| Thursday,
June 21, 2001 This is cutting into my fiction time, and I
have to spend a blooking week in New York which will do more. Maybe I can
work in my hotel room. I sometimes can. I'll take a good mouse. Maybe I'll
take an external keyboard. Heck, maybe I'll just build a system and buy a
monitor! Not that the Compaq Armada is that hard to work with. But I do
get set in my ways.
The latest problems are two: sometimes Outlook 2000 unexpectedly ZIPS a
file when it sends it, turning Book One.doc into Book One.doc0.zip and
sending it along that way; I know because when I send myself a cc I get
one; otherwise it sends it as a zip file but I never even SEE a copy of
that ZIP unless I have included myself on the send list. There is a
setting in Outlook 2000 Corporate and Workgroups installation that
automatically does that. There is NO SUCH SETTING in Outlook 2000 the way
I have installed it (which is the other way that isn't Corporate whatever
you call that), so there is no way to turn this on and off; but it is as
if Outlook is sometimes thinking it's the other kind of installation. It
hasn't happened often but it did happen when I sent an advanced copy of
some of my column to Waggener Edstrom (my policy on advanced copy to
people I am writing about: errors of fact I will correct, errors of
judgment I will listen to arguments, and I reserve the right to determine
which is which). Wagged couldn't open the file, but didn't say why; it was
only last night in searching for *.doc0.zip that I found that Outlook 2000
had compressed the files twice before, at random intervals, and with file
sizes ranging from columns [9000 words] to Burning Tower [25,000 and
growing].
Last night I sent Niven a copy of the latest version of Burning Tower.
I was damned proud of the 2000 or so words I had done. So of course it
went as a ZIP file (does Microsoft have a critical need detector) and
Niven's downstairs machine doesn't know how to handle ZIP files. An hour
later sending it the same way sent it unzipped but by then I had lost all
sense of composure.
I think this is a defect in Outlook that Microsoft needs to be
aware of. It may or may not be in Outlook XP; I'll try that but not until
after PC Expo. I was WRONG
SEE BELOW.
My other problem was and is Ricochet and DNS resolution and those two
may or may not be related. The result was an inability to resolve a lot of
addresses. That's being fixed and is a sort of normal wear and tear setup
problem brought on in part by using Linux and Microsoft together: once you
figure out which caused what problem things aren't hard to resolve.
Finally: perhaps this comes as news, but I have only so much time.
People who send me flames and later regret it and send reasonable mail
have used up much of theirs. Sometimes that ends up with normal
relationships, but frankly the next flame or even high temperature tirade
will be the last I read past the first paragraph. My standard answer after
that is something like "thank you for sharing that with me." My
apologies but at my age I just don't have as much time as I used to, and I
prefer to spend as little of it in unpleasant correspondence as possible.
This is probably unreasonable, but it's the way things are.
One more rant:
Microsoft policy is to place tools and options in places that no one
familiar with their products would look, but which are obvious once you
actually find them. Same with indexing entries in HELP.
This is because Microsoft hired some documentation people from IBM. IBM
for years ran a secret school that taught people how to explain features
such that it was clear they had explained them, but the explanation was
utterly useless to anyone who hadn't already understood it. That school
seems to have continued although where it is I do not know. If I could
find it I would lead villagers with pitchforks and torches to deal with it
as monster labs ought to be dealt with.
My wife has a phrase: Clear Only If Previously Known, or sometimes
COIAK or Clear Only If Already Known.
It explains Microsoft documentation and Help files perfectly.
Roland, bless him, has sent a pointer to a very
long file that essentially says that JASC QuickView Plus may be the Zip
culprit. If there is a way to configure it not to use the
"feature" of automatic compression of files being sent out I
can't find it. Attempts to disassociate it from Outlook produced ominous
messages saying it can't do that. A look at a previously unread README
that came with a revision tells me that a 'feature' is automatic
compression of files sent on the Internet. So it looks like this is it.
Only I can't find any way to configure this thing, and the README doesn't
tell me and I am out of time, so:
Control Panel
Add/Remove programs
Kill that sucker!!!
Removing QuickViewPlus entirely took resetting the computer, and
when it comes up there is still something looking for it that I can't
find. I need to do some more looking to expunge the last of this monster.
But perhaps that will end its career of doing things I did not ask it
to do -- and worse, doing them inconsistently, and not telling me it had
done them. I think I can live nicely without JASC QuickView Plus
although in the past I have recommended the program; but apparently a new
"feature" decided to start compressing files without my asking
it to, and as I said, doing it inconsistently. If it had begun doing that
every time I might have noticed earlier. Instead it used its critical need
detector to trash things only when they were important. Fooey. If anyone
has a simply way to communicate with JASC (having uninstalled their
program I've lost that feature) you might want to send them a copy of
this. And my apologies to Microsoft for suspecting this was something
they'd done.
Regarding ZIP: yes it is useful, and yes so long as you know the
recipient has something like WINZIP this is the right way to send big
picture and document files. But I do not want a program doing that without
my knowing it, and there ought to be an easy way to look at those features
and determine when and how you want them. JASC QuickView doesn't DO that.
It just -- sometimes! -- jumps in and zips files, and other times (no
change in settings) does NOT ZIP the same dadgummed file: as I said I was
later in the evening able to send the same file to Niven in the same way,
cc to me, and it did not get zipped. Inconsistency with a
"feature" is even worse that the feature turning itself on. And
inability to FIND THE WAY TO CONFIGURE the thing is inexcusable. And I
sure could not find it.
We will see if killing QuickView DEAD has fixed my unexpected ZIP
problem.
If not, then it was EARTHLINK. Bob Thompson says that sometimes files I
send him are zipped sometimes not: inconsistency again. But he assumed I
had done it so didn't comment on it. AOL used to ZIP files automatically,
but I never heard that Earthlink did. I'll ask Earthlink people.
AND here is their answer:
No, we don't do that. Files coming
through are just packets as far as
we're concerned, and packets are
packets.
As to Ricochet and DNS problems it's complicated and has to do with
ipchains vs. iptables for security; it's being fixed. Roland Dobbins to
the rescue once again. Incidentally, Roland's secret seems to be that he
reads EVERYTHING, and if he starts on a problem he digs around to see if
someone else has had the problem and how they fixed it before he starts
trying to do this and do that and change this and change that. It's a good
habit to be in. It's not my temperament, because when I was in the
aerospace research business our problems were likely to be classified and
also likely to be beyond what anyone else had tried -- that was the
business I was in, preliminary design and such. So I got in the habit of
trying to solve things myself: but I ALWAYS knew how to get back to the
last "good" state of a system so I could take excursions off
that rather than plunge into the breach so far I couldn't get back.
Roland, as I said, spends time looking to see if someone else has
already solved the problem thereby saving a heck of a lot of time later.
It's part of the Internet Age, of course. I said in 1978 that by the year
2000 anyone in Western Civilization would be able to get the answer to any
answerable question: and yea, verily I say to you, we have entered that
era....
And this just in from Gibson:
Since the publication of the report of our
May attacks, we have received an overwhelming number of requests from
representatives of those ISPs -- and their end-users -- asking for the
exact machine IPs involved in those attacks. We have denied those requests
feeling that too much time has elapsed and that significant "IP
drift" due to DHCP lease expiration, etc. would have occurred.
But today things are different.
http://grc.com/dos/attacklog.htm
We are now equipped to post attacking IP's
almost in real-time and to perform on-the-fly reverse DNS (machine name)
resolution. I have therefore decided that the best policy is to loudly and
publicly broadcast the IP's of any attacking machines so that their
administrators can promptly deal with their compromised security.
I will wait to comment on that pending getting opinions from people I
have confidence in. But it may change things... I trust Steve has sought
advice from attorneys. There could be some tricky legal issues.
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