Mail August 30 - September 5, 1999

Like you I have a W2K professional (ie Beta 3) client running DHCP with the server an NT4 server.

DHCP can be very weird and spooky however, especially on a multi-homed server. I fear to take issue with your colleage Mr. Thompson but could it be he has a multi-homed DHCP server? Even a logical multi-homing (ie more than one address on one NIC) makes it very unstable and dodgy. I couldn’t begin even to remember all the grief I had until I understood this (Duplicate addresses, conflicts, complete refusal to issue any leases at all, one card NACK’s the other ones OFFERs, and more). Now I stick strictly to one DHCP server per network segment, and it all works fine.

I have been following your experience with FP 2000 with great interest. I must admit that after reading Bob Thompson's experience, I had a fit and promptly fell in. I have followed the development of Office 2000 for over a year now. I used the last Beta of Office 2000 for 6 months. There were a few problems but overall it worked just fine.

I think you are using it out of context. The "Office" suite has always been MS's major cash cow. O2K is a different upgrade than in the past as it was like going from Office 95 to Office 97. MS designed O2K for the Workgroup. The overriding theme was "Collaboration". I attended all the MS TechNet briefings and MSDN meetings and the product was pushed at developers for collaboration. This was the selling point. To that end, MS has succeeded. O2K was not meant to be just another upgrade in the Office lineage. MS wanted an office person to be able to create any document in either Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access and save those files as native HTML with no loss of original formatting and publish those docs to a "Web Folder" to be shared over an Intranet. The office person would not have to have any knowledge of HTML or FrontPage to make it work.

What you are experiencing is what MS did to make that process work. They created the program to convert the native Word 2000 doc into HTML and XML. Aha, those funny tags are supposed to be there. (XML is the coming "thing." Everyone will be doing it sooner than later.) After the office worker creates a doc and saves it as HTML to a Web Folder, other co-workers can view the "docs" and add comments, and later the Author of the document can grab that document back and edit it in the original program that created it...with out any loss of original formatting. Word converts the HTML and XML file back into the original Word binary format. It does what it was supposed to do!

When O2K is used in this fashion...it works...period! I have clients that use it in this way and there have been no complaints and they claim they are more productive than they were in Office 97. I personally have not upgraded to Office 2000. I don't need these HTML publishing features. I do have FP 2000 and Outlook 2000 installed as separate components because I like the way they work. And they do work! I get my work done and that is what counts for me. I use Outlook for Calendar, Tasks, and Appointments. My favorite mail tool is Outlook Express which came with IE5. Having attended all the MS stuff, I knew up front that I did not need the "whole" package. I can live without "collect and paste."

I have to ask this Jerry, but why do you insist on using Word as an a formatting tool? I know this is how you do "the" mail but would it not be faster and easier to just cut and paste directly into FP2K from Outlook? Then reformat in FP2K. If I were doing what you do, I would cut and paste, add my comments, cut and paste and so on. When I was finished I would go back to the top of the page highlight the 1st mail message and change the font paragraph spacing, etc.. Next, highlight my response, change font and or text color and continue the process till the end of that page. Perhaps I'm missing something here...?

I think you are clearly wrong that MS rushed this product out too soon. If MS is guilty of something, it is very bad marketing of what O2K was intended for and the market it was NOT directed at. O2K was not meant for the average consumer at home.

Well, I am using FP 2000 direct now. It's not as convenient as Word if for no other reason than that I am used to the tool layout of Word, and I have Word customized. FP is also slower. Bang a key and you see a flicker as the letter goes on screen. The blinking cursor and the slight delay in the letter getting up is annoying if you watch the screen when you type. Keyboards are designed by non-typists, and I suspect that FP was also; it doesn't bother you if you are staring at the keys when you type, just as the old DOS screen flicker didn't bother the engineers who can't type.

Perhaps Office 2000 does precisely what they wanted it to do, and the WRETCHED documentation obscures all that? All I know is that I see no reason at all for most people to adopt Office 2000. Perhaps if you are part of a work group using an Intranet it's the cat's whiskers, but for me it's just a pain.

I am sure FP 2000 works on Intranets, too. What it doesn't work on is 56K modems when you have a large web site. If I break the thing into enough small webs I may be able to let pair turn on the FP extensions, but not until I have done that.

Frankly, I wish I had never heard of Office 2000. I was much happier with Office 97, FrontPage 98, and Outlook 98 although Outlook 98 did have some glitches in its rules, and we were all unhappy with that enormous outlook.pst file. But for all that it worked. I am glad to hear that Office 2000 does what it was designed to do; but what it was designed to do apparently isn't always what I want to have done...

I to was a happy user of Office 97. I then acquired and installed Office 2000. Many of my documents HAD Visio diagrams in them. After editing the documents in Office 2000 the diagrams dissappeared. Printing the documents, viewing the documents, etc yields no diagram. Double clicking in the space where the diagram used to be launches Visio and the diagram is present. Clicking outside the area to get back into WORD and the diagram dissappears.

I then removed Office 2000 from my system. Everything seemed to go well. I installed the suite, then installed the SR1 patch. It wanted to patch all applications except OUTLOOK. I let it run. I then tried to install the SR2 patch, and it is the latest version. The patch said that I had not installed SR1.

OK. I uninstall Office 97 and run ERASER97 which is supposed to remove all traces of Office 97. It doesn’t quite but is better than the Office 97 uninstall. I then install Office 97 again. Same problem with the patches.

I call Microsoft and am told that they do not have a solution. Instead of fixing the problem they send me a new Office 97 CD that is already patched. I again remove Office 97 and run ERASER97. I then install from the CD. Outlook still shows that it has not been patched. This kind of crap is really uncalled for.

I then get an even bigger surprise. I start ACCESS97 and I am greeted by a screen that says it will not run because it is not licensed on this machine. Now what. I call Microsoft and at least this time they know the answer. There is a font called HARREL that needs to be removed. I remove the font, reinstall Office 97 and now MSACCESS works.

So now I am back to Office97, my Visio diagrams work again, and Outlook is still not patched. But I wasted many hours and some long distance fees to get back to where I was. Perhaps it was my haste in wanting the newest that clouded my judgement.

I took Office 2000 back to the dealer, demanded, and received my money back. Perhaps more people need to be doing this. Microsoft will only truely understand when sales plummet. I feel like you that Office 2000 is a botched hack of Office 97 and never should have been released.

As to StarOffice. I have used StarOffice and have been very pleased with the results. It does seem to be a very good package. The download time was long, but I was able to use a T1 to get the file. At one time StarDivision would sell you a CD for $39.95 which is probably a pretty good deal. What I like is that StarOffice has a version that will run on Windows and Linux. Not bad for a product that is essentially free for personal use.

Oh Lordy. You are telling me that my plan to set up an entirely new system that has never had Office 2000 on it may be the best way. I can then reformat Princess's hard disk and start over. I sure will not get to this before I go to Japan tomorrow.

Bottom Line: WAIT before installing Office 2000. DO NOT DO IT yet. They must fix UNINSTALL (or wait for Symantec to do it) and there are other incompatibilities. Maybe, as Mr. Bierman says above, Office 2000 does what it was intended, but it was NOT INTENDED FOR YOU AND ME. Clearly.

If you have an older version of Office 97, you should be able to get a replacement CD with all the SR-2 (and SR-1) fixes. This may have more fixes than the patches (which would be good). See the Windows Office Watch archives:

I am not in a position to verify the validity of the information, but I have to say that I would not be surprised if it was true.

It has already been revealed that other products, such as Lotus Notes, with "strong encryption" already have a NSA backdoor built in.

Your tax dollars at work. I had this debate with the White House Science Advisor back in about 1993. They think they need phone tap and decryption to "bust drug rings and child porno outfits." My view was then and is now that the cure is worse than the disease. See next weeks Intellectual Capital column I am writing now.

Microsoft is denying this vehemently. I am inclined to believe Microsoft since while they may shade things I have never known the company to flat out officially lie, and it's demonstrable if this exists so this can be checked. they aren't stupid in Redmond, either.

But I know that the official policy of this White House is to ask for access to everything. Everything.

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 30 - September 5, 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: The Netscape Crashes The Amazon Flap is resolved John Sloan on the HCL: it's easy to find More replies to Trainor Adventures in Pasting with 2000 How to remove Office 2000 FrontPage 2000 code fixer Alternates to FrontPage IRFAN and how to Paste in the execrable FrontPage 2000 That smelly flower... A new Method for dealing with FP 2000; maybe FP 2000 is not so bad as I thought? It's not, and some of that is my fault. No it wasn't. I still hate this. An amusing pornography story Feh Feh! Microsoft Delenda Est? Better than Notepad Maybe, but you'll get more than you bought. You may not want some of it. Office 2000 defended and explained And condemned New Security Issues: Government access to your files.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Monday August 30, 1999 We will get to this shortly. The problem is stated: Jerry, You noted in your reply to Calvin Dodge that “[His] observations weren’t correct, although it is interesting that [he] could read it after [his] alterations. The problem was with the last Tuesday letter.” The problem with this explanation is that I could read the “last Tuesday letter” very easily; I could read everything posted under Wednesday’s mail, also. It was only on Sunday morning that Netscape started to bomb, and I immediately wrote my short note to you when I discovered it. Is it possible that there are multiple elements which interact to cause the problem, and that you’ve found some and Calvin has found others? Otherwise, it’s difficult for me to understand why the letter in question was the problem, since I could read it Wednesday (and Friday and Saturday, for that matter) but not Sunday. Something appears to have been stirred into the pot later that triggered the crash (at least for my machine and software). It’s conceivable that I was unintentionally working with a cached copy of the page, since Thursday’s mail wasn’t visible to me as late as Saturday (I have Netscape configured to compare cache copies to net copies once per session, and I end the current session each time I log off—but software _is_ complex, isn’t it?). However, I could still read Wednesday’s mail, so I come back to my original problem: the original posting of the “last Tuesday letter” didn’t contain that which caused Netscape to crash. I suspect it’s one of those “sneaky” problems. Regards, Troy Loney P.S.: With regard to Calvin Dodge’s question about Microsoft exploiting Netscape weaknesses: Go to Microsoft’s online Knowledge Base and try searching with both IE and Netscape, and draw your own conclusions. It is stickier than you know: I did NOTHING Sunday night until I posted Calvin Dodge's letter. Now the question is, had I simply not posted some final stage of that page before I went to Anaheim? What in the world happened? Because it was fixed by altering a Tuesday night letter. I wish I had time to reproduce this problem. What this tells me is that the price of using FrontPage is to tolerate it doing all kinds of things I didn't ask for and don't understand. This is the opposite of what I want for this site, where the notion is to keep things simple. I like FP's image handling but it appears I will have to find something else. That annoys me. This whole situation annoys me. Bob Thompson offers this solution: I can tell you what I do that seems to avoid those problems. I keep a copy of Notepad running. To paste a message, I Copy it from Outlook, Paste it into Notepad, do a Select All—Cut, and then paste it into FP2K. That gives me pure ASCII text that FP2K displays in the default font and size. I then select that text in FP2K, indent it once, and choose Courier. That whole process takes maybe 15 seconds per message, and strips out all the problem stuff. The problem occurs with people who send mail in Plain Text format, because it has embedded hard returns that cause lines to break. Bob Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com Which works until, as he notes, you get messages with hard returns. Then it has to go into WORD so I can run a line end macro. Sometimes I don't bother and just throw the mail out -- I get far more than is going up here anyway -- but as you suspect, some of the most interesting is formatted in very odd ways. If FrontPage 2000 worked as FrontPage 98 did I would not have most of these problems. The difficulty is the "improvements" and "features" that try to embed Internet Explorer and Word into the process, and in doing so things come all unglued, I lose control of what is happening, and SURPRISE! Netscape is crashed. If I had a couple of days I would set up another system running FrontPage 98 and Office 98 and access the web with that alternating with this, and just see what that does. I assume FP 98 can read all of the FP 2000 pages. I am assured it will. Of course Netscape is not blameless. WHAT crashes it, and why? And why doesn't it just ignore things it can't parse? Why does it DIE? The problem with data bases, like those used by Amazon, are that they are built by humans and operated by humans. Some databases might have a fundamental flaw, for example they don’t have the ability to list more than one author (but I don’t think this would be the case of Amazon, nor any modern data base made by a knowledgeable designer). Then there are data bases with awkward front ends (clients;) which makes it hard for the puncher to list more than one author. Then there are habits, usually, if you go to a bookstore, you won’t find a book under both N and P, because then the store has to have more copies of the book than they will actually sell. I think the ‘standard’ then is to file it under N for Niven, since N is before P in the alphabet. (I’ve encountered this many times.) So if the puncher has some experience from a physical bookstore, then that might also account for the missing entries. And finally it might be sloppiness or laziness, or if, as I might suspect, the Amazon data base imports information from the publishers databases, you might be able to trace the problem to the import filter or to the publisher. I know this doesn’t clear up the situation, but at least it gives you some reasonable places to start looking for the culprit. (Or notifying Amazon about them.) -- Paul Kenneth Egell-Johnsen Sales Support and System Development Metaphor Systems as Amazon, once made aware of the situation, says they are fixing the problems, and in fact were a bit more patient at my impatience than I had expected. When I examined the site, I found for instance that Niven is listed as the author of Fallen Angels, with Pournelle and Flynn as "contributors" and a person who never had anything to do with the book as "editor". In fact we have "editor" credit given to someone who never worked with either Larry or me on several of those books. This is extremely odd. Omissions I understand, but how did someone none of us know get listed as "editor"? I sent this to the relevant officials at Amazon: Pocket Books; ISBN: 0671795740 The Gripping Hand is shown as by Larry Niven. It ought to be by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Pocket Books; ISBN: 0671741926 The Mote in God’s Eye is shown as by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Dave Stern Editor. We don’t know who Dave Stern is or why he is listed. He was not the editor we worked with on the book, and there is no reason for his name to be on the book. Baen Books; ISBN: 067172052X ;Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn lists Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn as “contributors”. That is nonsense. We were cu-authors, and the “contributor” is somewhat demeaning not to say insulting. Pocket Books; ISBN: 0671695320 The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes is listed as by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Dave Stern Editor. Barnes is not mentioned, and we don’t understand why Dave Stern, who didn’t edit the book, is. Tor Books; ISBN: 0812524969 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.35 x 6.75 x 4.16 Beowulf’s Children by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes is listed as by Steven Barnes, well, here’s how it is listed: Beowulf’s Children (The Dragons of Heorot) by Steve Barnes, Jerry Pournelle (Contributor), Steven Barnes (Contributor), Larry Niven Which is absurd. It ought to be Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes There’s something weird in all this. All the books have 5 * reviews, and they seem to be selling reasonably well, but surely it is important to get the authors right? And I have a reply to the effect that this will all be fixed. So I think that is the end of the Amazon flap. Apparently they got a LOT of mail from some of you about it, and my thanks. Jerry, Andrew wrote: 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? Well, Andrew, a whole lot easier, they could have a pointer to the HCL somewhere obvious on their web site for starters. A) I would hope the HCL has advanced a little since I got my legitimate version of NT three years ago, so that list is not entirely usefull to me now. B) The URL you provided does indeed take one to the HCL, after giving a warning that it might not work if you don’t use IE 4.0 or later. An extremely unuseful version of the HCL in which I had to step through eight (8) pages to get to a find the printer I was interested in - then go back and start all over to look for anything else. I used to be able to download a zip file containing the entire list that I could search easily off-line, or print out to take with me shopping for instant referral to a piece of equipment I had not even thought about when I downloaded the list. No more, apparently. So glad they have made it easier. Paul hampson@cwws.net This discussion isn't going to go away. John Sloan has a comment I'll get up shortly. There are others. Dr. Pournelle, It is actually easy to find the Microsoft "Hardware Compatibility List". The URL is simply <http://www.microsoft.com/hcl> , or just follow these steps to find it via links: 1) First, go to www.microsoft.com <http://www.microsoft.com/> . 2) Click the drop-down list labeled "Support", then select "Product Support Options". 3) Select "Home Customers" and select "Go to Personal Online Support". 4) Click on "Browse", then "Support Highlights". 5) Drill down to any of the entries for Windows NT, and there is a link to the "Hardware Compatibility Lists". There are no labels like "Power users only", "MCSE or better required", or "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" on the HCL. All these links I've listed say stuff like "Home Customers" and "Personal Support" etc. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft intends this information to be used by anyone who's interested. If you think the HCL is useful, check out the "Knowledge Base" at "<http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.asp>". As far as compatibility with hardware, NT has excellent compatibility with almost all name brand and clone systems that are available on the market today. I have always been impressed at how well NT will run with generic hardware as long as it has a properly written driver, either from Microsoft or the hardware manufacturer. The clones that I build for work, friends and family almost all run NT, and I rarely bother to check the HCL before assembling these systems. I steer clear of "Winmodems" and any hardware that does not have an NT 4.0 driver included, and I seldom have problems unless I do something dumb (Which I do all too often). The exception to this is multimedia hardware in NT 4.0, which is pretty miserable. I am happy to report that this is fixed in Windows 2000. Many large companies use only a single brand of PC for NT or other operating systems. Some companies use IBM, some use Compaq, some use Dell, and some use locally made clones. The real reason for using just one type of PC with a large user base is to create savings in support and deployment costs, but it has little or nothing to do with compatibility with NT or other operating systems. NT and Windows 2000 users are not at all dependent on Microsoft for drivers. I keep a close eye on new hardware that is coming on the market (scanners, cameras, printers etc.) and lately almost all new stuff has drivers and application software for NT 4.0 and there are many 3rd-party drivers included in Windows 2000 RC1. This is probably due to the increasing percentage of home and SOHO users that have turned to NT for stability and reliability. In addition, any developer can write device drivers for NT if they want since there are a number of good books on the subject from Microsoft Press and other publishers. Also, Microsoft makes helpful device driver development software and API documentation available cheaply on the MSDN or for free on their website. J. Sloan John Sloan [john.sloan@sympatico.ca] Thanks. I suspect this dialog will continue... Incidentally, I put his message through WORDPAD, and FrontPage tore out all the font information when I pasted it in here. I had to change fonts again. I hate FrontPage 2000, and I MUST get back at least to FrontPage 98, if not to some other tool altogether. Having said that, I am no enemy of Microsoft. I found FrontPage 98 pretty well good enough, and the new "features" of 2000 including Word-like editing would be all right if they did not come at the cost of being able to work in Word and paste into FrontPage. FrontPage 98 was too slow to do real editing with. You HAD to use Word. The good news is that with 98 when you did it all in Word, and pasted into FP 98, it looked just as it did in Word, fonts, colors, sizes, and all, AND there wasn't a lot of imbecile html about div and span and classes inserted will you nill you. Bob Thompson is convinced that there are ways to make FP 2000 work properly the way 98 did, but the documentation is so bad you can't find it. May be. But the product managers of 2000 don't seem to be able to find them either. Much of this is off topic in this thread, of course. As to hardware capability, you haven't lived until you try to set up a complex Linux system out of old parts. You'll be a LOT more likely to get that to work with NT, and particularly with Windows 2000. Everyone I know has had problems with sound cards and Linux. Of course this too shall pass. Things do move in this business, and a year from now this will all seem a bad dream. Atter tag, atter tag... So now it is midnight, and I may have found the formula for pasting into FrontPage 2000. Let's see. Jerry, In your latest column, you mentioned the use of the shift key and the navigation keys for selection of text. You might be interested to learn that you can also use the shift key in conjunction with the mouse. That is, click the mouse to set the starting point for the selection and then <SHIFT> click to select the end of the selection. You can reposition the end point repeatedly (if you get it wrong) or even the use the <SHIFT> navigation keys to extend or shrink. All this is especially useful when your selection is more than a screen length. I enjoy your columns and your novels immensely. Regards, Andrew Mitchell. The above was pasted in from Outlook. It came in as Arial 10. That's fine, since I can do control-a and give a font size of 12. And thanks for the tip. No, I didn't know about shift mouse either. I wonder how I missed learning all those? Thanks. Aargh. The red color came across. The 12 point size came across. The Arial didn't, and the whole thing came in as Default which is Times New Roman. For one wonderful moment there... Hello M. Pournelle, First, congratulation for your great site. I’ve only discovered it few months ago, after the reappearance of Byte. It was a great pleasure to read your text, even more interesting than the new Byte (sorry for them!). I look at your site every day. Your experience with the wed editor was very interesting. I’ve done some software experiment with Adobe PageMill, Symantec VisualPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Web Expert (french version of Ace Expert 3 http://www.visic.com/home.html), Claris HomePage, HomeSite and finally FrontPage. Unfortunately, the best for my use is still FrontPage 98. Like most of your comment, I have found it is the easiest and most useful. But I never appreciate the principle of running a personal web server on my PC. Well, nothing perfect! According to your comments, I don’t plan “downgrading” to FP2000. I’ve read that you found pretty difficult to update a site using ftp with your previous web server. Since none of the server I tried support the FrontPage extension, I try updating manually with ftp (WS_FTP), but it was rapidly too complex. The ftp is so simple that it should be easy to compare the site on the local hard disk with the one of the server, so I search for such tool. And I’ve found a wonderful one, Crystal SiteUpdater (http://www.casdk.com/). It is fast and the site become a dream to maintain. One default, it will download all the file in the hard disc directories of the local site, including all the hidden or internal FrontPage files required by the FrontPage Extension but useless for me. Recently you wrote that you recently (re)discover the selection trick with <shift>-arrows. But few years ago you wrote in Byte that you used QuickBasic for some particular programming, even recommending it. It was with this software (in 1988-1989) that I discover those selection technique and I used it since that. This <shift>-arrows selections works for all Microsoft software I remember and I used it on a regular basis since it is faster (for me) than the mouse. I have a question, from what I read, it look like you are still using phone-modem ? I found it very surprising since the cable-modem is much faster and only a little bit more expensive. Here in Quebec, Canada, cable-modem cost 30$/month (20$US/month) with a limit of 6 Gbytes of download per month, no time limit, no more phone line busy by Internet, and very fast, up to 100 times faster than phone-modem. Phone-modem with no time limit cost between 20$ to 30$/month, at only 56 kbits/s (download, 33.6 kbits/s upload). I’ve measure download speed up to 400 kbytes/s (more than 3 Mbits/s), but the upload speed is slightly slower. Well it took only 3 minutes to download the 67 MB of Internet Explorer 5.0 full install. This technology is so wonderful! You should consider it if not already done... Well, congratulation again for your site and continue your good site! Best regards, Bruno Labranche bruno.labranche@videotron.ca Try something else. Convert everything to "normal", then tell it to be Arial. Now try to paste. HURRAH! Anyway, thanks for the kind words. I don't have cable modem because my execrable cable company doesn't offer it in my part of town, and of course they have a monopoly. Thanks again. As to what I did above: first I convert all the text to "normal" from "body text" which is what it comes into WORD as. Then I select what I want to be Arial and change to that. Then I can compose and write my replies in Times Roman. All this works, but it means extra steps. My advice remains: if you want to use FrontPage, use FP 98. The only reason to use FP 2000 is if you find you're stuck with it, and you're afraid to uninstall it. As I am, sort of. But when I look at the code this is generating it is horrible. ">It will probably feature how to rip out Office 2000 and go back to Office 98, Outlook 98, and FrontPage 98." I just thought I’d let you know, in case you didn’t already, that MS offers a lot of tips on how to do this at the link below. They also have a new utility called “Eraser 2000” there, which finishes the job that Office 2000’s Uninstall starts. OFF2000: How to Completely Remove Microsoft Office http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q219/4/23.ASP Thanks! I suspect I'll have to do that, too, since I can't solve this paste problem for handling mail. Although I do have a slightly better procedure now than I used to have. Jerry, A note from a friend via a subscriber. To fix your Y2K...sorry, Office 2000 problems. Rick Fried A Fix For The MS Office HTML Woes Last week, I told you about an MS Office 2000 weirdness in which Word2000’s “export as HTML” function creates code that crashes Netscape Navigator. FrontPage2000, on its own, won’t or can’t remove the code that Word puts in, even if you explicitly tell FP2K to create Navigator-compatible pages and not to use any fancy or advanced features. (See <http://www.langa.com/newsletters/aug-26-99.htm#bug2> for more info.) Reader Gunter Hartel found a fix: Dear Mr. Langa I stumbled upon an MS add-in that might solve your problem of microsoft codes in you HTML files after using WORD to grammar check. Cheers Gunter The add-in is called the “Microsoft Office 2000 HTML Filter” and it strips out the MS-Office-specific code that Word puts in by default. You have to register at the site to get the download, but it’s freely available at <http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/2000/downloadDetails/htmlfilter.htm> To me, is seems that Microsoft has the defaults backwards: The default should be to produce generally-compatible code, with the special option to produce code that allows the use of Office’s advanced features. It seems silly to have to add in a special filter just to produce basic, generic HTML. But I’m glad there is such a filter, and thanks, Gunter, for finding it for us! OK. That does look promising. But I don't have time to run programs including the demoronizing thing against every file I put up! As you say, it seems to be backwards.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Tuesday, August 31, 1999 From: Thomas Crook [tjcrook@email.com] Subject: Generating thumbnails for web pages Dear Jerry, A few years ago our family moved to Australia, so I publish lots of photos on my personal website for family and friends back in the U.S. This past weekend I decided to update the site and found I had a backlog of photos. In the past I did everything manually, but your mention of FrontPage’s thumbnailing feature led me to search for an automated solution. I adopted Dreamweaver some time ago due to FrontPage’s inability to handle the layout of a client’s website. Rather than re-install FrontPage just for that one feature, I decided to see what shareware I could find at c\|net’s download.com. After looking at several programs, I settled on Arles Image Web Page Creator because of its flexibility. Among other things, it allows you to specify the size of the thumbnails, the size of the corresponding full-size images, jpeg quality and thumbnail index page grid dimensions. It also automatically builds a slide show of the images. I was able to put up over fifty new photos in a fraction of the time it had taken me to do it manually. I particularly like the ability to size the thumbnails as I find many web thumbnails too small--what good is a thumbnail if you can’t even tell what it is? Since you’ve been mentioning it for some time, I look forward to hearing of your experiences with something other than FrontPage, Real Soon Now :) Hope you have a good trip to Japan. Regards, Thomas Crook http://www-personal.usyd.edu.au/~tomc University of Sydney When I get back from Japan I intend to build a new Windows 2000 machine, install only Office 97, and put up Dreamweaver, Irfan, and other such; and connect to the Internet with it. This leaves Princess as she is, just in case. It's drastic, but it's about the only way I can be sure of making all this work. I hope to do something other than FrontPage. It is convenient for small sites, and I suspect that if you use their themes and such it's pretty good for BIG Intranet sites and places with lots of bandwidth between workstation and server, but for over a modem line it's not so hot, and I am very weary of the enormous amounts of needless code it inserts. FP 98 didn't DO that. Thanks. Now if I knew where to find this program you like so much... <http://tucows.epix.net/htmlaccnt.html> It should be the first item listed. If the link doesn’t work, it’s at TUCOWS, under the Windows NT (button in the lefthand frame), under HTML Tools, under Accessories. It only got three cows, though... :-/ Troy Loney --- The developer’s official download page is http://www.xs4all.nl/~janderk/arles/ Regards Thomas Crook I believe that some time back you mentioned the freeware IrfanView graphics viewer on your site. I’ve been using it for a year or two now, and recently upgraded to the current version 3.05. I find IrfanView very useful for managing and massaging image files. It handles every format I’ve ever heard of, and some that I haven’t. IrfanView also makes it easy to do the kinds of things we need to do for our web sites. For example, you’d mentioned needing to convert the Olympus D-400 Zoom SHQ 1280X960 JPEG files to 640X480 files appropriate for posting on your web site. IrfanView does this conversion in only seconds per file. It also supports batch operations which, for example, allow you to resample an entire directory of 1280X960 images down to 640X480 in one step. Or, if you want to thumb your nose at Unisys and their ridiculous demands for a $5,000 license fee for using .gif files, you can batch convert all of your .gifs to .pngs automatically. You can download the latest IrfanView from http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e9227474/ Bob Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com Thanks. Incidentally, yours is the first letter I have used with the new letter handling procedure: open (or have open) a blank Word document set to 100% Times New Roman 12; open the letter from Outlook 2000; select the letter; copy; paste into WORD 2000 (the execrable Word 2000); leave it selected. It will come in as Arial (at least with my Outlook settings) but the tool bar will say "Body Text", so change that to "Normal". It will now all change to Times New Roman, but the letter will still be selected. Change font to Arial. There will be about 9 blank lines at the end of the letter, so if you want the reply to be in Times Roman you have to delete until you get past those and the font changes back to Times New Roman. Now the entire document is in different fonts, but the "text type" is "normal"; and THAT will paste into the execrable FrontPage 2000 exactly as you have laid it out. Splendid work around, no? I hate Office 2000. More in the column, but I thought you might want to know how to do this. I recall using IRFAN in the early days, back when I was doing this column from the beach house about 18 months ago. It and ThumbsPlus got lost in one or another of the machine shuffles here, and that's my fault. Thanks for finding it again for me. Sir, I am attaching an article regarding an Amorphophallus titanum in Florida. Pictures there, not really as good as yours though. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/showtime/destinations/favorite/amorphophallus.htm Bryan Broyles Thanks. Well, I should know better, but since I can’t resist, well.. On your website: Kevin Trainor said: >> 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. Avoided? Sure. Solved? Maybe not. Hard to say what he’s done though, not with what limited information we’ve got on his activities. >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. Well, possibly in the case of his internal modem, which he doesn’t specify, but I’m not aware of any external 28.8 modems that are software, or Winmodems. You know something, I don’t really like that term.. It’s an apt enough description, currently, but it does tend to make people think there’s no possible way other OSes could ever have drivers for those types of modems. Don’t think it’d be worth it, I detest Winmodems myself, they eat the CPU cycles I could be using for myself just to save a few bucks but it would be possible. > 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. Wise choice, if you want reliability, the less variation you have, usually the better things are. In a computer sense. An ecosystem would be another matter. :) >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. Well, not really. You can get new drivers for NT from the websites of many hardware manufacturers. Wouldn’t do much good if you didn’t buy the OS and have a license, unless of course, one doesn’t mind being a criminal, but you can get new drivers. Not to mention the CD’s the come with most hardware out of the box. Really I don’t think this so-called difference exists. Now if you want to make a point about the drivers being done by different groups of people, and that the Linux community might be more responsive to bug fixes, then you could have a point..but this claim here just doesn’t make sense to me. >>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? Well, it does come on the NT CD, though naturally that isn’t the most up to date list, but still.. And if someone is going to make a claim about the CD being useless if you don’t have a computer set up, well that’s also most likely true of those websites. I suppose one could have a WebTV and use that, but.. No, I won’t go there. I won’t. E Gray Thanks. I won't go there either.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Wednesday Spetember 1, 1999 I don't know if FP98 did this, but I think not. 1. Select and Copy one of the letters that your readers sends you in plain text format, with hard line breaks at the end of each line. 2. In FP editor, put the cursor where you want the letter to go, right click, choose Paste Special, mark the Normal paragraphs option button, and then click OK. FP strips out all the line breaks and pastes the result as normal paragraphs. No need for manual massaging or running a macro. Bob Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com Well, that certainly worked, and I don't think FP 98 did that. More interestingly, look at the HTML: it's a LOT simpler than I got going through WORD. Maybe the real culprit here is WORD 2000? I could live with Front Page 2000 if it did not muck up everything with needless code. This may be the solution, and thanks. Jerry, I was reading your Currentmail page when I came across the following: >Thanks. Incidentally, yours is the first letter I have used with the new letter handling procedure: open (or have open) a blank Word document set to 100% Times New Roman 12; open the letter from Outlook 2000; select the letter; copy; paste into WORD 2000 (the execrable Word 2000); leave it selected. It will come in as Arial (at least with my Outlook settings) but the tool bar will say "Body Text", so change that to "Normal". It will now all change to Times New Roman, but the letter will still be selected. Change font to Arial. There will be about 9 blank lines at the end of the letter, so if you want the reply to be in Times Roman you have to delete until you get past those and the font changes back to Times New Roman. Now the entire document is in different fonts, but the "text type" is "normal"; and THAT will paste into the execrable FrontPage 2000 exactly as you have laid it out. Splendid work around, no? I hate Office 2000. More in the column, but I thought you might want to know how to do this. It occurred to me that you were probably doing a "normal" paste into Word. Perhaps you should use "Paste Special" and select "Unformatted Text" as the option. It should paste the message text into whatever the default "Normal format" is for Word. That way you will not have to format the mail itself, just your reply if you want a different font for that. Incidentally, you may find it worthwhile to define a consistent style for replies that you can apply by selecting the reply text and selecting from the drop-down style list. I have included the relevant help section from Word 98 below which shows how to accomplish this. This should reduce the amount of steps you have to go through to handle your mail publishing. Incidentally, Arial is the default font setting for Outlook if you have your mail set to Rich Text. You may want to consider changing that to Plain Text which may avoid these pasting problems (but at the cost perhaps of readability). You can also set the font used to read and send mail under the Options settings in the Tools Menu of Outlook 98. That way you can change the Arial to your preference. I'm not sure if these headings are the same under Outlook 2000 but at least you will have an idea what to look for and where it should be located. Regards, Kendall Tull kendallt@ppsl.com mailto:kendallt@ppsl.com Create new styles The quickest way to create a new paragraph style is to format a paragraph, select it, and then base the new style on the formatting and other properties applied to the selected text. 1 Select the text that contains the formatting you want to include in your style. 2 Click in the Style box . 3 Type over the existing style name to create the name for the new style. 4 Press ENTER. Notes To create new character styles, click Style on the Format menu, and then click New. In the Name box, type a name for the style. In the Style type box, click Character. Select the other options you want, and then click Format to set attributes for the style. To set additional attributes for paragraph styles ¾ such as the style for the next paragraph or whether the style is saved in the template ¾ click Style on the Format menu, click the style whose settings you want to change, click Modify, and then select the options you want. OK. I confess. I got so disgusted with the inability of this silly system to paste properly from WORD 2000 that I didn't muck about trying to find new ways to do things. Some of this is documented, some is not. Clearly I know how to do all this in Word 98; that was one of my problems, that I had all those customizations in Word 98, and they do not paste properly into FrontPage 2000. Also in my own defense, there are aspects of Word 2000 that I hate so much that I didn't spend a lot of time customizing -- see the upcoming editorial by Paul Schindler in BYTE for some of his reasons -- and perhaps I should have. Thanks. OK, I'll make some styles and use Paste Special, and all this may in fact work. Customizations in FrontPage 2000 may make it usable. May. We will see. Actually this new system doesn't work. The Blasted thing does not remember that "mainletter" style is supposed to be Arial. I still hate FrontPage 2000. I created a style, and thought I could apply it to incoming mail. No. And Paste Special doesn't leave the thing selected, either. It's still all manual work. Then there's this: You probably won't be all that pleased to hear that hard returns are the standard for Internet mail. Everyone can read them, regardless of platform, whilst un-wrapped lines actually simply scroll off the right edge of the screen with some software. Stipulated that's probably bad software design, still, arguing with a pig wastes your time, etc... More importantly, there's an old tradition of interpolating responses into email messages which is exceptionally hard to implement against mail that is not hard wrapped. I can see how your environment makes it a bit less palatable to work with, but I can't see any real great compromise, I'm afraid. Cheers, jra Jay Ashworth And I fear that I don't care. If I use hard line ends, I get complaints about horizontal scrolling. If I don't I get -- to heck with it. I will keep trying to accommodate as many people as possible but I do reach limits. From: Paul D. Walker Subject: we live in interesting times... Hi Jerry, You probably already received the news by now, but in case you didn't. Sun has purchased the company that makes Star Office, a German office suite that is mostly feature compatible with MS Office. It runs on many different platforms (win32, os2, linux and maybe others) and the current version has a lot of nice features. Sun has announced that they are going to make the package and sources available for free. I wonder how Microsoft will respond to this. This will certainly cause them to react. Heck, they might even have to improve their products some more. Here are some links to the news articles on the subject: 1/ http://www.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId= Cn8Ttqb8ZtJmXntaYmty&;FQ=Linux&;SymHdl=1&;Nav=na-search-&;StoryTitle=Linux You Will have to Put the above one together. 2/ http://seattletimes.com/news/technology/html98/sun_19990831.html 3/ http://www.ft.com/hippocampus/q148ab6.htm and from Sun itself 4/ http://sun.com/dot-com/staroffice.html There is certainly no love lost between these two companies. I can't wait to see how this all turns out. - Paul This ain't precisely mail, but it's interesting: [Suggested solution: Bill puts up ads on Fiona's JPEG pages and cashes in on the horny pornhounds' misdirected hits.-Declan] http://www.dallasnews.com/technology/0831tech1xfiles.htm Baby site mislabeled as porn shows hazards of Web robots 08/31/99 By Pete Slover / The Dallas Morning News Dallas photographer Bill Maselunas was curious when he started noticing hits on his family Web site from the search index at search.thunderstone.com. Curious turned to furious when he went to the Thunderstone site and learned that his Web page - including snapshots of his 9-month-old daughter, Fiona - had been classified as triple-X porn by Thunderstone's automated indexing software. It apparently interpreted references to the infant cooing and giggling as smut. [...] POLITECH-the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe: send a message to majordomo@vorlon.mit.edu with this text: subscribe politech More information is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/ "On the other hand, sometimes ftp takes forever. Don't know why. Net weather is bad I guess. Today it takes 20 seconds just to change directories out on the site. Feh." Jerry, This is a direct quote from today's column. What the devil does the word "Feh" mean? I've seen it used ad nauseam on Usenet. According to my copy of the OED the word does not exist. There is a close cousin called "fey." Simple confusion? Warmest regards, and my check for membership will go out in the morning mail. Cheers! John Kenny It's something Niven uses a lot and I picked it up from him years ago; merely an expressive onomatopoeia like 'Duh', conveying disgust at things you can't do much about, and dismissal... Mr Pournelle I enjoy reading your novels and I wish you would write more of them. I’d like you to write a new book in your Spartan universe and didn’t you once state that you would write a sequel to Space Viking I’ve been waiting a long time for that one. By the way I’ve collected your books for a long time i.e. I have the 2 novels that were published by Laser . So I miss having you not writing more then one book a year. I know you enjoy doing the computer writing but 40 years from now you will be remembered for your Science Fiction books and all your computer writing will be forgotten. Finally if you want to write about computers how about getting your wife a Apple G4 500MHZ and reviewing that, especially with OSX coming up in the next six months. Yours sincerely, Thomas Monaghan PS. I do have all your SF books including your Men at War books. Well, but computers are fun, and writing about them is lucrative and I need the cash flow. Odd you should recommend a G4; as soon as they have them at Fry's I intend to go buy one. Thanks.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Thursday September 2, 1999 Bob Thompson has bones to pick: This is really the last straw. I just fired up FP2000 as usual, and it displayed an info box that told me the Windows Installer was loading. At that point, I got the initial splash screen for installing FP2000. It had my name filled in, but not my initials or the serial number. I did absolutely nothing different this time than I’ve been doing, so why should FP2K suddenly decide it needs to be installed? I do recall some time ago there was discussion of the fact that Microsoft was considering including a time-out in Office 2000 that required you to register or the programs would simply refuse to load. Is that what I’ve encountered? If so, I’m ready to take you up on your idea of borrowing that guided missile cruiser you keep mentioning and sailing it up to Redmond. I’ll shoot if you’ll steer. I’m tearing out every vestige of Office 2000 from my computer and reverting to Office 97. A pox upon Office 2000 and a pox upon Microsoft. Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com I asked if I should print that, and also noted that he will probably have to keep Outlook 2000; I have certainly had problems converting back to Outlook 98 from 2000. He replies: Yes, please do print it. I am so disgusted with Microsoft right now that I could spit. I can’t afford to remove all Microsoft applications and operating systems from my computers, or I would. Right now, I’ve uninstalled all of Office 2000, and have Word 97 and Excel 97 re-installed. I finally got FP98 re-installed after a bunch of problems, and I’m now publishing to my web site. It insists, of course, on publishing all 300 files on my site. Outlook 98 is a different story. I have the OL98 distribution files on my hard drive, but it won’t let me install. It insists there’s a network problem accessing www.microsoft.com. I hate Microsoft. Let me count the ways... Microsoft delenda est! Bob Followed by: As it turns out, I did need to keep OL2K, because I can no longer get OL98 to load from the distribution files on my hard drive (which they’ve done numerous times in the past). Also, Microsoft lies about no format changes from O97 to 02K. Documents edited with Word 2000 cannot be opened in Corel Office Suite 8. Documents edited with Word 97 open just fine. I’m back to running Word 97 and Excel 97 (with SR2a), FrontPage 98, and (damn) Outlook 2000. I really, really hate Microsoft. This has cost me about eight hours of work that I didn’t really have time for. I’ll post the details of this mess on my site tonight sometime. Microsoft delenda est. Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com For those not familiar with Roman history, after the Second Punic War, Cato, a prominent Senator in the late Republic, became convinced that Carthage was a menace to Rome and had to be destroyed. He took to ending all his speeches, no matter what the subject, with the phrase Carthago delenda est, i.e. "Carthage must be destroyed." Eventually Carthage was destroyed, the buildings all pulled down, and the Roman Consul ritually sowed salt on the place where the city had stood. I don't go that far, but I do think that Office 2000 was a product far too hastily released. The integration of FrontPage 200 was sloppy, and there are serious interaction problems among all the parts. I have never got that message about having to install, and my guess is that he's run into some kind of crazy glitch. I am using Office 2000 on one and only one machine, Princess, which has Windows 2000 "Professional" (i.e. Workstation), and I have not had all the problems Bob has. Mine are annoyances, some serious: for example I cannot make FrontPage 2000 remember the styles I have tried to invent for formatting text, and I am back to doing hand paste jobs and composing on the stick here in FrontPage 2000 because Word 2000 and FP 2000 don't work well together when it comes to transferring Word documents directly into FP 2000. I have not ripped out Office 2000 only because (1) it is difficult and time consuming, and (2) I am off for Japan this Saturday, and (3) we have no kitchen since it is taking weeks longer to make the new countertops than we thought so we have no sink so we have to eat out more and Roberta needs more help downstairs and (4) the column is due by tomorrow night and (5) I was Guest of Honor at NASFIC last weekend so I didn't work from Thursday until Sunday night. My solution to the Office 2000 problem is to bring up a new machine with Windows 2000 on it and all of the Office 97 FP 98, Outlook 98 stuff installed properly, then see just what I can transfer from the Office 2000 files here on Princess over to the new machine. A drastic solution, but apparently easier than tearing things out. The bottom line is, as I have said in the column, Office 2000 is not ready for prime time. Unlike Bob I have some confidence that it WILL be usable and that one day I can recommend it; but not yet. And I am getting an Apple G4. Of course that will have Office 98; nothing you can do about that. And when I get home I will begin serious work with other web site creation/management tools, although I have to say that FrontPage 98 was pretty well Good Enough. FP 2000 inserts too much bad code into mail; you will recall a few days there in which Netscape users could not access my mail page. Microsoft isn't evil, but they do rush products out. I used to have a rule that anyone using Release 1.0 of a Microsoft product deserved what happened. Perhaps it is time to revive that rule. Or, classically, "Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to cast the old aside." A poem (Alexander Pope I believe; sounds like him) I remember from childhood that used to be required reading when our school system was designed to do more than train potential employees. And then this, and it's time to end this for a while. >>The bottom line is, as I have said in the column, Office 2000 is not ready for prime time. Unlike Bob I have some confidence that it WILL be usable and that one day I can recommend it; but not yet. We certainly agree that Office 2000 is not-ready-for-primetime, but I think it’s more than that. I think the problem is that Microsoft’s reach has finally exceeded its grasp. They have finally succeeded in making something so complex that it may well prove impossible to debug. Actually, Office 2000 isn’t even the best (or worst) example of this. Windows 2000 is still an incredible mess. The Professional version looks to me like an early beta at this point (not an RC in the original sense of the word), but the real problem is with Windows 2000 Server, which still has huge chunks that are not working correctly or are missing entirely. I know that you think highly of Windows 2000 Professional, but just try, for example, to use it as a DHCP client on an NT4 DHCP Server. You may find, as I have, that Windows 2000 Professional grabs an IP address that is already being used by another system on the network. With Windows 2000, Microsoft has redefined DCHP from Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol to Dynamic Host Conflict Protocol. Windows 2000 Professional has done this to me both times I’ve installed it, on two different machines and on two different networks. I’m not prepared to say that the problem is reproducible (few behaviors, good or bad, are reproducible with Microsoft software), but it seems to me that this is a problem that should have been caught and fixed several builds back. It’s been said that Microsoft is betting the company on Windows 2000. If so, there must be quite a few people at Microsoft right now that are looking for a way to hedge their bets. I’m sure that if they could buy NetWare or Linux, they’d just do so and have done with it. The irony is that I have two Windows 2000 books under contract with O’Reilly. I think I’ll start the introduction, “If you find yourself sentenced to administer a Windows 2000 Server network, please accept our sincere condolences. Assuming that you can’t somehow convince your superiors to use a real network operating system like NetWare or Linux instead, here’s what you’ll need to know...” >>Microsoft isn’t evil, but they do rush products out. I used to have a rule that anyone using Release 1.0 of a Microsoft product deserved what happened. Perhaps it is time to revive that rule. Again, I agree. But this is not the first release of Office. Depending on how you count, it’s at least the fourth. By now, they should have their code fully debugged. Instead, they have a complete mess. If Corel Office Suite 8 could open Word 2000 documents, I’d have converted to it by now. I’m also seriously considering downloading StarOffice (64 MB) to see what they have to offer. Of course, Microsoft takes the Hotel California approach to designing software—make it easy to import stuff from other software; make it impossible to export from Microsoft applications. It may just be worth biting the bullet and getting away from Microsoft entirely. Microsoft delenda est. Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com I am using Windows 2000 Professional as a client on an NT 4 Service Pack 4 server. I have had absolutely no problems with it. We reserved some TCP/IP addresses, but Princess gets assigned a client address like all the other system on this net. The printers have reserved addresses. I don't pretend to understand all this -- Roland Dobbins set it up for me as I watched -- but I understand it well enough to see it working. Apropos managing recalcitrant html... NoteTab is an *excellent* notepad type editor that can among other things instantly and cleanly strip all HTML out of a file. I’ve used the earlier version “Super Note Tab” for several years. The current Light version is free and it along with trial of the Pro version can be had from the (new, domained) and informative home site at http://www.notetab.com/ Like much good European software, this is “relocateware”—it is essentially unpacked into its own folder and doesn’t mess with a lot of system and registry foolishness. The author includes clear info on how to make NoteTab the default notepad editor (and how to restore the original setting too!). Recommended. “Bo Leuf” <bo@leuf.com> http://www.leuf.com/ Thanks. I'll get it. I haven't been happy with any of the tools I have been using, alas. What I really want is a way to transfer formatted text into FrontPage 2000. Fat chance. LATER: They took my money, but the download isn't happening. Now they want to install download programs. I have Getright but that isn't good enough. Now I'm scared. Why the heck to do they insist on installing "certified" stuff on my machine? And their messages make it flipping impossible to see what is going on. I hate all that. Why don't they make it clear that you can just use your Getright to get their stupid product? I fear I am not happy with these people. I suppose Digital river Istream is all they say it is, but I didn't need it. GetRight would have done nicely. Feh! But in fact eventually all went well. I now have a Digital River Istream icon I don't need -- I don't really anticipate using that program again -- in my tray and nothing seems to tell me how to get rid of it, but Startup Manager and a reset will do it if nothing else does. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS??? I didn't ask for permanent download software just to buy their product. See view. Notepad may be great stuff, but buying it buys you more than you bargained for. Jerry: an explanation for “Feh!” from: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/5008/jokes/feh.html * * F E H !!!! * * · as presented by Leo Rosten, author of The Joys of Yiddish (1968) feh! This juicy expletive cannot be enlisted without its exclamation point. “Feh” is the Yiddish replacement for exclamatory expressions of disgust such as “Phew!” “Pee-oo!” and “Ugh!” It strikes me as a crisp and exact delineation of distaste. In saying “Feh!,” you may bare the teeth and wrinkle the nose, in visible reinforcement of the meaning. Here are some circumstances in which “Feh!” may serve as the perfect utterance: 1.Smelling a rotten egg. 2.Passing an open sewer. 3.Inhaling Los Angeles smog. 4.Driving past the sulfur pits that fringe New York in New Jersey. 5.Whiffing a rotten fish. 6.Describing an old biddy (if you are young). 7.Describing a beautiful tart (if you are old). 8.Summarizing a political position you detest. 9.Appraising the honor or benevolence of an enemy. 10.Contemplating an operation for hemorrhoids. 11.Responding to an invitation to a bullfight. 12.Reporting (the next day, to your loved ones) how the overripe grouse or pheasant smelled at the dinner last night, which, excuse the expression was plain chaloshes. 13.Delineating the character of the paskudnyak who ran off with your wife. 14.Reporting a klutz’s performance of Mozart. 15.Recounting how a soprano murdered an aria. 16.Depicting a hangover. 17.Portraying strongly negative feelings about any sight, event, person, crisis, experience or emotion. (“Feh! I salute you!”) Don Wilkes <Don.Wilkes@gems9.gov.bc.ca> Now that you say it I recall this is a Yiddish expression. I once read Rosten's book, which is excellent. As we get older details fall out one ear when new ones come in the other. Thanks.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Friday September 3, 1999 Jerry, Like you I have a W2K professional (ie Beta 3) client running DHCP with the server an NT4 server. No problems with this setup. DHCP can be very weird and spooky however, especially on a multi-homed server. I fear to take issue with your colleage Mr. Thompson but could it be he has a multi-homed DHCP server? Even a logical multi-homing (ie more than one address on one NIC) makes it very unstable and dodgy. I couldn’t begin even to remember all the grief I had until I understood this (Duplicate addresses, conflicts, complete refusal to issue any leases at all, one card NACK’s the other ones OFFERs, and more). Now I stick strictly to one DHCP server per network segment, and it all works fine. Andrew Well, we have only one DHCP server here, and it all works. Thanks. Hi Jerry, I have been following your experience with FP 2000 with great interest. I must admit that after reading Bob Thompson's experience, I had a fit and promptly fell in. I have followed the development of Office 2000 for over a year now. I used the last Beta of Office 2000 for 6 months. There were a few problems but overall it worked just fine. I think you are using it out of context. The "Office" suite has always been MS's major cash cow. O2K is a different upgrade than in the past as it was like going from Office 95 to Office 97. MS designed O2K for the Workgroup. The overriding theme was "Collaboration". I attended all the MS TechNet briefings and MSDN meetings and the product was pushed at developers for collaboration. This was the selling point. To that end, MS has succeeded. O2K was not meant to be just another upgrade in the Office lineage. MS wanted an office person to be able to create any document in either Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access and save those files as native HTML with no loss of original formatting and publish those docs to a "Web Folder" to be shared over an Intranet. The office person would not have to have any knowledge of HTML or FrontPage to make it work. What you are experiencing is what MS did to make that process work. They created the program to convert the native Word 2000 doc into HTML and XML. Aha, those funny tags are supposed to be there. (XML is the coming "thing." Everyone will be doing it sooner than later.) After the office worker creates a doc and saves it as HTML to a Web Folder, other co-workers can view the "docs" and add comments, and later the Author of the document can grab that document back and edit it in the original program that created it...with out any loss of original formatting. Word converts the HTML and XML file back into the original Word binary format. It does what it was supposed to do! When O2K is used in this fashion...it works...period! I have clients that use it in this way and there have been no complaints and they claim they are more productive than they were in Office 97. I personally have not upgraded to Office 2000. I don't need these HTML publishing features. I do have FP 2000 and Outlook 2000 installed as separate components because I like the way they work. And they do work! I get my work done and that is what counts for me. I use Outlook for Calendar, Tasks, and Appointments. My favorite mail tool is Outlook Express which came with IE5. Having attended all the MS stuff, I knew up front that I did not need the "whole" package. I can live without "collect and paste." I have to ask this Jerry, but why do you insist on using Word as an a formatting tool? I know this is how you do "the" mail but would it not be faster and easier to just cut and paste directly into FP2K from Outlook? Then reformat in FP2K. If I were doing what you do, I would cut and paste, add my comments, cut and paste and so on. When I was finished I would go back to the top of the page highlight the 1st mail message and change the font paragraph spacing, etc.. Next, highlight my response, change font and or text color and continue the process till the end of that page. Perhaps I'm missing something here...? I think you are clearly wrong that MS rushed this product out too soon. If MS is guilty of something, it is very bad marketing of what O2K was intended for and the market it was NOT directed at. O2K was not meant for the average consumer at home. Thanks for listening and I think I will climb out of my fit now. Will Bierman wbierman@flash.net Well, I am using FP 2000 direct now. It's not as convenient as Word if for no other reason than that I am used to the tool layout of Word, and I have Word customized. FP is also slower. Bang a key and you see a flicker as the letter goes on screen. The blinking cursor and the slight delay in the letter getting up is annoying if you watch the screen when you type. Keyboards are designed by non-typists, and I suspect that FP was also; it doesn't bother you if you are staring at the keys when you type, just as the old DOS screen flicker didn't bother the engineers who can't type. Perhaps Office 2000 does precisely what they wanted it to do, and the WRETCHED documentation obscures all that? All I know is that I see no reason at all for most people to adopt Office 2000. Perhaps if you are part of a work group using an Intranet it's the cat's whiskers, but for me it's just a pain. I am sure FP 2000 works on Intranets, too. What it doesn't work on is 56K modems when you have a large web site. If I break the thing into enough small webs I may be able to let pair turn on the FP extensions, but not until I have done that. Frankly, I wish I had never heard of Office 2000. I was much happier with Office 97, FrontPage 98, and Outlook 98 although Outlook 98 did have some glitches in its rules, and we were all unhappy with that enormous outlook.pst file. But for all that it worked. I am glad to hear that Office 2000 does what it was designed to do; but what it was designed to do apparently isn't always what I want to have done... AND NOW FROM ANOTHER READER: Dr. Pournelle: I to was a happy user of Office 97. I then acquired and installed Office 2000. Many of my documents HAD Visio diagrams in them. After editing the documents in Office 2000 the diagrams dissappeared. Printing the documents, viewing the documents, etc yields no diagram. Double clicking in the space where the diagram used to be launches Visio and the diagram is present. Clicking outside the area to get back into WORD and the diagram dissappears. I then removed Office 2000 from my system. Everything seemed to go well. I installed the suite, then installed the SR1 patch. It wanted to patch all applications except OUTLOOK. I let it run. I then tried to install the SR2 patch, and it is the latest version. The patch said that I had not installed SR1. OK. I uninstall Office 97 and run ERASER97 which is supposed to remove all traces of Office 97. It doesn’t quite but is better than the Office 97 uninstall. I then install Office 97 again. Same problem with the patches. I call Microsoft and am told that they do not have a solution. Instead of fixing the problem they send me a new Office 97 CD that is already patched. I again remove Office 97 and run ERASER97. I then install from the CD. Outlook still shows that it has not been patched. This kind of crap is really uncalled for. I then get an even bigger surprise. I start ACCESS97 and I am greeted by a screen that says it will not run because it is not licensed on this machine. Now what. I call Microsoft and at least this time they know the answer. There is a font called HARREL that needs to be removed. I remove the font, reinstall Office 97 and now MSACCESS works. So now I am back to Office97, my Visio diagrams work again, and Outlook is still not patched. But I wasted many hours and some long distance fees to get back to where I was. Perhaps it was my haste in wanting the newest that clouded my judgement. I took Office 2000 back to the dealer, demanded, and received my money back. Perhaps more people need to be doing this. Microsoft will only truely understand when sales plummet. I feel like you that Office 2000 is a botched hack of Office 97 and never should have been released. As to StarOffice. I have used StarOffice and have been very pleased with the results. It does seem to be a very good package. The download time was long, but I was able to use a T1 to get the file. At one time StarDivision would sell you a CD for $39.95 which is probably a pretty good deal. What I like is that StarOffice has a version that will run on Windows and Linux. Not bad for a product that is essentially free for personal use. Ray Thompson Oh Lordy. You are telling me that my plan to set up an entirely new system that has never had Office 2000 on it may be the best way. I can then reformat Princess's hard disk and start over. I sure will not get to this before I go to Japan tomorrow. Bottom Line: WAIT before installing Office 2000. DO NOT DO IT yet. They must fix UNINSTALL (or wait for Symantec to do it) and there are other incompatibilities. Maybe, as Mr. Bierman says above, Office 2000 does what it was intended, but it was NOT INTENDED FOR YOU AND ME. Clearly. Here may be some help: Paul S. R. Chisholm <psrchisholm@yahoo.com> writes: If you have an older version of Office 97, you should be able to get a replacement CD with all the SR-2 (and SR-1) fixes. This may have *more* fixes than the patches (which would be good). See the Windows Office Watch archives: http://www.wopr.com/wow/wowarch.shtml (look in the late 1998 issues, starting around the September 21 issues), or: http://www.zdnet.com/zdhelp/office_help/wow98/wow_sr.html for pretty much the same information.—PSRC Just when you thought you might be secure? Don't. Ever. Hi Jerry, http://www.cryptonym.com/hottopics/msft-nsa.html I am not in a position to verify the validity of the information, but I have to say that I would not be surprised if it was true. It has already been revealed that other products, such as Lotus Notes, with "strong encryption" already have a NSA backdoor built in. - Paul pdwalker@quagmyre.com Your tax dollars at work. I had this debate with the White House Science Advisor back in about 1993. They think they need phone tap and decryption to "bust drug rings and child porno outfits." My view was then and is now that the cure is worse than the disease. See next weeks Intellectual Capital column I am writing now. Microsoft is denying this vehemently. I am inclined to believe Microsoft since while they may shade things I have never known the company to flat out officially lie, and it's demonstrable if this exists so this can be checked. they aren't stupid in Redmond, either. But I know that the official policy of this White House is to ask for access to everything. Everything.
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Saturday
© Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Top	Sunday September 5 1999 I caught an airplane to Japan this morning. Return next Sunday.
© Chaos Manor home	Entire contents copyright 1999 by Jerry E. Pournelle. All rights reserved. Comments and discussion welcome.

CHAOS MANOR MAIL

A SELECTION

HIGHLIGHTS:

Monday August 30, 1999

Bob

Tuesday, August 31, 1999

Wednesday Spetember 1, 1999

Thursday September 2, 1999

Friday September 3, 1999

Saturday

Sunday September 5 1999