THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View May 31 - June 6, 1999

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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.  For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday

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Boiler Plate:

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. I'm making up a the mailing list. There are enough that it's a chore, which is not something to complain about. 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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If you subscribed:

CLICK HERE for a Special Request.

If you didn't and haven't, why not?

If this seems a lot about paying think of it as the Subscription Drive Nag. You'll see more.

For the BYTE story, click here.

The LINUX pages are organized as the log, my queries, and your responses and advice parts one, two,  three, and four. There's four pages because I try to keep download times well under a minute. There are new updates to four.

Highlights this week:

• Windows Installation blues: Win 98 2nd Edition has expired...
• Windows Installation with SCSI CDROM: clarifying my column, and an apology.
• Windows 98 Second Edition final arrives.
• On being Mathematically Correct: a remedy for unsound math teaching.
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God Save the United States; and let us honor our war dead.

At the beach house, working. I can recall marching in Memorial Day parades, but I don't suppose they do that now. In any event I am grinding away at High Tech Wars, and also at Campaign Cartographer 2 from ProFantasy www.profantasy.com to make maps for Burning City. I will probably also do the maps for Janissaries IV in this. It's pretty good. In fact it's darned good.

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Home. Everything is a mess. The Armada doesn't want to network. Had to reinstall and even then it kept dropping in and out. There were power failures here while we were gone, but most of the machines were off and the the critical elements were on APC UPS systems, and nothing untoward seems to have happened that way.

But Scarlet, Roberta's big Windows 98 system, will not come up except in safe mode even when I remove all the cards except the video card, and I cannot get it to go into Windows. I wil reinstall and may as well put in Windows 98 Second Edition while I am at it. I backed up everything just before I left so I can't lose any data for her, but this is annoying. It worked when I left so why won't it work now?

More later. Lots to get done. And a TON  of mail...

Catching up. but Scarlet is dead. Installing W 98 2nd Ed.

Apparently I have become a moron. With luck this now refers to something. Alas, it wasn't very funny, to begin with. Then I got currentmail in the wrong directory. Should all be fixed now.

There is more on the Internet and Health discussion. All worth thinking on.

Roberta's machine died mysteriously. I may have done something but if so I don't know what. But it wouldn't come up except in safe mode. At all. So, I decided, since I have to reinstall Windows (doesn't happen as often as the Microsoft haters say, but far more often than I like to do it) I figured to do Windows 98 2nd Edition. Erased C:\Windows\Options\cabs, and that's harder to do than you think if you are in safe mode or DOS. You don't have privileges. But I have QDOS on her system and the QDOS ZAP command will kill off most things. Norton Commander for DOS finished the job. Now painstakingly copy E: which is the WIN 98 2nd Ed, to C:\Windows\Options\Cabs, and do setup.

And find that Windows 98 Beta has expired and will not install. Sigh. So zap all that and start over with Windows 98. Sigh. And that's what I did with my evening.

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Well, Scarlet is as good as new, but with the older Windows 98. Ah well. Now for some work today...

Apparently I am not a moron...

The ATI DVD program has arrived. Goes with the new ATI Rage Fury 128Meg video board, and does DVD without a decoder board. Works. I have about 6 leads for the column this month.

Does anyone know the story of the Reiver of Tarrant Moss? There is a poem by Kipling that clearly tells a story, but it is incomplete and surely he talks of a story at one time well known? Twenty knights in the moss...

"For I slew a thief and an honest thief for the sake of a worthless maid..."

I've been listening to Leslie Fish doing Kipling. Just before the Song of the Red War-Boat is the Tarrant Moss poem and I don't know the origin.

The Red War-Boat--   "For we hold in all disaster, for the gods themselves have said, a man must stand by his master, 'till one or the other is dead..."

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Today's radio topic: the Microsoft lawsuit, and cable Internet access.

Got some troops coming over to help figure out how to convert Roberta's reading program from Hypercard for Mac to Windows; also converting from text to speech to reading the file from a CD. Need to do that to the Mac Hypercard version too: when it goes to text-to-speech it merely needs to open a file and play that sound. Doing a new Mac version ought to be easy. Putting that all on Windows is probably harder, but not that much harder. The real question is Delphi or Visual Basic.

I have a letter from a reader who misunderstood my point about Windows installation in my May column. I have restated the situation at some length in reply. My fault for not being clear enough. Anyway, I think it should be clear now. Again, apologies.

Windows 98 Second Edition final has arrived. This is the shipping copy. My next column will strongly recommend that Windows users upgrade to W98-2nd, whether you are using Windows 95 or 98. Upgrades from 98-1 to 98-2 will cost about $20 for the upgrade disk, and one presumes you may apply that to as many systems already running 98 as you have: this is after all as much bug fix as feature upgrade. Upgrade from 95 to 98-2 is about $100 per machine, and given the stability of 98-2, is worth it for machines that aren't pretty well dedicated. See the column for details.

Have made some revisions in the used and recommended page on this site. It still isn't completely up to date but it's better.

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Regarding Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition: I have a release copy. They will be generally available in a week or two. It's all production now. A tip: if you have problems with Scandisk dumping you out of Setup, exit to DOS; run Scandisk /All; go back to the directory where SETUP resides (I copy to C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS) and run Setup /is, and if you can't remember that, do setup /? and it will tell you the options. The /is switch skips the scandisk step, which you may need to do if upgrading from Windows 98. If you use Windows at all, you will like Windows 98 Second Edition, which is what Windows ought to be.

We continue to like Windows 2000. I have no idea when there will be a release edition of that.

1745: I am a bit less happy with Windows 2000 than I was. There is some awful power management stuff in there that makes it hang up on closing, a power management dll that will hang the machine on trying to switch to "sleep", and something that once you get a power management message messes things up so that if you have a SCSI card in the system you may have to physically remove the card to get windows to start up properly.

That's not a lot of fun. The whole power management green thing is stupid: a computer can't be using more than about 3 lightbulbs worth of power (monitors may be a bit more, but putting monitors on standby isn't a big problem). Turning off cooling fans and hard drives is pretty stupid; the wear on them probably cancels out the energy saved. After all, these things take energy to make. More over, conserving electrons is pretty dumb. The universe has lots of them. The amount of human time and energy wasted in fighting these stupid Green Impositions -- taxes, really -- is larger than any amount saved. Cheap energy plus innovation = economic growth. If you could really conserve your way to prosperity, Bangla Desh would be the wealthiest nation on Earth. And conserving dabs of power by making PC's not work properly, so that they stay on longer, and have to be powered up and down by frustrated people trying to get something else done, makes no sense at all. I would like to find the people responsible for this imbecility and see that they don't work on anything else.

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I have just learned about the Mathematically Correct movement. This is an organization that seeks to disestablish the "Whole Math" feelgood substitute for arithmetic and mathematics that has invaded our school systems and made our brightest children mathematically ignoramus. At its worst, Whole Math teaches that there really isn't a right answer to mathematical problems, and teachers are not supposed to teach but "assist in discovery" of some mathematical system. The results are as bad as you would expect.

The Mathematically Correct movement can be found at www.mathematicallycorrect.com  and if you have any interest in effective education I urge you to have a look there. The first defense against unsound teaching is for parents and citizens to realize there are alternatives. You don't have to trust "experts" nor should you.

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I keep forgetting what it's like to be programming. The problem is that it takes a degree of concentration I usually don't manage, because I tend to be an interrupt driven system. I'm using old QB to do a one-off job of scanning a bunch of files to make lists. It will work but it's a bit of a pain...

We are doing some shape shifting here, preparatory to getting a web site where the search engine works. For the next few days things may be a bit hectic. Maybe.

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The Normandy Invasion was the most complex activity in the history of mankind. The second most complex was Project Apollo.  Both were done by the military; there are no civilian organizations capable of that degree of management complexity. Or at least there never have been.

D-DAY probably had to be that complex. Apollo didn't, but it is the way we chose.

We continue to work on this web site. I do hope things don't get too seriously broken.

It's column time, so I'll do that: but at the moment I would as soon both Microsoft and Netscape sank beneath the ground not to rise again for a thousand years. Ye god. Netscape worse than Microsoft: they are so concerned that you will not see their advertisements that I have made four attempts to upgrade to 4.56 or whatever the latest is, and I have managed to download megabyte upon megabyte of material, but every time I am about to install, some trick advertisement says "click here" and I think it is part of the instruction. By the time I have recovered from that error I can't install. Their "smart download" is horrible, and there seems to be no simple way to just get a file and put it where you want it to go. They deserve to be out of business.

Microsoft meanwhile has got Front Page in such a mess regarding UNIX systems that it takes hours and hours to tune a web site to fit. I will get there, and I am told that Front Page 2000 is much better. We will see. Meanwhile, everyone give three cheers for Bob Thompson who has been helping me get this site moved and healed up… We will make it.

Monday Morning.

Maybe we won't. Front Page doesn't work on UNIX servers; not even big commercial outfits with lots of support. Or if it does I can't make it work.

We will look again. Meanwhile, it is column time, and I have to do the weekly cycles on view and mail.

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