View 32: January 18

Contents

THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 32: January 18 - 24, 1999

This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 words.

Day-by-day...: Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday

Previous Weeks of The View:

For an index of previous pages of view, see VIEWDEX.
See also the New Order page, which tries to make order of chaos. These will be useful.
For the rest, see What is this place? for some details on where you have got to.

Boiler Plate:

If you want to PAY FOR THIS I keep the latest HERE. You can pay by Credit Card now. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money. I'm making up a the mailing list. There are enough that it's a chore, which is not something to complain about. Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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If you subscribed:

CLICK HERE for a Special Request.

If you didn't and haven't, why not?

If this seems a lot about paying think of it as the Subscription Drive Nag. You'll see more.

For the BYTE story, click here.

The LINUX pages are organized as the log, my queries, and your responses and advice parts one, two, three, and four. There's four pages because I try to keep download times well under a minute. There are new updates to four.

Highlights this week:

This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Monday, January 18, 1999

More than half the month gone. Astonishing. Busy day today starting with eye examination: I hadn't believe it would happen, but I was told that SAMe might actually cause my eyes to get better, and it just may be that's the case. We will see. Be interesting if my next prescription is closer to the last one than stronger as they have been year after year. We'll see.

AAAS in Anaheim this weekend. Have to get ready for all that. And fiction, both Janissaries IV (Mamelukes) and Niven will be over tomorrow so we can talk about our next book, which is still at the talking stage rather than a real outline.

The January Column is now up.

I will have some pictures of the Niven New Year Party later; subscribers have already got them. I 'll be making a new subscriber list and sending some more pictures to subscribers Real Soon Now. I'm dancing as fast as I can.

Now I have to get going...

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Tuesday, January 19, 1999

We seem to have neglected things compuerish for a week or so. Not much to be done, this is still ficiton time. I do intend to return to the Linux box shortly, and Corel is having a tour to demonstrate their Word Perfect office suits and Linux; I'll be seeing them in a few days. And Larry Aldridge is collecting parts for a new series of systems, so we'll be back into building new machines. There are also a bunch of new video boards. So far, though, it's all Real Soon Now. I'm at the stage of dreaming about the novel, so it's got to be done or I won't get any sleep.

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Wednesday, January 20, 1999

Last daily for a few days. Tomorrow we go down to Anaheim to the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. I'll take cameras, and with any luck we'll have some photos and a good bit to report. However, while I will take Outlook, I do NOT have Front page installed on my laptop. I could, I presume, but I won't, meaning that I am not going to be updating these pages. I will try to keep up with important mail, but most mail is going to be shunted off to be dealt with when I get back, and there will not be mail posted.

I may or may not take a subscriber list and try to send a mailing to subscribers; I probably won't because it would have to go out over a telephone line.

I usually get my intellectual batteries recharged out of AAAS and I hope to do so this year. I also see old friends. This will be the first one I have been to when I was essentially "free lance" which might be interesting. I should get an intellectual capital out of it if nothing else.

So: it will probably be Monday before there is much here. Apologies but there is only me to do all this.

On that score we have a volunteer doing Strategy of Technology in rtf format, so that should be available in a few weeks. And Tim Pleasant Esq as former Marine intelligence officer is taking a cut at trying to do an edit to bring it up to date. That isn't easy, but I may be able to get something Colonel Kane and I can take a pass through and get into circulation. May.

I'll see what I can catch up on tonight, but I'm a bit pressed for time even now. Auf weidersehen...

I have been setting up my Compaq Armada notebook, the one I have to replace the Armada that sort of survived the desert crash, and I find something disturbing: I have the installation disk for Outlook 98, but I am sure I have updated that program considerably since last installing it on this NT system. Likewise Office 98. But I don't know, don't remember precisely, how to update those. Nor do I have Netscape installed on the laptop, and I don't know what program does install it.

I'll manage, of course. I'll get to Anaheim and install Earthlink and get Outlook working more or less, and my BIX connections, but there really needs to be a way to set up a system of files for updating other machines. I don’t really want to do all the downloads of updates on the portable. Has anyone else addressed this problem, and if so, with what solution? Royal Armadillo (the laptop) is networked nicely into the rest of the system so that's not a big problem, if I know what files to transfer. Interesting that I need to figure this out, though.

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Thursday, January 21, 1999

There is a security hole in Outlook. It's serious. Go to

http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/ms99-002.asp

for a look. Thanks to Captain Ron Morse for warning me about this. This one is serious, and real, and don't ignore it; the Microsoft verbage is soothing to boring, but if you read carefully it's a pretty frightening hole. Do something NOW. It only takes a few minutes.

And I am off to Anaheim for AAAS. See you probably Monday morning although I may find a way in here earlier.

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Friday,

Anahiem AAAS meeting

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Saturday,

Anaheim AAAS meeting

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Sunday, January 24, 1999

Home, a bit tired. New pages tomorrow. I will try to do a report on AAAS. I have a lot of pictures, and some observations. I'll have to do an Intellectual Capital column on it also. I used to do an annual report on the state of the sciences, but there's no real market for that now, alas. Still, there are things worth noticing.

I had a very long "You are ignorant, can't you see that Gates is evil and what does it take, to catch him tampering with Barksdale's brake lines before you'll realize it?" letter which I contemplated putting up, and decided that was silly: there's no thing new in it, if you will be persuaded by it you are persuaded now, and we all have other things to do. One day I may find a new argument on that subject, but for the moment I will leave things as they are.

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