THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 91 March 6 - 12, 2000

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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.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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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.  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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Highlights this week:

• Fixing IP Chains
• Telephone problems and rain
• Earthlink mucks up my wife's web site
• PC Pitstop and security issues
• Abuse of power?
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Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Rain off and on. Is the "cough" system useful when having a heart attack or is it an internet legend? See Mail. Column is coming along nicely. The Great Hall is cleaner than it has been for a long time although that's far from done.

More later.

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Monday
Tuesday
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Column is out and on the wire. Roland fixed the IP chains in the new Rack Mounted Netwinder and we are scheduled to have a conference with the tech people at rebel.com to tell them what they must do in their installation scripts to make this useful for the rest of us who don't know how to use vi on IP chains (and that, let me tell you, is Major Aracana; Roland downloaded and printed about 200 pages of on-line help stuff before finding precisely what the problem was).

I was able to buy a copy of William Coin Harvey's book on money and finance, but it didn't have what I wanted in it. Harvey became well known through newspaper fillers: quatrains that had a financial impact. The one I remember contains the lines

his clothes was smelling sweet and nice, 
and through his head ran this device, "Sound Munney."

An altavista search on "sound munney" and "sound muney" got no hits at all. The refrain "sound munney" is in many of the quatrains. It's that doggerel I am looking for. Any help appreciated.

http://Vote2000.ss.ca.gov/returns/pres/00.htm is a complete collection of analysis of the CA vote.

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This week:

Monday
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Rain. More Rain. Yet more rain. Still more rain. Rain. Telephone problems compound the fact that the new Rebel Rackmount Netwinder isn't doing it's proper job; it's all software and scripts, and it will get fixed. I can do everything except publish through Front Page. That remains elusive. I can ftp all right, and mail comes in. But there is also static on the phone lines.

Did the Audio Review with Mary Mosquera but had to use the telephone: the ISDN line is out. 

If you have sufficiently poor taste you might enjoy

http://www.geek.net/~rhayden/warning.gif 

and the mere act of looking at it will upset the American Medical Association. 

It's one thing to have one problem, and quite another to have two unrelated problems that impact the same operation. I seem to have had an internal problem with build software in my new rackmounted Rebel box: someone shipped it to me before it was quite ready to go. That won't happen to a reader. Meanwhile we have found out about www.netwinder.org which has all kinds of good information about the system.

Unfortunately there seems to be an external problem on the web as well, so that once we had things fixed internally, we still weren't operating, and in thrashing around to fix the internal problem we broke something else. Of course.

Eventually I physically disconnected the new rackmount Netwinder and connected up the old Netwinder in its place -- and discovered some of the same symptoms as before. So now it's up to pair to undo whatever they managed to do recently. Sigh.  But of course if you are installing something new, and it doesn't work, the tendency is to believe that the problem is your new gadget. Not this time.

It also got us into conversations with the software gurus at rebel.com and they've put right some minor problems we discovered such as allowing a / in a dialup user name -- often to dial up you must put in something like ELN/username to tell the local net which service you are going to -- and such like. I'm pleased to report that Rebel.com is doing a great job of cleaning up the problems we find. As usual, "you probably won't get this level of technical support." On the other hand, if we get all the problems fixed generically, you won't need it.

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This week:

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A day devoured by locusts, punctuated by a good long hike with Niven to work on BURNING TOWER, the sequel to The Burning City by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

The rains have stopped. The telephone company in "fixing" one line (which they didn't fix) mucked up two more lines, including the ISDN line. Getting an ISDN line fixed requires a different branch of Pacific Bell. When I had that installed I found myself negotiating with Scott Adams himself, ISDN was so little understood at The Phone Company. He has since left for Greater Glory of course, and The Phone Company has at least a few people who understand ISDN, but not many; so getting one to come out and find that the splicer who "fixed" our previous lines had put dial tone into the ISDN system took negotiation on the phone. The good news is that the ISDN line is fixed.

The bad news is that my family phone line isn't fixed, but they will get to it Real Soon Now. 

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This week:

Monday
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Earthlink "fixed" my wife's web site, by tearing it down and putting up an "under construction" sign. They claim they will fix it Real Soon Now. That has devoured much of the morning. Meanwhile, if you try to get to www.readingtlc.com you won't make it. I doubt you can subscribe to this place through there until they fix it. Wonderful. But at least they say they are going to fix it.

Negotiation with BYTE hierarchy on doing show awards: Miller Freeman owns BYTE as well as PC EXPO. BYTE awards are more prestigious than anyone else's. BYTE used to do the official awards at PC EXPO.  I can understand why Softbank wants ZD to do the official COMDEX Awards (although ours are I think more prestigious) and I don't mind doing ours in the Computer Resellers booth -- heck , I'd rather do them there than in some out of the way hall! it went really well last year at COMDEX -- but we ought to be "official" at PC Expo. Or maybe not.

Them show awards are a LOT of work, but I think they are worth it. They force us to look far and wide -- literally -- and pay attention to what is going on out there. I like that.

Martin Heller is involved with a new web site, www.pcpitstop.com which is pretty good although it has some growing pains. In particular it has raised some security issues I need to address, probably in the April column. I'm gathering information now. Apparently there can be some problems even if you have a firewall. How prevalent they are I don't know, but I may as well fix them. 

I've already downloaded a cookie analyzer, see:

for more on that. And some stuff from Microsoft, which, interestingly, allows me to use GetRight for one of their IE 5 downloads, but the Power Tools will not work with GetRight. That one I had to get through direct transfer and it kept timing out but eventually I got it. GetRight is sure a lot better: it took about 5 retries to get something recently but I never even knew that until I looked at the GetRight log...

Abuse of power?

From The Washington Times:
 http://www.washtimes.com/national/news2-031000.htm 

 "Five Northrop Grumman employees were so intimidated by White House threats of jail that one was nearly fired when she refused to tell her own bosses about the administration's failure to turn over thousands of e-mail messages under subpoena. Newly obtained information shows the White House threatened to have the five employees jailed after they and a glitch in the White House computer system that prevented the discovery of more than 100,000 White House messages involving campaign finance abuses, Monica Lewinsky, "Chinagate" and "Filegate.""

I think Nixon was accused of having an enemies list and "stonewalling"?

All my telephones are fixed. It cost me a couple of days fiction work, but it's all done. ISDN works, family line works, all lines work. Apparently the first chap to fix things broke the others. Then the second one made it all worse. Ah well. 'Tis done now.

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Monday
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It is one beautiful day. The mocking birds are convinced it is spring, and I suppose it is. They tell me we are about 6 inches of rain short of the annual average for this time of year, but I think we can make do; there's a lot of snow pack. More rain now would just run off. 

I have more reports on global warming: sure, it's real, and it has been going on for about 300 years (anyone who knows Alexander Hamilton brought the guns of Ticonderoga across the ice on the Hudson in the battle of Haarlem Heights, or recalls that Hans Brinker skated on brackish water canals in Holland would know that of course).

And I am off to various stores for gardening stuff. It's time for the Spring planting (mostly bulbs and poppies).

Well I haven't left yet because I was trying to send mail to subscribers. This is the last time I try it with OUtlook and Earthlink. The Earthlink server rejects lists of mail with a certain number of bad addresses but will not tell me which have bad addresses. It takes about 5 minutes to TRY. ONce I get some mail off to subscribers it seems important to try to get it to ALL.

It would help a lot if subscribers cleaned up their bad addresses by sending me the subscriber name, OLD address, and NEW address, all in the body of a mail I can open and copy from.  I have had to break the list up into tiny portions (I think Earthlink times out quicker on a Saturday). In any event, we are going to get some kind of mail server service. I can't take this any longer. I am down to very small numbers in the contacts list and it still isn't working.

If you subscribe and did not get mail, CHECK THE SUBSCRIPTION address, and send me mail with the REAL AND CURRENT address.  I can't spend a half day sending one bit of mail.

It turns out most of the problem was ONE bad address that unfortunately being on a division point got onto more than one list. nexus out on tatoosh, if you read this, please send me a valid address. It was that one and that one only apparently that killed the list. Sigh.

I have also found a major bug in Outlook 2000 (suprise!). If you create a folder as an address book, then delete the folder, you cannot delete it in the address book! It is there forever. I need to see if closing outlook and opening it again will fix any of that; but it's sure odd!

It's worse than that. I COULD NOT shut down Outlook 2000. Eventually I had to log off and back on, which is pretty well the equivalent of rebooting. OUTLOOK and WINDOWS 2000 do not work anything like as well together as Microsoft would like you to think. That will go in the next column, and maybe it will get someone's attention. I found another Outlook 2000 bug but they thought it obscure enough that they probably wouldn't do anything about it; this one is similar, and it's not so obscure. Outlook has problems. Windows 2000 lets you sort of recover, but not really: once Outlook starts acting up it begins to take over everything. I don't recall that happening with NT 4 but it may have. I will have to try again with a system running that.

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Weather remains beautiful. Most of my mail problems were caused by one name which happened to be on more than one list. Sigh. Why the entire list should be rejected for one bad name I do not know. But then Earthlink hasn't managed to get my wife's site back up yet either. First they charge me too much. Then they send me bills for even more money. Then they say they will fix things. In fixing them they take the site down entirely. I see. Pardon my disgust.

The only complicated thing about moving her site is that secure server/secure phone line for which we pay quite a bit; it allows secure credit card transactions. I don't understand that very well, and that's one problem: it works now so I don't want to fix it. But now it doesn't work because we don't have her site at all. Blast. While I have a zillion fiction works to do, it's Spring, Niven and I need to get to Mexico to research Burning Tower, and my garden needs attention. The Earthlink Critical Need Detector is working just fine.

Check the badmail page if you are a subscriber and did not get a mail message this weekend.

This is driving me nuts. I have to the best I can tell got rid of all cache files. I have shut down and restarted. When I go to 

http://www.readingtlc.com I get a "real soon now" message. With this machine and with other machines. Including a machine that has never visited that page as best I can tell.

Is the NETWINDER caching stuff?

Because:

Dr. Pournelle -

When I go to:

http://www.readingtlc.com/ 

it comes right up, as it did yesterday. I have checked this just now using both IE 5 and Netscape 4.7 (my usual browser). I have both browsers set to reload from the server every time they visit a page, and NOT to display a cached copy.

I do not know why you see something different, but her site IS available from here.

Ray A. Rayburn Audio@Technologist.com http://www.users.uswest.net/~rrayburn

But when I go there with any machine I get the "real soon now" notice. Can anyone tell me what is going on here?

Aha:

Jerry,

As of 7:55 PM sunday, there is only a "real soon now" message at Roberta's site, accessed from San Francisco through Pac Bell DSL. I think the other individual is cacheing and doesn't know it. Hope this helps.

John

I have several letters to this effect. So apparently it really is hosed, and I have not been unkind to Earthlink. Thanks!

Only:

Jerry -

As of 2300 CST, it's working for me. Since this was my first visit there, I'm quite sure I didn't have it cached.

Tom G.

Jerry,

As of 8:00pm I was able to access Roberta's site through a GTE DSL connection. I have never visited it before, so it cannot be cached. And as of 9:25 I can access it fine. Hope this helps.

Ryne

The Literacy Connection

"This is driving me nuts. I have to the best I can tell got rid of all cache files. I have shut down and restarted. When I go to <http://www.readingtlc.com> I get a "real soon now" message. With this machine and with other machines. Including a machine that has never visited that page as best I can tell.

Is the NETWINDER caching stuff?"

Dr. Pournelle:

 When I go to:  <http://www.readingtlc.com/> it comes right up and I have never been there before.  "(Dr. Pournelle was Dr. Guthrie's last graduate student.)"   Is Roberta a doctor too, or does this refer to you?  The site doesn't even mention who Dr. Pournelle is.

 Seems to me your problem is local.

 Larry Bayern

bavaria@bellatlantic.net

And all I get is the "it's coming real soon now" message. WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON HERE??? How can it be "local"?  Clearly there are things to learn about the Internet...

I can ping the site but then I get the address, and go there by numerical address, and I still get the "real soon now" message. What in the world is happening?

Because I get also:

From: Jim Griebel (jgri@earthlink.nospam.net)

Subject: Roberta’s Site

 “Can anyone tell me what is going on here?”

I suspect the other fellow, for all his settings in IE and Netscape, is getting a cached copy, because, having flushed my own cache (which didn’t include Roberta’s site) going to the given link gets the “Real Soon Now” page. A network monitor trace shows I’m getting the “Real Soon Now” page actually, genuinely sent to me from 207.217.96.99. I’d be interested to know how you set either IE or Netscape to always download and never look at the cache (seriously, I’m not trying to be sarcastic – the only way I know of to be sure you’re not getting a cached copy is to purge the cache).

So some get Real Soon Now and some get the real thing, and there seems to be no pattern to it at all. 

And this from R Paul Hampson:

I got the same thing you did. Thinking that it might be because I'm on Earthlink also, I tried from my wife's aol acct and got:

Description: Unable to locate the server named "www.readingtic.com" --- the server does not have a DNS entry. Perhaps there is a misspelling in the server name, or the server no longer exists. Double-check the name and try again.

There really does seem to be a problem. My condolences.

BUT:

When I called her site up just now (Sunday night, about 7:30, MST, it came right up - no "open real soon now message."

Just a data point for you as you inqure as to the problems.

Tim Pleasant

So now the confusion is complete. How can some people see it, some get "real soon now", and some can't find it at all? What in the ever-loving blue eyed world is going on? Earthlink Thursday said they had made a mistake and they would fix it. I have heard nothing from them since.

I need a way to slow down a Pentium system.  Warcraft II was fun when it came out, but even set to the slowest possible speed now, it's too much of a clickfest for me; it's just no fun any more. I need a way to slow it by half and maybe more. Clearly the code wasn't written with any absolute times built into the game speed. There must be a way to make Warcraft fun again, but it's sure too much like work now.

There is an FPRI report on anthrax and vaccinations; I have copied it here.

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