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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

Monday, December 12, 2005

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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  January 24, 2000

Solved several minor vexations regarding the iWill VD133 motherboard and Intel Pentium III 600 system running Windows 2000 Professional Gold Code. See last week for details. This system uses Kingston PC 133 ECC memory.

The I/O Magic DVD 8x DVD ROM IDE drive works fine as the only CDROM/DVD drive in a system, but with Windows 2000 if that is the Master on the Secondary IDE, there is a delay of almost 2 minutes when Windows 2000 comes up: you see the splash screen, the fuel gauge goes to 40% or so, and it sits there, no lights blinking no drives grinding NOTHING happening for about 2 to 3 minutes; then it boots up normally. I have since put the Hitachi DVD ROM IDE drive in there as master, and it works fine, with or without the I/O Magic drive on as Slave. I have no explanation, but I will try to get one. Understand that if you are prepared for a long wait for boot up to Windows 2000 the I/O Magic DVD works, and the WINDVD software that come with it will play movies under Windows 2000 with no decoder card: this system has a 3dfx Voodoo 2000 AGP Video card and the Hitachi DVD ROM drive, and a Pentium III at 600 MHz; and the movies show fine. I make no doubt they would show using the I/O Magic drive that the software came with...

I am assembling another Intel Pentium III 600 system on a Tyan Trinity board; this board has the property of allowing a Pentium III at 600 or a socket 370 Celeron at something lower. I intend to put Windows 98 on it, and see what happens with both those chips using Kingston PC 133 ECC memory ( although with the Celeron we will run the system at 100 MHz not 133).

I will then transfer all the material including the page maintenance from Princess, the Compaq Dual Pentium 200 Professional Workstation that has served me so well for several years, to Fergie, the new Pentium 600 with an iWill board. Fergie is of course a very fast Princess. My wife tells me that may be undeserved in her case, but it's too late to change it now. Anyway, I will shift all my "main" operations from this Windows 2000 Professional system to Fergie. That may not be as simple as it appears: among other things it means that every bit of this web will have to be sent up to the web site again to get them synchronized for time and date. That will take all night...

Other utilities and such look to be simpler to move or to reinstall. There ought to be enough disk space...

I will then test out the new Pentium III 600 Windows 98 system and if that goes well it will replace Parsifal as my main games and text writing machine. The old machines will become servers. Princess may get Linux; with those dual processors she ought to do very well as a general purpose communications and print server.

Roland Dobbins has been playing with the OmniSky Palm Vx system and loves it; his and my experiences will be in the next column. If you are looking for a pocket computer, think real hard about Palm Vx and an OmniSky radio modem. The potential is enormous including for remote control of major systems.

I have had to "twit bit" certain people who simply can't stop sending me abusive mail with no content. Anything from them goes to the bit bucket and I will never see it. I don't like doing that but there are two people who waste my time without contributing anything, and this is a simple defense. Outlook 2000 Rules work quite well...

I have been religiously sending spam to SpamCop (see www.spamcop.net) and have had the satisfaction of closing down about 25 spam operations, according to Yahoo, Earthlink, AOL, and a couple of other services. That's the good news. The bad news is that I seem to be getting EVEN MORE Spam, some of it stuff that was closed down and is now sent to a proper address rather than the one I got the original from. I am beginning to dream of staple guns and burning buildings again. I also reported that I didn't want any spam to the Direct Mailers Association, and I think that has generated a bunch more Spam also. Clearly something has to be done, and will be done. The reaction when Congress gets around to doing something is likely to be extreme, and the cure may be worse than the disease.

Shameless Self Promotion Department: I note that THE BURNING CITY is available at AMAZON although it is not yet in print.  If enough of you order it they'll print a lot more of them...


I was reminded today of Hillary Clinton's comment when asked if small businesses would have problems with the costs of her health care scheme: "I can't be responsible for every underfinanced business in the country." 

 Why are politicians more and more like that?

 

 

 

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Tuesday, January 25 2000

I am so sick of Microsoft's stupid documentation that I want to mail them a skunk. Th third party books including the much touted Woody's guides, and Platinum Editions for Office 2000 and all the rest are no better. Authors who write books that are that hard to use, and leave out so much, should not be writing.

Will someone tell me how to do an automatic replay in Outlook 2000 (not express, the big one, the real thing). None of the books has any reference whatever to replies, automatic replies, automatic messages or any other way a sane person might look this up. The Rules Wizard wants me to refer to a file with an extension of .oft, and a search shows that I have three such in a folder in Program Files under Office Templates. Clearly they are "office templates". Now try to find any reference to them, what you can edit them with, or how to create a automatic message to be sent. 

I know you can do it, because I did it before I had to reinstall Office 2000. Here is what I said back in December 1998:

>>I HATE OUTLOOK. A bad mood to be in just as I am doing orchids and onions. A hideous rotten onion to the people who wrote the OUTLOOK documentation. I have spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to do a new REPLY message for a new RULE. The Rules Wizard wants that message already created and gives you no opportunity to create one. The egregious Office Assistant won't tell you that's what you want to do. The Tools menu offers you a lot of options none explained.

 I know I managed to DO this once, but my memory seems to be going, and in any event you ought not have to spend half an hour looking through help files, the Que USING OFFICE 98 book, and black magic to find out how to "create a reply template"; or"create rule reply"; or "create oft file".

The files are called .oft and they are apparently not simple text files. Now you can make a copy of one of the .oft files and then OPEN it, after which you can edit the text; then try to save it as the file name you opened it under. The directories are wrong, it thinks it is a doc file, and it will take while but eventually you can get to Program Files/Microsoft Office/Templates and save the stupid thing under the name you opened it under as a .oft file at which point the imbecile Office Assistant will pop up and ask if you want to save this over the old file name, then when you try to close this thing it will again ask if you want to save it. This has got to have been designed either by someone who never USED it, or by a distinguished person who ought not be allowed to work on anything else. Including the French fry machine at the local burger joint. And documented by an illiterate.<<

I see no particular reason to change that view. Nothing better has happened, including enormous QUE "Special Edition" and "Platinum Edition" books that purport to tell you everything but which really demonstrate that the authors, famous experts all, are much better at demonstrating their expertise than in helping mere readers FIND OUT HOW TO DO SOMETHING.  Now I may spend a lot of time saying elementary things, but by cracky I do try to explain things. I wish other computer authors would learn the trick.

Anyway, I am going to have to do all that again to make new reply "templates," but I would also like to make the people who designed this, and who didn't document it, live in a room with some dead fish and a skunk for a couple of weeks.


Wow! Thanks to all of you, we are pushing upwards to the top on Amazon with Burning City... I will repeat the exhortation...

Shameless Self Promotion Department: I note that THE BURNING CITY is available at AMAZON although it is not yet in print.  If enough of you order it they'll print a lot more of them...

KEEP IT UP!!

Well, we have proved it can be done. Perhaps now is better to wait until there is a book?  I don't follow these things...

 

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Wednesday, January 26, 2000

http://asia.eonline.com/Games/buffy/ has a game I would normally like, but when I tried to get to it, I was told I needed to update my shockwave; after which I was told to register, after which nothing whatever happened. There was a fuel gauge that said in 28 minutes all would be well and ten minutes later said the same thing. To heck with it. Why have offers of stuff and no servers to send it with? Piffle. It's not the net, which may be slow, but it is not THAT slow. And Macromedia ought to have some kind of warning when things are just too congested; but they don't, figuring on wasting your time until you get the message that they aren't really sending you anything, although they were quick enough to collect your name and address, which they have probably sold to 30 spam lists while you sit there waiting for this upgrade that never comes. Or am I overly cynical?

Microsoft is trying to drive me crazy and their documentation is so awful they ought to get a prize. Is anyone listening?

I put something similar over in mail, but I keep getting mail like this:

Jerry -

This may be no use to you, and I'm sorry if I'm the 10,000th person to tell you this, but the steps to make an OFT (in Outlook 98) file are: 1) Create a "New Mail Message" 2) Enter the text that you wish to appear in your template 3) Click on File|Save As 4) Select "Outlook Template (*.oft)" in the Drop Down List Box (ComboBox) labelled "Save as type:" 5) Enter the name that you wish to give the template (in "File name:" edit box) and click Save

You can, of course, do 4) and 5) in reverse order! There appears to be some help on this if you enter "template" in the help index and then display "Save a form as a file or template".

Toodle pip, 

ROY TRUBSHAW, SYNAMIC LTD. 

"... the fundamental design flaws were completely hidden by the superficial design flaws ..." - Douglas Adams; So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

The important thing to note is that in 2000 you will not be offered the option of saving as a .oft file unless you remove the option to use WORD as your reply editor! and that in 2000 there is nothing like that in the help files. Search in HELP for 'template' and you get a list but none of them are that. If any of this is documented the documentation cannot be found.

I would like to find and beat senseless the manager in charge of documentation for Office 2000. Whoever that is should not ever be allowed to work on anything more complicated than sweeping floors in places there it doesn't matter if the floor is dirty. His stock options ought to be cancelled. This individual has managed to make the HELP files in Office 2000 even less useful than the nearly useless ones in Office 97/Outlook 98, and while that is an achievement, it is not one that one should be paid for making. 


I have been attempting to download shockwave for an hour. Nothing is happening. I conclude that this is a silly waste of time.

Dump it. I am offered the chance of  "repairing" it. Let that happen. And 28 minutes later, Voila!  Now was it worth it?


For all us intellectuals let me recommend David Gelertner (one of the Unabomber victims) on the consequences of rule by intellectual:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/9703/gelernter.html 

Read it. It's good for your soul. And recall who Gelertner is when you read it. 

 


 

 

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Thursday, January 27, 2000

On this day in 1967, Virgil Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died
in a flash fire in their Apollo I capsule.

An old military toast:

"Here to us, and those like us.

Damn few left, and most of those are dead."


 

With any luck I'll get out of here this afternoon and get to the beach house, where I hope to do 10,000 words of Mamelukes. 

Then there is this:

From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com

Subject: Shockwave

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

In re Shockwave, I think the timer is broken. Try starting the download and then going away for a long time. I downloaded it the other day, and it reported "28 minutes 15 seconds" for a long time, then suddenly it was done.

Best, St. Onge

so I'll try that to see what happens. 

We went to an opera party with Samuel Remy last night. Great party, but I ate too much chocolate. People try to tell me sugar crashes are a myth. Not for me they aren't. 


This in from the editors at BYTE.COM:

If you want to send people to old Week in Review webcasts, there is a complete set at:

http://www.audiohighway.com/library/showdirect.asp?SecStr=NEWS&;SuperCatID=5&;  Catlevel=2&;HasSub=0&;CatID=AW000240&;SubCatID=AW000118&;CatName=Byte%2Ecom 

Sorry about the long and ugly URL.


A. E. van Vogt, RIP.  Van was one of my first friends among professional SF writers, and one of the men I much admired. He had been fading fast the last couple of years, and died at 87 after a long and productive life. Mayne, his first wife of some 30 years died of cancer.   Van then met and married Lydia when he was about 65 and they had a number of good years. Lydia wasn't a science fiction person at all, but she did like most of Van's friends, and come to literary events.  Van and Robert Bloch were two of my favorite people, and I've missed them both for several years: Van really did fade fast after he won the GrandMaster award of the Science Fiction Writers of America, an award he richly deserved.

I first read his far-ranging stories when I was in high school, and they had a lot of influence on me, really stretching my imagination.


 

 

 

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Friday, January 28, 2000

I'm off to write. Back next week.

 

 

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Saturday,

At Beach House

 

 

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This week:

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Sunday,

Beach House. Working

 

 

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