CHAOS MANOR MAIL

A SELECTION

Windows 98 installation hassles: I think Microsoft has over-reacted to the high incidence of piracy with Win95. Of course, given how easy (and cheap) it is to knock off CD/R copies of a Win95 installation CD’s these days, like most such measures it slows down the pirates not a whit and irritates legitimate users like yourself. One could speculate endlessly on why 98 has turned out the way it has...I’m not sure even Microsoft would be able to answer that. I know I’m avoiding it like the plague, and you won’t catch me going near NT5 until at least service pack 2...

"Improper" HTML: You’re a writer, not an HTML coder. You need to use the tools available to accomplish the task with as little fuss as possible. Complaints about Front Page code generation should go to Microsoft, not you. Now, if someone was paying you a good solid wage to spend hours and hours tweaking the HTML, that’d be different. But we’re all here for the content! (Or should be - wasn’t that what this whole ‘net was supposed to be about?

Universally accessible content? Ah, well...) Which leads into:

The (I think) rude person complaining about your calls for donations: I think he has no idea how much traffic a site like this generates, and how much that costs - it’s way beyond what any sane ISP would allow for a "personal" site. Thus it needs to be supported - by payments to you, or advertising. Personally, I prefer your unobtrusive requests to screens full of garish banner ads that chew up my bandwidth. And, at the very least, you should be free to try and cover the hosting costs in any manner you see fit, even if you had a fit of generosity and generated content for free when you could be spending it making money on fiction. If you don’t want to pay, fine - with the understanding that at some point some portion of the content may not be available to you. Or don’t come by at all if you dislike it that much - but a rant like you received is totally uncalled for.

Oh, and I like Niven’s books too. :) Niven, Pournelle, and Asimov account for a large portion of my library (in roughly equal parts). Incidentally, I don’t mind any time you spend working on a new Janissaries book instead of this site...the anticipation is such that I’ve started re-reading the existing ones, knowing full well I’ll have to read them again to refresh my memory before reading the new one! :)

On Clinton: Not being an American, I don’t want to opine too much on this whole fiasco, but I will say this - completely ignoring his guilt/innocence/impeachability/whatever, that fact that thousands of copies of the President’s grand jury testimony are being duplicated as we speak and rushed out to video stores so everyone can own a copy, says something about the state of American culture in this media-driven age. I’m not sure what, exactly, but I don’t think it’s "A Good Thing".

Linux: I love Linux. Make it a point to have it on all my systems...but I don’t use it often. Far too many of the tools I need on a day-to-day basis:

IE4, Word 97, MS VisualC++, Outlook98, etc just won’t run under it. Wordperfect is available, but the Word/WordPerfect translation is always imperfect, especially when I’m working with template-driven company documents. Netscape is a good browser, but it’s Dynamic HTML is not nearly as comprehensive as IE’s (yet), and it’s Cascading Style Sheet handling is somewhat brain-damaged. Red Hat in particular has done a great job in making Linux easier to install, and the .rpm format is a great improvement over zipped "tar" files, but installation and configuration, particularly of applications of widely varying quality, can be tricky. While a good enterprise, server, or power user solution, it’s far from idiot-proof enough for most end users. Having said that, if you don’t have a need for specific Win32 apps, are happy with WordPerfect (or StarOffice, or one of the many free but often less capable - or oddly different - alternatives) and Netscape, and don’t mind occasionally getting into the configuration "guts", or have someone knowledgeable to do it for you, and can deal with some sometimes odd UI inconsistencies between apps, it can be more than "good enough" for most peoples basic needs. Certainly it can be faster and more reliable than Windows, and can breathe some old life back into older systems. This has probably been suggested, but if you happen to have access to a 486, or an older, slower Pentium, and have the time, an install there would be a good experiment, particularly for evaluating "good enough" configurations for a book - old 486’s can be had very cheaply these days.

And finally:

Alex Schaft [aschaft@msoft.co.za]

Hi,

This has got nothing to do with Linux, or anything else, it’s just interesting.

http://www.africam.com. Here they’ve got web cams set up at some water holes in a game reserve in Southern Africa, which refresh every 30 seconds. If you got a spare moment, or if you want to do something different. You can watch the wildlife.

Your Linux pages don't view well on a 1024x768 display, with Internet Explorer 4.x. Paragraphs through the linux1.html page are, well, unreadable; any of them with any substance run off the right side of my screen.

I am not enough of an HTML afficienado to be able to advise you on how to fix it (I did take a quick look via the View Source option, but didn't see anything to fix - but that's just me), but this page (and others) are terribly broken and are (a) unreadable and (b) very annoying and/or discouraging to anyone seeking Linux solutions..

For what it's worth. I hope you (or whoever set these unusable travesties up) can fix it.

Power Management and Win98

Edited by Alex Pournelle

Windows 98’s Standby mode is less than 100% perfect. It’s subject to disturbances of the system, disturbances which can cause it to suddenly stop working reliably. Thus this discussion. I welcome, nay, solicit your comments.

I’ve heard a strange rumor, that Win98 doesn’t support DOS games properly, that MSCDEX.EXE isn’t properly supported in DOS windows. Does anyone have comment in either direction?

Windows 98 is here to stay, in any case, so we have to learn to support it, bugs and all. From the little I’ve seen in the newsgroups, there are significant and ongoing problems which await service pack one, two, et al.

--Alex

As Peter Flynn notes:

It is clearly best to turn it off (sometimes funny things happen when you power back on after sleep mode - but not usually).

To which I say:

The problems with sleep mode are endemic with W98. I'm afraid that, because of Peter's good luck with the new Compaq Presario with W98 he bought, I caused one of my clients to purchase the lesser model. (There are two; one with a P/II-400 and another with a –350.) Somehow, that machine’s power management got perturbed in such a way that it will no longer reliably go into standby. In fact, the only way out is to power cycle. No fun.

Standby mode has a new kinder, gentler, smarmier method about it for detecting that the system has been having problems. If your system fails to do standby properly 3 or 4 times, it asks if you want the choice to be made available in the future.

If you’re ever asked this, and you ever want to see this mode again, do NOT turn it off! Turning it back on requires fiddling with the registry; there's no other way, according to the MS knowledgebase.

Eric Pobirs [nbrazil@ix.netcom.com]

One thing to keep in mind is that much of this is the fault of Compaq and certain other vendors who took it upon themselves to extend the APM spec in various ways. Worse still, Compaq’s attitude is that any machine they shipped three months or more before the June release of Win98 are Win95 boxes and that is that. Not that machines that shipped with the new Os or included a free update coupon are free of problems.

How could the (at times) biggest PC maker in the world act like this isn’t their problem? How could they not be aware that several hundred thousand recent Compaq customers would soon run out and get Win98 for no better reason than to have the hot new toy. Are we to believe the company isn’t on Microsoft’s Beta list?

Francois van Niekerk [Francois.vNiekerk@aspentech.com]

I followed your Chaos Manor articles in Byte and was quite disappointed when Byte folded.

Respectfully

Francois van Niekerk

Senior Engineer

AspenTech Europe bv

+31 499 364 444 Tel

+31 499 397 820 Fax

Carl Leubsdorf, Jr. [cpl@access.digex.net]

Please don’t think I’m a deadbeat!! I sent you a check (to the address on your web site) but it got marked "return to sender"!! When I pay my bills this month I’ll send it again. Maybe Word’s bar-coding was incorrect; I’ll hand address the envelope this time!

By the way, I absolutely love your site (and books and columns).

Jerry,

I like your web site, and visit it often. Look for a check soon (unless the Canadian dollar drops again). The only problem I have viewing your site has to do with font size. Many of the pages, especially those with letters or quotes, have a range of font sizes from almost too large to unreadably small. When I get to one of these I have to increase font size three times (Ctrl + ] in Netscape) . It seems to me that Front Page may be more trouble than it is worth. I have read a lot of good stuff about Homesite http://www.allaire.com/ .

Otherwise, the site is improving every time I visit, perhaps someone studying Web Design would volunteer to help, reality teaches more than theory.

The content is the most important thing and I can’t complain about that. Your column was the reason I read Byte. I’m glad it’s not gone.

I’m about to begin building my own computer as well, and have been fighting a battle between "good enough" and money gobbling, fire breathing speed demon. I have decided to opt for quality and sense. We’ll see how things work out.

Talin [Talin@ACM.org]

Week of 9/21/98: Of mice and memory.

Week of 9/14/98: A night at the opera.

Just to give a picture of what the future holds, here’s what I’m doing:

Andrew Cohen [andrew.cohen@mindspring.com]

Jerry,

Greetings from Atlanta, Georgia. My name is Andrew Cohen and I’m a technical call screener for IBM. I take hardware support calls on IBM PC and NetFinity servers and listen to what the caller has to say, then based on the problem, either solve it over the phone, or dispatch a technician on site. Suffice it to say that in my first three months at this job (fresh out of college), I have learned more than I ever cared to know about SCSI and RAID.

Can’t wait to see your photos up on the web.

Andrew Cohen—ICQ: 18198324 / AIM: AndrewC75

Kennesaw (Atlanta), Georgia

--------------------

Actually, our trip was in spring (we went to Ascension Day services on Ascension Mount). I suspect that pictures of Melchite open air services in a Franciscan church will be slightly less thrilling to you than me… On the other hand I have a number of pictures of confrontations that are not very encouraging, but I suspect are interesting to anyone who hopes for peace in Jerusalem.

Many of my pictures were taken with the Olympus and Agfa cameras, and they're preserved in electronic form, on the same glass disk as my series in Chicago about Spring Comdex. It's just getting time to edit them and provide a narrative that's lacking, and that's not quickly remedied because I have this book to get out the door.

But you have one excellent suggestion. We took a lot of pictures on film, and I have the negatives, and it would not be hard to have those put onto a photo disk; and I should do that. I think of that every now and then, and then I forget to do it. I also have a Papermate scanner that would do a less adequate job but will take paper prints and turn them into web photos, and I need to set that up. Now if I can just clone myself.

J.H. Ricketson [culam@dnai.com]

Dear Jerry,

First, I agree 110% with your M$ rant. If anything, I think you were too temperate in your remarks. Consider: You are THE Jerry Pournelle. You will get cooperation &; support from M$, and others, regardless. What of the rest of us schmucks that pay at least as much for SW as you do - and get ZILCH in support? Once my credit card is debited, I’m all alone on my ownsome, except for independent support sites (Tom’s, etc.) and News Groups. Too temperate. If I were to write a rant it would run to 500+ pages plus documentation &; references. Like the punchline says: "I know the Faro game is crooked - but it’s the only game in town!" For that reason, I hope you do a really thorough, step-by-step chronicle of the Linux Box (Linette - I like it). If you can make it into a working system, I, and probably many others of Pournelle’s legion, will be persuaded that Linux can be conquered by a non-geek, and encouraged to attempt the (presently) unthinkable. Consider the implications: if this happens, and a lot of us are encouraged to buy, try, and actually use Linux, you may be the catalyst that provides the critical mass required to get Linux moving as a serious alternative to M$. (I.E., more users=more good SW=more users ad infinitum).

Adjunct to Murphy’s laws: If there is only one really hard way to do something, M$ will find it and use it. Believe it.

My 13 disk solution: Due to my inclination to meddle, ("Now what would happen if..."), and my penchant to try out new SW &; HW, I often have to start again from scratch. After two instances of having to do the floppy shuffle with W3.1 in order to install the W98 UG to W3.1, I finally wised up (I’m a slow learner.) I made a Plain Vanilla install of W3.1 on my D: drive, and copied it to a Dynamo 640 cartridge for future reference, as W31_PV. I then renamed D:\W31 to D:\W95, and installed the W95 UG to D:\W95 with no problems. I did this (renaming, etc.) as I had found that if I installed W95 to its own empty W95 directory, it was dependent on the W3.1 directory for many of its files. Installing it over the W3.1 files solved this, as it now points to itself for the files it needs.

I suspect the same may be true for a W95->W98 "upgrade". Try this: Back up

your W95 install to removable media, delete it from your HDD, then try

booting W98. I’ll wager that if W98 boots at all, you will get many whiny

error messages that "Windows 98 cannot locate [filename]"

So much for my abbreviated M$ rant. Again - Please. I look to you for leadership in this Linux install process because you will tell it like it is, from a user’s point of view. I find it hard to accept assurances from some starry-eyed Unix geek that assumes ten years’ Unix experience that I (and many eager prospective Linux users ) simply DO_NOT_HAVE. Grep schmep. It’s as Greek to me as PetBasic was many long years ago. I simply do not have the years left to invest going that route again, with no assurance of a satisfactory, useful box as the result.

Keep up the good work. Incidentally, Don Bowman’s EMail says it all, more lucidly than I. I am indebted to him for expressing my point of view. Anyhow - Please upgrade Project Linette to a priority second only to Monk’s Cell duty. It is way past time I began the long, hard road to reasserting control over my box, rather than incrementally ceding it to M$. I am of the very UNhumble opinion that it is MY box, MY time &; money, and I deeply resent M$ requirements that I do it THEIR way, with NO viable alternative. (The operative term is _viable_. I don’t consider any of the long list of "alternatives" enumerated by one of your correspondents to be viable for my use.) More and more things are "incompatible" unless you are running Exploder4 and W95/98. This is no accident. "Once is coincidence. Twice is happenstance. Thrice is hostile activity." I consider M$ to be extremely user-hostile in every sense of the term.

As always - my very best regards -

JHR

--

Linette flies this weekend. I hope. I do have something Saturday night, and Friday nights is Mrs. Pournelle's movie night. With luck I'll see something I can review for Nikkei BYTE. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (gives the Golden Globes) requires that you do movie reviews for foreign press magazines. Now that I do columns for, among others, BYTE TURKEY and NIKKEI BYTE, that makes me eligible (anyone know an overseas paper that needs a cheap movie review stringer just to make this a bit more legitimate?) With luck I'll be able to join HFPA and you'll see me at the Golden Globe awards ceremonies…

Anyway, I do intend to get this Linux project going. I want to have a block of time so that I am not hurried and can keep a good log book. Log books are the great secret of the ages…

ChiggyVonR@aol.com

Microsoft word has this great feature that you showed me called define. There has got to be a way that it can be used in any program from a right-click menu. I have not been able to find out how to do make it happen, maybe you can ask in Chaos Manor Musings and one of your readers might have the answer.

Ward Gerlach [wgerlach@earthlink.net]

In my experience (20 yrs electronic tech, 8 yrs software tech support, all somehow computer-related) 9/10ths of electronic communications problems, where the sucker worked just fine last week, are bad connections, which includes your bad cable. You mentioned a source for SCSI cables (Granite?) once, do they make Really Good serial and parallel cables?

For communications problems, you can include "bad" memory. About once a year, I lift the motherboard out of whatever machine I happen to have, and Very Carefully press gently on each socketed chip. Those items that are in slots (especially memory) get removed, get their contact edges cleaned with a lint-free rag dampened with isopropanol, and re-installed.

All components on all boards get the dust blown off using a can of Compressed Dry Air (CDA).

You might ask your friends at PC Power and Cooling why they don't design a case that pulls air in through a filter, and out through the power supply and through the floppy drive and cd drive and through the other holes. That should prevent a lot of problems that cost a lot of money, and keeps ME in pocket change! A lot of components fail when they overheat. Prime cause of overheat in a PC? Dust on the components, of course. And where does the dust come from? Down near your grubby feet, most likely! You wouldn't beleive the dust devils I've found! All teeth and claws and appetite....

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I would like to ask you a question. Several question actually. The background is a little tedious. I came across a second hand copy of Robert Heinlein’s "Expanded Universe" and read it avidly. In the section on his trip to the old USSR he stated that Moscow’s population couldn’t be more that 650,000 as opposed to the then official figure of 5,000,000. and his estimate was backed by an unnamed class mate, then a US Admiral.

A quick check on the net shows an official figure for Moscow’s current population at 8,700,000. Do you have any data on this ? Was Heinlein so wrong? If not what is going on ? Is the overall Russian Population figures similarly inflated ?

A paranoid thought came to my mind. What if Foreign Aid is the reason ? I mean if Aid is being computed and given on the basis of a population ten times the actual population what an opening for crooks. More Paranoia:-What if the entire Russian Bureaucracy is in cahoots ? A basis for a story perhaps ? If so please use it as you see fit.

It should be easy to find out if he was right. He himself suggested that US Intelligence knew (through satellite data) that the official figures were false but were coddling the USSR.

Please put this in the mail section if you wish. I find the whole matter most intriguing and would welcome any light you (or anyone else) may be able to shed on this matter.

Dean Stacey [dstacey@mindspring.com]

Hi Jerry,

Let me just say first that I have enjoyed your BYTE column for many years and am very pleased that you have found a way to continue in the same vein on the web, having just visited Bugnet on a lark and discovered your column there. I am pleased to inform you that I subscribed straight away for that reason only. I was dismayed to see BYTE disappear, I too don’t feel it will be the same magazine at all when it resumes and will probably end up cancelling my subscription. Enough about that.

I’ve been reading some of your past journals and have learned a lot of helpful information about Outlook in the process, and am familiar with your complaints of not being able to read a .PST file with anything other than Outlook. I thought you might find this interesting: I recently read somewhere that some parts of Office97 and Outlook in particular actually use their own file system, based on the much ballyhooed ‘Cairo’ which Microsoft was promoting as ‘be all and end all file system of the future’ several years ago and which we stopped hearing about over time, the file system itself would be a searchable database.

Apparently Microsoft decided that there were too many backward compatability issues involved in actually implementing Cairo into the OS and getting everyong to use it so they built it into parts of Office, Outlook in particular. This is the reason the .PST ‘file’ is one big non-parsible file with it’s own friggin’ directory tree. It’s a file system on top of a file system!

I wish to God I could tell you where I read this, I thought it was in Showstopper! the book by G. Pascal Zachary on the race to develop NT, but I’ve checked and it wasn’t. I’ve read several such books on Microsoft and have lent most of them out so I’m not able to check. Perhaps you could ask around if you have any curiosity about this.

the book ‘Barbarians Led By Bill Gates’

Take Care,

Jerry,

I found the following reference to the ‘cairo’ file format buried on the ms website. It referenced a downloadable program to ‘look inside’ these files. It might be useful or might not. Since I don’t use outlook, I can’t try it out.

The knowledgebase article refers to an article in The Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ) for March 1994.

Look here for the knowledgebase article and look at the

reference to pe.exe .

John

John Rice [coredump@enteract.com]

They list 4 or 5 stores in California and I think a couple of them are in L.A. (I’m not real familiar with the Suburb Names out there, coming from the Chicago area). They have a store locator on the website, with maps.

I’ve always been able to get UPS replacement batteries from them. If you call them, they may not know specifically what a UPS battery is, but if you take the UPS or the battery in, there’s a 99% probability that they’ll be able to duplicate it.

They’re a great resource for batteries for just about anything. If you have an older ‘rechargable’ item that is long out of production and no longer supported, with dead batteries they can almost always replace the batteries, often by custom building a battery out of generic ‘cells’ into a package that will ‘fit’.

Highly recommended.

Jerry,

As near as I can tell, by experimentation, Word takes the date that’s set in W95 as the date to insert. Have you checked the date/time settings on the machine lately ?

JOhn

Jerry—

Found this on Cnet’s 22 frontpage tips which might be of interested to you. (Sorry for the spaces at the beginning of lines, but I expect you’ll glance and discard):

 John Rice

Sept. 26, 1998

Dear Jerry:

I too am missing my long-ago ordered (and promised) Palmpilot Pro to 3 hardware upgrade, and I'm beginning to grow suspicious. Could it be vaporware? Do you know of anyone who actually has a working iteration, or who has physically seen one in hand? I don't, and I'm wondering if 3Com has hit a snag and is just stringing us along...

What do you think?