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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

November 22-28, 1999

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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 November 22, 1999

We continue discussions of Microsoft's NT licensing policies. I now know why NT SP 6 breaks Lotus Notes: Napoleon Bonaparte was right. If you use Notes DO NOT, repeat NOT, install Service Pack 6 for NT. Not yet, anyway.

Mr. Dobbins will be here in a few minutes and we begin a new adventure with Linette. The REBEL.COM www.rebel.com Linux box works just fine and has become an indispensable communications manager for this place.

I have a bunch of observations about SIMCITY 3000 which has taken more of my time than it should, but just for the moment there's no time to write them up. I have due this evening a major article on the future of communications, Dobbins is to be here in a minute, Thanksgiving is coming, and Bob Gleason of Tor/St Martin is in town and wants to have lunch, and one does not disappoint any major editor, much less one who is also an old friend. And what else will happen?  Well, it IS Chaos Manor...

 

 

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Tuesday, November 23, 1999

There is something in this universe that doesn't want me to install Linux. Every hardware box I try it on has a problem. This time it is a flaky connection to memory on the motherboad. I'll replace that. Linux ran fast, and Red Hat 6.1 is a breeze to install, if you have decent hardware. Fortyfive minutes on install and about 5 hours on flaky hardware. Next time I will set up new iron and be done with it. 

But an older Pentium or AMD K-2 makes a heck of a good Linux box if you can keep the hardware going.

Official answer to the Microsoft / Lotus Notes situation. See Mail. It wasn't evil thoughts.

 

 

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Wednesday, November 24, 1999

I have probably taken my last trip to Fry's. Not only are their prices not much better than you can find on the web, but their basic policies seem to be customer hostile. A story goes with it, but I'll probably put that in the column. Even if you know exactly what you want, expect difficulties. This time they wanted -- demanded  -- to open two sealed and taped motherboard boxes. I had rooted through their stock pile to find two that had not previously been opened, but I couldn't get out of the store with the seals intact. That seems to be a new policy. They want the serial number off the mother board itself, not the box, although they had themselves sealed the box with nylon tape in a way that I certainly could not have duplicated while in the store. Why they thought this a good idea, I do not know, nor could anyone explain it other than that "the computer won't accept the order unless we do it this way."

There was a time when that store had some sane people in it, and there are still a couple of them in the CPU and Components departments, but this has become senseless.

If you get a Quantum Fireball CX drive, the jumper settings are shown on the drive as if the drive were held upside down with the power socket to your left. If you go to the web site they'll show you a picture with it right side up so that the settings look to be the exact opposite of what's on the drive itself. The clue on the drive is the tiny little box marked "key" which, if you stare at it long enough, you will discover is a picture, not to scale, of the cable connector with the key marked by a tiny bar; holding the drive with that "key" down makes it upside down, power connector to the left, the way it is pictured on the drive; on the web site they show it right side up, power connecter to the right.  Very confusing.  In theory it comes with the jumper in the right place for it to be the "master" setting,  and in fact it was, but the marking on the drive confused me. Oh. Well. It was 10 gigabytes for a hundred bucks at Fry's.

Fry's loses a lot to pilferage I am sure, and to employee theft as well, but the answer to that isn't to treat customers as the enemy. As Roland observes, the answer is surveillance cameras and store detectives.

Anyway I have the iWill Pentium II 400 going now, and Linux is being installed. First pass was a problem because the mouse wasn't detected but that message scrolls by so fast you don't notice it. But then it won't open X windows and that drops you into a text mode that's pretty hopeless.  Fortunately I figured it out.

Once I got the mouse connected properly -- I used Stabilant 22 -- then the installation went pretty well, except that I didn't properly configure the screen resolution. I checked the "graphical login" box, and when it finished all the compiles and rebooted, I got a big screen error message "Out of Range".  The STB 4400 AGP is capable of more, but not with the drivers Red Hat assigned.  I was locked out: there seemed to be no recovery.

Reboot with the CDROM and do it all again only this time be sure I have the screen resolutions set properly. This time I did NOT check the "graphical login" box. Big mistake. Now it came up and let me log in but I didn't have the foggiest notion of what to do, and the Red Hat book assumed I HAD a graphical interface going.

At this point I made my 4th panic call to Mr. Dobbins, who told me to use the highly intuitive command startx --bpp 32   with those spaces and dashes; and typing that in got me a perfectly good graphical interface that isn't windows but it's nice, and a Netscape that goes out through the Rebel box to the internet. I can now browse the net with Linette.  Linette is an iWill AGP mother board, a 400 mHz Pentium II, 256 megs of memory, a Creative Sond Blaster card, and a Bay Networks "tulip" 10/100 Ethernet card. I have had no problems with the net with that card. A SOHO card did NOT work. There is an internal IDE Zip drive which the system sees but which I haven't got working yet, but I am sure that's a matter of time. The disk drive is a Quantum 10.2 which formatted out to about 9.8 gigabytes. It's partitioned into a 300 megabyte swap file, a 16 megabyte boot partition, and the rest one big root.

So far I like what I see. I don't seem to have the problems I was having back with Red Hat 3.x when I began this experiment. Now I have two Linux boxes, and the Rebel is doing very useful stuff. I expect to see this one become useful shortly.

The boys are all here, and it's Thanksgiving weekend, followed by LASCON the Los Angeles SF Club's Science Fiction Convention out at the Burbank Airport Hilton. I'll be going over there Friday or  so and signing books Sunday afternoon. I have the maps for Burning City, I have finished a major article on communications, I've been told that my drew more people to a couple of big product web sites than they ever had before, and both Linux machines are working. It's been a good week despite some frustrations.

 

 

 

 

 

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Thursday, November 25, 1999

Happy Thanksgiving

Phillip is here with his young Husky, which is driving my 12 year old Husky  nuts: the young one is submissive enough but he wants to play constantly, and pokes into places that Sasha isn't sure this kid ought to be allowed to go to. Watching them is something else.

It's a glorious day and we're about to take them hiking. The Linux box has been stable all night. The standard screen savers are almost worth the price of the box...

Thanksgiving day. Two of my sons, Richard (left) and Phillip, with Sasha and Phillip's Nicholas. Nicholas is about 9 months old and kept bugging Sasha who kept telling him to "cool it, kid," but in fact the youngster learned some hunting techniques while we were up there.  The dogs got along pretty well. That's the trail above my house. Great place to walk. Great view, too.

 

The day before thanksgiving we had some high winds....

 

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Friday, November 26 1999

 

 

LOSCON

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Saturday, November 27, 1999

LOSCON

 

 

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Sunday, November 38, 1999

  I've been mostly at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society's annual convention at the Hilton in Burbank. More another time.

Larry Niven, Talin, and George Clayton Johnson at Loscon. I didn't get a lot of pictures, but this is a decent one. For newcomers, George and Nolan wrote Logan's Run long long ago.

A small panel by Niven and me. That's Roberta way in the back being dutiful. The audience was larger than it looks since this is a telephoto, but we were acheduled opposite JMS who was showing some new Babylon 5 stuff. The wonder is that anyone at all showed up.

Some did, though. That's Poul Anderson in the front row right.

SO: I am paying the bills, and I find that AT&;T without telling me has put in a $9.00 a month MINIMUM CHARGE on a Pac Bell phone. If I don't make any long distance calls, they charge me. No one told me The Phone Company was doing this. I will call MCI and all the other long distance carriers tomorrow: surely one doesn't have a MINIMUM LONG DISTANCE CHARGE.  This is ghastly. This is an old phone line I keep largely because it is cheap, and we make no calls at all on it, not even local. So now these highbinders are charging me for not using the phone. AT&;T, the big victim. Bah.

Mail on the Microsoft Office 2000 Registration by phone nonsense in Mail 76.

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