BPB Grafitti for Week ending September 19, 1999

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Highs & Lows

No Update Today.

No Update Today.

Hurricane Floyd is all we talk about now, here in the land of rumbling ground. I have been tracking through a couple of links one of Thompson's correspondents provided. What a wonderful time we live in. Did anyone else read Mother of Storms by John Barnes? A good book about what happens with hurricanes when global warming heats up the ocean surface waters just a few degrees... OK, that wasn't the WHOLE story, but a major plot element, well done, worth a reread, if only I can remember to whom I loaned my author-signed copy. Robert, our thoughts and prayers are with you and your fellow humans and other beings under all that mess. Hope everything comes out all right.

Music worth a mention. The cd's that went in the cup holder tonight were: ZZ Top - Afterburner, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble - Soul to Soul, and Sarah McLachlan, Mirrorball. Books on the nightstand right now are Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier and The Autobiography of Henry VIII (With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers), a novel by Margaret George. Open next to the computer is Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language, Third Edition, Teach Yourself GIMP by Pruitt and Pruitt and O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell by Ellen Siever. Why isn't there enough time in each day, I wonder?

I have back and forth'd with Tom Syroid a bit today, ending in...

I'm knee deep in a chapter on Samba in one of my Linux tomes. I don't think Donovan will be MS based for long, considering what I've learned today. As a matter of fact, Shawn asked me tonight how long it would be before Penelope turned into Penelope the Penguin. "Soon", was the short response...

I just checked out your web page. Very nice. Contrats. And you thought this would be a small dark secret on your part? Welcome to the Daynotes Gang. Unless I hear ruckus protest from you, I'll put a link to your site on my page tomorrow. Do you really know what you're getting into??? .

Cheers,
/tom

An interesting day. Lots of correspondence with various people. This site is being linked to in a number of places I understand. Thank you for your patronage, your understanding and forbearance as, together, we shake the kinks outta this place. First, from Tom Syroid, after we had gone back and forth a couple of times over using Samba on Donovan (who has shaken off Win98 like a happy dog shaking off fleas)...

Heh, heh, heh.... the sweet smell of success...

smbclient -L janus -U Administrator (**NOTE** the cap on the 'U'; your 'little u' wouldn't fly.

smbclient '\\janus\c$' -U Administrator ... presto, pocus, as they say...

Note the following: MUST have single quotes around the folder/directory you're looking for, and it would appear that with samba I must always provide the -U parameter. I also note that I cannot "CD" to a folder on NT that uses a long name with space (e.g., "Documents and Settings"); at least I've not been successful. Ahhhh, he muttered, I bet if I put the long folder name in single quotes...

Oh blast. So much for writing today . This is way more fun.
/tom

Success while using Linux is somehow much sweeter than that of the Win world. I remember trying to make first CP/M then DOS do my bidding, and the IMSAI 8080 that got me started in this wacky biz. Mine isn't in the Smithsonian, like Pournelle's is, but there you go - Jerry, after all, has talent.

Then thinking about how this place is structured, why I ought to change things to fall in line with the Daynotes beings... and this, from Bo Leuf (his answers interspersed with my original message to him)...

Thank you for your feedback. I have used it to start a follow-up thread on wiki [here] -- feel free to drop by and follow the ?-link on your name and make a guestbook page.

> My solution for the corporate site I am webmaster for is that the
> obsoleted pages are not deleted, but contain a message of obsolescence,
> and an automated refresh to the most relevant new content.

Yes precisely, that is the best way for continuity, and as Jakob has pointed out, pages that are "obsolete" can still have relevance for some users in ways that the owner can never know.

> On another recent topic, , I instead invert the
> page, putting the most recent date/content at the top of my "current"
> page. This comes from sheer lazyness on my part.

This is workable, although while most can deal with reverse chronology in lists and headings, many people are not comfortable reading extended text blocks that come in this inverted order.

In general, I find that web pages today live with many uneasy compromises between true hyperlinking and linear text.

/ Bo
--
"Bo Leuf"
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/

Jakob is Jakob Nielsen, former Sun Distinguished Fellow, web usability guru, etc. He can be found at www.useit.com. Recommended reading for people doing web work.

So I have restructured to weekly. Tell me what you hate, so I can think about it. Tell me what you like (if you care to). Supper's ready.... and was this chicken dish that usually makes me say "This is so good, I am never going to cook again!!!" So I said that - got a grin for my trouble.

Hi Brian,

My name is Tim Nall.. found your website via the C++ 3 class @ ZDU. See you like to write SF.. well, the PLACE to go for that is: Critters online F/SF/H critiquing at www.critique.org

..well OK the queue is really long since the write-ups in Asimov's and now in Salon, and the Chaos Manor writer's group is instant gratification.. but I still vastly prefer Critters...

[snip]

Cheers,
Tim Nall

Thanks for the pointer, Tim. This was Tim's message topic : pedo mellon a minno, which I was too clueless to remember graces Durin's Door. Science fiction is something I aspire to write well, but then, I have some years in which to improve, since my grandfather turned 101 this year. Well. the reorg took longer than I expected, but less time than it takes to restructure SGI, say. Looking forward to a little more work, a bit of a read and some snuggle time this evening. Sayonara.

TGIF. Got a mention in Robert Thompson's site, last night. Thanks.

Dear Robert.

Thanks for the mention. Actually, I was back and forthing with Tom, and he "threatened" to add me into the Daynotes loop, since I keep butting in about Linux, connectivity and other such nonsense. I took up the gauntlet, "conversed" a bit with Bo in the afternoon, got home from wage slavery and restructured the beast into a weekly system organized along lines similar to those sported by other Daynotes beings. I find that this will probably be the way in which I document the feeding and growth of a linux box, since it will acquire a couple of domain names, sprout a sendmail service and Lord knows what else over the coming months. Updating will be much less sporadic, and hopefully fun/useful for me, whether I get many visitors or not.

I appreciate and enjoy visiting your site. Glad to know you came through the blow OK.

No problem. I hope I can help drive a bit of traffic to your site. Good luck with your new page.

Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

I am mulling over a feature that I could provide which will actually add (maybe) value to this site, rather than just be a soapbox (well out of Kensington Park). I am reasonably technically proficient, and although I have used various *nix OS's at times over the last 20 years, I truly am a neophyte (and humble, too, proud to say >grin<). Therefore, in the process of getting anything working on this box, I make LOTS of mistakes. Documented and posted here, perhaps I can provide a reference p oint for people installing Linux for the first or second time and trying to head past the boundries of the GUI environment.

I will count on reader's feedback as well as many other resources to stay on track as I make these steps. Today's project is Find a web stats analyzer. Unless or until more of y'all start emailing me (and I know you're out there, since I have recorded 1k + hits and about 300 page views in the last 5 days), I want to know a little bit about the audience.

Prime resources for finding software (gpl'd or otherwise) for Linux are Linuxberg and Freshmeat. Starting at Freshmeat, I go to the appindex, then web, then administration.... lots of tools!!! On my way down the list, interesting things to follow up on later: Checklinks, since I need some more checking to back up this hand-tooled html code, LinkScan for the same purpose, aahhh : stoic a web log analyzer (perl script)... let's see what else we can find... Interesting, just under web|admin here, there are 42 entries for various programs to assist in administering something about or over the web, and only three of these are commercial programs. Cool. Let me use the search function, see if I can find anything else. ah - analog is here... a tool I have used before for log analysis -capable, but not a gpl or opensource licence tool. I am going to attempt to stick to gpl tools where possible. However, this gave me a pointer. I can look under appindex|Console|Log Analyzers ... much more applicable to my current quest. There are 28 items on this list. I shall report back later.

Success. The current front runner and operating solution is a gpl'd program called Webalizer. The README says that installing the binaries and running them under RH6.0 can be problematic and recommends compiling from source... No problem - I can do that - since I did (I know) a kitchen sink install of the distribution. ./configure, make, make install and voila... html pages full of analyzed log file ...way too much info... so I am going to have to read the documentation, and figure out how to shut most of the options off. It does lots and lots of tables and graphs. Currently the graphs are in (boo, hiss) .gif format, but next release should be in (yea) .png. Below is an example of one of the graphs generated. This is data based on the last six days worth of activity, mostly the last two, since I became "visible" :

Oh. Speed trap just caught something. Probably most of you have seen this. Major fun. Kryotech brings us the Cool Athlon[tm] 800 (long discontinued, 10/2000). OK. I want one now. Forget about Christmas. The balance of the evening is going to be spent a little playing with Webalizer, a little reading, some time being (mostly) harmless. I will be around email from time to time, but that's about it. There will generally be updates most days here (known exception : camping holiday 1999.10.03 thru 1999.10.08 but I may pre-write some material for those days :) sick, ain't I).

20:17 -0700, that is to say, later. Shawn wrote in with

I decided to try OL2.3 today. The first time I had the AMD card in and I couldn't get on the network. Then I tried the 3Com and everything worked. So I am now able to get out onto the internet. I am attempting to get Samba working. So far I have installed it off the OL CD. I knew I had to edit the lmhosts file, it took me a while to find an editor I liked. I am used to pico on my ISP's web server, but it wasn't installed. I ended up using 'Advanced Editor' off the K menu. I think I like KDE better than Gnome, but I have to play around with it.

Tomorrow I am going to try to download a application off the net (GRASS, a GIS package) and try install it. Everything has been RPM's so far. We will see.

I am going to be installing OL2.3 on my machine at home tonight. I have a spare HD, so I am going to go for it.

TTYL
Shawn

Huzzah. I have read good things about the OpenLinux distro. Currently on CD in-house I have RH5.2, RH6.0, four (!) disks of Debian 2.1, a Slackware and a Mandrake, both about one rev back. Great deals abound at Linux Systems Labs. Editors: I use the KDE editors in gui mode. For simple edits inside a console, I use joe. The reason is that my fingers memorized the wordstar style keymap way too long ago, and I can work in it without thinking - potentially a very useful trait. (it also makes backups by default, of the style filename~). Generally, I understand it is a "good thing" to use rpm exclusively once you start, because installing tarballs breaks the chain of documented installs. So, of course, I have done lots of tarballs >grin<.

And a hearty "Welcome, Welcome, Welcome!" was received this evening from Dan Bowman...

Timely, needed and useful. I just gave in and added your page to my Start Page. You come highly recommended, but I'd put off adding anyone in as my cup is very full (of the same balls that Tom and RBT have rolling around the floor). But, as I had commented to Dave Farquhar (get used to that name) in a Linux discussion some time back, "No one is giving the baby penguins any guidance. Sheesh, I just found 'Freshmeat' by accident and added it to my links for future use." Now here you go and give me a step by step run through of how to find and add a tool to my non-existent Linux installation. (Soon, soon, I only need to borrow some of Tom's spare time.)

One definition of an expert: One who has bollixed things up so often and so repeatedly that they can recognize your problem and say, "Of course; I've seen that. Here's what you do to fix it." You are ahead of the curve for many of us out there; to paraphrase Pournelle's line, "You do this so we don't have to."

congrats,
Dan Bowman

Thanks, Dan. If I keep hanging out with you brilliant author types, maybe I will get lucky and a little of that "I been published" magic will rub off on me. Also, fortunately, speed reading still serves me well in keeping up with the Jones', at least in such rarified company as the Daynotes Gang. There is so *much* to learn, and so few hours in each day. What I didn't say before, but will now, is that I have broken my installation at least 3 times and been cracked once, maybe twice. Learning through repetition is both tiring and thorough. On the other hand, just *who* is Dave Farquhar? And will I ever be able to spell his last name the same way twice running? Lastly, please shoot holes in this place. Tell me when I make errors of fact (or fiction), since the only way I will actually be useful to anyone is if someone critiques this place. After all, I wrote it, so I KNOW it is right, neh?

Good Morning. I awake to a flame war on a mailing list, and get-rich-quick spam purportedly from a russian domain. The flammage is silly, so like going to Camelot, we shan't. However, a couple of bits about spam. First, today's spam is

Subject: Publishing Company!
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 1999 06:10:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: [email protected] (ilko99)
To: [email protected]

If you ever wanted "the easy way out" to make a lot of money with a business of your own....Here is the EASIEST WAY TO START! The information in this C.D. report WILL show you [blah blah blah SNIP]
CLICK HERE http://3437342643/c%64.h%74m

Now, overall, this is unremarkable, and you may say to yourself, "Self, why oh why is he making me read this here. I delete thousands just like it every day." Well, as I was yesterday getting Webalizer, I noticed that they had an anti-spam link at the bottom, to the Anti-Spam Policy page. Nice little response. Of course spammers don't read such things. They have crawlers and spiders and 'bots that go about the web, collecting names and addresses for the lists, and anyone is fair game, since demographics do not matter when your effective cost per message sent is ZERO. Setting your robots.txt file in the root of your website is only respected by the more responsible search engines, there are no real fences. If I made it so that robotz and spiderz couldn't find this site, then neither could you.

Two short bits to tide you over for a while. First, Robert Thompson last week adopted a meta tag in his html code to enforce refresh, so that you automagically have the most recent content, even if you have caching set to look for the copy in my local cache, as long as I have been there in the last year. I have adopted this with the following caveat. I intend to remove the meta tag at the time I migrate the current page into its dated, last week mode. For some reason, it just now popped into my mind that it doesn't matter once the content becomes relatively static. I will drop Robert a note to this effect.

UPDATE: feedback indicates that since I am serving off of my desk at home via DSL rather than from a server farm with an el-huge-o pipe onto the backbones, I'd best remove the no-cache meta-tag from my site. Understood and agreed.

Good point. I'll try to remember to do that. It probably won't have a great deal of impact, though. Most of my traffic is current stuff.

Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

Secondly, I noted that PBS, in advertising the shows coming up in the new season, have a bunch of additions to the In The Wild with X series, where X is some large star, like Julia Roberts, etc. So far, my favorite of the series was the one with Robin Williams with the dolphins. However, the new season offers a strong contender : John Cleese with the lemurs of Madagascar (I think??). Watch for this. I will.

Hi Brian,

Dan Bowman sends me over to your place, and I see he's already talking like I'm someone important or something. Who needs agents when there's Dan?

That probably means I should step out of the shadows and introduce myself. I'm currently finishing up my first book for O'Reilly (actually my first book, period), titled Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia. It's been pre-announced on all the book sites, so I'm assuming I'm a bit more free to talk about it now than I was in the middle of the project. It's pretty much a "how to make Windows run decently on a Pentium-120 like it should, or how to make your $700 Celeron or K6 out-run your neighbor's $2,500 Pentium III" book. I tried to keep it from being the kind of book that lulls you to sleep, and my tech reviewers say I succeeded. I hope they're right. There's a big difference between writing a 200+ page book and writing a 900-word weekly newspaper column. I have training and experience in the latter, but not in the former.

In my search for a second project, I've been taking a long, hard look at Linux. I've messed around with Linux off and on (mostly off) for the past four years, and finally found in Red Hat 5.1 a distribution that I liked. I got KDE installed and configured, got used to WordPerfect 8 as my word processor, and boom, O'Reilly likes one of my book ideas, but of course it's the Windows 9x one... So much for even booting Linux for the next four months. Then four months became six...

I've found I like Mandrake 6.0, and then last night I installed Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 and its installation routine floored me. (My old Amiga spoiled me for multitasking really early on; Linux is the first thing I've found that multitasks as well as that old box did.) Now I just have to find software, but you just took care of that.

The site looks good so far. The key to sites like this really seems to be to build a community, rather than bowling everyone over with your fancy HTML (which you won't, seeing as HTML is a pretty lousy design language).

Best wishes on the site,
Dave Farquhar

Glad to know that Windows can actually be optimized for something >grin<... I know, it is just a knee-jerk reaction. There has been plenty of good stuff out of Redmond, but they tromped over a bunch of great people and products to get there, and produced some pretty amazing pieces of crap, as well. And as Pournelle noted at least once - Don't EVER let your Windows hardware know about the mere existence of other OS's. It gets cranky, morose and depressed. At one point, this machine was actually a dual boot, with /dev/hda being a Win95 partition of 2 gig, and /dev/hdb being 5 gig broken up into a sane distribution of primary and logical partitions for Linux. I was keeping 95 for "oops, I killed Linux (again!)" and game-playing reasons. The problem is that within three months, that 2 gig quantum drive upon which resided Windows95 had ground itself into non-booting coating and aluminum fragments inside the housing. Now you could tell me that it would have happened anyway. Yeah.

Windows is a great gaming platform, primarily because ALL of the gaming companies develop for it, most exclusively. There is a growing amount of activity in porting games into the Linux environment, Id and Loki for sure, others I believe, but I don't have much time for games these days, dunno why?

Thanks for the site advice. Yeah, I am a strong proponent of fast loading pages. Glitz doesn't load fast.

A question has arisen regarding the gpl (Gnu General Public Licence). You can find the formal online statement of the gpl here at www.gnu.org. The GPL is the license under which much Linux and other software is released, the intent being to put AND KEEP software "free". There is lots of philosophy and heated debate over free software, open source, etc, etc. However you view the topic, knowing what the GPL says is a good thing. I agree with it myself. [later edits in purple-ish. My error in not including "General" in the expansion of GPL was a silly assumption regarding self referential naming, common among the free software crowd]. A good place to visit and understand some of my sources of confusion is here.

Also, I had a good chuckle over a letter posted at Tom Syroid's place, with me being interrogated or some such by the Daynotes Gang. I was reminded of Geeks with Guns. What? You hadn't heard? Look here.

OK. Well, that was exciting. I have again learned a painful lesson. Warning - this is what comes of not reading the instructions - a flaw with which I am all too familiar. Webalizer creates it's reports in html format. This much I knew. I was able to easily view the reports. Cool, thought I. Then I happened to be in my web root directory when I re-ran the function. Weeehhhaaaaa. Oops. It overwrote my index page. Geez. First I dug out last night's tape, and set tar to extracting the /home/httpd/html/index.html file... That was running, so I read the Webalizer docs, and set up the config file, so that it automatically reads files from the right place, and writes files to a certain subdirectory where they won't interfere with anything else... and voila - oops^2 - the restore failed, file not found. WHAT??? So, a quick rewrite of the index file proceeds anon, and done. I think I will mirror this structure elsewhere in my directory tree for ease (and reliability) of access. Sigh. And I thought that Jerry did these stupid things so that I didn't have to... >grin<

This leads to Linux rule #356b/2 - RTFM, which usually stands for Read The Fine Manual(s), although people have been known to substitute other words in for the 'F'. Sick joke of the day department: There's more than one way to skin a cat : Way 38. Use a belt sander.

First published at Tom Syroid's site, referenced above. Now sent to me by Matt Beland (that's B-E-L-A-N-D) in its html-ish entirity, as follows

Regarding dragging Brian into the Gang:

I have a mental image of Jerry Pournelle sitting at one end of a dimly lit table wearing a green eyeshade. Bob Thompson, Bo Leuf, Shawn Wallbridge, Svenson, and the others straggling down each side, cigar and pipe smoke swirling up in the dim light. Under the lone bright light in the room we see Brian, sweating nervously as Tom paces around behind him. �Do you really know what you�re getting yourself into? Do you? Eh?� Tom says, leaning heavily over him. Jerry has Royal Armadillo open in front of him, muttering about his Earthlink connection, nodding sagely as he eyes the page layout. Bob is cleaning a large-caliber handgun, muttering "Microsoft Delenda Est" under his breath, and playing with a Windows 98 cd that already has more than the regulation number of holes in it. Bo is picking his guitar, looking over Jerry�s shoulder at the laptop, and nodding; he likes what he sees. Shawn is buried in papers, looked decidedly rumpled, frantically coding new additions to his ASP scripts, muttering "Yeah, sure, let him in, fine, just let me get this DONE!" The others are fixing Brian with piercing stares. In the background, there's a gigantic precision balance, balancing a heart against a feather.

"Well," Jerry says with a sigh, "We could use a Linux guy. So, if you can modify your site to the weekly format, combined or separate news and mail pages at your discretion, presto pocus, you're in.� Everybody else is nodding sagely, the scales disappear, Brian looks relieved as Tom offers him a beer (Canadian, of course) and a gigantic gold plaque (made from melted-down CD-Rs) drops into his lap, with the words "We do these things so you don't have to" engraved on it.

Or I could be way, way off. I dunno. <seg>

Here is an interesting article entitled The Disrespected Student - or - The Need for the Virtual University. This article (12 html pages) is an interview with Roger Schank, who does CS and CogPsych. I have heard the name, and I am now reading the article. Looks to be very interesting. More commentary on this topic tomorrow. Link discovered at slashdot.

UPDATE (repeated from the relevant area above): feedback indicates that since I am serving off of my desk at home via DSL rather than from a server farm with an el-huge-o pipe onto the backbones, I'd best remove the no-cache meta-tag from my site. Understood and agreed.

I am reading the hardcopy version of the interview with Roger Schank. I am spinning Sarah McLachlan in the cup holder.

Thinking about education and learning. I used to believe that the preceding terms were, if not synonymous, at least symbiotic. I find instead that learning is a process that I intend to continue for the rest of my life (probably long, since I have three living grandparents, one into 3 digits). Education is one of the processes of learning. I am currently upgrading my skills in programming in two processes. I am taking classes at ZDU, an institution of expressly on-line learning, offering a variety of IT related course-work, optionally for CEU s.

Coincident with that structured education environment, I am also a member in a loosely affiliated group of individuals studying C++. Most of us are doing this in addition to or replacement of ZDU. We use the free online book from Bruce Eckel [1]. This is a self-paced effort, with students pressing each other, constructively criticizing our works and moving forward. Of the two processes listed, given that the subject material is the same, I learning far more in the second, for reasons to be elucidated later.

I was educated in the California public school system. In the sixties and seventies, this was (at least the schools I was in) quite a bit more than good enough. My grammar school was experimental, with teachers who would not only drill students in "normal" modes, but also come up with individualized learning plans for students. My high school was relatively dogmatic in its regime, but a good school - 90% or better of each graduating class went on to higher education.

I also moved on, into the UC system. As Schank discussed tangentially in his interview, UC Santa Cruz was rather novel in its total lack of grades, at the time I was attending. I understand that UCSC has since caved in on this issue. Apparently too many students were having trouble validating their undergraduate course work, without grades to back them up as they moved into post-graduate systems. I will be the second to admit that in this less structured environment I did very well in courses I enjoyed. I also did very, very badly in courses which I was taking because I must. I also "learned" how to have way too much fun experimenting with better living through modern chemistry. Fortunately, I came out the other side of that dank valley, most grey cells still intact.

The above is all background to where we are today. I currently work not only for the employer where I am paid wages to turn up each day. A simple email exchange with an individual off of one of the mailing lists I s ubscribe to became a business opportunity. I remotely administered some perl tools onto his system in return for some reasonable dollar/hour rate. All this without ever meeting. This is a relatively new development for me. What ties it into the Schank interview is that the knowledge base and work ethic which I displayed as my online "avatar" stood me in good stead. This wasn t about education. It was about what I knew and what I had learned

Several advertisements in the online community these days now say BA/BS not necessarily required, depending upon previous experience. How refreshing. Not "Where did you learn?", but "What did you learn?".

When I anticipate my continuing "education", I look forward to a blend of study groups, critical communities such as the Critters site mentioned above, formal learning in person and formal learning online. All of these are valid modes. Each may be appropriate to a certain subject matter or state of mind and/or being. I will attempt to use most of them in conjunction, as I am currently doing with my coding skills update. This allows the strengths of each process to fill the gaps in the other.

Note 1 - Thinking in C++, 2nd Edition. This book is in beta and current users provide feedback on the book to the author. The book is being committed to treeware this fall, at which point, although the final text will be available online, most of us will be buying the paper version, both to support Bruce and his development model and because it can be easier not to switch windows while programming. Go look here.

An open question. The number one failed request showing up in my stats right now is a request for a file called "favicon.ico". This filename is not referenced in my code. Is it something that browsers look for. I am going to do some research - but please feel free to drop me a line if you know. Thanks.

Robert Bruce Thompson wrote:
>
> http://foreverweb.com/articles/99may3.htm
>
> Robert Bruce Thompson
> [email protected]
> http://www.ttgnet.com

COOL. Thanks. And that answers that, in a flash. Now, can I create a MS format icon in a Linux environment? Stay tuned.

Well, I haven't found a Linux tool that creates MS icons. I wonder why? I got a Windows based tool ( and loaded it on the HP, created a 16x16, 3bit color depth Windows icon file, named it favicon.ico. I presume that it is used by IE5, which I can't test ANYWHERE, here or at work. Let me know if you see something, neh?

Afternoon report. Bob Thompson says that the favicon.ico is there. And ugly (my word, not his). Ah, well. Michaelangelo I am not, not at 16 pixels on a side. You can always say "Just click on that ugly one, there."

Rebuilt the Art and Photography page. Added stuff from the wedding and honeymoon. Should load LOTS faster now, since I used the thumbnailing scripts I told Dr. Pournelle about some time ago, and each image is thumbnailed at about 2k each. Size of image linked to is noted in the adjoining text. Have a gander if you wish.

Ah, yes, the thumbnailing scripts for use under Linux. These are written by Adam Kopacz, and his page and scripts may be found at http://www.kLoGraFX.de. The scripts I used are in a set called Image Pack, available off of his home page with a right-click|save-as link In the C/Unix-Shell box. I have modified thumbs.sh to not delete the old and create a new directory, but simply to write to a pre-existing directory I create called thumbs, sub to my current image directory. Also had to edit the script to use thumbs, rather than its default of small. With a reasonably small effort, I can modify the scripts enclosed to run inside of an existing directory, create thumbnails and a page enclosing those thumbnails, ready for annotation. Real Soon Now (before W2K releases).