostly reminds you that there is a new BYTE.COM issue when that happens. That is usually on a Monday although this holiday week may be different. It won't hurt you to sign up for it: they assure me there's no way it gets out to the spammers.  And it will mildly help us by showing our owners that we have readers who care. Real registration would help more, and that we will be able to have -- Real Soon Now, I guess.  Sorry for the confusion. It has been a LONG week.


Does anyone know what DLL's FreCell calls? When I invoke FreCell on my portable it comes up with an error box and I have to close it. It is not frecell.exe as I have replaced that with no change in the result. Some init file or dll I presume, but I do not know which. I would like to replace something so I can get frecell working on that machine again.

Well, that worked. See mail. 


The Netwinder has gone insane and I don't know enough about UNIX / Linux to fix it. First I get a long series of being dropped from connection. I know that the same line connected with that modem through the machine directly does NOT get dropped.

Before I can do any diagnosis I need the symptoms, so anything other than symptomology in the following is pure speculation.

First, my line connection seldom lasts more than three or four minutes before it is dropped. Exception: it seems to stay connected when in actual heavy use. There is a box in Outlook that tells it to hang up when done. That box had mysteriously become checked. I unchecked it and exited Outlook; no change. I reset the machine. No change. It is possible but unlikely that Outlook is responsible for all this although how I do not know.

The problem remains despite changing dialup numbers and resetting the Netwinder. 

Sometimes the problem simply goes away, and all is normal again, for several hours. Then it is back. When I am having the problem I seem to have difficulties getting Outlook to reach the Earthlink mail server. Eventually it does, and all the mail comes in, but that may take several tries, and the system may have connected to pair.com and other places after timing out trying to reach the Earthlink server.

When things are working they work well, without problems. But then the line dropping starts again, and we dial, and dial, and dial.

After a while (hours of this) the Netwinder begins endlessly to display this message:

s10: transmit timed out, bad line quality?

It gives that message even if the modem is turned off and left off as well as when it is power cycled. Once that message begins to be displayed, the Netwinder never again tries to dial, good line quality or bad (and it doesn't sound bad to me).  Since it won't try to dial, it hardly matters. Modem off or modem on, telephone line plugged in or not plugged in, it will never try to dial, but pops up that message about every 20 seconds. Log in to the Netwinder. Don't matter. That message continues to be displayed.  Do

sync;sync

and I get

s10: transmit timed out, bad line quality?

at intervals. And that's it. So eventually I do 

init 6

and the Netwinder resets, and begins to dial again. 

This sucks rocks. Now I suppose that if I knew enough about Linux I could force the system to flush s10 or whatever it is (it must have some internal image since turning off the modem certainly flushes the S10 register in the modem itself). There ought to be a way to force the system to dial. But I do not know what it is.

So I reboot and it works again. For a while anyway.  Of course it more or less endlessly redials.  I change access numbers and it happens anyway. Then for a while all is well, and it has fixed itself. Then we are back to this again.

 Whenever this happens, incidentally, I can reach the mail server at pair.com but generally not the Earthlink mail server. By "this" I mean the endless s10: messages, followed by my rebooting the system and power cycling the modem, followed by intermittent connections with phone line dropping, but at least it is dialing; that will go on for a few hours, then whammo! Either all works well and the line never drops or I am back to the S10: message and it will not even try to dial. But while it is working after a reboot I can sometimes send mail, but it can't connect to the Earthlink server to receive mail. I can, however, ftp direct to the site which is how I am posting this. Later I can reach the Earthlink mail site. So this is somehow associated with connecting to Earthlink. And I am weary of it.

So we have three problems: (1)The line being dropped forcing endless redials. (2)The connection to Earthlink server when we are connected. (3) The Netwinder getting in a coil with that s10: message and my not knowing what I should do to force the dialup process to restart.  There must be a command to force redial without resetting but I don't know it.

Meanwhile it will connect, sometimes, and for a while, and I can ftp when that happens. 

I sure hate this. Perhaps I may have to scrap the Netwinder and connect through a Windows machine. That will at least let me discover what kind of problem I have. The trouble with network appliances is that when they don't work you can't figure out what has happened. Or I can't. When it works that Netwinder is wonderful, but what has happened in the past week? The phone lines got worse? Unlikely but possible I suppose. The Netwinder wore out? That's the trouble. I can't figure it out. One test will be to use the USR modem directly with this machine to see if it stays connected; if so, I will have isolated some of the problem.

Earthlink technicians I have some confidence in say that they have done nothing, and it must be my phone line. Thompson thinks so also. Why that is intermittent or even how it can be intermittent isn't clear. In any event it is clearly time to do some serious analysis. Why did everything work and about a week ago stop  working? Nothing I know of was done here to change things.

Continue in next VIEW. This has become serious enough to warrant some work on it.

 

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