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Friday,
March 26, 1999 Good weather. Home safe. Sinuses hurt like anything last
night, not so this morning, and sore throat clearing up so the anti-biotics are working
and I am finally going to get rid of this cold/sinus infection that has laid me out for so
long. Maybe NOW I can get some work done. I also need to get back to climbing my hill. I
am debilitated from lack of exercise on top of everything else.
Good bargains at Fry's in the paper this morning. Among other things the STB Velocity
128 Riva board with 8 megs memory at a very good price. This works with Linux machines,
and is Good Enough for any business application, up there with the Number Nine although
the Nine is better. But I'll get a couple of the STB 128 because they are reliable, Linux
likes them, and they make a good "default" board for building a new system:
build it up with that and change to a hotter board if needed. Also a big discount on
TurboTax. This will be the first year I have paid for a tax program. Usually all of them
got to me through BYTE. I could I suppose go ask for review copies, but in fact I always
end uop usinf TurboTax (in part due to familiarity) so it's fair to buy one for a change.
That's actually cheaper (on my time, which is what we are short of) than getting a bunch
of review copies and feeling obligated to look at each one...
Over on http://www.slashdot.org they
have one worthwhile discussion and one that is bizarre. Neither is easy to read, at least
not for me with a 49K connection, because the pages take forever to load; I think all the
adds load first before there is any text? In any event the worthwhile discussion is about
whether RMS, Richard M. Stallman, and GNU (GNU's Not UNIX) deserve to have their names
associated with Linux. The arguments get heated, and there's merit on both sides of the
issue. I've watched Stallman put a lot of time and effort into inventing a non-commercial
UNIX for a long time, and I thought his would catch on. He certainly did a lot to keep
alive the notion of Open Source Software. Whether or not that entitles him to a share in
the glory that shrounds Linux isn't as clear. What I would like to do is get a small
non-confrontational meeting of sane people to include Stallman and Linus, and see what
agreements resulted. That's unlikely to be me, but it might be a good theme for a Hacker's
Convention session or two.
The bizarre discussion is on whether a particulat columnist (not me) who promotes his
own work ought to be allowed over there. One book author has done a bit article on
it, in which he whacks at Jon Katz (the chap whose self promotional work he dislikes) and
in the middle of it takes a gratuitous slam at me. He doesn't like my mentioning my own
books, and he hates the names I give my computers, and apparently he's not too fond of my
dog either. I'll accede to his wishes and not mention his books (or name for that matter);
he certainly would not care to be associated with this place. Bizarre, I calls it. But
perhaps this is God's way of telling some people they have too much time on their hands.
Now to work. Roberta says we will climb the hill this afternoon. I can hardly wait.
Well, we didn't get up the hill. Not feeling up to it. But I do think I am recovering.
I hope so anyway.
I have a problem: I can't
find the floppy disk that I think came with my Olympus 400 Z camera. Over on Eagle One I
have the Olympus CAMEDIA software installed, and it works; I can download pictures with no
problems at all. Unfortunately, I cannot do that on Parsifal the new Pentium II. I have
copied the Program Files/Olumpus subdirectory from Eagle One where it works to Parsifal, I
have installed Adobe PhotoDeluxe 3.0, and I have made sure that every file with the name
Twain on Eagle One is in the proper subdirectory on Parsifal.
Now when I invoke Camedia, it almost works. It even offered to set the camera's time
stamp. What it doesn't do is start pulling in stuff to make thumbnails. I can't get it to
load anything, a file or from the camera. It acts as if it intends to, but there are no
error messages, and nothing happens. Clearly I am missing either some kind of DLL or some
kind of registry entry to tell it where to find something. I am not likely to discover the
truth by staring at the system. I can turn the place upside down looking for the Olympus
floppy (I presume that is what it came on; I can't find any other CD other than the
PhotoDeluxe 3.0 CD I have), but in fact I have nearly done that now with no results. I
can't find any reference to Camedia on the Olympus Web Site which is one of the most
poorly organized sites known. For that matter I find no software that admits it works with
the 400 Z camera. This is enough to drive me mad.
If anyone out there has a copy of the installation disk for the Olympus 400 Z, that
allows Camedia to operate (or heck, a Twain driver for the 400 Z that will work with
PhotoDeluxe) I would be very grateful for a copy. Alternatively if you know the names of
any dll or other files that must be present on the drive, but not in the PhotoDeluxe or
Olympus directories (or any of their subdirectories) please tell me; and if there's some
special registry entry I need to make, perhaps that will do it. I HAVE all the software. I
just don't seem to be able to make it install properly. This means I have a point failure
source here since only Eagle One can at the moment download pictures from the Olympus 400
Z, and I don't even know how to transfer the files to my laptop...
Well, I have been bitten by some kind
of Trojan. I hope it has done no worse than what I think it did.
I got an email that had a macro attached. I thought it was from a standard PR firm and
like an idiot I opened it. My system warned me that it had a macro, and foolishly I
allowed the macro to operate. The message text said I had asked for the document and I
shouldn't show it to anyone else. A document opened in WORD, which I already had open (I
think that saved me). It appeared to show me a document on Do's and Don't's of web design,
which I thought was someone's attempt at humor since the stuff was banal. What happened
though was that the system began to trundle and the modem lights flash. I did ctl-alt-del
and killed the task, whatever it was. I later discovered that it had sent itself,
purporting to come from me, to many people on my contacts list. it would have sent to more
had I not killed it; the list was in the to box from sent documents. Exactly what list it
got is not clear: it was from my contacts page but it wasn't all my contacts.
If you get an email with a word document attached that purports to be one you asked
for, even though it seems to come from someone you know, do not open it with macros
enabled. I should have known better. That appears to be the only thing it has done.
This thing used OUTLOOK to send the messages, and copies of the sent message with this
evil document in them were put in the SENT folder, so I could sort of reconstruct what it
did. Sort of.
Bob Thompson says it did worse to his system including altering outlook.pst and
normal.dot. It does not seem to have hit normal.dot with me. I'm now looking for files for
the appropriate time anywhere on the system, but I am not finding any, so I think I
limited its damage, but it will take a while to be sure.
If you get a message purporting to be me with a Word document with Macros in it, do not
open it with macros enabled.
Brooks Clark, to whom I sent it (and afterwards a warning about it) says it is a Word
Macro virus named "Melissa".
Olympus is at it again.
While they have the best digital cameras for the price, their software sucks rocks. It is
nearly impossible to install properly, and gives no clue as to what is wrong. Downloading
their latest doesn't seem to have helped a bit. This stuff is not for Anut Minnie. It's a
real pity, because when things are working they work so very well.
For now I have got one and only one machine on which I have the capability of
downloading pictures from my camera. I cannot transfer the software to any other computer.
It works just fine on the one it's on. Downloading the latest Olympus software makes Adobe
Photodeluxe, which I pretty well hate, attempt to talk to the camera, but it doesn't
manage to do it. Olympus software keeps trying, over and over, so that you can't
even close the stupid thing down without going to Task Manager. Once it starts trying it
will continue to try, and fail, until you either reset the machine in hardware or use
ctl-alt-del and Taskmaster to shut it down. Meanwhile, Olympus Camedia, which works on one
machine, is never mentioned in their web site, and cannot be transferred from one machine
to another. When all the program files are moved over, the program opens, but it never
loads any images, either from the camera or from the samples file, or anywhere else. It is
thus useless; except that it does work on Eagle One and is at the moment the only program
I can use to download pictures. Some day I will get it transferred to the lap top.
Probably in early 2003 the way things are going.
Olympus, you have wonderful hardware, and when it works your software can be pretty
neat, but your installation and error handling are HORRIBLE, and can be used as horrible
examples of how not to do things. Why is this?
What I really need is the secret of how to get Camedia to run on another machine. It is
plenty good enough, when it works.
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