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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 82 January 3 - 9, 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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Monday January 3, 2000

Spent the day mucking about. Some fiction. Then about 1800 Mr. Dobbins came over, and our troubles began. I don't have Windows 2000 Server going yet, but I do have the final version of 2000 Professional up: I am using it now. Installation was simple. Reconfiguring the net was insane. At least I have all the elements of a column now. And then some. And several morals to the story. 

I am told that the above makes it appear that Roland was the cause of the troubles that began. No, indeed, in fact the sequence was the other way around, the troubles began, then he came over to help, and THEN I discovered just much trouble I had. Hadn't been for him I'd still be working on the stuff. It will all be in the column, but that will teach me not to make not to do my journal late at night without reading it over the next day...

 

I owe the subscribers a mailing. I got some decent pictures at Niven's New Year Party. I was going to send some of the goofy details of Windows 2000, but that has to go into the column. It's late and my head isn't working properly, but I'll find a way to thank the subscribers properly. In any event, THANKS! 

 

 

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Tuesday, January 4, 2000

If you have to install NT 4 Server it will drive you nuts. Or ME nuts anyway. I sure prefer 2000 Professional to NT workstation, but I am told that the migration to 2000 Server is more complex than it looks, having to do with the nature of the data bases used to manage the server systems.  Ah well. I probably won't get to that this column.

I have to do an Intellectual Capital about the coming year, and have it in tonight. I have to do it because of deadlines and I need the money.... So there will not be much here today.

Mail is a little slow but then that's to be expected.

Note above: I have an apology to Roland for being ambiguous. Good heavens.

 

 

 

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Wednesday, January 5, 2000

Tomorrow is the 6th Day of January. Merry Christmas to my Orthodox friends. Give us back our eleven days!

I have a lot to do today. Errands, column, new machines to put together, and a lot of experiments with the Palm Pilot and OmniSky. This will be the Year of the Handheld, the Year of Wireless; and it looks very like Microsoft won't be the major player in that game at all. Palm, and even Psion, have big positions in wireless connected PDA, and Microsoft doesn't seem to be up on the radar screen yet. Of course Netscape had a huge head start on Microsoft. Never count Microsoft out. But still...


I have mail that states in part that I am a "crypto-facist super patriot" as well as making the case that Mr.Heinlein was 

"that tubercular parasite who was fired from the Navy and then inflicted his diseased hallucinations on us in the guise of science fiction..." . Because this was commentary on the stuff about Starship troopers I have left my rambling response to it over in mail. It's such a joy maintaining this place.


 

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Thursday, January 6, 2000

Before I forget it:

Jerry:

If 20 people haven't mentioned it already,  http://www.imdb.com  --The Internet Movie Database -- will search by title or actor among other things and return details such as the year and most anything else about a film.

Worth checking when a detail matters. Usually it doesn't but somebody is always gonna come by to nitpick.

--Jim

-- Jim_Carr@compuserve.com

which is worth bookmarking. It says Green Berets was released in 1968. From internal evidence in the picture, it was made earlier than that because the political situation was different from what it was in 68 (the year of the Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong committed suicide, leaving the only insurgency North Vietnamese regulars and conscripts; after Tet 1968 there was essentially no Viet Cong whatever). Hardly matters. The key event was when John F. Kennedy allowed his Harvard advisors to deliver a death sentence on President Diem.  This sent at least one message. It told everyone in the world that bringing the US in as an ally might have fatal consequences to your head of state: be warned, whoever wins a war in which the US is your ally, you, personally, probably won't live through it unless you kowtow to the US President.  

Most people don't know who Diem was. He had been the last premier of the united Empire of Viet Nam, and it was he who sent Emperor Bao Dai into exile. If you took a poll in Viet Nam, only two names were recognized in the population on either side of the border: Ho Chi Minh, and Diem. After his murder there were no recognizable leaders in South Viet Nam.

The Harvard meddlers who experimented with "nation building" in a place they had never visited, or had seen from an airplane and the European bar in the capital city, continue to teach government at Harvard, and presumably to wash the blood off their hands. It will never come off, of course.

In any event, some details don't matter a lot. At least not to me.


I have learned from the source that the "eval" editions of Windows 2000, which expire in 120 days, are designed so that you can upgrade to shrinkwrap when that comes out. One guesses that there will also be a Service Pack about that time; there usually is even though 2000 has had more testing than any other product. That being the case I intend to go with 2000 on all but the games machine here. Roland has been helping me with the upgrade path to Windows 2000 Server: that turns out not to be simpler, and indeed began with bringing up a new machine with NT 4 and all its service packs. That was grim work for me although Bob Thompson says he does it nearly weekly and finds it a lot easier. Anyway, I now have a stable NTFS NT 4 system tied to the net, and now it will slowly move to Windows 2000 and become a primary server here.

I also have both Palm V with OmniSky and Palm VII with its own internal radio link modem. I expect to put in a couple of days working with both. That all goes in the column.

There do seem to be things to do here.


If you want an irreverent history of millennialism try 

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/9941/succeed_fail1.html which is a link in John Dvorak's Y2K commentary http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2416140,00.html which is itself pretty good. 


I should NEVER muck about with games as "tests" for the column when there are deadlines. Sigh. But HOMEWORLD is quite good, if faster paced than I would prefer and with no way I can see to slow it down. Ah well....


Good experiences so far with Palm V and Omnisky, but in fact you need a Vx if you are going to do much with it and have big memory stuff as I do.


Go to

http://users.telerama.com/~rs7717/blacmail.html 

but it may turn your stomach... 

However, on that one, a good guy lawyer friend Tim Pleasant says:

OK, I went to the website and read it.

Notably absent are any case names, any citations to the reporters,
anything at all that would let you look up the case to verify it.

Heck, I can't even tell what state it's in.

Like most here, I hate the abuse of the legal system. In fact, I
suspect I hate it more than most. But I"m leery of anybody with 
an obvious agenda that doesn't give you what you need to verify 
any of the facts they cite. Heck, I'm leery of anybody who fills
up any posting anywhere on the Internet who uses CAPITAL LETTERS
like they're going out of style. 

so I have a bit of a hard time with that one....especially since every
judge I know would have stomped on at least some of the abuses cited
in that web page.

And of course he's right. It is certainly not something I would have found credible a few years ago. Of course before Waco I would have found Waco incredible.

 

Then try

http://cnews.tribune.com/news/story/0,1162,sunsentinel-nation-49140,00.html  

for another inanity. Will this never cease?


If you don't know about GEOCLOCK you ought to. And then: 

Jerry,

"Earth&;Sun" is a nice freeware implementation of the same idea for the Palm at: http://www.40-below.com/palm/

And there is a good shareware planetarium program for the Palm at: http://www.aho.ch/pilotplanets

Regards,

David C. Plunkett dcplunkt@ipa.net

In fact, in my other life with some connections to the intelligence industry, we had mechanical versions of those clocks, and whether you had one was a mark of how important you were. You may recall the Admiral had one in the movie Hunt For Red October. The notion is of course that you can see at a glance what is in sunlight. Now with the electronic as opposed to the mechanical Earth/Sun clocks you can even put in the Keyhole and other lookdown satellites, so you know what they can look at, and when they'll be over daylight areas...

 

 

 

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Friday, January 7, 2000

It is column time, and of course I got stuck "testing" games. Jagged Alliance 2 is about the most frustrating thing I have ever seen. You are stuck with some of the most incompetent soldiers around, and even if you have money you can't manage to buy them good equipment, at least not in the first few moves: they bring with them stupid pistols, which they can't shoot for sour owl jowls. There are aspects of this stupid game that I like, but I am weary of clowns who can't shoot straight, even at point blank range.

So I went web cruising, to confirm my suspicion that the internet is really a vast conspiracy to see how many grown people can be got to look at screens on which nothing useful happens. I have downloaded 30 game editors none of which work; I presume it is because I was stupid enough to patch the game with something offered by the game publisher, and I suspect that was enough to throw them all off. The games designers have expended considerable energy in making it hard to use hex editors on their stupid games, as if, somehow, this were an interesting thing to do. "You ain't going to hack MY game! Even if you did pay money for it, and even if you think you can improve your fun with the game, I will make it take longer to write and thus cost more by putting in a lot of effort to confuse anyone trying to edit the save files. I'll hide the character names, bring in silly little sub files, and in general I will FIX you, so THERE!

Why do they DO that? Anyway, it's easy to hack the amount of money you have -- they hid that a couple of times, but they weren't that smart about it -- but hacking some of the player stats is a bit harder, and I don't feel like doing it. But even with money, you can't buy decent weapons for these troops who are, after all, going to overthrow a government. With pistols. Bah. Stupid. And it has all the makings of game of the year.

Oh. Well. But ye gods what incompetents! I could get Boy Scouts as better troops than those.


It's  a day for needless frustrations. CYBERLINK has "Power DVD" which is supposed to be a DVD player. My ATI DVD system locks up sometimes depending on the DVD and there seems little I can do about it. I thought I would try this: the disk came in the mail.

Install. "Insert the code from the label that came with your disk." Needless to say there was no code. I can't tell you if CYBERLINK works. I can tell you they are a bunch of paranoid idiots who send you a disk with no way to play it. Why not? It got the Best of COMDEX from those other guys who give awards. Doubtless they didn't gat a copy that can't be installed.

So I still have no way to play DVD disks except on the ATI system and that locks up more often than it should. Like at least once or twice a DVD.  

 

 

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Saturday, January 8, 2000

The dog came up and got me. It's time to hike, he said. He was quite insistent, and of course he was right. Did me a world of good. Even late in the evening, when there are owls out and the light isn't good. I live this part of California. Fifty square miles of park, safe, and just nice. I've put up pictures of my trails.

Column is slower than I thought it would be.

And that stupid Jagged Alliance is driving me crazy. My crack troops are equipped with junk, they can't even shoot back, while the enemy has ranged weapons. Why in the world would anyone attempt this? I've known a few soldiers in my day, and I guarantee you that no one commanding five thousand a week plus a couple of thousanf for equipment would go looking for a fight with the junk these guys have. And the game cheats, because half the time if you do win the fight the bad guys didn't have any weapons on them.  Must be some of the universe's biggest sarcophagus beetles haul away submachine guns and ammunition. Or something. This is just stupid. I've wasted enough time on it. The fact that I did waste time on it says a little, but ye gods, the designers need their head examined. I am sure they wanted "play balance".  Foo.

 

 

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Sunday, January 9, 2000

Does anyone know how to stop NoteTab Pro from being my default editor for everything? I presume I can do it one file type at a time, but what I want is to get that miserable thing off my computer. If anyone knows the people at NoteTab Pro I would like to be able to send them a letter.

It turns out I have in my system a file called "pdvd  cd-key eval.txt" which must have come from the people who sent me the CD. It turns out to have the key. Why they are so paranoid about this that they send a key that begins "EV" and presumably is going to trigger the install so that it dies in some upcoming time is another story; but I do have it. So I double click to open it. Up comes NoteTab Pro. "pdvd  cd-key eval.txt does not exist. Do you want to create it?" Of course I said no. I opened Notepad and read and printed the key, then copied the file elsewhere, and tried the experiment again, and discovered that all my fears were well grounded.  If you foolishly click yes at that prompt, you now have a blank document with the name of a real document, and one more click to save and your file is gone, gone, gone. This is unacceptable. To experiment further I opened Notepad Pro and used "file/open browse" to go find the file. It showed. Click on it and on Open. "pdvd  cd-key eval.txt does not exist. Do you want to create it?" 

I don't know what is wrong with that thing but I haven't time to do their debugging. I tried to get to their web site but nothing happens, and I can't make a career out of all this.

In fact that's stronger language than I intend to use in the column, but I am going to tell the story there. NoteTab Pro has some good features but this is totally unacceptable. Totally.

I have sent a mailing to all subscribers. If you subscribe and didn't get it, please let me know by email, preferably using the email return address I have on file for you.

I have found the secret of doing this with Outlook, and it is quite good. There is a way to tell Outlook to take a contact list and add it to the lists it will search when you are sending to a mailing list. It's not at all obvious but if you diligently search the help files you will find it; and it makes setting up mailing lists MUCH easier, and indeed pretty snappy. Outlook 2000 has a lot of great features. It does a wonderful job of hiding them. I couldn't find anything on this in either the third party books, or the Outlook documents.  It wasn't obvious in the Help files either but eventually my faithful dog assistant -- I am beginning to like that dog -- found it. If you use Office 2000 try using the dog as the assistant. He can be amusing, as when he cuts his leash with a welding torch...

If you want a hoot go to

http://www.geekculture.com/geekycomics/Aftery2k/y2Karchives/053.html 

 

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