THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 192 February 11 - 17 2002

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Highlights this week:

• The Crazy Years: see mail
•  
• A major security alert
• Space Activity Society announcement
•  

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 page is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE. If you have never read the explanatory material on that page, please do so.

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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.  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:

CLICK HERE for a Special Request.

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.

For Current Mail click here.

The atomz Search returns:

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 The freefind search remains:

Monday
Tuesday
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Back to work on Burning Tower after a flying trip to San Diego (well by train; see last week's view). I got up late so I'll have to do most of the work on this tonight. The first part of the new column is up. 

I made the mistake of taking a look at the index page of this place. Ghastly, isn't it? OK for those who know what is here, but not so hot at getting anyone to have a look inside. Tips appreciated, but rambles on the subject probably won't be read. As I get older I find I have less time than ever, which doesn't make a lot of sense because I refuse to admit I am slowing down. But the place certainly has its chaotic moments.

Indeed it seems to be worse all the time. This is just after finishing the last column. Maybe I should put THAT up on the cover... In fact I just did.

Query: If BYTE were to become a "mail subscription newsletter" with the subscriptions free (but you do have to subscribe and give your address) two things: how many might subscribe, and what would be the preferred format?  At the end of the month everything would go into archive so you could still see it all on a web site without subscribing.  Serious thoughts only, please.

Roland says for .NET in depth see:

http://www.javalobby.org/clr.html 

And we have this inquiry:

Jerry,

I really enjoy your articles at www.Byte.com . I am a long-time WordPerfect user. However, with Word having taken over most of the market, I have been using Word 2000 more often. However, there is one feature I greatly miss that as extremely useful in WordPerfect, the "Reveal Codes" function. This allowed me to view the codes in the document while I was editing, and also allowed me to really see what was going on with the formatting, etc. Any hope of getting this in Word, or is it there and I have just never been able to find it?

Chuck Badger

I remember that too, and I don't know how to find it in WORD, which does have that thing that shows paragraph endings and such like but is not the same as the old Word Perfect "reveal codes".  Maybe it's in Word and I don't know about it.

One thing I have noticed is that not many new readers of this site see the reports, some of which are more interesting than others. I need to reorganize all that so that people can find those. There's other stuff like that. I probably need a much better map.

I don't quite know what one wants in a map. Perhaps I should fire up VISIO and see what it can do. I do find my tourguide is better done than I thought.

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Monday
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New Security Patch and Vulnerabilities information in Mail.

Many responses to yesterday's inquiries. Thanks to all of you. Regarding BYTE the consensus seems to be that you'd subscribe to an email edition in html but you would not opt in to receiving advertisements and the like; which is about what I would expect and what I would do (and note I didn't ask to begin with: If I wouldn't subscribe to a newsletter that sent me other stuff and sold my name to sucker lists, I sure wouldn't ask you to...)

Discussion of my web page is a little more complicated. It's almost certainly too busy, and there's too much stuff at the top before anyone figures out what they have found. I'll have to look into that. And thanks.

Got a good bit of work on Burning Tower done yesterday. Movie people keep eating time but they offer money so I guess I can't complain on that.

We continue to destroy our country in the name of security. We seem to have opted for Incompetent Empire. The transition from Republic to Empire will always go through a phase of incompetence. It took Claudius to develop an Imperial civil service that was actually competent and responsive to both the Emperor and to local influential citizens. What Julius would have put into place we don't know. Augustus did a pretty good transitional job but didn't know where he was going. Tiberius had no taste for the job to begin with but darkly brooded over it, tried to escape to Capri and run things by remote control --  The came Caligula, who made his horse a Senator, and was killed by his own guard because he didn't understand that if you rule by Janissaries you must at least keep the Janissaries respectful.  It took Claudius to develop a civil service of Freedmen, and institutionalize the Army.  That system survived even Nero, and continued until Aurelius.

But Empire will always be incompetent compared to local self government. It will attempt more, and can accomplish great things that local self government will not attempt.

Herman Kahn once told me (and I suppose published, but I recall the conversation as we by chance breakfasted together during an annual meeting of the American Political Science Association) that "the natural state of government is empire, and the natural size of empire is to grow until it meets an empire of similar size and strength."  He wasn't entirely serious but he put it out as a possible truth.

We will see, I think. Meanwhile we have incompetents teaching us to be subjects and get over the idea that we are citizens. Put your hands on top of your heads for the duration of this flight, or we will jail you for 20 years for interfering with a flight crew, have a nice day. Thank you for choosing Delta Airlines.

The bilingual debates are in mail.

And for REVEAL FORMAT in WORD

The Reveal Formatting pane (see the end): http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/
2002/articles/wdTameUnrulyFormatting.aspx 

Thanks to rseiler

A major Security Alert From Roland:

http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2002-03.html 

Sound security policies which -ought- to be in place will mitigate these problems until fixed code can be deployed . . . -- --------------------------- Roland Dobbins  

If you are responsible for network security of any kind, go read this now.

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This week:

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Ash Wednesday

The day was eaten by productive work and administrative errands. I got a lot done but nothing worth reporting here.

A fix for the XP  bug sending documents with error reports. Click here.

And Roland warns of Yet Another Backdoor Trojan:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter
/venc/data/backdoor.egghead.html 

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This week:

Monday
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The Feast of St. Valentinius commonly known as St. Valentine's Day

Or the Lupercalia to those who follow the Old Time Religion...

I have a new list of those who did not get the Chaos Manor Security Warning I sent out on 12 February. If you are a subscriber and did not get that, see badmail, and send me your correct address. Note that some of those on badmail were those who exceeded quotas. I stupidly did not separate those from the really bad addresses such as could not be found. Note also that I put spaces in the formats so that those won't be harvested by a spam spider.

If you're not a subscriber and want to be, click here. If you aren't and don't want to be, tsk tsk.  (Can you tell I am listening to the KUSC subscription drive?)

Niven will be over later and we'll work, Burning Tower is moving along. I am also getting back to Janissaries, and I have some preliminary discussions about a new Falkenberg novel. It gets busy around here.

Interesting puzzle thingy over in mail.

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This week:

Monday
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Saw The Count of Monte Christo after taking Roberta to dinner. Man could that Dumas tell stories! Of course I read the novel but that was 30 years ago. This is well staged, and while an adaptation, any movie has to be an adaptation: novels take many hours to read, 2 hours is a long movie. But this was well done.

Otherwise I sort of took the day off.

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Monday
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I think I will do some gardening today.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a number of projects.

Space Activity Society meeting announcement. See mail.

There is other mail of interest. And thanks to all of you who subscribed recently. There was also an interesting note from someone who tells me how much he hates what I say -- and showed considerably familiarity with it all -- and how ghastly it is that I should ask him to pay when he'd pay not to read it. I didn't send him the obvious solution to this problem...

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Monday
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I pretty well took the day off.

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