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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 167 August 20 - 26, 2001

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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  August 20, 2001

With luck I will get fiction done today. 

There's a lot of mail that needs answers. I won't get to all of those until this afternoon.

 

 

 

 

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Tuesday, August 21, 2001

Rather than fill mail with it, I have created a Report page for the Nigerian and other scams. Those interested will find it here. In doing so I see that I haven't updated my ADD etc. report page in a while, and I ought to. Sigh. There is never enough time.

But at least I am doing some fiction.

 

 

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Wednesday

Sir Fred Hoyle is dead. We weren't close friends, but we had an odd mutual admiration: he liked my science fiction, and I found him fascinating. I first met him about 30 years ago at a Cal Tech seminar, and knew him off and on ever since. Sir Fred, John Gardener, Gene Roddenberry, and I  were together on a symposium at the Library of Congress where Sir Fred told me a hilarious story and also made the best one-liner I have ever heard. I guess I am now the only one left alive who knows the story.

Sir Fred was a scientific curmudgeon who made people think, and that's all to the good. My friend Adrian Berry once summed up one of Sir Fred's theories saying "But Sir Fred is off his head, don't you agree?"

But off his head or not, he did make people think, and his modified panspermia theories may yet prove to have considerable merit; and while his views on evolution from space are highly unlikely to be proven true (well in Popper's view of the world nothing can be proven true but you know what I mean) they are an intriguing addition to Darwin.

Roland sends this link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1503000/1503721.stm  

A spinning compass. Wow.

 

There is more correspondence on the Nigerian and other scams. Clearly P T Barnum thought small. Incidentally, for a list of all the reports available here ranging from a disquisition on the phrase "Bob's your uncle" to far more serious matters, see the Reports summary page.

If you want to know what the Sklyarov program (well it's not his but he did the algorithm) actually DOES, you may find that interesting.

I am told I am a bad guy for not putting in tags that describe my images. I recall doing that a few times when I first started this site, but it's a fairly onerous task. There is probably a way to get FrontPage to do something of the sort automatically although what it would say other than "a missing image" possibly with the file title (which may or may not have anything to do with what is in the file) I don't know. Apparently there is some requirement for these in government web sites. That may make more sense than most of the things governments do with our taxes, but if they require that of me I'll just have to shut down. I don't really have time to do everything here in the first place, and going through and putting in some kind ot "alt = "a picture you don't need to see to understand what's going on"" or "alt = a picture that makes sense of the text and without that picture it's pretty silly to be reading this"" -- if I had to do that I do not think I would bother to be here at all.

Ah well.  I suppose it is a matter of time.

But we were born free.

 

 

 

 

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Thursday, August 23, 2001

Quite a lot of mail reminding me that Windows doesn't use "extensions" quite the way DOS did, and UNIX has other conventions for file names that allow dots in the file name. I suppose on some level I knew that. 

But it still doesn't mean that OUTLOOK shouldn't be able to have rules based on attachment file names, particularly searching for those that end in anything executable: one ought to be able to flag messages with that kind of attachment, move them to some folder that insures that you'll inspect them, etc.

I'm also reminded that Windows hides file extensions by default. I had forogtten that: the first thing I do when installing Windows on anything is turn on the full path names, and turn off all that silly hiding extensions nonsense. 

Thanks for all the reminders. 

I have also had one email to the effect that there is a virus that runs when you preview the message in an Outlook preview window. Unfortunately, it said that was "Melissa"; and that one I know operates from opening an attachment. (It's about the only one of those I ever got bit by: I opened an attachment from a well known PR firm thinking it was a press release. Fortunately I noticed the furious hard disk activity that immediately began when I did that and turned off my machine. Even so it had emailed itself to two people before I could catch it....)

Does anyone have hard evidence of a virus or worm or Trojan that operates merely by being viewed in an Outlook preview window? I know of none, although I keep hearing rumors of them.

I have just heard a new theory: the reason we are all overweight is cheap clothes make it less costly to simply buy a new wardrobe than to lose weight to keep the old one...

New mail on Education and ADD

Another view of the Adobe Sklyarov matter.

 

 

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Friday, August 24, 2000

Worked on Burning Tower this morning and I'm limp as a dishrag.

Watched the Hour of Condit last night. I think his lips were moving. We know what that means.

They think they found the grave of Genghis Khan near Ulan Bator. HIs empire stretched over degrees of latitude and longitude, and he told subordinates that the greatest pleasure in life was to possess an enemy's wife while the man was forced to watch. His legions were never defeated although there were two failed sieges of stone castles in Bohemia, and there was one defeat of a detachment of his troops in the forest passes. The west learned to deal with light cavalry in the crusades. It was not an easy leasson.

And for course there is The Mask of Fu Man Chu, but that's something else again...

Lots more mail when I get around to getting it up.

 

 

 

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Saturday, August 25, 2001

Far be it from me to urge web DoS attacks, or spamming, but one does wonder how the j/e/r/k/s honorable people at http://www.the-dma.org/ have escaped. Here is an organization that has done its level best to prevent any kind of legal action to slow down the spammers, and which unashamedly blocks all attempts to prevent spam. This message is brought to you in compliance with the Federal Pro Spam bill that says that if you pretend to have a way to remove yourself from the mailing list then you are entitled to spam anyone stupid enough to believe you.

And despite my frustrations, thank heaven for www.spamcop.net ... At least it gives me a way to think I am striking back at the morons who believe that by sending me 40 copies of a message they will get my favorable attention.

And from Greg Cochran, who is always worth listening to, on obesity in America's youth:

Sigh. There is a lot of silly stuff said about diet in America, but no one is compelled to take it seriously. I sincerely doubt if asthma has anything to do with obesity or with an increase in obesity. Second, if you want reasons for an increase in obesity over the past twenty years, among the most plausible would be A. a decrease in dietary fat and B. a decrease in smoking. Fat is better than inducing satiety than carbohydrates, while the nicotine in cigarettes definitely speeds up metabolism.

As the ecologists insist, you can never do just one thing...

Roland tells us that now keyloggers are classified?

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/25/technology/25CODE.html 

But it's of a piece with the general level of competence and understanding of the new technology among our public servants. Competence is a rare thing. So we get powerful incompetents. But depend on it there is never a penalty for incompetence among "public servants".  So why do we think the right solution to any social problem is to hand it over to a government agency, which means hiring more "public servants" who will never be accountable to ANYONE?

Civil service is a monstrous farce. If we have to have a pervasive nanny state, then maybe the spoils system would be better. At least when you get a new political boss you get new "public servants" and perhaps one of them might even know the difference between classified and unclassified technologies.

Intel gets rid of the worst 10% of its employees every year. This lets them earn the profits to be a tax paying organization. Think what that kind of rule might do for tax consuming industries.

And make no mistake, the world consists of tax payers and tax consumers, and the consumers are winning.

The name of the file is damned. I guess you had to be there.

Microsoft is shipping XP. I have deliberately not activated the XP on one of my machines. The period for activation runs out today. Report Monday.

Perhaps they will now make it a criminal offense to break whatever silly scheme Microsoft uses to enforce "activation". Use a computer, go to jail. 

Now I have to go write. But first:

When I began this site, FrontPage apparently inserted "alt" tags when it put in an image. The tag would be the file name, which is better than nothing. I had assumed that was continuing, and I have been astonished to find that they aren't being put in any longer. Perhaps it was an older version of FrontPage? FrontPage help is its useful self which is to say no use at all.

Does anyone know a setting that will make FrontPage 2000 automatically insert alt tags defaulting to the file name  into the html code when it puts in an image? For example the "golden balls" lines: at the top of this page there is one put into the template when I made up this page a long time ago. It has the alt tag for the file name. Further down is one I inserted this week. It does not have that alt tag. 

I have the horrible feeling that FP 98 automatically inserted alt tags defaulting to the file name, and this was removed in FP 2000 in an attempt to make FP stop rewriting html, but I am not sure.

My colleague, rival, and sometimes collaborator John Dvorak has a wonderful essay in a rival magazine in which he asks why Microsoft, which has made its fortune hiring bright arrogant people who think they, not the customer, are right, wants to get into the service business in which the customer is always right no matter what.  The Microsoft corporate culture can't handle that concept, and anyone who believes it can't survive at Microsoft: will they have to kill the company to move into the service industry? This may be interesting.

Then there are those who invested in Salon... http://www.msnbc.com/news/613238.asp 

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Sunday, August 26, 2001

Opera thingy. Hot in Los Angeles.

 

 

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