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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 123 October 16 - 22, 2000

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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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This week:

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Monday  October 16, 2000 

Driving to a small convention in Las Vegas today. Back Thursday. I will probably be on from there, but we will see.

The way to get rid of the QAZ Trojan is given over in mail.


A very curious thing: I cannot put the NT Terminal Server machine (which has Citrix) in the server room. If I connect it to a monitor and keyboard and Ethernet it comes up fine. If I move it into the cable room and attach it through the ICS-124 it seems to run but I can't tell for there is NEVER any video, not even at the BIOS level. The monitor never thinks it is getting a signal. I can disconnect that cable from the server and attach to any video source (leaving the ICS alone so it's the same station it is looking at) and there is video; but reattach to the Terminal Server and whammo! the monitor goes back to the yellow "no signal" light.

The server works, but not through the ICS-124.  The ICS-124 works but not with that server.  I am off on a trip. I would love to have a happy ending to this story but I don't know what it will be. I'll try a Belkin data switch when I get back, but the ICS-124 has always worked before.


There is a disturbing letter in mail for Monday. Meanwhile there is so much spam in my inbox that I cannot check it for what is meaningful. I think it increases every time I report anyone to spamcop. Something has to be done about these swine, and Eric is right, it must be personal and physical. Nothing else will stop them.

But WHO bites on this crap? Who buys from spammers? Who are their customers?

 

 

 

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Tuesday

Off Line

 

 

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Wednesday, October 18, 2000

I am back. Opera opening tonight and all other time will be eaten by the hardware book... Still no solution to the Terminal Server not putting out video that the ICS-124 will eat.

 

 

 

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Thursday, October 19, 2000

Woke up to find there was no power. Fortunately it happened in daylight. We found that at least one of our emergency radios wasn't working properly, the telephone system UPS didn't last anywhere near long enough, and there is a general SNAFU all around. OK, we'll have to fix all that.

So it was an interesting emergency preparedness drill, and we flunked it. So far one thing is a real problem: one of the machine doesn't want to turn back on at all. This is Galacticus, an Intel 933 built on an Intel SE815 board, and punching the power switch does nothing. All this modern junk of electronically controlled power and power up gives me a Big Pain: I want a positive on-off switch. I don't even like pushbuttons. I switch that turns power on and off is my idea of the way things should work. And if I could find and beat senseless the EPA imbeciles who want all kinds of  "sophisticated" power management systems in what are at bottom rather low power devices, I would be pleased to do it. When Niven and I do another Inferno I have places for those highbinders.

While we are at it, spammers who flood my mail box while I am trying to get communications established are good candidates for the organ banks. Whether their problems are their ethics or their mental capacities, you really don't want them reproducing, and if they manage that, raising children, do you?

A power failure that lasts longer than the UPS was a pretty serious test. I'm still recovering.

One of my Techweb broadcasts was done from the bathroom which was the best sounding telephone in the house. All the sophisticated equipment that used ISDN clearly wasn't going to do it...

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Interesting: when the power switch button doesn't do it, pull the plug and wait a bit. Then when you plug it back in, it attempts to run. Power switch will now turn it off, and you can later turn it on again. Ain't that real cool? I mean the people who designed that deserve medals.  For morons.

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Can anyone tell me why I am getting mail like this?

Hi its Jeff here in Plymouth I am after some databases that was written in office 2000 as examples so I can get some idea in what I am going to do for my gcse course work, so if you can help that would be great thanks very much.

FUNKYHOUSE [jeff@jeffers.eurobell.co.uk]


And does anyone know more about this space club that someone posing as me was supposed to have ruined? I have heard no more than the original letter, and I have no answer to my reply.


A daybook event. This will be in the column.

Galacticus, built on an Intel 815 motherboard with an Intel 933 Pentium III, has run through a 10/100 Ethernet connection to an DS-108 Netgear concentrator for weeks. That concentrator hasn't been turned off for months.

Today's power failure turned it off, of course. When I brought up Galacticus -- and a story goes with that because to make it turn on I had to unplug it; it would not leave that standby status by any manipulation of the on/off button -- the net didn't work. No blinking lights. No connection. Nothing. 

Check cable. Take machine to test stand. All worked. Shorten the story: that port on the 10/100 hub is DEAD, dead, dead.  Other ports on the hub work. Why that one died and no other isn't clear. Why it died when it did is probably due to its having been power cycled.

Moral: Intel and 3Com hubs cost about 3 times as much as Netgear. They are also more reliable. Reliable is a relative term: this is the first failure of any Netgear hub in years, and we use many of them. It cost me about an hour of my time. I would have saved money by buying a 3Com, as it happens, except that in my case this gave me something to write about. You probably won't have that upside.

 

 

 

 

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Friday, October 20, 2000

Working in some earnest on books. Not much time. See mail for an alternate view about equipment.

 

 

 

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Saturday,

I took the day off

 

 

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Sunday, October 22, 2000

Hurrying along. There seems to be more to do every day.

Roland sends this link on Zinni's explanation of his decision on sending the Cole into Yemen:

http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-20001020221429.htm 

I leave conclusions to you.

 

I have been trying to buy a slocket for a week. Fry's doesn't have them. Outpost doesn't list them. The web outfit I found one on took my money but hasn't sent it; I ordered it a week ago.  What in the world is going on?  TC Computers isn't a place I intend to do a lot more business with. At $18 for the part and $8 more for shipping you would think that something ordered on October 13 would be HERE now, would you not?

I have got to learn more about what I am doing with some of this stuff. Ah well.

I have had one more port fail on the Netgear DS-108.  On the other hand I bought a new one and put it in the Cable Room for the servers and it works fine.

I removed the ICS-124 KMV Data Switch and replaced it with a Belkin OmniView Pro 8 Port KVM Switch.  That solved the problem with the Microsoft Terminal Server: unchanged this came up fine when it would show no video through the ICS.

Here at least is a situation where the more expensive equipment worked first time. The ICS-124 is all right, but Belkin seems to have a better video bandwidth.


Here is what TCCOMPUTERS.com tells me about my order:

ORDER IS IN PROCESS.  Isn't that splendid? Informative? This was supposed to ship on the 18 -- a fact they did not tell me when I ordered it on the 13th -- and now it is "in process" on the 22nd.  I do not think I will recommend TCCOMPTERS ( www.tccomputers.com  ) to many people I like.


I am no particular fan of  "freethought" particularly organized freethought, but one appeal they distribute is worth paying attention to. Note that this is the Year of Our Lord the Two Thousandth:

CAN YOU HELP SAVE DR. SHAIKH?

Dr. Younus Shaikh is founder-President of Enlightenment, a Pakistan-based organization which is a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (www.iheu.org). Dr. Shaikh is a doctor and a teacher at a medical college in Islamabad. He lived and worked in the UK before returning to Pakistan.

On October 4 2000, Dr. Shaikh was arrested by the Islamabad police and booked under the dreaded Section 295-C (Blasphemy) of the Pakistan Penal Code. The police First Information Report was not readily available, but in it he is alleged to have defiled Mohammad, the Prophet of Islam, by pointing out that the Prophet did not become a Muslim till the age of 40 (i.e. until he received the first message of God), and that the Prophet's parents were non-Muslims because they died before Islam was proposed by the Prophet. It is for stating these facts that Dr. Shaikh will be killed by the State, if he is found guilty.

There is considerably more, of course.  See www.iheu.org if you are interested. one suspects that Dr. Shaikh may have said more than what is reported there. But perhaps not.  Of course in this world many scholars are persecuted. Christians have been routinely killed in Iran, as were Bahá'í and other "heretics". One cannot crusade for everyone.


I have just read a very long academic article on The Bell Curve. I cannot better the commentary of one of the scholars in a discussion group I belong to:

I've just read the ("long, tedious") Reifman article and find that those descriptors are not a bad fit, although it is indeed not repetitious. On the other hand, it is useful. It is an account of what has come out of a half-decade of first, hysterical denunciation of TBC as outright fraud, vicious incompetence, simple racism, etc.; and then intense effort by large parts of the offended academic enclaves actually to demonstrate the truth of those denunciations. What this article shows, in embarrassingly heart-on-its-sleeve, objectivity-only (for a change in the social sciences) style, is in fact this: that the best the denouncers have been able to do is to argue that Herrnstein and Murray may have exaggerated (rather than overestimated) the simple heritability of IQ. There has been, obviously, nothing that even begins to be a serious refutation of the general empirical argument of TBC. (We leave aside for now all the social and theoretical ones.)

After hearing the wild hysterical denunciations of The Bell Curve at AAAS and other respectable conventions of science, this denouement would be amusing if there were not so many elements of tragedy.  One might wish that IQ were not inherited, and that The Bell Curve was nonsense, but in fact that turns out not to be the case.  One may ignore facts of course; but they are stubborn things that return to affect outcomes whether we will or no.

Moreover, reading the long and tedious article shows one other thing: many geneticists do not apparently know as much about uterine factors as the average diary cow breeder. Sad. Very sad.

 

 

 

 

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