Chaos Manor Mail August 9 - 15, 1999

HOME Current View VIEW Home MAIL Home BOOK Reviews © This week: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	CHAOS MANOR MAIL A SELECTION MAIL 9 - 15, 1999 REFRESH/RELOAD EARLY AND OFTEN! CLICK ON THE BLIMP TO SEND MAIL TO ME The current page will always have the name currentmail.html and may be bookmarked. For previous weeks, go to the MAIL HOME PAGE. Fair warning: some of those previous weeks can take a minute plus to download. After Mail 10, though, they're tamed down a bit. IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private SAY SO AT THE TOP of the mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. If you want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature. PLEASE DO NOT USE DEEP INDENTATION INCLUDING LAYERS OF BLOCK QUOTES IN MAIL. *TABS* in mail will also do deep indentations. Use with care or not at all. I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too... I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail. If you want to send mail that will be published, you don't have to use the formatting instructions you will find when you click here but it will make my life simpler, and your chances of being published better.. This week: Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday Current Mail HIGHLIGHTS: Intercomputer Connectivity: Internet Connectivity Sharing More on spam Web Tools HotMeTaL Pro SETI Reliable printers
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Monday August 9, 1999 I am way behind, so much of this mail gets Short Shrift. (Short Shrift was the title of the catchup mail column I had in the very early days at BYTE, where I gave a one-sentence reply if that.) First the customary letter from the Penguins: why are you still futzing with nt server? linux/samba works great as a file and print server. samba is a dream.... get it installed and you can forget crashes.... cheers, rich p.s. I still have the thankyou note postcard you sent me when I sent you the clue for patching dBASE 2.4 for CPM/86 when dbase changed their program file extension from PRG to CMD. that was about 1982. I still have a picture of my compupro..... -- rich.gregory@virginia.edu And in fact it's not a bad question. But most of the applications software I run and test is Win 98 or NT. DeLorme maps, GPS stuff; map drawing; most games. If you are doing a fixed set of tasks, Linux is a good way to go, and I presume one could set it up as a server for Wintel stuff. So perhaps I am a masochist. Mostly though, Most of my readers tend to need someone whose task is "I do all these silly things so you won't have to..." === When Dates Do Matter: On networked systems (increasingly the Internet makes every system a networked system) group calendering functions do not correct for obvious to the human-eye errors. Two people can sit side by side and work in different time zones per their computers. Automatic make-meeting and journaling functions will then always fail by garbage in garbage out. The one time this happened to me we wanted very much to simply correct the erroneous time zone as of the project beginning and have everything in the record be corrected or at least correctable. In fact all we could do was go forward with a group mailing that previous efforts had been in vain and a suggestion to do it all over. Another example of which kind of error do you want - big brother is watching you and sets your machine to accommodate the group or you control your machine and make your own mistakes. Clark E. Myers e-mail at: ClarkEMyers@msn.com I wouldn't Spam filter you! === Hi, Jerry Microsoft now have their group licensing handled on the web, to provide immediate access. They also enforce on-line registration of Office 2000 installations. We recently purchased a block of Office licenses, expecting to get Office2K coverage in May. We received Office 97 licenses. We expected to be able to buy a copy of O2K for evaluation and then upgrade our other copies, but no. We have to fill out a form, pay a little money, and then wait four to six weeks for "processing". So much for the Digital Nervous System. I suppose this should remain an event to look back on when I get the feeling that the world is moving too fast for me. Regards, Peter Smith === I must confess to being a little puzzled by an appearance of inconsistency. You have in the past expressed a desire for sundry bad things to happen to people who deliberately waste your time with spam. (An attitude I thoroughly agree with!) Some free-lance socialist breaks the window in your car, steals your property, and costs you most of your Saturday, and all you confess too is being "annoyed" - and mostly at the cops and PacBell at that! Both have stolen your time, and inconvenienced you a bit. I'll wager that the phone thief inconvenienced you a heck of a lot more than a spammer, right? And the time he's costing you is "two days", which I'll take to mean two working days of eight hours each. So where's the fulminating outrage at the thief? Or maybe a wish that he become infested with the fleas of a thousand camels? Ward Gerlach Ah. But wishing him the fleas of a thousand camels is not QUITE the same as taking steps to bring in the fleas. Obviously I have means to make life a bit unpleasant for the owners of those phone numbers. The real question is how much should I brood about it? The spammer harms us all. This chap harmed only me while giving some work to the glazier. And I did get a little from it. In a word I am trying to be charitable. I may or may not succeed. ===== From: William S. Cornell Dear Dr. Pournelle, Better people than I have pointed out that long time marrieds often grow to look alike. I checked out some of the photographs posted on your web site. I'm happy to report that this phenomenon is not true about you and Mrs. Pournelle, for which I'm sure you are grateful. However, it does appear to apply to you and Mr. Niven. Well, I suspect that will make Roberta feel better. I am not sure what Larry's view will be. Thanks... === One of the nice things about this job is some of the mail I get. Dear Jerry Pournelle; I am a fan of you who read your colums on Pc World Turkey.First i must admit that your experiments were very helpful to me about computer's software and hardware. And i am only writing this mail to tell you that your character is one of my aims to be in the future. Because you do experiments and write it in PC magazines with your experince. You are the one that i want to be like. In fact i have a lot of things to say which doesn't come to my mind right now. But every idea in my mind about your computer life would tell that you are the best in computer section. You are still writing after long long years which passed with the computer world. So; I hope you would conitune to write for another long long time. Thanks; One Of Your Fans Cagatay Cebi Turkey Thank you for the kind words. And I shall continue to write so long as I am able... === Jerry, You wrote: “So having spent today on this I have another day to go, getting the phone replaced and taking the car out to have the glass replaced. And paper work with my insurance company to deal with. So that someone can make 5 one-minute local calls.” First, my sympathy. It’s been a long time since the late 1970s but your story reminded me of crime horror stories my own family (who, then and now, live in L.A.) went through back then. I’m sorry to see that things are still capable of being that bad. Next, a depressing thought: I don’t care for the regime of Rudy Giuliani in NYC, but if somebody like him were running LAPD the way that Giuliani’s running NYPD, whoever stole your phone would probably get a fast trip to jail, and then prison, in a vivid and memorable way. Leading to a further depressing thought: is this the only choice we have? On the one hand, regard for civil rights, but regard that at least sometimes manifests itself as a complete spoiled-child willingness to let social mores be pointlessly and wastefully violated? Versus, on the other hand, a kind of low-voltage but quietly nasty American-style semi-fascism? (I am using the latter term about Giuliani advisedly: the man has had to be forced into compliance with the First Amendment at least once when he tried to squelch lawful and witty advertising for _New York_ magazine, seems completely indifferent to torture or murder of black men by the NYPD, and is currently trying to violate the city charter of NYC so that his lawful [Democrat] successor will not take office if Rudy becomes a senator.) I read _Lucifer’s Hammer_ in 1979 and, because of my family’s experiences in L.A., didn’t need to be told that the issues of law and order, liberty versus survival that you and Niven discussed in that grim book were quite real. I wish that affluence such as we have in the U.S. didn’t come with such an ugly trade-off between respect for civil rights and security of lawful property. --Erich Schwarz schwarz@cubsps.bio.columbia.edu The alternative to self-government is grim. We seem to be giving up self government. In the Old West sometimes the towns took it back with Committees of Vigilance of the 7-7-77 variety. Of course you can go to Mission Delores in San Francisco and see rows of graves of people who "Died at the hands of the VC". I have no real solution other than localism. If you keep jurisdictions small most people will find a place they like. Attempting to make one size fit a nation as large as this inevitably leads to empire. I make no comment on the New York political situation as I know nothing about it. I used to be Executive Assistant to the Mayor of LA (the position I held is now one of five Deputy Mayors) but my view of politics is that I served my turn and it is someone else's. I don't much care for career politicians. Ah well. ===================== I heard that with windows 98, two people on two different computers(say, in the the same household) can both use the internet, but use one phone line(both connected to the same phoneline). How do you set this up on your computer? Paul Norton [cryptic_reign@hotmail.com] I know it's often done with NT. I am not sure I know how it is done with Windows 98, but I make no doubt one or another reader here will be able to help (and I could find the program over in the corner if I hadn't lost two days here and have to go to SIGGRAPH tomorrow...) (See Eric's letter) ===== Subject: Linux news you might like Jerry, Ignore the headline itself, which is patronizing. The news article here is good news, since it might mean that a commerical software company may be getting ready to address the features of Linux that make it a pain to use: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2310564,00.html?chkpt=hpqs014 --Erich Schwarz Great. thanks! ===
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Tuesday, August 10, 1999 Internet Connection Sharing ICS is a specific feature of Win98 Second Edition. It cannot be had by installing the Service Pack. Just about everything someone who already has a home network going needs to know can be found by looking it up in Help. I haven't done it yet but it appears pretty straightforward. There are third party products that provide the same capability for older versions of Windows but I think this feature is a pretty good reason to upgrade since it's part of the total package. Some may interpret this as Microsoft stealing business from ISV's again but others might point out that this is a long-standing deficiency in Windows and it was inevitable that it would appear once home networks became common. Eric Pobirs ==== You say in Tuesday's View quoting Eric Pobirs: "ICS is a specific feature of Win98 Second Edition. It cannot be had by installing the Service Pack. " Service Pack is a term of art here. As Microsoft says: "Microsoft® Windows 98 Service Pack 1 The Service Pack includes bug fixes for Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 4.0 as well as Year 2000 updates, but does not include any new features. Free plus $5.00 S&;H per unit US($7.50 CDN)" Internet Connection Sharing is not available so far as I know as one of the free downloads, though much (most?) of the Second Edition functionality is available in bits and pieces to be downloaded. However, assuming for Internet Connection Sharing that there is a network connection between the connection host computer and other computer devices sharing internet access - obvious but to omit might mislead somebody. Microsoft does assert that the Internet Connection Sharing is available in the for sale at a profit "Update" "Current users of the Windows 98 operating system can receive the updated functionality by ordering Windows 98 Second Edition Updates on CD-ROM <https://order4.microsoft.upgrade.com/scripts/startwin98se.asp> for $19.95 US ($34.95 CDN), plus shipping and handling." Clark E. Myers e-mail at: ClarkEMyers@msn.com I wouldn't Spam filter you! ===== Dear Jerry, In regard to the message from Paul Norton about using Win98 to share an InterNet connection: It is not possible for two modems to use one phone line at the same time. Just as two separate voice conversations cannot occur simultaneously. The sharing happens over a local area network (LAN) and only one of the machines is actually connected to the ISP. These shares generally work better and are easier to configure using a local “real” ISP. TCP/IP must be installed on the local machines using IP numbers such as 192.168.0.x or 10.10.x.x which are non-routable. Since most home or SOHO users will have a relatively slow connection to the InterNet, a budget minded installation will work just fine using 10baseT equipment. And besides, 100baseTX is only 2.5 to 3.5 times faster than 10baseT, anyway. If only two computers are used, a hub is not needed (just use a “reversed” cable: 1-3, 2-6, 3-1, 6-2). The applications will have to be set to use a proxy server and be filled in with the IP address of the machine that is acting as the gateway. I highly recommend WinGate from Qbik through www.deerfield.com. It is robust, acts as a firewall and has a limited user free version. And larger installations are possible and work very well. Also, this product works using Win95, Win98 or WinNT on the gateway system and *ANY* TCP/IP device as a user. WinGate works using any connection to the InterNet such as dial-up, DSL, ISDN, cable, digital satellite, T1, etc. John Ruff JRuff@excite.com Wayzata, MN Bob Thompson likes WinGate too, and I intend to get it going on my system as soon as I am sure it works properly with Windows 2000. And thanks. === Hi Jerry... A reader asked: I heard that with windows 98, two people on two different computers(say, in the the same household) can both use the internet, but use one phone line(both connected to the same phoneline). How do you set this up on your computer? Paul Norton [cryptic_reign@hotmail.com] Oddly enough, one answer is in the latest issue of Byte! You can use a modified version of “the Linux Router Project”—everything you need on ONE floppy and a 486 -- to get your home network hooked up to your ISP! http://www.byte.com/column/trevor/BYT19990804S0008 Have fun! Jerry Wright http://www.iaml.net ==== For what it's worth, I've had some experience with both Sygate and Microsoft's internet sharing. Briefly, for an existing system, Sygate worked better for me. Especially when installed on an NT system (in my case, NT Workstation). I tried Microsoft's program with Windows 2000 beta 3, and it required I change all my IP addresses to the 169.254.X.X range (though, in an environment of Windows 98/2000, it DOES make it easier to install new lan cards by dynamically assigning IP addresses). Also, it didn't seem as clean as Sygate. It would through up a message box for each PPP connection, and sometimes tended to stop working after awhile, with many boxes on the screen. Sygate on Windows 98 seems to work, but unlike on NT4, doesn't seem to really work as a service. I have to be logged into the Win98 box before it will work, and sometimes it will not dial on demand if a message box is displayed on the screen. Also, Sygate doesn't support the Windows 2000 betas yet. My plans for the future are either to move Sygate back to my Windows NT system, or to try yet again to get this stuff working on my Linux computer. Kevin Krieser [kkrieser@delphi.com] ====
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Wednesday August 11, 1999 was devoured by locusts.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Thursday August 12, 1999 Friday the 13th falls on Friday... Familiarity breeding contempt as it does, my years in and around the Army and NASA have made me no big fan of government, and even less so of big government. On the other hand, there are a few things which only government can do without causing a “range war” so to speak. We have courts and such so that if the local garage breaks something else while unsuccessfully changing the timing chain on your car, you can sue them rather than having to take the bus there and demand your money back, M1911A1 in hand. A very simple solution to a lot of the spam problems would just be to require by law that all commercial email either contain standardized text or a standardized tag in the header identifying it as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), or a valid return address. In that way, the spammers could spam to their heart’s content... and I could killfile them to my heart’s content. Chris Morton [ChrisM@systemcareinc.com] The 1^st Amendment guarantees your right to speak, NOT your right to be LISTENED TO, especially at cost to the listener of time, effort and money. Now, if spammers claim that everyone will just automatically killfile their email, they have to ask themselves why that is.... Clearly requiring some valid return address would have a dramatic effect, but the question becomes, do people have the right to anonymity? Certainly King George III would have been happy to have all the pamphlets and papers of the Committees of Correspondence have valid return addresses... === On what to do with those phone numbers: Subject: Reverse Phone Directories, etc. Dear Jerry, You might want to surf over to http://www.searchgateway.com/finde.htm and see what information you can get from the phone numbers called on your stolen cell phone. If nothing else, it could help alleviate the feeling of powerlessness. My personal favorite gimmick is the Map button http://www.anywho.com provides. If you want, you can put in a phone number and get back driving directions to the person’s house with detailed maps. We’ve come to refer to this around here as stalker.com, although there’s already a real site name (of course). On netscape.com email addresses… If you go to the site you can sign up for a free email address, which is listed as yourname@netscape.net. I haven’t tried, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same account also goes to netscape.com. I’d much rather believe that the offensive mail is coming from random idiots who sign up for free email. Thanks for the pictures and report about the Corpse Flower! I had no idea such a thing existed. Bill Cavanaugh (billcav@yahoo.com) Much of the hate mail from Netscape return addresses was in fact merely mail from people who had accounts; some of it was not. The odd part was that I said in the next paragraph that I understood that most of the problems but not the error messages was not Netscape's fault. Perhaps next time I should put the text through that JarJar Binks program to translate it into something understandable? === Every now and then I get a message on this subject. It's certainly a good way to use spare CPU cycles: Jerry, Here’s something you may find of interest. A project using a distributed network of over 900K workstations over the Internet to process SETI data. http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ Steven Ruhl sruhl@fastrans.net A lot of people have got in on this. It can't hurt. === On Web Tools: Hi Jerry, I have been on vacation for the last several weeks. I am afraid to say that I actually did not get around to doing a comparison. I started with Dreamweaver, and I was so impressed with the package that I decided that I did not want to try anything else. I found the interface easy to use. I found the html editor contained no suprises and accepted my markup without problems and without destroying it. I found it easy to use links, add pictures, connect pages and do all these things with much fewer keystrokes than using FrontPage. (Actually, my biggest hate with FrontPage was that it so often took so many clicks to do anything, even when using hotkeys when you could.) I guess that I would make a terrible reviewer if I get so easily hooked and sidetracked. I gather that you are having better(?) results with FrontPage, especially after all the help you have been receiving. I am glad that things are starting to work out. No one needs that kind of grief in their life. I did download your site initially; when I looked through the html code and other files that the mirroring utility brought down I noticed a few things that I might be able to suggest that may help you with your site. They are just little things, but you might find it useful. Since you have redone a lot of the links in your site, it would be prudent if I downloaded another copy of the site. I have not done so, and will not do so unless I have your permission. I understand that you are up against a bandwidth/cost limit and I do not want to be the one to push it unnecessarily towards the limit. I have just decided to pay for the registration on your site. Look for it shortly. I guess by now I realize that I have gotten my money’s worth in the entertainment value alone. Apologies for not realizing it sooner. Respectfully yours. · Paul Paul D. Walker pdwalker@quagmyre.com Thanks. We no longer have bandwidth problems, since I moved the really high resolution pictures out of the public area. Astonishing how many people wanted pictures of that plant! Hi Jerry, I wondered if you have had a chance to try Hotmetal Pro 5.0 yet.... You could make a project from a file, which would be your opening screen. As I work to revise the curriculum my colleagues and I have have burned onto CDROM I have found that hotmetal has some nice features to find broken links. One of the choices for View is Web View...which shows you all your files and the files they are linked to. If the file contains broken links, it shows up in red. The hardest part of fixing broken links is to manipulate the web view so you can spot the red links....Our CDROM has about 10 megabyte of content spread over a couple hundred files, and it have found this graphical approach kinda nice instead of purely text approach. You can also get a site summary which shows all the files in the project folder or a subfolder thereof, and shows the filename, the title of the page, the type of file, its size, and the number of links to and from, and finally it’s size. When I did it it kicked out 22 pages of files, and I found and killed several orphan files. Charles Duell I have HoTMetaLpro here (what an odd spelling) but I have been so busy lately I have had no chance to try it. I wish I had, and when it comes time to make a CDROM I'll look into it. FrontPage like a lot of Microsoft products is infuriatingly good: it works just well enough that you don't want to scrap it, and you've got a bit sunk cost into learning idiosyncrasies. And if you're then short of time it's hard to bite the bullet and learn something new. == Hi Jerry HP Printers are worth the price. Just read your 2 Aug Byte column re: HP Laser printer I baught a HP Laserjet 4M in 1993 and it’s the best invest I ever made, here’s why: In 1997 a spinkler in our office burst at 11pm on Saturday night. (Our sprinkler system was the first installed in New Zealand, in 1939.) The loss of pressure sets off an alarm which brings the fire brigade. They fail to find anything wrong. The next morning, after 6000 litres of water has been pumped into our office, and the water is 3 inches deep, someone raises the alarm again and the fire bridge break finally do there thing. Under the spinkler sat our HP Laserjet 4M printer. An inch of water had collected in the bottom tray. Were not talking clean water either; this stuff was black and gritty - there was 55+ years of pipe gunk pouring into our office. I turned a fan on the printer overnight and slapped in a new toner - and it printed clean and sharp first time. It’s still our work horse printer and showing no signs of age. That kind of quality is worth paying for. Note: if you have spinklers - think about what will happen if, for whatever reason, they are set then off. It ain’t pretty - almost as bad as a fire. Cheers, Paul -- Paul Kennett paul@kennett.co.nz I usually recommend that one get the best HP printer available that does what you need doing. Better would be one grade higher since your print requirements never go down. Then about ten years later you'll probably want another printer, but the old HP will still be working, at an annual cost way below what you'd have paid for anything else. I still have a working HP III which was rebuilt into a III from a II, and it still works although it is no longer in use; we use the 4000 for nearly everything now. Agreed all around, and thanks. ===
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Friday August 13, 1999 I'm out of here. No new mail until Monday. Do continue to send mail, but understand I won't be reading it until next week.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Saturday I am reading books and drawing maps.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Sunday On Vacation.
© Chaos Manor home	Entire contents copyright 1999 by Jerry E. Pournelle. All rights reserved. Comments and discussion welcome.