ISDN WAR STORY

My ISDN experience was relatively easy. I called the phone company, they hooked it up, and they left me with a sheet of paper with the ID numbers and other info. I purchased an internal Zoom ISDN modem (okay, okay, terminal adapter) because I only had one computer that I wanted on the net at the time. Plugged everything in, installed the software. I had a little trouble figuring out which flavor of ISDN network I was connected to. One call to the phone company and that was taken care of. A call to my ISP and I was up and running. Basically, not much worse than setting up a regular modem on a second phone line, though much more expensive. About $125/month between the phone company and the ISP.

A year later, I was looking to buy another computer and my roommate was going to buy a computer. Suddenly, I had three computers that needed internet access. I started looking into proxies and routers. In all, it appeared I was going to have to spend hundreds for the router, and full-time access for multiple IPs was going to be much more expensive than what I was paying for ISDN. And the logistics of using one of my computers as a proxy just wasn't going to work well.

@Home had just introduced cable "modem" to my area. $150 for installation, $50/month for three IPs, and they supply the router hardware. That's far less per month than I was paying for the ISDN line plus ISP dialup account. I recently looked at DSL. Their prices were proportional by speed to the high prices I had seen for ISDN. As long as @Home is diligent about adding nodes when the current one reaches its limits it'll remain the best bang for the buck by far.

But, the installation for @Home didn't go as well as it should. The guy that came to install the software seemed nice enough, but he was following a cookbook and I don't think really understood what he was doing. As he installed the first piece of software I asked him to install it on my drive E:, because C: was always getting full. He hesitated at that, but did it. Then I noticed with the other software that he blew through the wizards quickly so I couldn't remind him to install to drive E:. Oh, well, I could uninstall/reinstall if I needed to.

After he left I realized that he had written down my TCP/IP info but forgot to enter them into Network Neighborhood. Also, he had installed an older version of RealPlayer than what was already on my system. Basically, careless mistakes by someone who doesn't really understand why he's doing what he's doing. Fortunately, he didn't do anything that was difficult to fix. But I could see this guy breaking a newbie's system and neither of them being able to fix it.

After five months, I find @Home more than Good Enough. A few outages for a few hours at a time, but I don't think any more than I saw from my ISDN ISP. And the high speed access really changes how you use the net.

Drake Christensen

Several mentions akin to "as daunting as ISDN…" makes me wonder what the problems are in the US version(s) of ISDN.

As noted earlier, I have just upgraded to ISDN (in Sweden). The steps to get this working were minimal:

1. Physical installation. Pretty much plug&;play. The Swedish telco (Telia) remote-switches the exisiting copper line from analog to digiital. The telco will even let you do the physical install of the ISDN-to-analog adapter yourself, as long as the line distance to the digital exchange is not too great. At longer distances, the telco wants one of their technicians to do on-site (automated) calibration with the ISDN unit on the line first. On the other hand, he can then immediately order the A to D switching, otherwise you would have to wait perhaps a day for the ISDN numbers to be activated.

2. Set-up. The unit is programmable using an ordinary touchtone telephone. Set up the assigned (new) phone numbers. "Duocom" is sold as a 2-phonenumber base package. Each logical line is via the adapter available as both digital and analog.

3. ISDN "modem". For ISDN internet, an extra ISDN to computer box is added, allowing computers to connect via an ordinary serial port connector.

4. ISDN software. This is simply the driver and set-up programs that on the system look like any other RAS modem. Installs like any other modem on the designated port. Usual AT dialling commands. Quite transparent to the user.

Given the rock-solid connect and data transfer of ISDN, I found that ISDN was easier to set-up and get running than my first attempts to get RAS dial-up working with POTS and modem.

For the newbie, it’s virtually automatic, because the telco’s bundled Internet account comes with a preconfigured install CD, which will install driver and Internet software, set everything up for RAS to the designated account and guide the user through direct activation of it via webpages on the ISP server.

What, exactly, are the problems that so disillusion the US ISDN customers? Is it simply the lack of interest from the telcos?

Oh well, I suppose you will be able to tell us in short order when you activate your own ISDN line.

/ Bo

--

The simplest would be a Netopia router, which has a built in Ethernet hub. Makes connection to a network very easy, particularly if your existing hubs have an uplink port which allows "daisy chaining". From the ISDN wall jack is RJ45, straight through usually unless the particular ISDN hardware requires a crossover cable (Ascend Pipelines, etc). The RJ11 port is for connection analog telephone equipment.

Jerry,

A fresh idea. Have a competition to improve the usability of your website. I don’t care about the colors and graphics—less glitz, more content is a good motto for the web. But you admit in various places that this page needs to be better organized, etc. I also enjoyed the special report by Jessica Mulligan and discussion of it, but I couldn’t figure out how to submit my own comment to that discussion. To general email? Not clear.

Prize: recognition, i.e. it is a good resume booster

Categories: professional, amateur/student, even corporate (several Web portals have interesting features like group discussions, conferencing, etc.)

Let them reorganized your site (the content) and have one "button-link" on your current main page to their makeover locations. Voting could be by users and even Byte might want to feature this or the next idea.

Another idea—get someone with skills like Moshe Bar to put up to web servers—everything identical WRT hardware and connection speed, but one with NT and one with Linux. See if there is a discernable difference according to users. Then see how long they can stay live w/o going down. Then challenge advanced programmers (I hesitate to use the word "hackers") to try to take either or both down and explain how they did it. Then challenge security experts to protect them, &; etc. Now I would pay $20 per year just to see such a "computer jousting" exhibit site.

Jerry, your fine novels show that you like competition. Go for it! Remember to delegate, though. Don’t want the stop the ole thought-flow from your brain to ours! I’m willing to help out if I can be of service.

Just read your column on the web and its good to have you back!

An interesting one for you to peruse is the whole area of DMA Channels and IDE controllers. Most modern IDE Controllers can use DMA, but windows 9x and NT do not enable DMA Transfers by default. In Win 9x, you simply go to the systes\devices tab in the control pane, click on the disk or cdrom, and click on "Use DMA". On Windows NT, you need to get a thing called DMACHECK.exe from one of the micropsoft service packs (It unpacks the file while installing, so you can get it from the temp directory). This allows you to turn on DMA transfers for the primary or secondary IDE controller under NT.

As you can imagine, this has a huge effect on Disk performance, and it also drops CPU Usage dramatically!

I am just now catching up on your articles (it’s been one Hell of a year, and without Byte arriving on the doorstep every month, it’s just been easier to fall behind...), and noticed your comment about "a little inconvenience" in Frontpage.

Frontpage 98 wants to be connected to your web page. Oh, that’s just fine and dandy on my office machine, which finally has a LAN connection (only two years after I was hired and promised it!). On my home machine, though, I do a fair amount of HTML work as well. There, I prefer to only be connected when I’m actually using the net (there are these $per hour charges that rack up fairly fast as is!). I don’t see any reason that I should have to make a connection before I even try to fiddle with web pages that I may never upload (I’m involved in some projects on web education; only a fraction of my work actually gets onto the public web site).

As is, I dropped Frontpage and do a lot of my work in Netscape Composer. It’s incredibly basic, with no tools for assisting in the design of frames for example, but it gets my work done well. I set up frames and bitmaps from raw HTML code anyway (I guess, at heart, I’m just a DOS and UNIX boy- I don’t mind typing!). The results are fine for my work, albeit not quite so polished/fancy many commercial sites.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE regarding REGEDIT /c

Hi Jerry,

please publish this to the registry/REGEDIT thread:

I have Win95 OSR2 with several bug/security fixes applied, and recently upgraded from IE4.01sp1 to IE5.

Today I backed up my registry using ERU, then exported my registry, went to DOS and did the REGEDIT /C trick. My registry shrunk from 7.2MB to about 5MB.

Back in the Win95 GUI, everything seemed just fine.

I backed up the registry using ERU again, then I decided to remove a couple of old backups.

After a while I decided to check my email and launched OE5.

Within a few seconds I nearly died of a heart attack!

OE popped up as if it had newly installed!!!!!

No messages, no inbox filter rules, no mail accounts, no Digital IDs!!!

I found out that stupid me accidentally selected the backup I did right before the REGEDIT trick instead of the second last version—for heavens sake, this was only 6 days old.

I restored that. Now I have the old registry size, but at least all important settings are back again.

I wonder what EXACTLY the REGEDIT /C trick is supposed to clean up - the experiment has proven that it cleans up things it should better leave in place.

Subject: Fix-It Utilities under NT 4

Jerry,

I’m running Fix-It under NT 4 SP4 with nary a problem. I’m also running IE 5. The only problem I encounter with the latter is that it occasionally "forgets" the pages I’ve just visited. Closing and re-opening IE fixes that.

 Bruce Gregory

Dr. Pournelle:

I do not know if it is your kind of humor but as a Buffy fan you might enjoy it.

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I’m sure someone’s told you by now (or you’ve remembered on your own), but you can get the file listing in any order by adding a switch to the DOS Dir command.

DIR /O:N > 111.txt should accomplish what you want. Dir /? if you want to see some other options.

Claud Addicott

Jerry,

quick solution to the dir ordering problem:

1) Dir to text file (you already did that)

2) open text file 111.txt in word

3) cut headers and footers (and any extraneous lines you see)

4) alt+left-click drag the VERTICAL COLUMN selection until you get to the column of long WIN'98 names (last column on the left) cutting out DOS-names (with ~ inserted), datestamps, etc.

5) Select table>sort and it should put everything in order by paragraphs.

5B) if you need the other information, you can paste it at the end of the first line before the ordering process, and it should paste down line by line, but it isn't very pretty (columns don't align as well, and I don’t know how to do that part). To get the Names ordered, this is the quickest way I know, and it comes in handy for me often enough, even though I know there are some shareware utilities which I think can do much of the same.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Make a file called "dirlist.bat" containing this:

dir %1 /-p /o:gn > "c:\temp\Directory Listing"

Start /w notepad "c:\temp\Directory Listing"

The /o:gn sorts with directories first, then by name.

Go to Start => Settings => Folder Options, File Types tab.

Select the "folder" file type. Select "New". Hit the "Edit" button. Hit the "New" button. Put "Directory Listing" in the "Action" box and "(path)\dirlist.bat" in the "Application" box.

Now you can right-click on a folder in Explorer, select "Directory Listing", and get a listing dumped into notepad.

The above was more-or-less shamelessly taken from The Mother of all Windows 98 Books by Leonhard and Simon. Great book. Woody Leonhard is a Word / Office guru who writes a great newsletter on Office. He isn’t beholden to Microsquash and calls ‘em as he sees ‘em. He really blasts MS when they deserve it (and praises them when that’s appropriate, too). Subscribe to his Office newsletter at http:\\www.wopr.com . I think you’d like his nutsy-boltsy approach to Word / Windows.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks,

Jim Riticher

jritiche@bellsouth.net

 =====

Jerry, try

dir /on/b >111.txt

/o = sort order, n=sort by name, and /b = bare listing without headers.

DIR /ON /B > mylist.txt

The /ON is Order by Name

That should do it for you.

Dr. Pournelle

I moved this to your "more urgent" address since you appeared to want this information quickly. I have already sent it to ‘jerryp’.

I know that this will always work with 4DOS (and 4OS2) but I believe that COMMAND.COM also supports the /o:n switch which will list the files sorted by name. I just checked an old DOS 5 manual and /o:n will sort ascending, /o:-n will sort descending. Just redirect the output to a file and you should be set. 4DOS gives you far more options if it is available. I would never have a system without it.

I have verified that this does work with COMMAND.COM under Windows 95. After all Win95 and Win98 are both just Windows for Workgroups on very strong steroids.

Rolf Grunsky

--

First off, if you didn’t already know, most DOS commands, including dir, have built in help if given the "/?" option. Using that, I was able to find a way to sort with "dir". Use the /O switch, followed by various other letters indicating the sort order. The fields to sort by and their associated letters are:

N By name (alphabetic)

S By size (smallest first)

E By extension (alphabetic)

D By date &; time (earliest first)

G Group directories first

A By Last Access Date (earliest first)

• Prefix to reverse order.

So, to do a directory listing placing subdirectories at the end of the list, then sorting by file extension, then by filename, you would do:

dir /o:-gen

or, broken down

e - keeping directories last, now sort by file extension

n - keeping extensions together and directories last, now sort by name

Notice the cumultive effect of the sortorder. Later elements in the order only effect directory entries where earlier elements make no distinction.

Jerry,

I’ve had to do this often enough that I figured out a way to do it, repeatably and simply. My solution works from the right-click context "send-to" menu.

First, create a folder: c:\program files\utilities In that folder create a .bat file named dirlist.bat.

The .bat looks like this:

---

dir /ON /L > c:\windows\desktop\dir.lis "%1"

exit

---

That’s "%one" at the end. The result is to put the directory listing, sorted by filename, in a file named "dir.lis" on your desktop. If you want to change the sort attributes, you can get the command arguments for ‘dir’ by going to a dos window and doing a ‘dir /?’.

Then create a shortcut to that bat file (right click on it and drag a copy down the window. When you release the right click, tell it you want a shortcut.

Copy that shortcut to c:\windows\SendTo.

Now, if you right click on any folder icon in a window and select sendto, you should see ‘dirlist’ appear in the sendto list. Select that and it should create a file on the desktop named ‘dir.lis’  which has the directory listing of the folder you selected, sorted by filename.

Takes a few minutes to set it all up, but if it’s something you need to do periodically, this makes it slick.

 coredump@enteract.com

Jerry,

This is a setup that I use sometimes. It is neither original nor new, but I have not seen it in your wednesday current mail. Please ignore it if it doesn’t make any sense for you.

If W98 behaves in the same way as W95, the following might work:

To use, right-click on the file icon of which you want to make the directory listing, and select "Directory Listing". Your directory listing will be written to the Windows desktop, in file "direct.txt", long file names sorted by name, no subdirectories.

Add as many Actions as you like. Adapt the command line to your liking.

To view the MS-DOS DIR command options, open a command window (MS-DOS prompt) and type: "DIR /?|More". Note the use of the DIRCMD environment variable.

I use Frontpage extensively and I have learned (the hard way, mostly) about most of its quirks. Like most MS products, it tries to be overly-helpful at times. This is what I have discovered about its picture preferences...

Anyway, this way seems to work well enough for me... My site (done entirely with FP) is at www.inwards.com, and gives some idea of what you can do with the above method.

Digging the Encore’s 6X with Dxr3 board we find a little more information, even if contradicting some of the above. It states that this drive can read at 6X the original DVD spec, or 8.1 MB/s (this would mean the 5X can read 6.75 MB/s and 1X DVD would mean 1.35 MB/s). The funny thing here is that this drive can only read CD’s at 24X (3,600 KB/s), much slower than the 5X (32X)!!!!!!!

In any case, either one should be fast enough to serve as the sole CD in any PC, even for 4X CD recording. Why don’t you try it and inform us of the results?

Hi Jerry

I read your column on the fun you had installing a CD writer. I too am having a lot of "fun" installing a CD rewriter. I went for a Plextor SCSI rewriter as a cheap and fast alternative to tape drives. The basic installation of SCSI drivers and the Plextor management software all seemed to go easily enough, as did the software Nero Burning ROM.

The only trouble is having tried backing up to rewritable discs and got nowhere, I have tried duplicating CDs both on the fly and by creating an image. The software seems to go through the motions for between 20 and 30 mins then sometimes hangs, sometimes fails and sometimes even says it’s burned the CD successfully. But when you attempt to look at the CD it’s completely empty!

Ever heard of that?

Jerry - I’m not sure if you’ve seen this, but I thought you might appreciate the humor.

The new Master Card Commercial . . .

Lockheed F-16 Fighting Falcon Jet - $25 million

Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Fighter - $45 million

Boeing B-52 Stratofortress - $74 million

Brand new B-2 Stealth Bomber - $2.1 billion

A decent map of downtown Belgrade—Priceless.

There are some things that money can’t buy ... Unfortunately good intelligence isn’t one of them. (unless you’re at Los Alamos)

Dr. Pournelle,

Sorry to beat the horse further. I also practice the DIR /ON > FILENAME command routinely. Usually that’s good enough. I have found something that causes some consternation, though. The ‘name’ DIR sorts when using the /ON switch (at least while inside Win95B—I don’t have Win98 conveniently available) is the DOS name (the 8-character part of the 8.3 form, often with a ~ in it) NOT the long-name. This makes for some counterintuitive sorting when you make long name files that are the same in their 1^st 6 chars, but different thereafter. It’s even more fun when your long name contains any ‘8.3-illegal’ characters because they’re either squeezed out of the DOS name or ‘_’-replaced before suffixing the name with ~digit(s) and trimming-to-8-characters algorithm kicks in: (in the DOS names, spaces are squeezed and any occurrences of ;=],[ or + are ‘_’-replaced, in a Novell networking environment, it’s different again because more of these 8.3-illegal characters are squeezed—I believe that Novell uses OS2 long-name-to-8.3 conversion rules, which don’t allow the ‘~’ either—in any case, none of the filename systems, including Windows, allow any occurrences of \:/*?">| or < ). It really gets fun when you have more than 9 such files, because the ~ eats the 6^th filename char instead of the 7^th: e.g., FILENA~1.XXX thru FILENA~9.XXX and FILEN~10.XXX thru FILEN~99.XXX. Again, it’s the DOS name part that sorts.

This is also true when using the /B[bare] switch: DIR /B/ON >

FILENAME

And DOS [legacy] stuff is more intuitive?? --NOT—

(Of course, all this seems to exist to ensure backwards compatibility rather than [MY definition of] reasonableness).

My only real solutions to sorting lots of filenames that fit these weird rules is to haul the DIR outputs (named as .TXT files) into Excel (as fixed-length field columns) and let it sort on the real long-filename strings.

Regards and best of luck with any other fire-breathing dragons (wherever they are ;-)

From: Thomas Crook [tjcrook@email.com]

Subject: Ted Nelson and user interfaces

Dear Jerry,

Among other things he coined the words hypertext and hypermedia, although as he says, the current implementations of those ideas (e.g., the World Wide Web) have many problems.

I believe I recall reading an article on Ted many years ago in Byte, but I haven’t seen much on him in the press or various "computer histories" since. It would be nice if people were more aware his contributions. For example, I suspect more people today have heard of Richard Stallman than Ted Nelson, even though Ted’s ideas as implemented in the World Wide Web may have a wider impact. (Interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee had not heard of Ted when he invented the web, but he was influenced by people who were influenced by Ted.)

Regards,

Thomas Crook,

Subject: C. S. Lewis

When I was reading through the section of your webpage about some of your favorite books I noticed you were a fan of the works of that great Christian author C. S. Lewis. I wonder if you know about a wonderful resource of information and memorabilia about Lewis, among other Christian authors, that is located in the Chicago suburbs.

Due to some major new donations to the Wade Center they are currently having a brand new building designed for them. This will allow them to grow beyond the small section of the college library they are currently shoe horned into. Hopefully you will have time to visit the center the next time you are in the Chicago area.

Thomas Price

Subject: Shrinking Memory

Jerry,

Forgive me if you have already found the answer to the above.

Have you tried FREEMEMPRO, http://www.meikel.com/freemem/fmempro.htm ? This works for me on w95!!!!

Dear Jerry,

In the Thursday 5-27-1999 current mail, Andrew Peake told of an odd problem while writing disks. My experience is that the Plextor Manager software that comes with the drive does not work. I have had a NT W/S machine become unbootable immediately after loading that software. I probably did something wrong—and I did not try again. I have, however, found that there is no need for their manager package. They recently began distributing a program named CDRESQ (which appears to be a Plextor drive limited and renamed version of Symantec’s Ghost) which can create an image of the hard drive and works very well. And Adaptec’s Easy CD Creator Deluxe works very well with the Plextor CD-R drives I have &; have installed for customers.

John

John G. Ruff.

Jerry,

Anyway, this is to thank you for recommending MemTurbo. It does all you say. It has not only kept me from locking up, a frequent occurance due to multiple open windows, etc., but it also helped identify a major trouble maker on my system.

I noticed that MemTurbo, kept kicking itself off (I had it set to run at low mem warning). I pulled it up and could see memory disappear, it would run, memory would restore to 40MB free, then fall to 5MB, restore, fall, etc.

I used the emperical method to determine the culprit, by closing applications one after another until I found the perpetrator. A pull from an outside database via a somewhat jury-rigged spreadsheet interface I got from a friend. I still will need to run it on occasion, but now I know to go to barebones application-wise when I do.

Anyway, thanks for the tip.