Chaos Manor Mail August 23 - 29, 1999

HOME Current View VIEW Home MAIL Home BOOK Reviews © This week: Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	CHAOS MANOR MAIL A SELECTION Mail August 23 - 29, 1999 REFRESH/RELOAD EARLY AND OFTEN! CLICK ON THE BLIMP TO SEND MAIL TO ME The current page will always have the name currentmail.html and may be bookmarked. For previous weeks, go to the MAIL HOME PAGE. Fair warning: some of those previous weeks can take a minute plus to download. After Mail 10, though, they're tamed down a bit. IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private SAY SO AT THE TOP of the mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. If you want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature. PLEASE DO NOT USE DEEP INDENTATION INCLUDING LAYERS OF BLOCK QUOTES IN MAIL. *TABS* in mail will also do deep indentations. Use with care or not at all. I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too... I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail. If you want to send mail that will be published, you don't have to use the formatting instructions you will find when you click here but it will make my life simpler, and your chances of being published better.. This week: Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday Current Mail HIGHLIGHTS: How to do Replies in Outlook Big Bird goes mad Do Real users use Notepad? NetObjects Fusion The Borg Moves on? And suing to prevent deep links A CoDominium Chronology Is Linux a hoax? Real Webmasters use a pencil... Request for help: Northgate keyboard Office 2000 mail merge problem Netscape crash fixed. (But WHAT FIXED IT???) Is this the handwriting on the wall for Netscape? What a mess. Do you use gif images? Then PAY UP! Unfair to Microsoft?
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Monday August 23, 1999 A lot of mail got put up late last night. Dear Jerry I managed to find some instructions for automatic replies in “Running Microsoft Outlook 98.” Or, more accurately, in the hypertext version of the book that comes on a companion CD (and how does anyone know how the book feels about having to lug around a CD-ROM?). In a tip in a sidebar under instructions for the rules wizard, I found > To learn how to create an Outlook template, see “Out of Office Automatic Replies.” The link in this leads to: > Out of Office Automatic Replies > > To send an automatic reply using the Out Of Office Assistant, follow these steps: > > > In the Edit Rule dialog box, turn on Reply With, and then click the Template button. > > [graphic showing how goes here, but Windows NT 4 wouldn’t copy it to the clipboard] > > > Click Yes in the message box to save your changes. I suspect that MS figures that you don’t really need a decent index with searchable text. There is something to be said for using a machine when it is more suited to the task than one’s body parts, but an index is essential in a reference book this size (606 pp. without the “index”), and I don’t always have a CD-ROM drive handy to read the CD-ROM. P.S. I don’t remember seeing any reference to your Bronco betting replaced. I won’t claim the suspense is killing me, but my curiosity remains quite lively. Peter Schuman Thanks. I bought a new Eddie Bauer Explorer eventually. Four door so the dog has his own window. Comfortable for long distances since Niven and I have to go to Yucatan on our next research trip. I sure wish they'd do more indexing of help files. Thanks. Give Adobe GoLive! 4.0 a try. It’s better than Dreamweaver. (First Windows version and darned reliable considering). It’s got great web management FTP built in. Never has made a mistake yet. I’m not a web professional. I’m a Quark professional. I like the way GoLive let’s me avoid having to write code (though I CAN do it when forced to). Notepad? Only for masochists and macho types. :-P Eric Welch St. Joseph, MO http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch What is a free gift ? Aren’t all gifts free? I'll try. Adobe is sometimes slow about sending review stuff and I am sure I have not seen this. I'll ask. I sure could use something with good web management and good editing. Dreamweaver does not have the image handling capabilities of FrontPage, alas. Otherwise it's pretty neat. I am not sure where this goes. It came as mail... IMPORTANT BREAKING SESAME STREET NEWS! NEW YORK (AP) -- Big Bird, the famed friendly muppet of Sesame Street, has apparently gone on a rampage. Several muppets are known to be dead; including Prarie Dawn, Oscar the Grouch, and Bert—long time friend, room-mate, and occasional lover of Ernie. The bird is now reportedly holding Maria hostage in a five floor tenement near Hooper’s Store. New York City Police SWAT teams have surrounded the building. NEW YORK (AP) -- Big Bird, Sesame Street muppet, is reported dead at this hour after an hour-and-a-half hostage standoff with New York City Police. Kermit-The-Frog, Sesame Street Muppet on the scene, reports that as police stormed the five story tenament building where the bird was holding Maria hostage, Big Bird flew out an upper story window at them in a Kamikaze-like attack. Police SWAT units brought down the bird in a hail of automatic weapons fire. Dead are: Prairie Dawn, Oscar the Grouch, Bert, and Big Bird. There is no information available concerning Maria. NEW YORK (AP) -- The Professor and his assistant, Beaker, muppet chemists, have reportedly found angel dust in Big Bird’s feed. Big Bird was killed by Police early this morning after the bird went on a killing spree on Sesame Street. Maria, taken hostage during the ordeal, has survived unharmed. Three muppets were killed by the bird: Prarie Dawn (a friendly, pig-tailed muppet girl-child), Oscar the Grouch (a green garbage-can dwelling grumpy muppet) and Bert (the famous gay paper clip collector and pigeon friend). Authorities in the area report that the bad seed was purchased at the local Hooper’s. NEW YORK (AP) -- Police are asking all motorists and humans to stay away from Sesame Street today as tensions are running high among the muppets. Many reportedly are outraged at the tainted food supply and at how the police handled the hostage situation. According to bystanders on the scene at the time, Mr. Snuffalupagus pleaded with police to be allowed to talk Big Bird down. Instead, police stormed the building with deadly results. Ernie is said to be despondent at the loss of his good buddy Bert. NEW YORK (AP) -- Violence erupted again on Sesame Street at five o’clock this afternoon. As thousands of humans driving home took a sightseeing tour of the scene of Big Bird’s deadly rampage, muppets became enraged. Hundreds of muppets, large and small, stalked the streets and surrounded humans in their cars. In at least one case, ten muppets pulled a motorist from his car and beat him with large, styrofoam letters. Police again arrived on the scene in force. At this hour, quiet is restored—but tensions are very high. NEW YORK (AP) -- Police and fire units have been called to Sesame Street. Reporters on the scene describe a nightmarish atmosphere. Furry muppets ranging in size from only inches to seven feet in height are looting Hooper’s Store and firebombing the entire neighborhood. Orange and blue firelight is rising over many buildings. Cardboard backdrops, props, and storehouses full of numbers and letters are burning to the ground. Muppets are taunting firemen and police from windows high above the street with counting and alphabet songs. NEW YORK (AP) -- Morning light has brought an eerie calm to Sesame Street after a night of rioting. Smoke rises from most buildings. On the street, lifeless, crumpled fur lies in mute testiment of the night of wild outrage. Unknown numbers of muppets have died or been shot to death by Police in full riot gear. Here and there, a muppet—still animated with life—can be seen staring at the wreckage, or sweeping vacantly at the rubble. The Count was reported running down the street crying and yelling, :”Ten, Ten Lifeless Muppet Bodies!” No humans were killed in the rioting, although several people reported rug-burns. NEW YORK (AP) -- Ernie, gay friend and roommate of the murdered muppet Bert, broke his two day silence today with a eulogy address at a mass muppet funeral. The following is the complete transcript of his address: I come here today to honor a man I loved. A man who was loved by millions thoughout the world. Bert was a giant among muppets. His paper-clip collection was viewed with awe by many of the world’s leaders. Just one year ago, as President Clinton campaigned on Sesame Street for the muppet vote, it was Bert who everyone turned to for advice. It was Bert who told us all, “anyone who can hang as many paperclips together as Bill Clinton, can certainly run the country.” I also come here today to honor Big Bird. Bird was such a loving creature. His large size and bright color alarmed many who first met him, but it was his innocent and curious nature which taught us all to love him. Bird wouldn’t have wanted us to remember him, or to memorialize him, with violence. All he ever wanted was for all creatures to “just get along” with each other. Big Bird has come to a bad end, friends, but is wasn’t his fault. It was just some bad seed. Jerry, re: >Professor Ted Williams at Keele University, Staffordshire, England has developed a patented solid state memory >system with the capacity of 86 Giga Bytes per square centimetre of surface area. The system uses a magneto-optical >system not dissimilar to that of CD-ROM, except that the system is fixed, solid state, and has a different >operating approach. >http://www.cmruk.com/cmrkeele.html Didn’t find the page there but did find some information here: http://www.cmruk.com/cmrinventions.html regards John John Rice coredump@enteract.com The Internet - Someone's LAB experiment gone horribly wrong. Thanks. Jerry, Regarding a piece of mail you published last week about a possible “urban legend” mainframe virus: I believe I know the source of that story, although I cannot pin down date/title/author. There was a science fiction story published in (I believe) Analog sometime in the late 1960’s about two or three programmers who created a mainframe virus. They would come in as consultants and remove the virus from that system, be treated as heroes and receive large payments. Eventually, of course, that system might contract the virus again and they would of course be called in again to save the day. Part of the story was set in a bar somewhere in Antarctica where they were hiding out from the security forces of a major computer company with a three letter name. A few years later, around 1973-74, I was delighted to begin a story in Amazing (or perhaps in its sister magazine, Fantastic?) that seemed to be set in that same future history, only to discover it was simply a reprint of the original. Jim Lawrence I must have missed that one. Thanks.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Tuesday, August 24, 1999 We're still in short shrift mode, and will be for several days. Hi Jerry, Thanx for your great column. I am glad you and some of Byte went on-line. With the advent of the web, the print magazine was beginning to look like yesterday's news. This week's column has inspired me to a few comments: The name HoTMetaL simply comes from the capitalized letters HTML with a few vowels thrown into it. Your explanation is a lot more interesting, of course. Dreamweaver V2.0 has the site management capabilities you missed in V1.0. I built my first web sites with FP2.0 and FP95. I liked it a lot until my client tried to publish a web-site with a Unix-based ISP. For security reasons, the ISP refused to install FrontPage extensions for months. When they were finally in place, it turned out to be too complicated to make corrections. When I tried to generate a site-map with a web-bot, the pages came out in the wrong order every time. I never figured out why. All the web-bots had to be converted to CGI-scripts. In my opinion, Dreamweaver 2.0 plus HomeSite 4.0 plus Fireworks 2.0 is by far the best web-creation package out there. In addition to that you need a few essential CGI-scripts such as formmail. If you get annoyed with any of this, you just walk away from it. I would never, ever, go back to FrontPage. Now to the critical part: A few weeks back, you gave Microsoft a hard time for the Power Management features in W2K. Not that I mind Microsoft getting a spanking, but in the process you described the power consumption of three light-bulbs as negligible. That sounds very peculiar to Europeans and probably even more so to the rest of the world, I suppose. The power consumption of three light-bulbs multiplied by two million Danish computer-owners is NOT negligible. That's how I see it, anyway. As you are so fond of saying, your mileage may vary. Best, Charlie -- Charlie Breindahl Work: Department of Film and Media Studies, University of Copenhagen, http://www.ifm.ku.dk/ Phone: +45 35 32 91 89 Cell: +45 26 23 01 76 E-mail: hitch@coco.ihi.ku.dk ICQ: 33825072 "For the modern Don Quixote, the windmills have been preprogrammed to turn into knights" - Janet H. Murray Thanks. I have a hectic schedule for the next few weeks, then I need to rethink this entire place. FrontPage works, and for people with relatively small sites and no great complexity it works well. It handles images and electronic pictures extremely well. My biggest problem with Dreamweaver was making up my photojournalism pages. It didn't have an automatic thumbnail maker; FrontPage makes thumbnails, and automatically links the thumbnail to the big picture, and when you save gives you the opportunity to change folders for the pictures or the thumbnails. It does very well with name changes too. I knew about the HoTMetaL use of the letters HTML and in fact that cutsey pie nonsense was one of the reasons I didn't pay much attention to the product. I rather like the name HotMetal reminding me of a Linotype machine, but the screwy capitalization would have meant I would have to write it that way in everything I wrote, and I'd have to make a macro to find it and set it right, and that was just too darned much trouble. When they get a sane name for the product I'll think again. It may be treat to use but who wants to write about it given the spelling gubbage? I have all the Dreamweaver, Homesite, and Fireworks programs, and when I get through this exhausting summer I'll install them and see if I can convert. I will probably be looking for scripts, too, to do automatic date and time (the main 'bot I use in FrontPage) and such like. Conversion is a lot of work. I am sort of used to FrontPage's idiosyncrasies now, so I can manage for a while. Thanks. Hi Jerry, enjoyed your column on Office 2000 and WIN 2000 - {bahhh humbug} anyway, here's the answer to your question regarding those Out of Office Rules, "How To" You Said : "You can send automatic replies to messages, although that's not documented. Open a new mail form as if you were going to send mail to someone; leave the "To" field blank; enter a subject and write the message; and save it as a file of type "oft", which means Outlook File Template. Now the Rules Wizard will let you assign that as an auto-reply message. If you can find out how to do that from the Outlook online help files, please tell me where. I never did. " Okay Jerry, per the MS Office 2000 at a glance book - P161, under the section Identifying Messages By Color.. Odd place I know, but that's where I discovered it. and no I didn't find it in the outlook 2000 hyperhelp since I was reluctant to ask that kitty <g> to go out on the internet and find the answer in the "micro"soft knowledge base. However I resorted to the Microsoft Outlook book and this is what I found - tip - create out of office rules. to automaticaly handle messages when you are out of the office, choose out of office assistance from the tools menu. use the "Out Of Office Assistant" dialog box to compose the text of the "AutoReply" message. Then Click Add Rule to Specify which messages you want outlook to automatically handle and what you want outlook to do with the messges (to reply to them or forward them to someone else, for example). note: this feature is only available for use with Microsoft Exchange Server Just thought you wanted an answer, since you asked.. Best Regards, REality Ausetkmt <"http://welcome.to/RealTruth"> "Live Patiently in the world; Know that those who hate you are more numerous than those who Love You" {African Proverb} I sure hope your proverb isn't true. Thanks. Part of my job is to create professional documentation for some of the software I write. I have learned that the best documentation is the one that explains a process in detail in very simple terms. But, MS Office 2000 documentation is written for the person that can’t even type using more than two fingers. It is overly simplistic and sometimes even insulting. For doing things on the “expert” level, it is completely useless. I agree. The documentation is not one of the highlights. Speaking of Office Suites, have you used WordPerfect 2000 lately? I got the upgrade at the office (including MS Office 2000 and its ugly icons) and I have been impressed. It seems to me that MS Office has a bunch of features you will never use. WordPerfect has plenty of those too, but it also has things that make life so much easier. I recommend you try it out, learn it (most people don’t like to bother to learn anything new; God forbid brains should be used for learning), and see what you think. It won’t turn your writing life around, but I think it will make it more pleasant and more productive. 95% of the manuals I write are written in WordPerfect simply because Word would not make it easy to do. Word can do it, but with too much effort in my part. Before I forget, I’ve had a great deal of Access 2000 woes. I had to do a database that should have taken about 2 days to complete. Instead it took 2 weeks. That “cute” dog that sat on my screen didn’t help either. Let me know your opinion and your points of view. I’ll be happy to talk (or write). Alberto T. [atl@inquo.net] I have not got too deep into Access 2000. I continue to discover idiosyncrasies and annoyances tin Office 2000, and I have not changed my opinion: Office 97 with the various parts updated to 98 where possible (Outlook and FrontPage in particular) are Good Enough For The Moment, and I would wait for some service packs on 2000 before adopting it. Hello Mr. Pournelle, I have been a big fan of yours for years, both for your Byte columns and your fiction. So this is meant as a helpful comment, not a criticism. In your latest column on the Byte web site, you mention encountering some issues with Front Page. (Wannabe webmasters should all thank you for the warning, by the way...<smile>) You go on to mention other web authoring tools out there that you hadn’t had time to look at yet. I was astounded that you did not mention a really fine one—namely NetObjects Fusion (currently at version 4). If you pick one other web design tool to look at, it really should be Fusion 4 (along with the other bundled products that come with it). I am CCing this to the marketing folks at NetObjects, in hopes that they will jump on an opportunity to win some well-deserved kind words from you, and send you a copy of NetObjects Fusion 4 :-). I know you get lots of free stuff from all over, but this is one product you really should take time to look at! I’ve used all of the products you mentioned in your article, and for what it’s worth, I think Fusion is the best tool of the bunch. Don’t take my word for anything, though, who the heck am I anyway <grin>. Surf on over to http://www.netobjects.com or http://www.efuse.com and see why lots of people like Fusion! (The minutes you spend to do that might save you hours of frustration battling with what I jokingly call “Front Rage.”) I presume you were joking when you said in a past article that (paraphrase) “real webmasters use notepad.” (Linux buffs would tell you that they code HTML by hand with Vi, but they’re joking too...) But I am not kidding at all when I say that lots of webmasters who build great web sites for a living swear by Fusion! -- Warm Regards, Karl Strieby http://www.k-c-p.com/ I thought I said that many professionals use NetObjects Fusion. It seems to take a bit of learning that I haven't had time to do yet, but yes, it's certainly powerful enough. My advice isn't going to be very useful to professionals to begin with; I am very much an amateur at web building. I can tell people what works for me. And "I do all these silly things so you won't have to..." As to "real webmasters use notepad," I doubt it myself, but I have readers who swear it's true... Jerry, I don’t know if you ever check out the on-line ‘zine “Salon” so I thought I would pass along the following two recent items of interest that are technology related: 1. “Don’t link or I’ll sue! ‘Deep linking’ lawsuits threaten everything that makes the Web work right” - an article about sites that want to prevent access except through their home page. http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/1999/08/12/deep_links/index.html 2. A ‘letter to the editor’ responding to a Salon article about the new Sega Dreamcast video game console - “One thing you didn’t mention in the article about Sega’s Dreamcast: The Dreamcast runs Microsoft’s Windows CE. Those who buy Dreamcast will be helping Microsoft to gain control of the gaming console market—one of the few computer software markets they don’t already control ... “ http://www.salon.com/letters/1999/08/24/marsalis/index1.html Regards, Alan Donders alan_donders@hotmail.com I don't usually see Salon unless someone calls an article to my attention, so thanks. I can see both sides of the deep link situation. In my case I provide permanent page names for current mail and current view, but I too sort of wish people would come in through the home page in case I have an announcement or something. As to Dreamcast I don't know enough, but Eric tracks that market. We'll see what he has to say. Dr. Pournelle— Just letting you know that my web-pages dealing with your Future History series have been updated. The timeline has been completed, I’ve added some sociology notes, some star-maps have been included, and there is now a complete “Suggested Reading Order” list (which is useful for the Falkenberg books, but nearly essential for the “War World” stories!) I recall you once had a link to this site on your page. If it’s still there, it probably points to the old URL (at www.math.washington.edu). If you have a chance, you might want to update it to the new address: http://www.chronology.org/pournelle/ or http://www.chronology.org/noframes/pournelle/ Again, thanks for allowing me to put these pages up. Despite the recent ABM tests, I haven’t been hearing deafening retractions from the anti-SDI crowd on television....... *grin* Larry King univ of washington Larry@chronology.org http://www.chronology.org/ Thanks. I'll go fix the link while I am thinking about it. For those who don't know, these pages deal with the CoDominium history in which Falkenberg's Legion and eventually Mote in God's Eye take place. There are some wonderful maps and a lot of work on my stuff there. And thanks! Hi Jerry I’ve followed your exploits with FP2000 with great interest and wonder if you have also had problems with it crashing on any of your systems. I have one of those intellimice and find that FP goes down every time if I click its button on the taskbar and begin scrolling while the mouse is still pointing at the button. It doesn’t take the system down or mess with any other running applications so I suppose there’s something to be grateful for. Cheers Allan Jackson P.S. I’m no SF’er but after some visits to your site I was moved to try Fallen Angels and enjoyed it very much. I’m about to start Moat Around Murcheson’s Eye; lord knows where it will all end.. :-) Allan Jackson [moriarty@mediagroup.co.za] Not that, but I did manage to crash FP regularly last night. I was in a hurry and I forget just how. Oh. I know. On a big page, I did edit/find and a phrase. And it went off into the blue, and eventually reported that it wasn't working, and did I want to close the application. So I closed it. That's FrontPage 2000 -- I am still looking for time to uninstall Office 2000 and FrontPage 2000 and go back to the older ones -- and it was quite consistent. At least with Windows 2000 it didn't bring down anything else. Of course I am running Windows. 2000 so some of my FP problems could be due to that. Even so, I just don't recommend the Office 2000 stuff until the next service pack. Incidentally, Moat Around Murcheson's Eye (The Gripping Hand in the US) is a sequel to The Mote In God's Eye. Have you checked out any of the 35mm slide scanners, such as the one HP makes? Nikon’s is the best, but it’s price is still in the high four digits. Any other recommendations/reviews? In previous columns I think you said your wife is a teacher/educator. Could you ask her if she has checked out the SurfMonkey browser? It uses a monkey and a rocket ship gui to help make the web fun and safe. The browser uses server side filtering via Surfwatch. I work for SurfMonkey. Thanks, Dave Butler San Jose Alex and David Em had a slide scanner for a while. There was some problem with color balance. Although David being a professional artist may be a bit picky. I know I need one. I have a thousand older slides I want to convert. Dear Jerry, Regarding your adventures with Linux, I thought you might like some input from someone else who’s been playing around with it (fighting with it, is a better term!) for some time. I think I must have tried most distributions, starting with Red Hat 4.1 and Slackware 2.5 a couple of years ago. (This incidentally, is being written in Word, initially, running under Win95. Tell you something?) I’m now up to Red Hat 6, SUSE 6.3, Caldera 2.2, and RedHat-Mandrake 6. After about two years, I finally got my sound card working… this was after I removed my SB 16 PnP and put in an old Awe32 that doesn’t even have a driver for 95/98 (well, it does, downloadable, but you have to install the old DOS drivers first.) On the subject of sound cards, incidentally, go to www.4front-tech.com and prepare to be instructed and aided. I’ve never been able to get my internal modem working. I did manage to get an old (28.8) external working, but it never made a proper connection, something about the ppp-dialler. I like WordPerfect and I like it a lot on Linux, though not as much as I like it on 95/98. Putting my toe into chilly waters, there seems to be some problem with something in Linux called glibc; to wit, WordPerfect only runs with a full set of clear icons under the RedHat distributions. On other distributions, most of the time, and especially under SUSE, it’ll run, but most of the icons are replaced with grey wavy lines. Usually: but not always, which annoys the hell out of me. StarOffice I like even more but there is a problem with both 5.0 and 5.1 in that you can’t get proper ‘smart’ quotes. Now, I’ve been around long enough to remember writing stuff on Professional Write (Dos); I can do without smart quotes but why should I have to? And don’t request advice from Star, they never answer. Another thing: everything I’ve read about Linux swears it’s fast, much faster than Win95, so you could run it on an old 486 or even, at a push, a 386. Rubbish! Caldera 2.2 especially is painfully slow. Both that and the latest RedHats come equipped with KDE. Very pretty but very confusing; I seem to spend most of my time looking through menus to find what I want. On the subject of running it on a partition, I use PartitionMagic and the bundledBoot Manager. Works fine. One of our magazine editors over here in England, after playing with Linux, averred that basically it’s just a throwback some fifteen years to the old command-line interface. Okay, if that’s what you want, but I don’t. So tell me, since I haven’t seen anything in/on your web page, why are you interested? I find it difficult to believe that you can actually manage to do any creative work with it. Yours, Tony E. Well, that's a harsher judgment than I would make, but you will note that I do my production work with Office 97/98 on Windows 98 or Windows 2000. I continue to work with Linux, in part because I really do like to have Microsoft run scared. Microsoft won't put resources into improving (or even fixing) a product for which there is no competition. Moreover, as you say, Word Perfect is pretty neat, and Corel is working to make it even better, and to run with the Rebel Linux box. I'm looking forward to that. To make Linux work properly you need to choose just the right equipment. It's not really for cobbling up a system out of what's lying around because you probably won't find drivers for that. It won't use the latest hardware. But when it is running properly it's something to see. I'm happy to encourage people to play with it. And some people do get work done with Linux. Alas, so far, I have not been one of them. But then there is this: Regarding the following process... take a directory full of images create a thumbnail for each create a protoype html page containing all of the thumbs, linked to the full size images... http://www.klografx.de/software/image_pack.html is a link to a group of perl and shell scripts which do part of that right off the bat, and can be easily modified to do the whole thing... under linux. The power of small command line tools re-emerges... regards, Brian Bilbrey bilbrey@pacbell.net FROM:Steve Setzer < SUBJECT: “real webmasters use Notepad” comment As a “real webmaster” myself, I would never create a new page layout, or even a table, in raw HTML—I’d build it in a GUI tool first. But I think ASCII editors come in handy 1) for a quick simple fix to a couple of files or 2) for adjustments when the GUI layout program doesn’t quite do The Right Thing Some really geeky folks use text-handling tools (grep, sed, awk, perl) for large-scale alterations; my minimal “sed” skills saved a dozen hours on one site as compared to either Notepad or FP. These tools easily co-exist with FP with a bit of care. Versions are available for Windows, e.g. perl at (http://www.ActiveState.com/) Long term, web authors who understand the raw code get more done than those who do not, but that doesn’t mean one must write in raw text every day. Steve Setzer That's very close to my sentiments. Thanks. I have to say that pasting your letting into mail crashed everyone's Netscape. I do not know why. But it sure did. I have removed a whole bunch of html code that Word used to interpret your letter as we saw it in OUTLOOK... Do real webmasters crash Netscape? I suspect it was what WORD did to your code but why did it do it to yours and not to anyone else's?
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Wednesday August 25, 1999 Can anyone help? Hello Jerry, Since you are a big fan of the Northgate Omnikey ‘boards, I thought you might be able to help me out with this question. I just picked up a Northgate Omnikey Evolution that appears to have been never used for a great price at auction. It’s the model with a touchscreen between the two halves of the split keyboard. Anyway this model says “programmable” on the back, and there is an LED on the top next to the caps lock, scrollock and numlock lights that reads Macro Mode. Upon first plugging it in and powering it up, it appeared to work fine. I was updating a video driver and shutdown. On startup I was leaning on the keyboard or something (I assume), because now it no longer works properly. Some keys don’t produce any character at all, some produce the character they are supposed to, but most produce the wrong character. I feel that somehow I leaned on a special key combo that reprogrammed the keyboard to some mangled keyset. I’m wondering if you know of a special key combo to hold down on startup, or some similar thing, in order to reset the eprom (or whatever it has) inside that stores the set keyboard configuration/macros/whatever. I have heard of a 101P model that Northgate made at the end of their days that was buggy in regards to programmability... and I’m wondering if that could be what’s going on as well. Regardless there must be a way to reset it. Thanks for any suggestions or advice you might have - it seems like a great keyboard. The tactile feel of the keys is wonderful. The touchpad is pretty jumpy but I think if I used an adapter and plugged it into a PS/2 port I could adjust the refresh rate of it to smooth it out (like I do my PS/2 mouse). regards, Slaton Lipscomb Slaton Lipscomb [slaton@gorby.UCSC.EDU] I never had that model and I don't know a way to reset. Alas. Jerry, I tinkered with it and figured it out myself. Holding down the escape key on boot, after about 10 seconds (somewhere between the POST and when the OS begins to load) all four lights on the keyboard flashed, and that was it. Now the keyboard works great. Anyway there’s a guy who’s been selling them one by one on ebay and amazon.com’s auction site. I picked mine up for $25. Thanks for your response. regards, Slaton Regarding Tony E.’s comments on Linux- While I don’t have the extensive exposure to Linux distributions that he does (I am currently wrestling with Caldera’s OpenLinux 2.2) I do want to point out that in one respect Linux is very similar to NT: it is very picky about the hardware it will work with, and if you try to make it work with hardware it was not intended for it will not work well- if at all. Now, the hardware drivers available for Linux are a matter of public record, as are the hardware packages supported by each distribution. They can easily be found through links on linux.org or (in the case of OpenLinux) at www.calderasystems.com. So Tony could have easily avoided his hardware problems if he had taken the time to look at the hardware compatibility lists and see if his gear was supported. I suspect his modem problem stems from the well-known inability of Winmodems to work with anything but Win95/98 or NT due to the software controls, but that’s another rant for another time. This is not any different from NT, which also has compatibility issues- to the point where the techs here at [massive Left Coast/Midcoast bank company’s name deleted to protect the guilty] use only *one* brand of computer throughout the company. It’s a major manufacturer whose products have a long history of bundling with NT. The main difference between Linux and NT in the hardware compatibility issue is that new drivers for Linux are continually coming online and being made publicly available as people hack them together, while new drivers for NT are only available if you’ve bought the OS from Microsoft and paid the license. Besides, unless you are a power user or MCSE, where are you ever going to find out where the Hardware Compatibility list is for NT? Kevin Trainor “There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.” -Mao Tse-tung I have noticed that a new window pops up when W98 loads. At the bar along the top of the window, it says, “Runbind” and I cannot find any information on the window (what it does, what it means, etc.) I even searched Micro$oft’s Technet page to no avail. I did a Hotbot search for the term Runbind and got only 2 results. One of your former pages came up. 1. View 21: October 26 - November 1, 1998 Contents THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR October 26 - November 1, 1998 HOME VIEW MAIL BOOK Reviews For the BYTE story, click here. Previous Weeks of The View 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Boiler Plate: If you want to PAY FOR THIS.. 99% 7/3/99 http://www.jerrypournelle.com/VIEW/view21.html See results from this site only. Do you know what “Runbind” means? Is something wrong with my system? Regards, Hope M. Hope Aguilar [hoper@bigfoot.com] I never heard of runbind. Sorry.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Thursday August 26 I am Guest of Honor at NASFIC this weekend. I shouldn't even be here now. So it is VERY short shrift... Jerry, Have enjoyed your column for years - the best thing in the print (and now web) Byte. So I want to inform you of something I’ve come across that may save you and your reader community some time and trouble: in my application we use MS Word’s mailmerge function, connection to .DBF files as a data source....A colleague bought a new PC from Dell in England, which came with Office 2000 installed, and we’ve found that something that worked fine in Word 97 is broken in Word 2000, which now TRUNCATES memo field data. We tried to tell Microsoft about it, with the message below, but MS support refuses to take the details and says because the package is supplied by an OEM we have to tell Dell. Dell say they will only support installation issues and that we should contact Microsoft. And so on. This kind of run-around will be an old, old story for you, but we really want the information to get to somebody in Microsoft who will be glad to know about it! Maybe you can forward it to MS, and/or add it to the knowledge base. How to reproduce the problem: “Have available a small dBase (.dbf) file, containing at least one field of Memo type (unlimited length). For test purposes, fill this field with a text exceeding 255 characters in length... say 300/400 characters. Create a new Mailmerge document in Word 2000. Select the .dbf file as the Data Source. Place the field name on the Mailmerge document. Inspect the data which comes in to the document. You will see that the data is cut off after about 254 characters. “I think that the Word 2000 ODBC driver in question is now wrongly interpreting a dBase Memo field as a dBase Character field (the latter is limited to 254 characters). This problem is NEW in Word 2000... the Mailmerge in question works perfectly in Word 97.” Thanks again for your wonderful column, please keep it coming! Kind regards -Daniel O’Sullivan Daniel O’Sullivan ADS Distribution Ltd Stonelea, Churchinford, TAUNTON TA3 7RE, England Tel: 01823 601560 Fax: 01823 601503 ads@cwcom.net Thanks. Another reason not to switch to 2000 yet... Jerry, I just ran across a nice web site that lists all the free email sites on the internet. Also listed are some other nice services. This particular link goes to the free listserv-type services: http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_mailing.htm Looks like listbot and onelist are highly regarded ( www.listbot.com and www.onelist.com ) and might be right for your use. Brent Jones ( brentrjones@mediaone.net ) ===PSSSST hey, you wanta make some $, buy up manual typewriters and sell them to lawyers on 1/1/2000=== ===but make sure the ribbons are only 6 inches long ;-) 'cuz I sell ribbons!===== Dr Pournelle, A few weeks ago you were having problems due to “power management” with a system you were building. Now I can’t find the view were you covered it. could you please send me to the correct week? I just assembled a system with a FIC 503A + with a 450 mhz K6 II and after turning on and off fine several times it now flashes the front lights and the chip fan turns one turn then stops when I press the power button right after reconnecting the power cord. It did repower one time after not for many try’s. Now nothing I try will power it up. Thanks and best regards, Dave David L. Griffin [david1griffin@yahoo.com] I'm running short on time, but doubtless someone will be able to help. Dr. Pournelle, Is there, or do you have posted somewhere, a chronological list of your fiction and possibly your non-fiction? I would like to make a more complete collection of your work for my bookshelves, and I doubt that Amazon’s list is wholly accurate. Re: the muppet scene in Mail: A long way to go for a bad pun, eh? I might not want my kids to find that one! Thanks, George A. Laiacona III <undead@duesouth.net> “Oops! Adjustment fire, 1000 meters left... No, no, the other left!” · Axly, Forward Observer for a Day “...and grenades are also useful for digging foxholes, removing unwanted shrubbery, unclogging drains...” · Axly’s book of Explosives for Pyromaniacs Get back to me, but also see my LINKS page, where you can find a way to some really cool stuff fans have put up. Thanks. I need to do a full bibliography one day. Sigh.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Friday Gone to NASFIC
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Saturday Gone to NASFIC
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Sunday August 29, 1999 Calvin Dodge reports Jerry, I did some experimentation of my own, and found that after I removed every instance of: <p class=”MsoBodyText”><font face=”Arial”> from “Current Mail” that Netscape displayed the file just fine. I also tried replacing that text with ‘<p>’ - and THAT worked, too. Should Netscape crash due to bad input? No, of course not. Does Microsoft know that Netscape has this weakness, and is Microsoft trying to exploit it? Who knows? I wouldn’t put it past them, though. FWIW, Mozilla (alpha version M10) does NOT crash when it opens that page, so I guess somebody at Netscape has noticed (and fixed) this problem for the NEXT version of Communicator. At any rate, removing that text will fix the problem. Now, how to do that in a Windows environment? If it was my responsibility, I’d probably write something simple in Python to do the trick. If that interests you (Python is freely available for just about any platform) let me know, and I’ll send you a program that will remove that offending text. Calvin Well, thanks, but I have no intention of altering everything so that the Arial type face vanishes. I replaced the class = mso body text part with '<p>' leaving the font tags intact and that doesn't seem to change anything, but as you can see, there are all kinds of class statements in there. There's no generic command to rid me of all of them. They seem only to infest mail and a few other programs, and those that talk about body text are more rare still. I presume they get imported from Outlook through Word when I try to cut and paste. More and more I wish I had never heard of Office 2000, Outlook 2000, and Front Page 2000. Without those we would not have this difficulty. I am due for another trip shortly so I will not be able to make any drastic changes to the system until I get back, but something has to be done. Outlook doesn't handle mail consistently, it all brings in IE 5 which may or may not have problems, FrontPage is putting in this imbecility of class statements presumably because Outlook is flinging them in and when I try to copy and past I get them. I hate this, and there has to be something easier to use and better. I still like some of the image handling, but I recall that Outlook 98 and Front Page 98 worked together without these difficulties. NOW I see it is worse than I thought. Your observations weren't correct, although it is interesting that you could read it after your alterations. The problem was with the last Tuesday letter. I went in and hacked out a lot of junk put in by the sender, and sent as an HTML file, all of which got carried on through Word to FrontPage. Front Page likes to treat html as html and thinks this is a feature. It is not, and the result can be bad. Anyway, this is now readable with my Netscape. LATER: I was exhausted last night or something should have been obvious: we could all read the page in Netscape or in most versions of Netscape from Wednesday Morning until Sunday Evening. Something I put in Sunday evening (something put in above this, I would guess) caused Netscape to crash until something put in Tuesday was altered. More on this in next week's view, but this is a mess. There is also something that alters the size of this cursed mail page. I can't find it. This comes from Fred Langa, and details his problems with Word/FrontPage 2000. My solution to all this is going to be to rip Office 2000 out and let it lie bleeding on the floor. I don't have time to watch out for all components and go through and do settings. Prior to 2000 when I wanted to do mail I would: open the mail in Outlook; Select what I wanted; paste that into WORD; format it with the right fonts, and colors; reply in Word, also using fonts and colors I liked; select; and paste into Front Page. It went in just as I had seen it in Word, and it was readable in all browsers. Now that procedure won't work. We get godawful code, Netscape crashes (which is a good part Netscape's fault) and my formats are all shot and I have to redo them. But when I redo them in FrontPage it has left some of the miserable code it inserted. I don't have time to clean all this by hand. Anyway here is Fred's observation: THE LANGA LIST by Fred Langa Please email the LangaList to a friend! (Use the super-fast form at http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm !) The LangaList 26-Aug-99 A Free Email Newsletter from Fred Langa About BrowserTune, HotSpots, Columns, Tips &; Tricks, and Other Activities MS Office/FrontPage/Netscape Problem: I’m just about caught up with the thousands of emails that accumulated during my week off. Just before vacation I got a new PC (more on that in an upcoming issue). I took the opportunity of starting fresh with the new PC to finish my switchover to Office2000, including FrontPage2000. Like all software, FrontPage is imperfect: Its editor has always been funky, and the site management tools are slow on large sites. But on the whole, I’ve never found a better tool for quickly assembling sites and pages. I’ve been creating the HTML version of the LangaList with FrontPage97 for over a year. (The HTML version is available online but not yet in email; you can view the HTML version by going to http://www.langa.com and clicking on the “what’s new” link.) For maximum compatibility with all browsers, the HTML newsletter uses no advanced technologies---no scripts, no DHTML, no stylesheets, etc. By default, FrontPage2000 wants to enable advanced features, but you can turn them off (and for the newsletter, I did). It also has an explicit setting that allows you to create pages that are backwards-compatible with both IE 3.0 and Navigator 3.0. Again striving for maximum compatibility, I told FP2K to use that setting. And, unlike its predecessors which were very aggressive about reformatting perfectly good HTML to its own sometimes-odd standards, FP2K has a setting that tells the FP editor NOT to diddle with your preexisting HTML. I selected that option, too. So, in theory, to produce a plain-vanilla HTML version of the newsletter, I’d disabled all of FP’s advanced features. And that was fine--- until I wanted to use Word2000’s grammar checker on the newsletter. (FP has a spell checker, but not a grammar checker.) Running the HTML newsletter through Word added in a ton of MS Office-specific stuff that FP didn’t strip out--- and that caused Netscape Navigator to crash when users tried to use it to read the last issue of the newsletter! I suspect it’s some DIV and SPAN commands that Word inserted: DIV and SPAN are areas of well-known weaknesses in the current versions of Navigator/Communicator. But still, I told FP not to use any advanced features, and it obeyed, except when it came to handling Word-generated code. This is one of those Rorschach-type problems where you’ll see the villain depending on your world view: You can legitimately blame Microsoft for not having better integration between its Office components, but you also can blame AOL/Netscape for having such a limited browser. (I know, I know, everything will be perfect when Mozilla--- Netscape5--- finally ships. Riiiiiight. Just like the next version of Office will be problem-free, too. <g>) I think there’s plenty of blame to go around to both sides, and to me too for assuming that I was producing plain-vanilla pages when I was not. My apologies to those readers whose Netscape browsers had trouble with the HTML version of the last issue. This one should be OK--- honest! Fred Langa was at one time the Editor in Chief at BYTE and later Editorial Director at CMP. I remember when Pamela Clark brought him aboard the Byte/Popular machine. Then there is this: Jerry Some thoughts on the longer term impact on innovation of microsoft dominance. The other day, when the html code for your mail page caused Netscape 4.61 to crash immediately on loading your mail page, I saw the handwriting on the wall for this browser. Shortly, I expect, IE5 will be enjoying 80-90% dominance as does Windows. Netscape has been obviously lagging in the update race. It certainly isn’t keeping pace with the proprietary technology that Microsoft is introducing in its servers. I find now that Netscape can’t access some sites which use pure MS technology. The Mozilla initiative is certainly taking its time, so that by the time new browsers are introduced, they will be irrelevant. I believe the cause of this is that with the demise of the commercial browser, browser develop will pursue only the paths that fit some organization agenda. MS will use the browser to make the web safe for its windows base technology. Open source people will pursue alternate courses, but apparently on extended timetables. Companies like Corel, who have had a long-standing interest in “thin client” approaches that by-pass the windows desktop can’t justify the investment needed or generate the capital they require to pursue this market area. Yet it should be obvious that browsers and desktop gui serve exactly the same purpose in the end, except that they can eliminate platform dependencies. MS on the other hand very much wants to preserve platform dependencies. I am not inherent anti-MS although there has always been something about the aggressive voraciousness of their competitive urge that bothers. Most of their products are predatory, preying on competitors offerings. Competitors, in addition to developing new features, are constantly forced to overcome the improvements each new version of their software introduces. This usually requires a kind of reverse engineering because of the proprietary nature of the solutions. Hence, like AMD chasing Intel, they are always one-step behind the market. The question to ponder, in my mind, is MS going to be the company to take the next step beyond windows or are they forever going to try and capture everything by providing more windows solutions. iandmccreath@home.com Good analysis. Thanks. ANd this advice: Hi Jerry I have just read your article about using Frontpage as you web management / Creation tool. I myself am a web professional, and I must say that after extensive research that I have found Dreamweaver 2 to be far the best tool for the job. Page layout and site management is a breeze. The use of templates for maintaining a corporate style is brilliant, and it has one of the best linking features I have seen. There is several ways of doing it. Drag and drop of pages and url’s are among the easiest. Subwebs is absolutely no problem either. You can define your home directory anywhere in your websites tree structure. For your own sake you should give it another go. Kind Regards Max M PS: I am also a long time fan of your SF writing. Max M Rasmussen, New Media Director http://www.normik.dk Denmark e-mail mailto:maxm@normik.dk Thanks for the kind words. I need to work up a tool set that does what I want. FrontPage isn't doing the job... Here's a Howdy Do: Dear Jerry, I don’t know if you had yet heard of this, what follows is a link to the pertinent Unisys webpage... http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzw-license.html Basically, the premise is that a while ago, Unisys said that hardware &; software that performed the patented LZW compression had to be licensed. NOW, they are apparently wanting to get licensing fees from EVERY web site that uses/displays LZW compressed images... eg GIF format images. You may want to look this up, and or remove the GIF’s from your site - $5,000 is kinda steep for using an image format. -- regards, Brian Bilbrey bilbrey@pacbell.net I have no certain knowledge that having a gif image on a site uses their technology. My guess is they are not going to be very successful here. Jerry, Kevin Trainor wrote: Besides, unless you are a power user or MCSE, where are you ever going to find out where the Hardware Compatibility list is for NT? This is really a bit unfair.The HCL is on Technet (okay, you need to a be a power user or a corporate NT guru to have that one), but it’s also on their web site at http://www.microsoft.com/hcl/default.asp, and also, wait for this one...there’s a hard copy in the box if you buy a kosher NT licence. How easy does it have to get? Keep up the good work, Andrew
© Chaos Manor home	Entire contents copyright 1999 by Jerry E. Pournelle. All rights reserved. Comments and discussion welcome.