| Monday
November 29, 1999
Last night's mail has
some questions about registration of Microsoft Office 2000. I have
certainly opened mine many more times than 50, and I have not registered
it. What is going on?
I am going to try to make subwebs of Mail and View for
about half of the entries. Front Page is supposed to know how to do this
without breaking links, but I am not sure it will work. I had problems
last time. We will see.
Does anyone know how to make Front Page 2000 believe a
WORD Document in html which is incorporated into a web is in fact
something I can edit in Front Page? When I open webstuff.html
it opens Word and there it is, in a document editor. Most of the links are
good locally but broken on the web since they refer to files. I can I
suppose use Notepad and rewrite the code. This was originally created in
Word, imported into FrontPage 97 or 98, and now 2000 simply won't deal
with it. As I say, I presume I can hack the html, but is there a simpler
way?
[Added later: there is indeed a simple way. Several, in
fact. See mail for all that. Mail
1 Mail 2
Spoke to Dan Bricklin a good bit at COMDEX. He's revamping
Trelix, which looks to be a really good web site manager; that and one of
the other html packages, plus Allaire's Homesite editor, would probably be
better for site construction and management than FrontPage 2000. On the
other hand I have got more and more used to FrontPage 2000, and I see as
features stuff I originally thought were bugs. I am not sure I would
choose FrontPage 2000 if I were starting from scratch, except that if you
are starting from scratch it's probably the easiest thing to use; and by
the time you know enough that you could use Dreamweaver or Hot Metal Pro,
or Net Objects Fusion, you have a lot of time invested in learning 2000's
quirks -- and 2000 did get you on the air very quickly and easily.
Anyway I am still using FrontPage 2000.
I played author over the
weekend. Now it's time to be a writer...
Linette is running Red hat 6.1 and I installed it myself,
with only two frantic phone calls to Mr. Dobbins. I cannot get it to
believe that the STB 4400 board has more than 16 colors, and if I try to
set it to more it blows up with a "OUT OF RANGE" signal when I
try to open x windows. Every now and then the screen saver reports
"Using 16 colors, requested 32" and such like. Linux is still
not for Aunt Minnie.
I also had a problem with the Rebel box. As we were
sitting here the Modem (Creative Modem Blaster, external of course since
it plugs into the Rebel.com box) made funny noises and all the lights but
two went out. I power cycled the modem. Usually when you do that, the
rebel box redials immediately. Not this time. It did nothing. Meanwhile
all attempts to make contact with 192.168.1.1 utterly failed. I finally
power cycled the rebel.com and that didn't do it either. Eventually
I connected to it with a keyboard and monitor -- normally it has none and
we get to it by TCP/IP internal to the network since it has a fixed
address -- and it wanted some input. I had to let it reset and do all the
things UNIX wants to do when it has been power cycled, and shut it down
normally. Then I did another power cycle. This time it came up just fine,
dialed the network, and has been working ever since. I have taken it off
the keyboard and monitor and it's breathing normally and I can contact it
with TCP/IP now...
AT&;T meanwhile
is taking blooking forever even to answer the phone. The highbinders
have decided that they can charge me a minimum long distance
"service" charge for NO CALLS AT ALL, and attempts to get them
by phone have this arrogant message: "Due to the overwhelmingly
positive response to AT&;T offers, all our representatives are busy and
there is a half hour wait..."
Those highbinders. I will in fact disconnect from them
entirely. But that may take a long time. You can only get them by phone
and they don't answer the phone, and they play awful music while you wait.
This is unconscionable. We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't
have to.
I keep thinking I ought to write the book about a
sociopath who simply can't take it any longer and begins to take out
places that are deliberately making life difficult for people. Maybe I can
call it SMITE HIS MINIONS, or THE MISANTHROPE. I suspect a novel of
terrible tortures of executives of companies that do this stuff to us
would make interesting fiction. It's not malice, per se, but at some levels
insensitivity and incompetence are indistinguishable from malice. Why
treat the stupidly incompetent different from malefactors if they ought to
know better?
I have been thinking about
Microsoft and registration of Office 2000. Their experiment in Australia
is wrong. At the same time in the Orient there is no such thing as
intellectual property, and the WTC isn't likely to be able to make China
or anyone else enforce copyright.
I don't think making you register by phone (or presumably
on-line) is entirely unreasonable, but then binding that to a specific CPU
and motherboard IS. People do upgrade. When they do they are entitled to
take their software with them. Realistically, a copy is probably left
behind on the old machine, but the chances that both are in use at the
same time are slim. That, I think, is what Microsoft and any other
software publisher is entitled to: that the program will not be in use by
two people at once.
For example, there is no harm in having Office on both a
desktop and a portable at least for an individual. They won't both be in
use at the same time, and transferring from one to the other is a pain in
the arse up with which most will not put (sort of like trying to avoid
ending a sentence with a preposition: you shouldn't but sometimes you have
to). A company that doesn't see it that way and tries to make the customer
buy two copies when they won't both be in use at once shows it doesn't
understand the situation, and will lose out to a company that doesn't try
that.
Microsoft can't be that stupid. Word was once the most
pirated program in the world; now it is the best selling, and the two
events are not at all unrelated. I'm sure Microsoft can think of something
better than trying to tie the program to a specific CPU. They are entitled
to not have you buy one copy and have ten users all at once...
Over a year ago when I was starting
this place I didn't know what I was doing. I still have some problems, but
it's better now. Anyway, I had one page called "webstuff"
that discussed tools, how to do things, included letters, and was in
fact a pretty interesting page for people in the same boat as me. It was
created in WORD 97, imported into Front Page, and carried here as a Word
document. Some of the links didn't work at all; that is they work here,
but they don't work out there where you can see it.
I have tried to fix that. I just now took a blank FP page,
and pasted into it all the content from the old page to it. It is called webstuff2
and I will try to see that all the links on THAT work; it's easier since I
can do them sort of automatically. We will see what happens. As a record
of the kind of floundering I did and others may do, it's illuminating.
Like swamp gas...
I have the end of the AT&;T story. See
mail.
And I have been reminded by mail of
my older essay on Velikovsky and science, which I just read again. Not
too bad, actually.
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