CHAOS MANOR MAIL

A SELECTION

October 19 - 26, 1998

Richard Meyer [Richard_Meyer@za.cu.com]

Hi Jerry,

I’ve been following your Linux saga for a while, without wanting to interfere and disturb the "purity" of the experiment. The tone of your posts re Linux has been very downbeat lately, and I was wondering if this was just the Linux, or whether the allergies were really getting to you.

While most of your grumbles are justified, I feel that you are not giving Linux the same dedication you give to other software. For example, see the saga of Winnie - you did a heck of a lot of work there, but there were few grumbles. On the other hand, with Linux you started off enthusiastically, but now you just seem very depressed.

When I installed the first time, I also was left facing a prompt and wondering what I was doing there (clueless at the prompt) as it were. But I had been using DOS for everything and only firing up Win when I absolutely needed it, which gave me the impetus to fiddle about a bit (DIR worked and so did a few other DOS commands - they were defined as aliases).

I admit that there is no such thing here as a learning curve - more like a learning wall, but anyone who could master DOS can learn a few Unix commands and be productive. It really is worth it. Otherwise there’s always X, which is not bad - BTW if there is a question when setting up X that asks something like "Logical screen bigger than physical screen" - say yes. This gives you the ability to have large logical screens so that everything isn’t on top of everything else.

I have been using Linux now for about 2 years and would not consider anything else for my programming - the first thing Linux freed me from was the need to worry whether or not arrays would fit into 640KB.

A friend has been using it for large neural net applications and Web page design, and finds everything to be very portable.

Richard Meyer

Dr. Pournelle, Congrats on selling The Burning City. The question is Larry Niven has written other stories in the same world as The Burning City before (I am thinking of a story from All the myriad ways) My computer question is how does one go about formatting a hard drive and reinstalling window son it. Thank you very much for your time and knowledge. Ray Percival

Roger G. Smith [rgsmith@c-gate.net]

You’ve probably seen this, but not every one has. The timing is perfect. See

~ Alice in UNIX Land ~ ( http://www.obfuscation.org/~deco/aliceinunixland.html )

Sure, it boots, it loads, it takes memos. But some day you’re going to want to ‘right click and send to A:\’, and then where will you be? Searching desperately for a "man" page, that’s where!

Harry Erwin [herwin@osf1.gmu.edu]

We use a few around the house—MacOS, Windows 95 and 98, LINUX, UNIX via telnet, and then Diane has to deal with some other strange ones when she telnets into NIH. Each seems to have its niche:

MacOS—internet access, productivity applications, graphics, and programming. I use Metrowerks Codewarrior C++ both in my teaching and in my dissertation research—it’s a good deal closer to the new C++ standard than either VC++ or Borland. This I find to be the easiest OS to use.

Windows/DOS—mostly games, but also some programming (Metrowerks, VC++, Borland, and DJGPP) and statistics (S-Plus)--it helps to have a platform around where I can replicate the compiler problems my students encounter. I do use productivity applications on a Windows 95 box at work, but I’m forceably reminded from time to time that there are some kluges in that OS. I always reboot that box first thing in the morning. I have used Windows NT for graphics and computational work, and I like its stability over Windows 9X, but not enough to buy it over MacOS.

LINUX—programming (gcc) and internet. My middle son is into bioinformatics programming and prefers LINUX as the host operating system for that work—it’s faster and more stable for what he does. It’s also useful for me to have a UNIX platform around the house at times.

telnet (me) into the UNIX machines at school—programming (I teach data structures and advanced C++) and neural modeling. These are Alphas, SGI, and Solaris boxes.

telnet (Diane) into the NIH machines—SAS, other statistics programs, FORTRAN programming, e-mail. This is a heterogeneous bunch, including IBM mainframes and Solaris boxes. There may still be a Convex and a DEC-20 out there somewhere.

I’ve worked with many others (Tandem OS, Apple ProDOS and DOS, Twenex, VMS, OS 3X0, various CDC Cyber systems), and have been the system engineer in charge of the requirements for one (a distributed, highly fault-tolerant, real-time OS). My take is that you choose an operating system the same way you choose an application—based on what you need it to do. I appreciate the fact that you’re trying out LINUX—that’s the only way to figure out what it does and whether you need it—and for some things you may do someday—modeling and AI in particular—I suspect you’ll find it to be your platform of choice.

Cheers,

Hello Jerry

I hardly ever read Byte anymore, well, these days never.

But I’ve missed your column.

So, now I’ve just found you again through a reference on the DKLite mailing list. And you’re running a Linux stream of conciousness from the point of view of the older beginner (returning to the fold?) ... just when I need it! How did you know?

When I get money again you can have some of it, but fr Chri’sake don’t stop while yr waiting for it to arrive. By then you might even have the ecommerce automatics working.

rgds

Dear Jerry,

You know, I was thinking as I looked over your web site, that you might find it easier to manage if you moved it to MS Access. The downside is that you would have to learn HTML, but only a little.

Each section of your web site would get it's own table. For instance the David Em Graphics Updates would go in a table with fields like Subject, KEY (automatically generated, either from the subject field, or by just using the auto-counter. It depends on whether you want keys that make sense or not), date, and then a memo field that contains his column, in HTML format. I would strip out the <HTML> and <body> statements that result from a Word HTML export, so that the column would start with a <p> and end with a </p> (there can be more <p>s and </p>s in the middle of the column).

Once you have your work stored in the Access file, you write a script that exports the whole thing into your web directory tree. If you feel adventurous, you could even try to get Access to ftp the files directly to your web server (I tried to do that at my job over the summer. It failed, but for strange reasons. You might have more luck finding help then I did).

I've implemented this plan a little on my own web sites. But don't think that I am pawning an untested plan on you. I did extensive work on this idea for the company that I worked for over last summer.

My business page (http://catpro.dragonfire.net/) implements what I am talking about, but it is a very simple page. My personal page demostraights what I am talking about on the main page, but since college has started again I haven't had time to finish implementing that design across the rest of the site. Besides, I want to move the whole thing over to PostGres SQL server. On my personal page (http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/main.htm ), the two parts of the table are each stored in their own Access table.

A note on what you said about large quantities of email at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/computing/August98.html. Didn't you once write in your column that you have a Linux test system? Linux's email system is excellent at handling large amounts of incoming email, once you get it to work at all. I'm using fetchmail (grabs email from a POP server and runs it through sendmail), sendmail (my mailing list currently goes into the /etc/aliases file, soon I want to implement majordomo, or something similar). As I said, getting Linux to work with email in the first place can be difficult. I recommend reading the guide to getting email working published in the February issue of Linux Journal (that article is held on their web site, www.linuxjournal.com).

--

Joshua Boyd

<<And here’s a suggestion I wish I had time to think about more, because I

think it would do a lot for me:>>

<<you might find it easier to manage if you moved it to MS Access. The

I hope you jest. This guy’s Access suggestion is a very bad example of

re-inventing the wheel. He’s apparently more interested in the

golly-gee-whiz neatness of the process itself than the results. You could invest weeks of work getting a system like this set up, debugged, and tested, and still end up with something that requires much more effort to use routinely and is functionally inferior to FrontPage. Not to mention that you’d end up with dynamically-generated pages that search engines can’t index. FP98 has it’s aggravations, but it allows you to accomplish more with less effort than any alternative like this. FP2000 will be better still. What you’re doing ain’t broke, so why fix it?

<<Linux’s email system is excellent at handling large amounts of incoming

email, once you get it to work at all. I’m using fetchmail (grabs email from

a POP server and runs it through sendmail), sendmail (my mailing list

currently goes into the /etc/aliases file, soon I want to implement

majordomo, or something similar). As I said, getting Linux to work with

email in the first place can be difficult.>>

Yes, and thermonuclear devices do a good job of exterminating that pesky crabgrass problem, too, so long as you can live with some collateral damage. As far as his casual suggestion that you implement sendmail, be aware that most Unix gurus regard someone who can configure sendmail as a guru’s guru.

This probably aren’t the only reasons, but ...

When pictures don’t have size identifiers (the width= and height= bits inside the image tags), bad things happen. On a site where they do, you (the browser) canleave the familiar box while loading the text, and then come back later to fill it in. If not, you have to download the image to fing out how physically big it is before you can do the rest of the page. Most site creators put them in automatically. But ...

Banner ads are often hosted somewhere different from the site they appear on. Often they change without html being updated. So, they’ve got no size tags, and they have to be loaded first. Similar things can happen with automatic table layout things. This destroys everything, and makes people turn off. If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, I recommend the Alertbox at http://www.useit.com for good advice on making the web useful.

Keep on dancing; I love your site, and I’ll be paying you just as soon as I work out a good way to get 10 bucks to you from the UK without the use of credit cards (my bank manager may know...)

Burnside Kenneth W [kw.burnside@hosp.wisc.edu]

Anchordesk is driven entirely by a database—when you click on a link, a query is sent back to the database to pull up the appropriate ads, and a second query is sent to grab the text, while a third query references what the formatting will be.

Sometimes, one of the queries will fail. The lowest priority query is the one for the text.

As to Berst’s Anchordesk, I generally find him inane and sycophantic— he hypes whatever products are being advertised on ZDnet for better than half his collumns, and for the other half, it’s clear he does skimming, as opposed to actual research.

Jerry:

If you think Berst is bad now, it was REALLY slow when they first started it! I gave up on it for awhile but its gotten quite a bit faster. Relatively speaking.

Just now, I clicked on a link to it in e-mail, Communicator 4.5 launched, found the page and drew screen (stayed white for awhile as you experienced) and then finished and was ready to read in 40 seconds.

This on a Mac 7100/66 with a G3/215, 72meg ram and connected to a T-1.

Obviously, it takes a lot longer over a modem. And I don’t even want to think how slow it was over modem when it was too slow for me to tolerate over T-1!!!

***

When you get Linux up to speed, if you want another adventure, have DSL installed. Maybe my experience wasn’t typical, but one person I outlined it for said it would have been ruled a justifiable homicide by any jury if I had acted on my frustrations.

Comment to View 20, Wednesday afternoon Oct 21...

They don’t call it the World Wide Wait for nothing :)

The short likely explanation is that the page in question is layout-formatted into columns like yours using tables, *and* that one or more of the cells contain animated gifs. Nothing will render on the screen until the cells have been fully parsed and images in them decoded. An animated gif *without* explicit size declaration put say in a bottom table cell could easily generate a long delay between "done" and visual text, since the gif has to be size-determined (for *all* its frames) and placed before the text rendering can start.

Such a page should render significantly faster if the browser option to view images is turned off. (There are times when I would really like this option to be a toggle button on the toolbar, with instantaneous effect.)

Cheers

/ Bo

--

Dennis de waard [digidennis@hotmail.com]

Hi Jerry

I was searching on the web for an answer to a problem I have with Word 97 as HTML editor.

I came to your page and I wonder if you know the answer. (If you have got the time for this, otherwise it’s ok!)

At work I had to make internet-pages, and I tried to make them with Word 97. Perfect! It went very well and I was so enthousiastic about it that I wanted to make some at home too. Well, that’s where my problem started.

I have Word/Excel 97 installed on my computer, and creating a internet page is possible (I can see the lay out, BUT when I save (or convert) the document to HTM-format, The only thing I see is the HTML-codes, like <BOLD> on my screen. This doesn’t happen at work, where nothing more or less things are installed......

Richard H. Brown Jr. [c_brown@ids.net]

Dr. P

re the next in the series, since the Aliens perform a re-supply function

for the "troops". Is there a time distortion re "real time" vs travel time between Earth and Tran. If there is a plot element of introduction of some "ATF’ers" investigation the export of munitions to an unknown destination might be interesting, also the introduction of a Laptop computer, solar recharger and several cd-rom’s of information to the University.

Alwin Hawkins, RN [ahawkins@imagina.com]

Donald W. McArthur [don@mcarthurweb.com]

Jerry,

Your mail volume is way down due to the experiment you inadvertently performed; you changed the requirements for submitting mail.

Your new requirements are non-trivial, compared to point and click. And while it is a solution, it is not an elegant solution.

You could consider a Perl/CGI solution. Your readers would submit mail with their browsers, you would review it with your browser, and you would post it to your web site with your browser.

I’ve also been thinking of a solution that would place the submitted e-mail into a text box for you to edit, and also provide a different text box for your comments.

In any event, and whatever solution you chose, some form of automation is the way to go. And Perl/CGI is currently the state of the art, though Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (from an NT web server) is gaining adherents.

You know, you need a webmaster, I think. And I think I’d be interested in filling the role, as a volunteer (my job disallows outside income). We should chat. Look at my web site, and see if you envision any possibilities for yourself.

*********************************************

Carl Leubsdorf, Jr. [cpl@access.digex.net]

Hi Jerry,

1. Glad my earlier message cheered you up. Hope you know I’m no deadbeat now; my check should have reached you.

2. Just bought and read Starswarm. Great book. Hope we hear some more about Kip and Lara sometime.

3. Many of your "problems" with FrontPage would go away if you ran a local server with IIS and the FrontPage Extensions, then "published" to a server (www.jerrypournelle.com) that was also running the extensions. For example, your problem with needing a "batch mode" to update the "last modified" links can be fixed by doing a "recalculate links" in FrontPage Explorer. Just set the "last modified date" up as a FrontPage "Include" component in its own file, then "include" it in any other files as appropriate. Open the date include file, save, and recalc the links. I believe many of your absolute link problems would go away also if you used the Extensions. This is the way MS wants you to use FrontPage, and I’ve found (hosting/managing many sites with FrontPage for about 3 years) that it works well. They ARE the Borg, and you Will be Assimilated! :).

4. http://www.simplecomputing.net/contlist.htm has information on an Outlook add-in for creating mailing lists. The list is stored as a single contact, doesn’t require the Personal Address Book, and can be stored in any contacts-style folder. Haven’t used it, just read about it in Woody’s Office Watch newsletter (http://www.wopr.com/wow/).

Have a nice Sunday,

Carl

----------

Carl Leubsdorf, Jr.

From: Brian Cheesman [cheesman@istar.ca]

Dear Jerry:

Regarding reading Jesse Berst’s column: You’ve probably received scads of mail so far on this, but I recall reading somewhere that tables do not display until they have completely downloaded.

I’ve also collected U.S. $11 to send ($10 for this site and $1 for Stephan Possony’s widow), which I intend to send real soon now.

I also noticed your computer GIF now explodes at a normal rate, so I guess the GIF s/w I sent did the trick.

Also, NASA just launched a probe (Deep Space I) which uses an ion drive as its propulsion method (post-launch).