The View from Chaos Manor

Week 4

Jerry,

I just read on your your site about the difficulty of people from foreign countries sending you checks. Presumably, Millicent would solve this problem, as well as many others. While you are waiting for Millicent to be implemented, however, I suggest you sign up with "Kagi". Kagi is a shareware payment service. Here’s what Kagi does: Instead of customers sending money to individual shareware authors, they can send money to Kagi in _any_ form (this includes foreign currency, credit cards, checks, money orders, invoice, First Virtual, whatever). Kagi then takes a flat six percent of that, and sends the rest to the shareware author, aggregated into a single monthly check. Kagi removes the burden of accounting and payment processing from the shareware author, and let’s them concentrate on writing code or doing whatever it is that they do best.

Anyone who is collecting payments over the internet can use it. For example, there are various "charity" accouts—there is a list of charities that you can donate to using the Kagi mechanism. There are also newsletters and organizations which have Kagi accounts—you can pay your membership dues via Kagi.

Kagi works with both shareware and crippleware, i.e. they have a mechanism whereby receipt of payment will automatically send you an email containing an activation code.

Kagi has been in business for about 5 years, and processes $20,000 worth of payments per _day_. They have over 500 authors.

Kagi is convenient for end-users—they can submit payments via regular mail, email, web or fax. They have a customer support staff to handle end-user problems.

Also, I should mention that the founder and owner of Kagi is Kee Nethery, a close personal friend of mine. (In fact, my personal web page is running on a machine located at his offices.) If you ever come to Baycon, I’ll introduce him to you.

Not knowing what you were using to produce the "Blue Button", I’d guess it was trying to build a default sized graphic image and rendered the Big Black Box the button was trapped in.

IrfanView32, while being the slickest viewer I’ve seen in ages, can also clean up little problems like the Button. Open the file with Irfan, use the mouse to encircle the area you want to save, then click on Edit - Crop. The result is attached as BestBrws.JPG.

Expect a ten-spot in the mail shortly. I was a subscriber to BYTE for years, and the first column I’d turn to was Chaos Manor. For the price of a cheese pizza, I can learn along with the Good Doctor for a year and not worry about cholesterol.

Thanks. Worked like a charm, of course. I'll move all this over to mail directly, but we'll leave it here a day or so.

 And now for a key question:

The questions here being two. First, if this isn't readable, what would be, that I can manage to do without spending most of my time at it. And behind that of course the implied question, am I going to be 'on the web' other than casually? What formats are readable?

For what is probably a disastrous experiment, see TESTVIEW.   [Note: it was a disastrous experiment. Most to all the links in testview are broken. I haven't eliminated it, but think of it as a horrible example. Pay no attention to that test page behind the curtain.]

Long lines at Fry's and COMPUSA for Windows 98. I can't think why. I have had the shipping copy for a couple of weeks. Eric (Eric Pobirs, our mad associate) likes it a lot but I doubt he'd have stood in line to get it. Windows 98 solves some problems, and creates others. It breaks some CD R/W systems -- the Ricoh Media Master can't stand it without a bios upgrade and that upgrade has to be done from DOS, and it's complicated enough that I haven't done it. In fact, I don't have a CD R/W system running just now because I had the Ricoh in Fireball under Windows 95, and when we changed that to 98 the Ricoh stopped working. We were using Fireball to make CD's so I quickly installed the Panasonic CDROM 4X (writes at 4X) and removed the Ricoh, and I haven't set up a Windows 95 system for it to work with. I think it works with NT, and Fireball reverts to an NT only system in the next day or so.

Spent yesterday afternoon in the Monk's Cell working on Mamelukes. Felt good, but OLDCOW, a Gateway 2000 486 Dx2 seems painfully slow after all the other stuff I've been working with. Of course once WORD loads it doesn't matter; it's loading and copying that seem to take forever. Of course a lot of that copying is file transfer through a serial port ZIP so speeding the machine up wouldn't change that much. Still, I think I'll put together a somewhat faster upstairs machine, probably with Windows 98. I've got a lot of boards, chips, and drives here. But then the system I was going to do next is a really speedy Socket 7. But that would be good for games. Games are precisely what I must not have in the Monk's Cell. I have some Kingston memory chips, and with luck they'll work to give OLDCOW a bit of a memory upgrade. I have some recollection of trying that once and it didn't work. I know that when we tried to add memory to Supercow, a Gateway 2000 486 dx2 VL local bus machine of the same era, we got parity errors, probably because I can't find the manuals: there's probably a jumper or DIP switch setting that needs changing. In those days machines needed to be told what memory they have. We get used to all that being automatic now. That's one change that's all to the better.

Anyway, Supercow is now being used by the Space Access Society, the only space activist group I have a lot to do with any more, and upgrading it is their problem. For details on Space Access, send email to Henry Vanderbilt.

Apparently there were extraneous spaces in my link to the Amazon Books location where you can buy Starswarm. I believe I have fixed those: if you click on the book title it ought to take you direct to the page at Amazon where you can buy it, with the code that gets me a percentage of what you pay. It worked for me before, so it may be that my system remembers something yours can't find. Clicking on Starswarm ought to take you to direct to the right page at Amazon Books, with a code that will cause it to add jerrypournellcha to the order information. (Apparently they truncate your name and web site to get that code.) If that's still broken, someone tell me: it seems to work for me.

Alex -- Alexander Pournelle, my oldest son, who was responsible for starting me at BYTE, and I guess that story is worth telling. It was a computer show here in Los Angeles. I was wandering around with Mac Lean. We took Alex who was about sixteen at the time. He came up to me: "Do you want to meet the fabulous Carl Helmers?" Helmers being, of course, the founding Editorial Director of BYTE. Sure, says I. I found later Alex had gone to Carl and said "Do you want to meet the famous science fiction author Jerry Pournelle?" As it happened, both Carl, and Chris Morgan who was the editor of BYTE, had read a couple of my books, and were desperate for more text to hold the advertisements apart: BYTE was thicker than a Sears catalog in those days. We had a short discussion and the column was born. Lasted more than 20 years. Not bad...

Anyway, Alex has a page here now. Go find it.

I see that Jesse Burst is complaining that Windows hasn't fallen in price for years. It's more powerful, sure, but shouldn't it cost less. Funny. I recall a few years ago the big problem was stagflation: wages stayed low but prices kept going up. Inflation and unemployment. Misery index. Now we complain if prices don't fall.

Cars don't cost less. Bicycles don't cost less. Computers and electronics in general are about the only things that do fall constantly in price. Most stuff goes up. Maybe what we need is more government interference into the computer business. That will fix that falling price expectation.

I don't hate Windows 98. I just don't use it much. Got along without you before I met you, gonna get along without you now... I'll install it eventually, but frankly, ORS2 works about as well with everything I have. No USB, though; for that I will need Windows 98. If it weren't for USB I might not bother.

Considerable Amusement in building Alex's web page. Don't blame him for the layout. The content is his, but I used his page as a design experiment, that's still going on. I'll get it settled later: have to work on fiction now. But I do see some progress here.

What I am going to do is redesign everything of course, then import all this into a themed system. But that is a long term project. For now we muddle through. I sure am glad I kept the HTML reference book. Some of the problems are noted on Alex's page. Now that they are solved I will take them off there, and for that matter, most of this log needs to be incorporated into the web page construction file. That's a good hour's work to find all this and put it in there, and I won't get to it for a while.

The important thing to note is that Front Page does not always send all new files created when you bring in a new object. In my case I have a thing called bg.jpg which looks pretty good for the left column of a 3 column page layout. I copied bg.jpg into the place where Front Page keeps the files for the web page. For reasons not clear to me, Front Page never saw that file and thus never offered it as a cell background option, but when I manually typed bg.jpg into the cell property dialogue it accepted it and displayed it -- but that background never appeared on the web. The reference to that cell background was in the html code, but "Publish" for Front Page didn't FIND that reference and thus didn't send that file up. Eventually I figured it out, used FTP to manually send bg.jpg up to the site, and LO! There is is.

I am beginning to see how to organize this. Patience, and I'll manage to get all these pages into a new and we can hope better format. And WOW do I see the value of learning how to get in there and fine tune the html code; WYSIWYG is for the birds. Still, the best thing I have found is to create formats in Front Page, then edit the actual pages in Word, which is much faster, then let Front Page publish what was done. As long as you realize Front Page doesn't always find all the needed files...

THURSDAY NIGHT: I have found out more about Front Page from reading, of all things the Reviewer's Guide. For a lesson on Front Page image processing, click here.

Friday, June 26, 1998 Just out to Fry's. Lots of W 98 packages, resource kits, books on using it; seems to be selling well. And radio ads on all the local shows. It has been pointed out that W95 OSR3 will do all that W 98 does, and some of it better; which may or may not be true. I don't have any experience with OSR3 but I am getting a copy so we will see, won't we?

Bought some cartridges for my SyQuest SparQ 1.0 gigabyte drives. I'm backing up everything off Fireball onto those; because Fireball has a lot of disk space I was accumulating all kinds of stuff over there. Much of it is junk, but I have no time, so I will copy it all off, and after it ages a while I can erase it; meanwhile if there's DLL or some program I stashed there before scrubbing another system, I'll have it. Fireball will shortly get NT Server 4.0 with Service Pack 3. I probably ought to remove the Number Nine video board and put in a cheaper and more generic one. The Number Nine is a great board. On the other hand, I am not sure where Fireball will go; I could put him over where Larry Niven works. He'd be fast enough, and on a 100 megabit Ethernet, and with the dual processors the fact that he's being used as both server and workstation won't be noticed. In that case I will want a really good video board, and while the Nine may not be quite up to the Intergraph, it's going to be close. Hmm. The more I think on that, the better I like the idea. Niven doesn't do anything on a machine that won't run under NT. And since Fireball has a lot of assets -- built in IDE Zip, built in SyQuest SparQ, multiple CDROM changer, CD R/W drive -- it's better if he's out where I can get at all that stuff easily. Yep. That's where he will go. Meaning I can liberate Pentafluge, probably to take up to the Monk's Cell.

I feel the need to add a games review section. Getting a lot of games. We're getting a lot of hits on this site, too. Astonishing. Thanks, everyone...

 I am not sure where to put this:

I did not know a thing about this. Interesting; I hope all my Australian readers already know it.

I have got to get a games page going. Next week, I guess. I seem to have a lot of them that I like. Too many, actually.

Amazon reports that about a dozen of you have bought books through my links. Remarkable since I didn't recommend all that many books, and the report came quickly. No money yet and it won't be large in any event, but they have already told me they owe me. Very prompt and very commendable.

CMP has sent me a 'final release form' generated by a lawyer. Of course it offers me a bit more than half of what they owe me. It's not marked as an offer; it's sent as if it were routine. I suppose lawyers work this way, hoping you will be fool enough to sign their unfair proposals. Then they can go to the managers and boast of how much money they saved and how they have safeguarded their fiduciary obligations to the stockholders. Have you noticed that if you pretend to be working in someone else's interest you can justify all kinds of loathsome sharp practices that you would eschew if you were working for yourself? In the absence of a communication from Adam Marder of CMP who has acted in an honorable manner throughout this, I'll assume this was just a lawyer trying to play hero, and not an actual attempt to repudiate what I believe they have admitted they owe me. As for instance for the July column, already published, but not yet paid for.

A great deal of hype about Windows 98; I have started a discussion which I expect to become lively over time. I am still concerned about the organization of this place.

I am having a horrible time with TEMPLATES and STYLES in Word. Clearly I don't understand them. What I want is a way to go through a book (THE BURNING CITY to be exact) to find major breaks. This is a heroic fantasy, and those are long, and this book is certainly long. I would like to be able to click on a "section heading" or some sort and have it: insert a page break; skip down x lines where x depends on which kind of break this is; insert the words "BOOK" or "PART" or "Chapter" depending on what kind of break this is; insert the next number in order from the last (ie Chapter 25 follows Chapter 24 without regard to Book and Part breaks, but Parts go in order starting over at each "Book" break; skip down x lines and exit in the case of Chapter breaks, but insert a Page Break in the case of Book and Part breaks.

Now that is all complicated, and it's easier to do it by hand than to learn how to make Word do it. The trouble is that it has ALWAYS been easier to do all this by hand, so that I haven't made very much use of the Style and Template capabilities of Word. I know they are there. I know you can use them. I know that people not a lot smarter than me have used them. What I need is some EXAMPLES, and all the examples in all the books I have don't seem ever to have heard of a chapter when it comes to making templates. Certainly not parts and books. All the examples seem appropriate for the book about Word that the author is writing, but not for anything else. Why is this?

One silly book says that publishers want their text in Word format with each chapter a separate file. This is insane, and I wonder how many books that man ever wrote, and who was his publisher? It could not possibly have been the publisher of the book with that dumb advice? Or could it? The book was from SAMS and has a nice chatty style and some of the advice is good, but I sure don't want all my chapters saved in different files! What my agent wants is a nice clean readable neat copy of the book in good black print laid out so the editors who are going to bid lots of money will be able to read it easily. What the eventual publisher wants is clean copy so that the copy editor who is going to find all the places where we let characters' names change or their hair color vary from chapter to chapter and such like will be able to see this stuff and make magic marks and paste on the little query flags. No one I know wants a disk with a bunch of linked files on it. So much for that "book" template.

And I find I got rid of a number of my books on Word, and the new Office 98 books are fine if you sit in an office and do reports with spread sheets, but none of this stuff seems to have been written for people who write books.

So I will probably muddle through once again, doing all the work by hand, and next time I have a book to organize I will have it all to do again. But it sure would be nice to get a template that does it once and for all. Once I know how to do it I can figure out how to handle books that don't have the "Book" division. Most of mine have "Parts". But for this one I guess I will once again be doing it by hand. Alas.

NT is pretty stable but there is a sure fire way to crash it. Just fill your hard disk C drive so that it can't swap properly. The problem is that it will do that quite nicely as you surf the Internet. Mail accumulates, and cache files grow, and suddenly you are DEAD. Word locks up and won't save, and your only way out is to close stuff down; that takes a long time even with Task Manager.

That just happened to me so I invoked Disk Mapper, a neat little utility from Micro Logic, the people who brought you Infoselect, which is the free form "improved" version of Tornado Notes. Infoselect is improved, a bit, but the name is horrible compared to Tornado Notes. So it goes. Disk Mapper shows where your disk space is used. In my case the big blocks were Visual Basic, and Netscape. I saved all the VB programs I had done and uninstalled it; I'll put it back on Fireball when he's set up as a server. Other big files are system files and can't be moved. Front Page eats a good bit although most of it is over on the D drive. But there are over 100 megabytes in Netscape Mail. So. I saved the big mail file over to the server, just in case there is an address I need some day, and deleted 80% of the mail in inbox. Then I went into "Sent" and deleted a lot of stuff like copies of books and columns I have uploaded over the months; all that was kept in there.

Netscape moved it all over to trash. The files were still enormous. Bigger than ever. I went to TRASH and deleted all the files there: I know there is an 'empty trash' command somewhere in Netscape, but there is no HELP under "Trash", "empty", "erase", or "delete" and I can't think of anything else to look for. I tried Elisabeth Parker's otherwise pretty good book on Netscape, but there's nothing in her index either. If someone knows that magic formula, please tell me. Finally I just erased the high 'trash' file that hides deep in Program Files/Netscape/Users/Jerryp/Mail/ so that went away. However, despite all those efforts, the netscape inbox file remains 92 megabytes and the sent file has over 20, and nothing I can do will shrink those bloated things. Surely there is a way short of eliminating Netscape entirely? I also got rid of its cache, which was enormous, because some of those big gif files went back a year and more, and were for places I have not visited in months. All told I made about 200 megabytes, which has cured NT of thrashing.

SOME QUESTIONS: please send answers.

If you know how to make Netscape "inbox" and "sent" files smaller, please tell me. It may have to do with legitimate ways of deleting the trash, but if so, I don't know how to do that.

Do you like this wide format, or the format (forget the colors) of the Windows 98 page?

Answer here.

WOW! That did it. The inbox file went down to under 20 and the sent file to about 1 megabyte. I also thank you for the advice on NT swapfile management which I will get in another time. Meanwhile, this is great. Thanks.

Silly of me: the solution to my WORD formatting problem is macros. Tomorrow I'll get into why I didn't think of that right away. But I have certainly solved the format problem.

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Notes

Monk's Cell: The upstairs bedroom that was always the domain of the oldest boy still living here. It's now a room with no telephone, the simplest of computers, no computer games, and no books other than old high school textbooks. The only chair is a steno chair. I go there to work on fiction.

At the moment the computer there is a Gateway 2000 486 DX2, many years old, with Office 95 and Infoselect 3 and almost nothing else. In particular, no games...

Windows 95 comes in several flavors. There's the original W 95 that almost no one has now. Then there is OSR1, the "a" version which is what most have, and is the original with bug patches. Then there is OSR2, the "b" version, which has been shipping on new systems for a while, but which is in theory not available. I've been running it for months; it's much better than the "a" version. It also allows FAT32, but if you install it with FAT32 you better know what you are doing, and I don't have time to go into it. OSR3 is controversial: officially it does not exist, although there is a version, complete with new dot number, floating around out there. Known as the "c" version, it has USB support among other things, and I know little about it, but I am getting a copy and we'll see.