jp.jpg (13389 bytes)

THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

VIEW 84 January 17 - 23, 2000

Refresh/Reload Early and Often!

read book now

HOME

VIEW

MAIL

Columns

BOOK Reviews

For Current Mail click here.

emailblimp.gif (23130 bytes)

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.

If you are not paying for this place, click here...

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

For Previous Weeks of the View, SEE VIEW HOME PAGE

Search: type in string and press return.

 

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.  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.
.

If you subscribed:

atom.gif (1053 bytes) 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.

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.

Current View

Highlights this week:

 

 

 

line6.gif (917 bytes)

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Monday  January 17, 2000

I still find myself writing 19 then changing it. Oh well. And my checkwriter dates checks as 1900, and I have mislaid the source code. Ah well, a rubber stamp fixes that.

---

Every time I go to Fry's I swear I won't go again. Then I try to order on line and I understand why I go to Fry's. 

Today I went out to Fry's to get I/O Magic DVD players: they were on sale at under a hundred bucks, and this operates as both a DVD player and a CDROM drive, and comes with some good DVD movie software. Just what I wanted.

I also got a Tyan Trinity 371 motherboard. This works with 600 MHz P III or with Celeron socket 370 chips. Alas, when I got it home, the mounting hardware wasn't in it, and there was no CD.  OK, thought I, I'll order that board on the Internet and take this one back to Fry's when I go out to pick up Mrs. Pournelle at the airport tomorrow.

Surprise. The internet price is about $25 less than Fry's. Today at Fry's I did get bargains on disk drives, but the motherboards are overpriced. It's often that way  out there. So off to the Internet I go.

This Internet shopping ain't ready for prime time. I have spent about 3 hours ordering a motherboard and a chip.  First I tried NECX which sounded good until I put in the order and they said "We can send some of your order, but your motherboard can't be sent to you because you live in California and we don't like California's Use Tax."  Now if they had said "We have to collect this tax, do you want to pay it?" or "We can't send ANY of the things you ordered because we don't do business in California due to their tax policies" or "We don't like you. Go away, you idiot Californian" I might understand; but to offer to ship a chip and a box of tapes but not the motherboard makes no sense.

So then I try Insight.com. They don't have the motherboard I wanted, and don't seem to have heard of it.

I go to the TYAN site, and that leads me to EGGHEAD, which has the board, and I ordered it. When I submitted my credit card info I got an "Unspecified Error" and Windows 2000 opened a debugger. 

Closing all that and going back to the site revealed that my order did apparently get to Egghead and ought to be shipped soon, but it took about 3 hours to do it. I can go to Fry's in less time. Sigh.

 

 

 

TOP

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Tuesday, January 18, 2000

Building two new machines, one with an AMD chip. We'll see. I am still seeking a good replacement for Princess (Windows 2000 Professional, primary machine for net access, web site, and Visual Basic). One I built with an Intel 600 and in iWill motherboard takes 3 minutes hanging there on a splash screen, then seems to work normally, but 3 minutes (not an exaggeration) is too long. It's clearly a hardware problem, allocating resources or something, and the 133 bus speed may have something to do with it. More another time. I have ordered another motherboard, and Intel is supposed to be sending a couple. Intel boards nearly always work as advertised without any special handling. Windows 2000 in general works well, but at high speeds machines become picky about having good hardware.

The AMD system will get Windows 98 and a 3dfx Voodoo 3000 video board. Ought to be fast enough...

Once you get on with Egghead they keep sending confirmations and stuff, so that works OK. Went to Fry's to get my money back on the board, and discovered that I hadn't paid the sticker price on the board; the refund was for about what I had paid on line, which was considerably lower than the price on the sticker on the box. But there is was in the receipt, so all was well. Took about 10 minutes including going to the cashier to change the refund certificate for a credit card credit. 

I was just sent a copy of Notetab Pro 4.8 which is in test; and that will open the file that it could not open previously. It now works well, and NoteTab Pro goes back on my list of approved software. The problem was apparently Windows 2000 gold code since it worked fine with NT; indeed it worked all right with early beta 2000. In any event, all is well. I am also told that Digital River has fixed its problems. Could be. Me, I still like GetRight except that lately GetRight hasn't been automatically intercepting downloads. I am hoping to fix that; I am sure it's operator error.


For those who asked about installing NT fixpacks, in order or do one last one and get it done all at once, the short answer is you don't have to do them in order; but there may be good reasons to do it that way for a server. See mail for a detailed answer.

And over in mail there is a short question and a long answer about my political science dissertation and mapping the political spectrum.

 

 

 

TOP

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Wednesday, January 19, 2000

I have been experimenting with using Spamcop ( www.spamcop.net ) to report spam. The problem is that to get all the headers I must: open the spam; do view/options; copy the headers; paste into Spamcop form; go back to the spam; highlight and copy the SUBJECT, which in neither the headers nor the body; past that into Spamcop's form; go back to the spam; select and copy the body of the spam; paste that in to the Spamcop form; submit the spam; wait; select the places the spam complaint goes to; send it. None of this is difficult but with 30 spams it becomes tedious. I am going to try next time to open the spam; get and paste the headers; hit forward on the spam, and select and paste everything from there. That ought to get the subject and save a step. But it is still tedious. Mere forwarding doesn't send the header information.


 

There are apparently people out on the web in places I don't have access to who are quoting me as saying things about David Brin that I have never said, and also quoting remarks made 10 years ago as if current. Let me get some things on record.

First, my differences with Brin are political, not personal, and mostly have to do with SDI, particularly views he held or was reported to have held prior to 1991. They were not rare or unusual views -- most of the liberal establishment had precisely the same views. That is the entire difference I have with him. As far as his works, he is a fine writer of good stories. Some people like his Uplift Wars series better than any other science fiction. That's high praise. He has won well deserved rewards, and anyone reporting me as saying they were not deserved is trying to promote a fight: I certainly never said any such thing seriously. I may well, when he won and I didn't, have said something I should not have said, but I don't recall any such thing, and it would have had to be many years ago.

Second, my recent references to a writer for whom I have little regard most certainly did not refer to David Brin.

Third, I took part in a joke at the North American Science Fiction Convention last fall that apparently David resented; it was a widespread joke, I thought it only a joke, and apparently I did not understand that some of those involved did not think it a joke. David has my apology for my being involved. I would not have done it if I had thought it other than a harmless joke.

In general, if you hear people tell stories about things I supposedly said about David Brin, you may take them as false, with two exceptions: a story about SDI which I am going to retire as long past retirement, and another involving Jimmy Carter, which again is so long out of date that it is silly of me to repeat it any longer. My opinion of David Brin is that he's a good writer, demonstrably an admirable parent -- I was very favorably impressed by the interaction between him and his children at NASFIC, and the children were well behaved, polite, inquisitive, all the things people want their children to be -- and for that matter I think he did well with his movie. The Postman was a good short story. I didn't care for it as a novel, but the movie was taken from the short story and did it well. I liked it. 

There are other stories being told that I can only characterize as vicious, most of which I first heard only when it was reported that I had said them. Anyway, if you hear stories about me and Brin, please tell me the sources; I think someone is trying to stir up trouble between us, because I am told that he is very unhappy about things I supposedly said about him. I would be unhappy too if someone had said those things about me. But I didn't, and he didn't, and since I don't know the sources there isn't much I can do except make the public record straight.

 

 

 

Incidentally, I have the opinion that almost all movies ARE short stories, in structure and plot, and have to be: it takes many hours to read a novel and 2 hours is a long movie. Filming a real novel with subplots is extremely difficult, and most attempts to make a novel into a movie are doomed from the beginning: and most novels written to be made into movies are not novels as all. Odysseys can be made into movies, but real novels have subplots and complexities that take TIME to develop and there is never enough time on screen to do that. But that's my view, and should be considered an aside and not part of this statement.

TOP

 

 

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Thursday, January 20, 2000

Roland reports that Heddy Lamarr is dead:

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000119/us/obit_lamarr_5.html 

She was a remarkable person. One story: after Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust sold 420 copies in hardbound, Bennet Cerf is reported to have said "If I ever publish another Hollywood novel it will be 'My 2000 Ways of Making Love' by Heddy Lamarr." Lamarr later published a Hollywood book called "Ecstacy and Me."  I thought her a splendid actress and many of my generation were somewhat in love with her. (You can tell my age: we were in love with Moira Shearer, Heddy Lamarr, and Ingrid Bergmann...)

Then I got this in the mail:

 From: Stephen Shirk <sshirk@houston.rr.com> Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 22:36:01 -0600 Subj: FW: Life is better than you think . . 

When you have had one of those TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT days, try this:

On your way home after work, stop at your pharmacy and go to the section where they have thermometers. You will need to purchase a rectal thermometer made by *Q-Tip. Be very sure that you get this brand. When you get home, lock your doors, draw the drapes, and disconnect the phone so you will not be disturbed during your therapy. Change to comfortable clothing, such as a sweat suit and lie down on your bed. Open the package containing the thermometer and remove the thermometer and carefully place it on the bedside table so that it will not become chipped or broken. Take the written material that accompanies the thermometer and as you read it you will notice in small print the statement "every rectal thermometer made by Q-Tip is PERSONALLY tested." Now close your eyes and say out loud five times, "I am so glad that I do not work in quality control at the Q-Tip Company."

--

Have been experimenting with Spam Cop. I also sent my "Opt Out" to DMA, then my confirmation of my opt out, and so far that seems to have doubled the amount of spam I get. I am back to fantasies involving nail guns.


In the current Atlantic Monthly there is an article about working at Microsoft that is right on the money. I do not know if it is on line. I get the magazine in paper, and the article by Fellows is excellent and illuminating (or in my case confirming since I already had the impressions he gives). 

 

Jerry: Thanks as always for your wonderful site. This may be old news but http://www.theatlantic.com/ is the Atlantic Monthly web site. I would like to see a little more information about subscriptions, and how many users/viewers of this site subscribe. More importantly, I guess, I am interested in some sort of automatic reminder system to let me know I need to re-up. I am very lazy by nature, and need some prodding. I miss seeing the UNIX adventure continue, but I guess you have to pay the bills. I remain

James Post

Thanks for the kind words. I note that they have the December issue up, while the article I was recommending is in the February issue. I presume all things come to those who wait...

(I find that you can find the January issue on line now, but you'll have to wait for February. I subscribe since it's hard to carry the computer everywhere. Maybe twice a year Atlantic has something worth a year's subscription, so I am ahead...)

As to subscription renewals, I sort of let people let their conscience be their guide. Eventually I will have to do more regulatory stuff, but so far it's all pretty cool...

 

TOP

 

 

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Friday, January 21, 2000

The plumbers who did the repiping finished the last of their work, but found a problem I have to fix. Bad stems in one of the lavatories. Sigh. An hour, if I do it, and about as long if I call plumbers.

Please do not write to berate me about how wonderful it must be to have piles of obsolete old stuff and what a horrible person I am to throw some of it out. In the first place, by "throw out" I mean it goes in boxes which get picked through by my sons, the Chaos Manor Associates, and anyone else who happens to be visiting who I know well enough to impose on. In fact there used to be a rule, you can't come upstairs unless you are willing to take something away.

Copyrighted software still for sale gets treated differently, of course: some of that really does go into a dumpster. Otherwise it only goes to an associate who will actually run it and give me a second opinion like "Hey you shouldn't have thrown that out!" and bring it back so I can try it again.

Old hardware after it goes through the above sifting process gets to Salvation Army or Vincent de Paul Society, someplace where THEY will sort it, and no one expects ME to maintain it. My wife wants me to dumpster more because the corner where the kitchen middens reside is one of her favorite corners and she likes to read there, which she can do only if that area is empty. So please. I weary of long letters telling me how much you or your favorite charity can use surplus computer stuff even if old. I know that. I also know that at my age if I spend a lot of my time sorting stuff, packaging, and mailing, I don't get a lot of other work done. When I was younger I could work 12 hours a day. Now 8 is about my limit before I run out of energy.

I would have thought that at my age I could relax and read some of the books I have meant to read or reread; instead I seem to be busier than ever. It doesn't help to be called a bad guy in vituperative language because I haven't time to solve everyone else's problems at a cost of hours I don't have.


I have just been told of the dangers of trying to use words in languages you don't understand. A chap jumped into a taxi in Hong Kong and tried to say, in Cantonese, "Take me to the airport." The taxi driver fortunately spoke English, and said "You have just told me to throw my grandmother under a truck."  You need to get the tones right with Chinese...


LOG: I found the source of the problem of the new Pentium 600 Windows 2000 machine taking nearly 3 minutes (and sometimes 4) to come up. It was that ATAPI DVD  as the master on the secondary IDE string. Make it a slave to an Hitachi ATAPI DVD ROM and it boots normally; or remove it. Either works. I did not have that problem with the I/O Magic 8x DVD on a Windows 98 machine. Interesting. But now all the hardware problems seem taken care of. I will now try to see what I was doing wrong about the networking.


I post the following without comment:

http://www.towardtradition.org/pubs/hitlerletter.htm 

 

TOP

 

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

TOP

Saturday, January 22, 2000

Log: I had difficulty getting Fergie (a fast Princess; 600 MHz Pentium III with 256 megs of Kingston ECC Memory) added to the Chaos Manor Domain. Since I didn't seem to be doing it right from Fergie (I wasn't), I thought to add her to the domain from Fireball the NT 4 Server that runs the domain. Alas no NT administrative book seems to know how: including Bob Thompson's O'Reilly book, and also AEleen Frisch's. Thompson's doesn't try. If Frisch's does she doesn't index it nor is it in the Table of Contents. So I did what I always do: I called an expert, in this case Bob Thompson.

For the record: on the NT 4 Domain Server, Start/Programs/Administrative Tools Common/Server Manager after which it should be obvious. I added Fergie to the Domain. Went back and started up Fergie. Logged on as Jerryp. Control Panel/System/Network Identification PROPERTIES. Prior to this Fergie never SAW the Chaos Manor Domain: it simply did not exist. Now I was asked for the name and password of someone who was authorized to add a machine to the domain. Administrator, password, and a long delay as the net was scanned. Then Voila!  Reboot and Fergie is now part of the Chaos Manor Domain, and all my other machines can access her drives, she can get to all the other machines, etc.

What I had been doing wrong before was hitting the button that opens the wizard on Fergie: that's fine when you first start, but the right way to add a Windows 2000 system to a domain is PROPERTIES on that Network ID screen. Simple enough if you read the fine print. I probably didn't have to go to the server and add the name from there; I probably could have done it through the PROPERTIES button. The Wizard ONLY DOES THAT THE FIRST TIME; after that the Wizard isn't so smart.

Fergie is destined to replace Princess, the Dual 200 Compaq Professional Workstation I am writing this on and using to maintain my web site and so forth. It's not that Princess isn't good enough, but the disk is getting full -- it is "only" 4 Gigabytes, which was pretty big back then. I used to have memory problems even with 296 megs of memory, and had to run a memory manager/garbage collection program (MemTurbo, search the site for references) but after we changed to Windows 2000 Professional that problem went away and has never returned. I keep a LOT of windows open and there are no problems. So Princess is good enough, but slow compared to what's available. She'll probably become a test bed for multiple processor Linux, and may become a main print and communications server for my entire system. All that will take a while as I pound on Fergie to establish stability, but I don't anticipate any problems.

MemTurbo for the record is invaluable with Windows 98 machines, and was useful with NT 4 workstation, but does nothing interesting with Windows 2000 Professional (does no harm apparently, but does nothing useful as far as I can tell).


Considerable mail on Windows 2000, mostly favorable. W 2000 Professional seems to have NT Workstation beat on all grounds. Certainly I think so, but with tiny exceptions the mail I am getting says so too. One correspondent reports subjectively that 2000 seem slower in loading Word 2000 and some other apps. I haven't noticed any such thing. And Fergie is really FAST (with an Intel Pentium III 600 she ought to be...)


This from Jim Warren:

Hale Hawley, Mary Kay Cosmetics, the Fuller Brush Company, and the W. R. Grace Company have decided to merge.  The resulting company will be known as Hale Mary Fuller Grace.


I have the new Tyan motherboard. Alas the instructions for placing the control jumpters are a bit ambiguous. I am sure they have mislabelled the pins -- it has to be because they show pins 1 &; 3 reversed in two different diagrams, so one of thos ehas to be wrong -- so it's not clear where the HDD LED and the Power On LED's go. Enough for tonight. I'm going to look at it in the morning.

 

 

 

 

TOP

 

 

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

read book now

TOP

Sunday,

 

 

 

  TOP

      Current View                                                         Current Mail

 

birdline.gif (1428 bytes)