| Wednesday, January
2, 2001
The good news is that I don't have a virus warning for you today. Well,
it's not all that new, anyway, you have seen it before. See
Mail.
I sent out several warnings to subscribers
over the weekend. Subscribers please note: if you did not get any of those
virus warnings, stand by: in a few days I will send one last test mailing
to subscribers. I will then start eliminating all the bounced addresses.
There are currently enough that it's becoming a problem.
If you need to change your email address here, send me email with
something to that effect in the subject line, give the old email address,
and the new one, and note which is which. If you think you subscribed but
you aren't getting the mailings, send me email indicating when and how you
subscribed, and if possible the email address under which you subscribed:
I find that many of you have changed your email addresses but don't
realize that you didn't tell me that (or you did and I didn't get it; I
acknowledge COA's when I enter them.)
It's column time, and Niven and I have to work on fiction as well. I am
hoping to get this year off to a flying start.
 And it
is TIME for NOMINATIONS for the annual Chaos Manor Orchids and Onions
Awards. My Chaos Manor best of the year, and the annual Chaos Manor
Orchids and Onions Parade, will be in the January column which I am
writing now.
Send your nominations with a BRIEF statement on why this product or
person or company should be in the parade, to me at jerryp@jerrypournelle.com
with the word ORCHIDS or the word ONIONS (or both words but don't run them
together, my rules want whole words) in the subject line).
Nominations close Friday.
We have Q&A data base running, but I need to tweak the printer
settings to let Roberta use it for mailing labels. I hope to get that done
shortly. It may be as simple a matter as capturing a printer port
properly. We have several printers on this network, and I don't use
the one Roberta uses, so it's probably not set up properly. That's a
matter for the column when I get it running.
Also in the column will be fixes to the Outlook
Preview problem: the simplest one is to go to INBOX, View, and set to
"View with AutoPreview" which does almost the exact opposite of
what you think: it turns off html, and shows about 4 lines of plaintext
for each message. The preview window is off entirely. If the first lines
attempt to execute html, there is no preview of the message at all, making
it easy to delete. This works very well and my thanks to the several
readers who sent me this suggestion: I thought I knew Outlook but I had
not understood the use of this setting. Since the setting is particular to
the folder, you can use it or not as you choose.
Otherwise it's a quiet day at Chaos Manor.
And in your copious free time have a look at
http://www.satirewire.com/news/0111/mammo.shtml
for what's in the future.
And
http://www.euronet.nl/users/frankvw/IhateMS.html
states the case against Microsoft in fairly extreme terms. I can't say
I agree with much of his view of the early history: I was there and this
isn't what I saw. Hindsight is wonderful, of course. And Eric points you to
this:
This article provides some desperately needed clarification
on the Universal PlugnPlay security issue, especially the fact that many
so-called security experts are handing out bad advice.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23517.html
This should be required reading, particularly for Microsoft haters...
For the record let me register my ritual complaint about DirecPC which
flops out whenever there are critical messages to send, but always gets
back up about the time I get angry enough to go to the server room and
start the 28.8 modem. Sigh. The files are transferred FAST, but the
latency of acknowledgments and such is enough to drive me mad.
Actually it is worse than that. The Internet remains a trap, a trick, a
way to get grown people to stare at screens on which nothing is happening,
then gives you a page cannot be displayed. It delights in that. Feh! The
Amazon search is broken, everything is broken. It takes a good half hour
to locate and buy one book. Aargh.
WARNING! Roland sends:
Strongly urge you to warn your
readership of this horrendous AOL Instant Messenger remote exploit:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/01/02/aol.security/index.html
and
http://www.w00w00.org/advisories/aim.html
and
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20020102/tc/aol_security_2.html
Sigh.
TOP
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An important article:
Meanwhile, if you find yourself going to porn web sites, there's yet another
worm out there. Thanks to Roland for pointing me at this; it hasn't
bothered me at all. 
