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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

VIEW 89: February 21 - 27, 2000

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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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Monday  February 21, 2000

My temporary solution to the mail attack is not to look at the ibm.net account. This being a holiday there won't be much legitimate mail from there; it's mostly used for business purposes. Since I have heard from no one else on this I can presume the mail bombing attack that continues is directed at me alone, and since all the mail bomb messages have the same ID number the suspicion is that it's a mail server gone mad. The situation, on analysis, is not particularly severe, but it does show some of the vulnerabilities of the Internet. I presume IBM.NET and UU.NET technicians all went home (the bombs come through UU.NET) so there is no one on duty who can put a stop to this, and apparently there won't be until Tuesday. Just hope it doesn't happen to anyone else.

The spammer has gone to extraordinary lengths to fake where his stuff comes from, and who he is. power.net tells me there are tens of thousands of bounces coming there as a result of this so I was not the only victim although I have not heard from any others. uu.net tells me they have shut down the originating account. We don't know if Mr. Blevins whose name is in the Spam is a victim, or this was an advertising scheme gone very bad because he hired the wrong spammer to push his product. He may get to pay for a LOT of 888 calls as a result of this. Interesting.

But why would a Spammer be sending this message unless to promote First Venture? So as a pure guess, this was a shop job: they had someone send their solicitation and it went very wrong. The people hired to publicize their stuff may have fooled them, of course, but one moral of the story is that there probably aren't any legitimate email advertising services -- they're ALL spam.

 

 

 

 

 

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Tuesday, February 21, 2000

First the official Microsoft response:

http://www.microsoft.com/Windows2000/news/bulletins/response1.asp 

This is Allchin's statement regarding the "63,000 bugs" report.

It is early on today and I will look into the Spam Attack. The rain has stopped. I managed to write a few hundred words on Mamelukes yesterday.

I have an ODD GLITCH in Outlook/Word in Windows 2000 I need to check out to see if it happens in Windows 98, or on another machine. Most of this will go into the column, but it's something to worry about. 

Certain email simply cannot be replied to when Word is selected as the reply engine in Outlook. The symptoms are that some process begins, and Outlook is dead; it can be closed only be control-alt-delete Task Manager close application and even then it is not closed; logging off produces trundling and a dialog window about word not shutting down and generating an error log. I never find the error log in question. I have reinstalled Office 2000.  Since I only use Outlook/Word for much on Princess, which runs Windows 2000, I don't know if this is a Windows 2000 problem or an Office 2000 problem.

If I change from Word to Plaintext I can answer the mail in question. Moreover, for the vast majority of my mail I can answer it with no problems at all with Word; it is only certain mail that blows the system up, but it does that rather reliably.

Don't forget:

The Burning City

which is now shipping. So far everyone who has read it loved it. That could of course be a biased report...


I have a new book about Heinlein's stories that I will probably recommend but one sentence in it set me to thinking.

Robert said, and now I remember him saying it to me, that he wrote Glory Road in "23 glorious days". Now all novels don't go that way, but some do. Mr. Heinlein used to write that way: sealed himself into his suite (office, bedroom, and bathroom, all self-contained) with no telephone and came out only for meals. You might or might not be able to get him on the telephone at meal time; depended on his mood. But never at any other time. Ginny answered the phone, and unless the part of the house he was working in was burning she wouldn't disturb him, nor did she tell him who had called. He did that once a year, for from 30 to 90 days, and had the rest of the year to himself.

I could certainly do that. I have several books to catch up on, and the reason I don't get them done, I think, is that I do too much else.

The column takes time, but I am beginning to think that a week to 10 days sealed away every month would get some books done. And perhaps I ought to. It would mean this place gets a different kind of service, of course.

The problem is that only I can do what I do. Or at least I like to think that. And there's only one of me....

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday, February 23, 2000

Got a couple of thousand words done on Mamelukes yesterday and today. Microsoft has an explanation of the odd glitch in Outlook. It's rare but real, and it goes in the column. And I'm a bit tired.

Good Buffy last night...

Late: took me a while to catch up. More fiction today. Tested my two 600 systems. The Tyan motherboard will not run properly at 450x133, but will run at 100x6; the iWill board runs nicely at 4.5x133. I swapped CPU chips one to the other just to be sure although in fact the chips are the same, both Intel internal engineering chips 600, and being internal from Intel engineering I can set the multiplier. So I have two 600 machines, but one needs to be run at 100. I need to get a good 133 motherboard to finish the tests. The Tyan has a Celeron socket as well as a Slot One, so I can set it that way eventually, and probably will. That's Mohican, which with any luck will be the last Windows 98 system I set up for around here.

Run Regclean on your Windows 98 systems. It works. Cleaned up a nasty problem with Parsifal.

I have posted a press release over in mail. I don't usually reprint press releases.

And I heard a joke today:

Rabbi Schwartz answer his phone. 

"Rabbi, this is the Internal Revenue Source. Is Mr Harry S. Cohen a member of your congregation?"

"He is."

"And did he donate $12,000 to your building fund?"

"He will..."

 

 

 

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Thursday, February 24, 2000

The rains have stopped or at least paused, leaving me with a million things to do. There are some questions over in mail for today.

BLURB: Mary Mosquera provides the Washington lowdown and Jerry Pournelle opines on  this week's chip news in Byte.com's Week in Review. 

MP3 version: http://img.cmpnet.com/byte/weekinreview/thisweek.mp3 

 LAST WEEK'S SHOW IS NOW: http://img.cmpnet.com/byte/weekinreview/te-20000218_wir.mp3 

Trinoo apparently is now in Windows machines. See mail. I haven't had time to look into this much. You will recall that I warned everyone to go check their own machines for vulnerability. Just because something wasn't used doesn't mean it won't be, and it was only a question of time until Windows systems got incorporated into the world of the zombies. Happened even sooner than I thought, apparently.

I read at

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1555637.html 

The Windows version also allows the tools to be spread as apparently innocuous email attachments, much like ordinary viruses. Computer security experts say they haven't seen this happen yet, but that the Windows platform makes it relatively easy to do.

and that sounds more like the usual scare tactics of "experts" hoping to promote their services. Many, indeed most, "security holes" are found by security experts, often working at Universities, and the holes are fixed before the public ever becomes aware of them. Then there is a loud cry of "Wolf!" That is the problem: with reports like the above we have heard them so many times that we don't listen much. Perhaps this one is real, perhaps it is merely theoretical, perhaps it is a hoax like the evil virus that sets your refrigerator to defrost. I wish my colleagues in the industry would be a bit more careful on some of these reports.

 

I'm sitting here in my pajamas doing all this because I am waiting for some other stuff to happen, so I can get dressed, walk the dog, and get to work on fiction. I also have errands to run. Now perhaps I can make some phone calls...

My thanks to Earthlink: they managed quickly to solve my wife's problems of access to here site (it's maintained there, unlike mine which is at PAIR. She just doesn't want to change.)

And here's this:

Subject: The date 12/31/2107

Dear Mr. Pournelle,

When Mr. Fuhrhop mentioned the dates 01/01/1980 and 12/31/2107, I recognized them as the minimum and the maximum values of the MS-DOS date/time structure, used by all the FAT file systems. It's 32 bits long, where the last 7 bits determine the year offset from 1980, and 1980 + 2^7 - 1 = 2107.

Just in case this is of interest for someone...

Kind regards,

Stefan Fleischmann

-- Homepage: http://www.winhex.com 

I put that here because if I had a product of the week it would be WinHex; a very good hex editor, although the unregistered trial version has enough annoyances that I very nearly didn't find out. But it's worth the rather small price. More than worth it. It's the hex editor I use now.

And then:

From: gossg@mindlink.com

 Subject:Here's a better hyperlink to help us buy your book "The Burning City"

You provide a link to the Amazon listing for your book. However, there is a boycott running of Amazon in a significant portion of the computer nerd community. (in the activist atmosphere of the Internet, there are ALWAYS boycotts running -- I've been involved in three since summer)

The following link calls up your book from a book shopping comparison service. Amazon is there, but so are a dozen others. One of them is 23% cheaper if we're willing to wait for stock. Another is 8% cheaper and in stock.

http://www.bestbookbuys.com/cgi-bin/bbb.cgi?ISBN=0671036602 


The Amazon link, as I think I have said many times, provides me with a small "finder fee" for books bought using that link; I like the notion of getting higher royalties. But that's trivial compared to buying it at all, so if you hate Amazon....

If you LIKE Amazon: The Burning City

Thanks

 

 

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Friday, February 25, 2000

The Burning City is selling pretty well. Keep it up! Buy early and often...

Bix has been fixed.

I am continuing the cleanup. Now I go into the Cable Room where the severs lurk. I have a box that lets me control all the servers with one monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and I need to set it up. I also have some new memory for one of the servers.


Log

Spirit has a serial mouse on Port 2. At the moment we have a 10 megabit thin net ethernet card on an ISA. There is one PCI slot available. The board is a dual processor Pentium slot 7 system, with 128 megs memory. Everything works. It is full of dust...

It had communication with the UPS.  Wants it on startup.

The ISA card is at IRQ 10 0x300.

Fireball has 64 megs of EDO memory. I believe I have one more EDO DIMM here and that certainly ought to be upgraded. 

Spirit's serial mouse will NOT work with a regular Microsoft PS/2 mouse plugged into an adaptor to the serial port. However, an el cheapo PS/2-Serial mouse works just fine in Fireball's PS/2 slot and in Spirit's serial port 2 with adaptor, so I can use the KMV switching system I bought for the server room, using the el cheapo mouse for both machines. That saves one more monitor in the cable room. If I can get Spirit on the network with a PCI bus 100 base t Ethernet card I can get the thin net out of my life, and shut down the old old Garret 10 megabit concentrator that converts from 10/100 to thin net. No more coax. I may leave it in place...

I have a DLINK concentrator and cards, and I'll try those first. I know the concentrator works. One day I want to set up RADIO links also.

Every time I try to do something here I find more spam. Can't something be done about all that clutter? Blast them.

Added memory to Fireball. Ancient BIOS made that harder to do than it should be, but all's well now. Syquest SPARQ removable drive failing. Pity they went away, but I sure can't rely on that drive any longer.

Fireball installed and running, new memory, and a DLINK concentrator in the cable room. Fireball is now on a data switch, so I will be able to control three servers from that one monitor and keyboard.

 

 

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Saturday, February 25, 2000

Over in mail Erich Schwartz tells us of an excellent article. My comments are there as well. See

http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TotW/encyclopedia.html 

There has been a big spate of news about global warming, and I have a lot of accumulated stuff on the subject. If I only had more time... But it's worth looking at what's happening. Do understand that the Earth may well be warming (although on much the same data not 20 years ago the concern was for a New Ice Age); but whether we can or even should do anything about it is quite another matter. The truth is, we don't know enough, and rather than spend the money to find out, we seem to be haring off in all directions, wildly spending money on measures that are unlikely to do any good and will certainly do economic harm. Junk science rules in Washington and in the courts: if there's any better path to dictatorship other than straight military coup, I don't know it.

We went to Cider House Rules; intriguing and well done.

I have redone the cable room and all the servers are on a switching system so that they use only one keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Spirit is now DLINK 100 Base T and works and is FAST, although I think we had assigned Spirit a definite address rather than allow the name server to assign an internal address. We can fix that another time. For the moment, it's all working again.

I may add a 6-pack changer CD as an asset to one of the servers and I may not. 6 CD ROMS (if full, most aren't) would be 3.6 gigabytes or about $40 worth of hard disk space; simpler to copy the CD images to disk, no? I need to think on this.

Anyway, the system is working again. NT Network Administration isn't my strongest point, but with the aid of several books I seem to be managing.

 

 

 

 

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Sunday, February 27, 2000

Roberta has a concert this afternoon. I got some pictures, and I'll try to do something with them. I've been rebuilding the cable room. It works. I am using a switching device I got at Fry's and I have to say it works just fine with one exception having to do with an older system that wants a serial mouse. More in the column, but the Cable Room, while still infested with monsters, is less of a problem than it used to be.

Next week I'll look into whether it's worth upgrading to 2000 Server (as opposed to Workstation, which I heartily recommend). Meant to do more with mail yesterday but ran out of time. Should be a lot Monday, if I can get time to put it up. I sure get good mail.

 

 

 

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