THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View September 20 - 26, 1999

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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 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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Monday -- Tuesday -- Wednesday -- Thursday -- Friday -- Saturday -- Sunday

Boiler Plate:

If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. 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.

Current View

Highlights this week:

•  
• IBM.Net
• Spam through IBM.NET: an odd story
  • Oops, it happened a while ago...
• Readers LOVE Mindspring
• Frederick Hart, RIP; see his work at the National Cathedral
• Pair.com problems
• The great Truncation Flap. Continues Friday
• Still flapping
• Still flapping Sunday
• Flap over. Endit.

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I spent the day making the mailing list work again. One bad address -- ONE -- of Robin Gould to whom I can't send mail without blowing up Earthlink, managed to cause the whole list not to work. I do not know why. I think this is the execrable Earthlink rather than the execrable Outlook, but I am not sure. Bob Thompson says there is an alternate method of sending mail through the service that hosts my web page, and I hope so. Darnell had a way to do it, too. The Earthlink one seems very odd, rejecting everything if there is some particular problem -- I don't know what it is -- with the list. Some errors get through fine. I will shortly be updating the badmail page with new returned addresses. But Robin Gould blows up the system whether in a list or sent to individually. I can't figure that one out.

There was a big spate of mail and stuff and some new pictures in last night's uploading. 

And the execrable Earthlink couldn't wait for me to go to dinner: I set up some ftp uploads, went to dinner, and came back to find that the connection had been dropped. Why not? It hadn't happened all day...

Actually, Earthlink has worked pretty well. I have also changed my sender service to my web provider, and that seems to be sending mail to subscribers. 

Earthlink seems to glitch on certain bad addresses. I don't know if it has some kind of limit, but it may also have a timer that has the same effect as a limit. Anyway, I did manage to get my subscriber mail out, Earthlink is behaving again, and all's well. I was also able to send my expenses to Japan so that is taken care of. Tomorrow I can do all the things I was going to do today...

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Joe Zeff of Earthlink reports:

Jerry, I've checked with a few people.  When a message is sent with multiple recipients, the SMTP server checks each address (Not to see if it's valid, but if it's properly formed.  It only checks for validity if the address is local.) and reports back to the client before accepting the next address.  If any address in the list is bad, Outlook stops the upload and reports that the message wasn't sent.

 This is nothing unusual.  I've often had to telnet to our POP3 server to read the actual error message if Outlook can't connect.  This is one of several reasons I like and recommend Eudora: it *does* report back with the server's message.  Don't blame us for not reporting proper error messages; we do.  Blame instead Outlook for not passing them on to you.  As one person in alt.sysadmin.recovery wrote, "Every program evolves to the point where it can send mail, except for Outlook"

 Joe Zeff

It does appear that I have to do something about this. Outlook's behavior isn't acceptable. One bad name on the list? One? Earthlink rejects lists with a number of bad names (anti-spam device) but ONE?

Ah well. 

I had it wrong in my column: if you do the proper installation of Office 2000 and Outlook 2000, then the little messages box that reports progress on mail sending and receiving on various accounts works fine (it don't if you did the wrong installation, which I had done). However, it's not very useful: the "send" one shows a fuel gauge that instantly jumps to halfway, then sits there. You can't tell if there is actually progress or not; and in fact often there is not. Earthlink, for instance, times out. The fuel gauge ran to halfway instantly stopped there, and waited until the whole mess died. This is ungood.

It is now clear that even with all addresses good, Earthlink has a limit to how long a list you can send to. Presumably this is a Spam prevention device, and may even make sense, but it does mean I will need a new service to send to my mailing list. The real problem here is that you have no idea, due to that bad fuel gauge in Outlook 2000, whether it is actually being sent, so it takes a LONG time time test each attempt. That is a good way to waste a lot of time.

Outlook 2000 is NOT USEFUL as a mail manager if you want to send to a large list. It may be all right in a corporate environment, but it's not for you and me. I'll have to find something that is.

Now, after I was trying to send to my relay, Earthlink dropped me. This really is too much. I have to find a service that works. The interaction between Outlook and Earthlink is deadly if you have much of a list to send to.

OK, I exited Outlook, entered again, and the mailing was sent through pair.com, now let's see if we GET it. By exiting Outlook I triggered reading mail from Earthlink before attempting to send, so the Earthlink timer didn't drop me in the middle of sending to pair (and thus not making contact with Earthlink and telling Earthlink I am alive and still on and not to hang up on me)...

No. Pair.com accepted the message, but never sent it on. So those did not go out. I am making a couple of other attempts, but it is clear, Earthlink and Outlook 2000 are precisely the wrong tools for this job. I can accomplish it by breaking the list in two, I think; but what I really need is a new mail program, but also a new Internet Service Provider. I can well understand that anti-Spam measures are important, but this one makes Earthlink nearly impossible to use for mailings. I need another. Pair clearly isn't it.

Ah. Then I divided the list into two chunks. Earthlink reported that the first timed out, but in fact it sent it even so. So apparently I can send. 

And Earthlink was so slow I could not upload, but I hung up and tried again and now it works. Sigh.

And now the Execrable Earthlink has dropped me. I MUST get a new ISP.

I'm probably being too hard on Earthlink. By and large it does the job. But it does seem to have a critical need detector, so that it goes out when you really don't want it to...

Went to Samson and Delilah tonight. Roberta had already seen it, since our season tickets are opening night, but I was in Japan so she went with my son Richard. We went again tonight, and it was very good. Roberta is the big opera fan in this family, but I liked this one just fine. Tomorrow night is another one, back to back operas.

I have an ibm.net account. I know the account name and the password. Alas, long ago I told it to forward all the mail to me, and I am not sure I know how to undo that, or how to find local phone numbers. Time to surf around on the web and see, I guess. Maybe it will be easy. 

Talin has sent a long letter pointing out that most desktop software isn't suited for big mailing lists, something I was already getting pretty sure of. There has to be a way to work this without subscribing to a service that tacks advertisements on the bottom of my mailings. Now all I need is a bit of time to study the situation. And now I get a notice that Eudora won't import from Outlook 2000. Sigh.

I have had several warnings against MINDSPRING despite all the advertisements from Larry Elder and Art Bell. Earthlink seems far preferable to Mindspring from the reports I have been getting. Understand, this is a report; I have no first hand knowledge. I was ticked off at Earthlink, but the horror stories I am getting about other ISP's make me think I may have one of the best there is. Sigh.

I also have mail defending Windows 2000 and explaining where I went wrong in a previous analysis. Mea culpa, although the Word interface didn't help nor did the reviewer's guide (usually the Microsoft Reviewer's Guides are the best documents you will see on new programs). I was wrong. It's all explained over there.

This is probably as dumb a request as I have ever made, but I recall not long ago there was a discussion of batch methods of renaming a bunch of files. I have forgotten where I put it. Help?

Well, I went to Tucows and got Pegasus. Tomorrow I'll install and test.

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Just as I was going to bed I went into the back room where I keep the office TV (I don't dare keep a TV where I can see it without going looking for it) my cable company was showing (at 2 AM) a special on drugs. Quite good, actually setting out arguments for and against legalization, and dealing pretty realistically with some real policy questions (although not, I think, enough emphasis on the corruption of the police and the general misallocation of law enforcement resources). Anyway I got to watching it, and that kept me up far later than I normally would be.

Well, I have been half an hour on the phone with ibm.net, which has polite employees who don't know why the system has revoked my password, and don't seem to be able to do anything about it. Meanwhile I am assaulted with rock music of a particularly insipid variety. Elevator rock music to listen to while I am on hold. This is not the start of a beautiful relationship, as I try to type with elevator rock music in my ear. Why ibm.net revoked my password I don't know. They say "contact customer assistance" which is, of course, a category they do NOT list when they offer you a list of places to contact. I finally called billing. Billing said I have no problems and put me to technical support. Technical support said they have to go do something and I am on hold. OK, here they are.

No one knows why they revoked the password. My suggestion that when they do that they ought to send an email to the person whose password has been revoked got a polite response. Anyway, now I need to find out what the POP access is to ibm.net, but at least I can manage the account. The idea is to see if I can send mail through there.

I must be stupid, but nowhere in the ibm.net pages do I find the NAME OF THE SERVER.  mail.ibm.net does not work. What does? Anyone recall? Hah. Here in the tutorial is:

• Incoming Mail (POP3) Server: (given to you during registration) pop1.ibm.net, pop3.ibm.net, pop4.ibm.net, or pop5.ibm.net
• Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server: smtp1.ibm.net

Only of course I don't have any idea of which one of these to use. Try them all I suppose. Seems unreasonable but what the heck.

OK, tech support tells me which one. But now, now, Outlook 2000 is demanding passwords for my OTHER accounts, and nothing is happening that is good. I am going to shut down and start over. 

Well, shut down and start over works, but:

Although in theory IBM.net was forwarding all my mail, when I finally got access to the box I find that 1. the box is full, and 2. there are 850 messages to download.  Now either I got 800+ messages in the last hour, or they were not in fact forwarding my mail to me at all. More when I know more, but this isn't fun. At least the stuff is coming in, and I can try using it to relay or send mail. I suspect my account isn't a type that lets me send to my mailing list, but that I can fix with some money.

Once I get past 800 messages...

Most of which were "returned" and had a spam content. Someone was able to use my account to send a pile of spam to AOL members. I don't know how. Clearly I better change the password, and NOW. There is still a LOT of mail coming in. The password has been changed.

DOES ANYONE KNOW the address at ibm.net that I ought to send some of this crap to so they can figure out what went on? I make no doubt that's why my password was cancelled (although it would have been nice if they told me) but what do I do NOW?

I have got a TON of mail in praise of Mindspring, so my four complaints seem to be overwhelmed. I'll post some of the positive mail over in mail. The letter prompted a tirade from me on public schools which I suppose ought to be a section of alt.mail when I get to that.

Still downloading old IBM.net mail. TONS. All of which ought to have been forwarded some time ago.  Interesting. But mostly Earthlink has slowed to a flipping crawl. I will hang up and dial again, but I sure need a better service.

That helped. And I have finally cleaned out all the old mail from the ibm.net account, and made rules for dealing with anything new (it will be low priority in general).

It was nearly all SPAM, sent through my account. I get two addresses from the header, homeBIZ@aol.com and benjic.sprintmail.com

Neither of those are known to me, nor would either have had permission to use my account to send phoney business opportunity Spam to thousands of people (about ten at a time, all to AOL so far as I can see).  How they managed to use my account I don't know, nor do I know to whom to report this. I make no doubt that's why IBM.net cancelled my password, but why they didn't notify me is a mystery. It's pure coincidence that I was trying to get control of that ibm.net account again just now.

Here's what I have 800 copies of, each with about a dozen aol account names that had been rejected:

From:Mail Delivery Subsystem [MAILER-DAEMON@aol.com]

((There follow a dozen or so addresses at aol.com))

So my question is, how does this joker make any money? 

And having said that, I note that it happened long ago...

Subscribers: now that the tests are over, I'll do a real mailing in the next couple of days. Thanks!

If you live near Washington DC or are going there, be sure to get to the National Cathedral and see Ex Nihilo, religious statuary by Frederick Hart, then be sure to see his Peter and Paul at the same location. This compares well with anything you will see in Rome or Florence.

Went to Elixir of Love tonight. Excellent. Best Adima I have ever seen. Sir Thomas Allen as the mad doctor snake oil salesman was wonderful. In fact the whole thing was extremely well done. Loved every minute of it. Alas no pictures.

LA Opera is now certainly world class, up there with the San Francisco and Chicago's Lyric. Huge house, so needs strong singers or they can't be heard. Alas, Peter Hemmings the General Manager is leaving after this season, and Patricia Mitchell his deputy has left (probably because the board didn't offer her the position of GM). That leaves Placido Domingo as Artistic Director to try to be the General Manager as well, and I don't think that works, although I hope I am wrong. He needs a strong chief of staff, and there isn't one; and as one of our people put it "We aren't the only ones looking." Managing a major opera house is WORK and lots of it, requiring knowledge of theater (that part I might be able to handle), the operas themselves, which singers are good in what roles and which are available, which singers can't work with other singers, etc., and that's just to put together a season, which of course has to be done a couple of years in advance. I can't imagine how anyone can do it. I sure couldn't, and I probably could handle being project director for building a Moon Base. But not running a major opera house...

Of course Terry Pratchett has a somewhat different view in his Opera Novel Maskerade... (which you will love if you like opera).

Regarding that horrible person who used my return address (and possibly my account for all I know) to send all that Spam: how DOES he expect to make any money out of causing all that trouble? It puzzles me.

OOPS!

I note -- well a reader points out -- that the date in the Spam above is September 13 all right, but 1997 not 1999; this all happened long ago. I had not noticed. For years all mail to that account was relayed to another. So I suppose this isn't as important as I thought...

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Have to take my wife to lunch. Still humming tunes from Elixir. Author's get-together dinner tonight.

This web site is hosted at pair.com, which until today has worked well, but as of now, they have set some kind of timer so that my pictures no longer download. I get a few lines or half a picture, but not all the picture. This seems to be with all pictures. They were all right a few days ago. Even the Gates House picture (view 66) which was all right last week is now truncated. 

When we informed them of the problem, Pair asked what kind of connection I have. That's not relevant, is it? I have 56K, and it always worked before. Or is this is preliminary to telling me that you must have a T1 to use their service? If so, it is a change they did not tell me about before. I confess a certain anger, since they have been informed and were remarkably unhelpful. 

The problem is not at this end. Bob Thompson has the same difficulty. I have flushed my cache entirely (tools - Interner Options - General - delete files) and that didn't do any good. Flushing cache seem to have got me a few more lines, but most of the picture does not come across.

I paid for this service a year in advance (they had a special rate). I may have to go find another web service provider. It may be that when someone in real authority comes on duty at pair.com they will fix the problem. I hope so because I have been quite satisfied with their service until this. But this isn't tolerable. I don't want a text-only Internet Host.

For those wondering about Air Mouse, the earthquake in Taiwan has closed down many servers there, and probably that one.

Had a nice dinner with Niven and Yoji and Ursula Kondo (Yoji writes as Eric Kotani), and some new writers. Pleasant evening until I came home to find out that Pair is truncating my pictures.

There's a new update to badmail. If you think you should have got mail from me and did not, look there.

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Awards dinner tonight, black tie. Meanwhile Pair.com continues to ay it's not their fault that all the pictures -- well nearly all, all for instance that you can reference from http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaospics.html

are truncated, some very badly so. Since it was not this way earlier, and many experience the problem, it is the pair.com server, but they, for a long while acted as if it were somehow local to me. Local to me. I get a hundred reports from people who used to get my pictures. It can't be local to me

Perhaps they are right. Perhaps. But I do not understand how a thing like this can develop, suddenly. I didn't discover it. I was told about it by others who had the problem. From other states and using other ISP's. Which is what makes it puzzling.

I did get some attention from pair, and I have to say they are trying, but no one can find anything wrong. Yet the pictures are being truncated.

==

And more and more mystery. Some of you are getting the pictures fine. Others can't even download the entire currentVIEW page. Now some problems are cache, but I flushed the whole blooming cache on my system, then shut down the system entirely. I cannot believe it's local, because I get too many reports from others of problems. It may have to do with the net connections. It may have to do with some bad routers. I do not know. I just know I didn't do it, and the problem persists, and you don't all have it. And I am getting upset because I don't want to have to waste time on this.

And it is beginning to truncate even older copies of VIEW. Something dramatically wrong has happened in the last day or so. It is in theory possible that it's FrontPage -- Microsoft certainly manages unpleasant surprises -- but why did it happen to pages that WORKED FINE A FEW DAYS AGO??? And why to some and not to all?  Now

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view66.html

is truncated here. 

Later: now that one isn't truncated, and the Gates House picture is truncated at a different place. Of course once it is cached it seems never to get any different. Erasing the cache and starting over produces a different truncation. This is beginning to drive me nuts. 

Is it my ISP? Pair claims that everyone is normal, their server is normal, there are no timer problems, and all the files are normal. Some of you report no download problems. Others report having download problems. This is definitely a big times waster.

The symptoms are these: I click on a link to a picture (generally a thumbnail). The picture begins to download. The progress report shows x% of, say, 196K which is the correct picture size. It trundles. Then at 7%, or 21% or 44% or some number it jumps to "document done". This is with both Netscape and IE5. Another time that whole picture may download; but usually it's only part of it. It may be a different % completed before the jump to document done. There is no consistency. But it happens with great regularity.

If you get that problem, please send me a message to that effect, with the exact URL you were getting the problem from. Maybe we can make a pattern out of this. Maybe.

Thanks

Just got back from a big awards dinner. Someone took pictures and promises to email me some. Not, with this problem, that it will do any good.

But we'll see.

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Well, I thought I would see if the problem was Earthlink. To do that I would need to connect to the IBM network. I got a local number and tried. Never could connect. Downloaded the IBM dialer. Installed it. Never did connect. Discovered I couldn't dial the Earthlink account either. The IBM thing had taken over the modem and would not let go. Shut down. Brought it up. Was told I could not log onto a server on my local network. Uninstalled the IBM dialer. Still couldn't. My network was disabled. Nothing.

Went to control panel. The Networking card had been disabled by the IBM dialer. Windows 2000 was able to turn that back on, but I do not have an IBM dialer. The IBM Dialer wanted to know my account and my user name. I guessed it meant ibm.net for account name, but I don't know. It dialed, then dropped me. Never did log in. Don't know why. Help not much use. Anyone know what account name you give the local net if you have an ibm account?

I hate little computers just now. I want to go read a book, or write one, and forget that these machines exist. I hate people who write help files. Most are fiends in human gesture, determined to torture you by not telling you the one thing you have to know, like what the heck account name to put in the IBM dialer, not that I would ever install that horror on my nice machine again. But this does mean I can't test whether the problem with the truncation is related to my net connection. The truncation problem remains, as described above. And I give up for a while. I'll think of something.

Saturday Afternoon.

I understand that one of the remedies for the problem of the truncation of my files is a discussion of my personal life in a pair.com newsgroup. I can't see how that is going to solve their problem.

To review:

First I was informed by Bob Thompson that pictures from my site were being truncated. I checked on that and it was happening here, too. I sent a message to that effect, pointing out that it happened to two people on two different ISP's and was thus more likely to be at their end than mine.

Here's some of the exchange:

(To PAIR}

I continued to get messages from Pair indicating that since they could prove the problem was not at their end, I must be doing something wrong; utterly ignoring the fact that others were reporting the same things. The answers were getting a bit snide, too, or so I imagined, and I thought the problem more urgent than they did, so I posted a complaint on my index page.

That got a response. One response was a mailing to I don't know who all to the effect that I was unfair and rude. Well rude I can't argue; I was getting pretty angry at being told it had to be my fault, with the clear implication that nothing more was going to be done until I proved that it wasn't my fault. Unfair is more of a concern since I'm in the business of being fair. There's a hard to distinguish boundary between rude and blunt, but there's a fairly easily seen boundary between fair and unfair, and I do not think I had crossed it, particularly given the rather condescending tone of some of the messages I was getting. I then went off to an author's event.

I returned to find that they were finally taking it seriously and thought perhaps there was some kind of odd interaction between their network connection and the Apache software they were using. I didn't point out in my reply to them that this was one of the first things I suggested; just as I had suggested that it looked to me as if some kind of  "end of file" signal was being sent prematurely. The answer I got to that was that UNIX doesn't have an end of file marker. Well, I wouldn't know about that; what I do know is that "end of transmission" is being sent before the whole file is sent, and it seems to be random at what point that is sent; sometimes more of the file comes through than other times, and sometimes people get the whole picture.

Enough people get the whole picture that pair's mailing list has people on it who had no trouble at all, and since they had been told I was being unfair and rude, they were free to talk about my past life, how much I used to drink, as if, somehow, this were relevant to solving a technical problem. On that score: it's no secret, I used to drink a lot. I have written essays on the subject including one called "On Being Drunk" published by a writer's association. I quit drinking several years ago when I found that not only was I having to say "It seemed like a good idea at the time" but far worse, "It MUST have seemed like a good idea at the time." I don't go to temperance rallies, and I usually give my advice on alcohol to friends individually, but it's no great secret that I, like one hell of a lot of other press people, used to drink too much at press parties where the liquor was free and pretty often the company was boring, the room was so loud you could not hear anyone anyway, and -- well it seemed like a good idea at the time. But what that has to do with solving a technical problem about truncated files I do not know.

Presumably someone will figure this out. Pair says 

But presumably by now they have noticed that many besides me are getting random truncations of files from my site. I do not know if this is hardware or software. I know what I would do were I a commercial net host service provider. I would first look at my logs to see what happened in the last couple of days that is different from before. If I found nothing, then I would move this accursed thing [my site] to entirely different hardware and see if that helps. It may be that there's more traffic than they expected. I would also send my customer [me in this case] a message saying "oops, we get a lot of bogus complaints, sorry we didn't take yours seriously at first. We should have, and we're sorry we blew you off at first." But neither of those seems to be happening, the files are still being truncated, and since this is a weekend and I have yet one more author's party to go to (I will take my camera this time; last night a chap took a bunch of pictures for me and if I get them by email I will try to do something with them here, although if this truncation isn't solved that will be pointless).

Why do all these goofy things happen to me? I don't have that complicated a web site. We do get a fair amount of traffic, but ye flipping gods, why, suddenly, after everything went so well for several weeks, did this start? I would think if I were a site host provider I would find that fascinating, instead of hosting a discussion of the personal life of the person having the problem. But then I don't understand the new generation anyway.

It took a while to get them to understand that it was not FrontPage, it was not my bad web design, it was not my client software, it was their server, but pair.com now understands that their server is truncating files, in some cases badly. Those with fast connections may not experience the problem. Those with medium fast connections may not have any difficulties with the normal week's view and mail. Alas, those with slower are getting truncations even of view and mail, so the earlier parts of this week are view67 and mail67 and that will be the case until Monday, when Pair is supposed to move me to a different server, and I will be able to consolidate. More work for me, of course.

Compounded by the fact that it took me a day and a lot of time to convince them that it was not my client software nor my stupidity. Most of the story is over on view67. I'll put Sunday up here, then consolidate Monday.

Those with slow servers may not be able to download all of view67 until Monday. Apologies but there is nothing I can do about it.

You may have problems with partial downloads of pictures, particularly large ones. Nothing I can do about that until they change servers. IT IS THE SERVER, and I have no control over that.

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I know people are trying to be helpful, but understand: the truncation was a sudden onset problem and happened to files that had worked for weeks. It is not just happening to me, but to people all over. It can't be my telephone lines, it can't be anything local to me. It is happening to people in Norway and North Carolina as well as Los Angeles. It happens to people with Netscape, Opera, and Internet Explorer. It ain't local.

It is clearly a case of something was done to the server, so that it now sends a "transmission complete" signal before it has sent all of a file. This doesn't happen to everyone every time. It is not a timer problem since they have resent the timeout values on that server and it continues. It is clearly something having to do with Unix, Apache and that particular box, and it may be a hardware problem with that server box although why it happens only to me isn't known. I am assured this hasn't happened to anyone else. I don't know how many else's there are on that server, so there's no way to knowing what value that information has.

It will in theory be fixed Monday. Until then we will continue to have this split in view; Monday if the truncation is over I will move all the stuff from here to view67 and start a new currentview as I always do.

Once again this has eaten the time I intended to use to add new content to the site. I find I am spending more time mucking about keeping things going than I am adding information, other than information about site maintenance problems. What this tells me is that the state of this art is nowhere near as finished as everyone pretends. 

Anyway, I have many things to get done today. It's pointless to make photo reports since I am not sure at all that you'll be able to download the photos. We'll see.

Meanwhile, anyone desperate can get the exact page title and ftp that to your local system where you can see it. Ftp works. The Pair.com server has all the files. It's the server software that is doing something odd, terminating files before they are done.

Night. Tomorrow they are supposed to be moving me to a different server, one that does not have the truncation problem. We will see. If they can't manage it, I will have to shop for some other place to keep this web site. That will not be fun either.

IS ANYONE ABLE TO REACH BIX?

Monday morning: they have moved the site to another server, which works. Another time wasting crisis done with. Hurrah, I suppose, although it it is hard to be too cheerful about something that ate half a week, part of it trying to convince pair.com that they, not I, had a problem. But it has ended. Not well, because I am further behind than ever, but it has ended.

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