| Tuesday, November
5, 2002
Some mail you just love to get...
Hello,
I’ve subscribed for several years now, and I read
your site just about every day. Love it, love the books, love the column
on byte.com. But, I can never seem to keep track of when I subscribed, so
I tend to renew when it “feels like” it’s been a year or so. It
would be easier for me (and probably others) if you could remind us when
that year is up. I realize that setting up a subscriber database may be a
bit of a pain, but it’s easy enough to drag an Outlook custom view into
Excel and from there go to Access (assuming your subscriber list exists
primarily as an Outlook folder).
Believe me, never in my life did I ever think I
would be asking to get subscription reminders, but your site is no
ordinary periodical.
Also, please post more puppy photos.
Regards, Carl ______________________________ Carl
Leubsdorf, Jr. carl@carlthewebmaster.com
Yes, I have thought of setting up a
data base, and perhaps. But for now, I guess I have to let people's consciences
nag them... And I have more puppy pictures... later today I hope.
Dr. Pournelle,
"I want to transfer the system to the
new drive and dump the old drive that is very quickly trying to die."
Hmmm. As I understand it, XP gets picky with
transfers like this, something to do with hardware identified in the
system registry. This is what I might try: Make a Files and Settings
Transfer Wizard disk. Make a folder on the old hard disk, and put all the
files in it. Install XP on the new disk, and activate over the phone
because of a "system crash". Put the old hard disk in and then
use the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard disk to install the old
settings back on to the new drive from the folder. It's a lot of work.
However, Ghost should work as long as the replacement hard drive is the
ONLY hardware change taking place. XP is supposed to be forgiving of minor
hardware changes as long as there is only one or two. But, if I were
dumping an old system in favour of a new one, the above procedure should
work. I'll test it out one day.
--
Semper Fi George A. Laiacona III <george@eisainc.com>
Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Gunpowder Plot: Nov. 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes placed
gunpowder kegs under the Parliament building in an attempt to blow up
Parliament and King James I.
As I said earlier, I'd use Norton
Ghost for this job. One of these days I have to try it myself. Partition
Magic also works to create a new drive and transfer everything in an image
to it, then make that the boot drive. XP hasn't complained about
doing it that way.
Subject: Farewell Galileo
Your journey was long and fraught with challenges
and peril but in the end you triumphed and showed us great things. You
will be missed.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/830828.asp?cp1=1
-Dan S.
Aye.
And an important
question:
Dear Mr Pournelle,
I have been reading your column for years and we
have exchanged mails a couple of times.
I shouldn't be bothering you with this sort of
question but the people who ought to provide an answer don't.
If you copy and paste from a .pdf into a Word
document you will find that two sorts of carriage return appear: the first
category Word will find with a search on ^p; the second category it cannot
see, even if it displays them the same as the others. with .pdf files
becoming increasingly common as a means of shunting stuff around the
place, it would be incredibly useful to find out how to eliminate these
extraneous characters.
The people at Wordscan claim in their publicity to
have mastered pdf to doc conversions but did not take the trouble to
attempt to answer my question.
Thank you in advance if you or anyone in your
network can provide any guidance.
yours
Harry Forster
---------- mailto:harryfor@interrelate.fr
Harry Forster - Interrelate 2, rue Saint Laurent,
38000 Grenoble, France Tel.: +33 (0)4 76 51 00 11 - Fax: +33 (0)4 76 44 87
71
technical and commercial translation traductions
techniques et commerciales
I recall I managed to solve it once;
I think I used ASCII numerical values, which I made Word accept as
something to scan for. But it has been a while and I don't have time to
experiment today. If someone knows off hand I'd appreciate a note on how
to do it, else I'll get at it later this week. It's a good question.
And Joel Rosenberg
says
The problem, if I remember correctly, is that Word
uses the LF/CR combination, but recognizes both LFs and CRs for formatting
purposes. Several of the de-wording applications that run under Linux
recognize and correct it, so I'm told -- but the simple way is to
download, install, and use OpenOffice.org, which imports things properly
and can save things in a standardized Word format (for those who really
need Word, or, like you, prefer it) which is what I did when Ray Feist and
I were collaborating on Murder in LaMut.
best,
jr
Open Office is certainly getting
good enough. Thanks. And the
History Lesson:
Dr. Pournelle,
Harry Forster asked about searching for two types of
return characters in text copied from a PDF file into Word. You mentioned
using ASCII numerical values. In general, Windows programs accept most
ASCII characters not available on the keyboard by holding down the ALT key
and typing the four digit code of the character on the numerical keypad.
This code can be found in the Character Map program included in Windows.
Character Map does not have the nonprinting ASCII characters such as BELL
and the CR/LF characters.
Microsoft's Support Knowledge base also says that
you can search for Unicode values in Word by typing ^uNNNNN in the search
text box. ^u is the control code, and NNNNN is the five-digit Unicode
value of the character to search for.
For those who aren't aware, Unicode has the ASCII
characters as well as character sets used in other languages. This allows
Unicode to be used in multiple countries, and Microsoft is integrating
Unicode into Windows. The spurious return character may be Unicode, not
ASCII.
To continue the history refresher, the CR (carriage
return) character has an ASCII code of 0013. LF is the linefeed character,
which is often paired with CR when the return key is pressed; its code is
0010. This behavior dates back from teletype days, when both CR and LF
were used to advance to the next line, so it may be possible that PDF is
using CR/LF codes where Word may be using the Unicode Return character. I
should say that Unicode has most ASCII characters; I doubt that Unicode
incorporates the nonprinting characters left over from teletypewriters.
I hope this helps.
Bruce Jones
That's it I am sure. THANKS!!
Now
for a WOW:
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Date: Nov. 5th, 2002
subject: Star Wars progress
Dear Jerry:
According to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2407807.stm
, the Army just destroyed an artillery shell. In flight. With a laser. A
mobile laser.
Best, Stephen
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
Roland also points to
http://www.msnbc.com/news/831012.asp?cp1=1
I knew that technology was coming
along, but WOW!
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Date:
subject: Peggy Noonan's column for Nov. 1st
Dear Jerry:
The link Mr. Utter sent is no longer good (it will
always bring up Noonan's latest WSJ column, and she's written another
since last Friday), but this should be good for months, at least:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110002554
Meanwhile, the head of the DNC is denying reports
that he and his minions planned the rally-disguised-as-a-memorial ( http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_920.shtml
, http://punditwatch.blogspot.com/
for Nov. 03, 2002). Imao, that little stunt is going to go down in history
as one the greatest campaign blunders of all time.
As a Minnesota Republican, I gotta love it.
Best, Stephen
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
Well, it will if it didn't work;
we'll have to see.
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Date: Nov. 5th, 2002
subject: The House, the CIA, and the Republic
Dear Jerry:
I went and looked at the Constitution today,
particularly Article I, Section1.3. The House as originally designed had
65 members for less than 4 million inhabitants. In proportion to today's
population, that would be about 4550 members, not 435.
Now, if we could multiply the House membership by a
factor of ten, while cutting their pay 90% -- BE STILL, MY BEATING HEART!
There's a reform that would go a long way to restoring the kind of govt.
we both want. I think it'd be a lot harder to gerrymander 4350 districts
into safe seats, and a lot easier for grass roots campaigns to overcome
incumbents in primaries. And with their pay cut that much, Congress would
become a part-time activity of citizens again, instead of a career.
Meanwhile, nice work by the CIA. I have to say that,
imao, the early CIA was a huge threat to the Republic. Not because Allen
Dulles was likely to sponsor a coup, or anything like that. Because
Eisenhower and Kennedy used it to conduct a secret foreign policy. While
obviously one can't run covert operations overtly, a govt. responsible to
the electorate should be outlining in general terms what it's covert
agencies are doing:
'We're spying on every country except a few we
consider especially friendly.'
'We assassinate foreigners that are members of
terrorist groups that wish to harm the United States. There are sometimes
reasons for mercy, or delay, but our general policy is to make them dead.'
In this case, their comment should be:
'No comment, but it's certainly the kind of thing we
will do whenever we get the chance.'
Best, Stephen
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
The Company did a number of things
in the Cold War that were not good for the republic; but as Justice
Jackson observed once, the Constitution isn't a suicide pact. I supported
a lot of activities when there were 26,000 nuclear warheads targeted on us
that I would normally deplore. Eisenhower
had the Company assassinate 10 for one over the RB-47 incident. The USSR
got that particular message, and such incidents became very rare after
that. But the Yemen action was
in keeping with the Barbary War. It is a declared war against gangs that
aren't formally states. And TR made it pretty clear in the
Perdicardis affair... Regarding
the House, a system of part time representatives with a full time Senate
is pretty close to what the Framers had in mind. I see no reason we
couldn't implement it. The notion of electing someone you actually know
sounds bizarre today, but it wasn't always thus.
From Roland
Subject: Dinosaur killers.
Plural.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/94172_meteor05.shtml
--
------------------------------------------------------------ Roland
Dobbins
It sure would be nice if we had the
tools to make sure that don't happen again...
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