EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy say so, I will respect that. If I don't know that you want your email address published, then I won't. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

To recap, last week included network printing with Linux, plans for a trip to Ashland, a new keyboard and repaired links around this place, thanks to Don Armstrong. Also posted this trip report about Natural Bridges State Park, where the Monarch butterflies spend the winter. To the right is a screenshot of my current KDE desktop, using the wallpaper selected from among the shots taken at Natural Bridges. Enough waffling about in the past. Here's Monday, belting me right in the face.

Out comes last night's backup tape, check the backup report that cron mailed to me . . . a 362K mail message that lets me know everything completed OK, listing all the directories backed to tape.

If you saw Tom's post of last Saturday, there's more conversation rolling about the back channels about the trials and tribulations of authordom. Some of that will probably make it into posts here and there. Suffice it to say that Tom is going on Daynotes sabbatical in order to complete the current Outlook in Hell ... oops ... I mean Outlook in a Nutshell book. Some days life is tougher on us than others. I have immense regard and respect for Tom, and from a distance that is hopefully non-distracting, I wish him well. Save the innundation of email for his return, or send it here, and I will make a 'finish the book soon' page (kinda like a get well card), that Tom can see at his leisure, without dealing with unnecessary email in the meantime.

Attached JPG - let me put it in context - that is my Linux Nutscrape 4.7 Message window, the purple/red/blue blur in the message pane is Bob's whole annotation of Tom's post, jammed over and over itself, in one paragraph. When I hit reply, Nutscrape dies the death, climbs the curtain, whatever. No OS problems result, but netscape gone, from the process list too. Restart, reply all - Same. Restart, forward ... ah - now I can read... Some oddball formatting characters, but I can read, oh good Tom's post hit the air today. Write my complaint about Nutscrape/Linux being unable to cope with certain (unknown) types of message formatting as sent by Outlook (that was Outlook, wasn't it, Bob?), attach a copy of the partial, squeezed screen capture I did, click on Send, and bang, Netscape dies. Why didn't I save the message first? BECAUSE BRIAN IS STUPID, ALRIGHT????? So here I am, writing again. I hope to not have a sudden loss of hair or anything when netscape dies on me again. Maybe things did all fail at the turn of the calendar, and what I experience now are the raving hallucinations of a maniac who will never again get a computer fix. Oh, that was me, huh?

Brian,

A similar sort of thing used to happen to me now and then with a 
previous version of Pegasus Mail. I'd get a mail (from an Outlook 
user) formatted in HTML, glance at it briefly, but when I came 
round to open it again for a reply for example, it would self-
destruct, sometimes bringing down the client. In either case, the 
message would be completely gone from the local system.

A later version of Pegaus Mail fixed this, and came with a sour 
comment about non-standard embedded codes and MS-HTML.

/ Bo

Bo writes back to let me know that both IE and Netscape are implicated in my problems. To paraphrase, IE shouldn't extend HTML in proprietary and hidden ways, Netscape shouldn't die because it sees something it doesn't understand. Can you say graceful degradation? Netscape can't. One hopes that Mozilla will. The occasional mid-weekday update is brought to your eyes care of SSH and Joe. Joe is an editor which is a good-old-days Wordstar keymap compatible. And if I hold my tongue just right, then everything works. What I am actually looking forward to is a persistent connection with a static IP for ETS. This will allow me to run X applications remote from Grendel on my desktop here. I think.

Finances are in vogue today. First, Red Hat, as previously announced (though not on these pages), split their stock between close of market on Friday, and market open today. So, the +9 point move today was the equivalent of a +18 point move Friday. Nothing, given how volatile the stock is, but now, as owners of Cygnus, RH has built some steroids into their stable. Nextly, Microsoft and Caldera have settled. The story is here. While they say that the terms of settlement are confidential, Microsoft will take a onetime charge against earnings, costing $0.03 USD per share. You do the math. Unless something is funny, that's about $155M into Caldera's coffers. Of course, that piddling amount could have come from the left hip pocket on Bill G's jeans, lying on the floor. Who'll miss it? Not Melinda, that's for sure. Last, and huge on the financial and internet front, the pending merger between A-O-Hell and Time-Warner. If you haven't already heard about this one, then you aren't reading this, probably. If so, bang the rocks together, guys. Interesting times.

Cool, I manage to post at the same time as Slashdot on the MS - Caldera thing. In other /. news, have a look at Dell's Inspiron page, down at the bottom, support for drivers by OS, including Linux, with NIC, sound and wallpaper (ooohh), and a working XF86config file. Takes all the fun out of an installation, if you already have a working XF86config !!! Next, I suppose that you'll have to reboot after installing this text file . . . well, you do, but the X-server, not the OS or the machine. Also culled from the recent /. past, Fred Brooks won the Turing Award from the ACM, see the story. Brook's Law follows -

Brooks's Law /prov./ "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" -- 
a result of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting work among N 
programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications
cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, 
proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's 
OS/360 project and author of "The Mythical Man-Month" (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN
0-201-00650-2), an excellent early book on software engineering. The myth in 
question has been most tersely expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and 
Brooks established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never forgotten his 
advice; too often, management still does. See also creationism, second-system 
effect, optimism.  
[credit - the Jargon file]

Lastly for the moment, US full lunar eclipse on January 20. Story is linked here. My luck, it will actually rain. Maybe it will rain this evening. There are rumors. Now on to Perl.


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Happy Tuesday, all. I want to start with a .sig of the moment. I had run across this some months (7) back, and in doing some bottom grubbing in my mail folders, came across it again - found in a message from Dan Holdsworth.

By caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, By the beans of Java do
thoughts acquire speed, hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes
a warning, By caffeine alone do I set my mind in motion.

<SEG> In related news, check out this page from thinkgeek.com. Yup, it's an online store, offering to make money from you selling a variety of geek related knick-knacks, consumables, etc. But the linked page takes you to their selection of caffeinated drinks. I had no idea. I want them all <g> Another speed related site is here, courtesy of telus.net. Select a file size, and check the size of the pipe into your location. Doesn't check upload speeds, but interesting - I am averaging about 1Mbps with this. I peak at about 1.5 (hard limit) on FTP downloads from local, large piped, sources.

In a return to financial news, I dreamt last night of playing with million dollar bills, at least a couple of them, as well as lots of smaller stuff, $10K's and more ... clear sign that it is time to buy a lottery ticket, methinks. More later.

Well, actually, we are amused, but the Queen is not. Apparently, Elizabeth II has made the transition to clothing hell, making Blackwell's list. No, the worst-dressed one. Sigh. Given Chris' disclaimer, he probably can't even echo that story, or comment on it. Fortunately for the Queen, Cher and Celine both beat her out for top honors (although Cher's was apparently related to 'bottom' honors).

Here is a story about Xerox finally hitting back. They apparently have won a preliminary ruling against 3Com regarding the Graffiti handwriting recognition system, claiming it infringed on their patented Unistrokes technology. We have an entire business environment built on ideas 'stolen' from Xerox, since so much of the conceptual work behind today's implementations rests on work done at Xerox PARC, back in the dark ages of disco and the sista's Polly and Esther. Funny though, that Xerox should choose now to enforce just one of their patents, against a non-MS vendor, at a time when Palm is making such great strides in the one arena in which MS appears to have missed the ball, court, day, week and month. Nah, not a conspiracy theorist in the woodwork here, just wondering out loud. . . Couldn't be, since they started the process back when Palm was a USR product.

Check out Censorware.org. These people are doing good work in pointing out the damage to free speech, personal rights and freedoms by programs like Cybersitter, Cyber Patrol and the like. These programs do have a use, but they are largely ineffectual at blocking all access to those things you would most like blocked (say, hardcore pornography from the view of 5 year olds). On the other hand, since the lists of sites that are blocked are generated, secret lists in many cases, this site could be blocked (Ohhh, Naked Butterflies) for entirely silly reasons, or none at all. No recourse. Sigh.

Finally got my order in for Dave's book, and also Unix Power Tools, 2nd Ed. (Tim, Jerry & Mike, from O'Reilly). Marcia's box, named dollbaby on the network, but named Scotty in real life, apparently needs help, or needs to get beamed up. Should have the books within the next couple of days, then we expect rapid improvements in reliability and useability on Scotty. Oh, what? Yes, I know that if I want that, I really should install NT (or Linux), but I dunno about NT on a low-end box like this - I think more memory is the next thing to do. Maybe now-ish. Let me look into that. Later.

Oh. heh heh heh. Thanks to John Doucette for the following . . .

A writer died and St. Peter offered him the option of going to 
hell or heaven.

To help decide, he asked for a tour of each destination. 
St. Peter agreed and decided to take him to hell first.

As he descended into the fiery pits, the writer saw row upon 
row of writers, chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop.

As they worked, they were repeatedly whipped with thorny lashes 
by demons. "Oh, my" the writer said, "let me see heaven."

A few moments later, they arrived in heaven and the writer saw 
the same thing, toiling in a sweatshop being whipped by demons.

"Hey, this is just as bad as hell." said the writer.

"Oh no, it's not," St. Peter replied, "here your work gets published!"

Welcome to the working week (thanks, Elvis) and Hump Day. Only we're still (here on left coast time) on the tall side of the summit, and my eyes aren't pointing in one direction at the momemnt. I have had 5 browser lockups in the last 12 hours, and am about to give up on NS here. Very frustrating.

Qcad, which is a developing, decent-but-not-there yet vector-based CAD package which is available for Linux and other OS's, and is currently open-source (GPL), is looking a going to a closed source model. The package author is being offered money and a job, to take the package commercial. From a food and rent perspective, this is a good deal for the guy. But he only just recently took the package OS, and I am not sure what he (or the purchasing firm) want to accomplish. This is an interesting package with good potential, but it isn't there yet. Hmmm. More thoughts on this later.

Some panic'd person wrote in about Feb. 30. heheheh. Oh, and I did place an order with Crucial to add to Scotty's memory. Should be here in time to coordinate with system improvements via Farquhar's book. Later.

NPR featured a bit on the DVD CCA vs. code on the Internet dispute today. The RA file is available here. The attorneys for both sides get bites, as does Don Marti, over the Code Distribution Contest.

Correspondence on the topic of going ex-GPL, or closing the source...

Subject: Just how do you close something that's open?
   Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 15:10:34 -0500
   From: Robert Bruce Thompson 
     To: [email protected]

> is currently open-source (GPL), is looking a going to a closed source model. 

Pardon my ignorance, but how is it possible to do this? Once something is GPL'd, 
I can't see how anyone, including the original author, can subsequently close 
the source on it. Isn't it kind of like putting something in the Public Domain? 
Once it's there, it's there for good.
 
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

Hey, Chris -

A question if you have a moment - I have been tracking Qcad for a variety of reasons. Author Andrew recently (in the last year) GPL'd the product. Now he is talking about taking it commercial. Once source is opened with GPL, how do you go about closing the source again? I was talking about this on my site, and sort of blindly parrotted what Andrew had written, without thinking about consequences. Any feedback I can post would be great. My take is that I don't understand how. Maybe I am just particularly dense today.

Resources:
@egroups ... http://www.egroups.com/group/qcad-user/?fetchForward=1&start=47
Qcad Home... http://qcad.sourceforge.net/index.php3

Subject: Re: [Fwd: [qcad-user] Re: QCad Polls]
   Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 12:54:00 -0800 (PST)
   From: "Chris J. DiBona" 
     To: Brian Bilbrey 

Well, you can't close the barn door, you can however, not relelase later
versions if in fact you have not added other free software to the code
base. 

Some folks to the "trailing release" model. Literally having the
commercial version that becomes teh free version after a year or so. This
will also allow you to take advantage of the free software out there.

 Chris

--
Linux Community Evangelist, VA Linux Systems http://www.valinux.com
President, Silicon Valley Linux Users Group    http://www.svlug.org
Grant Chair, Linux International.                 http://www.li.org
Co-editor, Open Sources                       http://www.dibona.com

Doesn't this clause prevent even Andrew from returning any portion of the code base back into a proprietary model? Understand, I don't intend to cudgle (sp?) Andrew over this, or even (perhaps) mention it to him, just for future reference, know what the "right thing" is... If I understand your first paragraph, you are saying that if I author a program, and release, let's say, version 1.3 under GPL, I can, electively, release 1.4 under whatever license I choose, as long as I did not incorporate anyone else's GPL'd code ... ???

yep. if you are the code owner, i.e. you own -all- the code. You control
it's licence. IF you as a code owner have released the code in the past
under a liberal licence like the GPL, you cannot take back code you hav
given out, but you can change teh code under your control when you like. 

That said ,you can't take anyone elses patches/additions/modifications
with you when you do so.

 Chris

Then you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages 
that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized 
to take action to enforce the GPL. 

Morning, all. Today's lesson is about the Death Penalty. First caught wind of this on Slashdot, and followed the threads till I think I understand what's happening. The @Home network is a significant source of spam for usenet newsgroups. Probably, given this story, top of the spam pops, as it were. Many complaints have been filed with the appropriate authorities at the ISP, and "nothing" has been done - the spamming continues. Therefore the Usenet admins have issued a UDP notice to @Home Network. If @Home does not sit up and take notice, make changes, take names and kick spammer ass, then starting on the 17th, ALL messages destined for newsgroups, posted from @Home addresses will be denied forwarding and storage. Yup, including Shaw customers, too. Here is the link to the UDP Notice, as echo'd on Deja. There are links from that point into the Usenet FAQs regarding this level of penalty, etc. Very interesting stuff.

I was harassing Dave Farquhar last evening, because I didn't see a Thursday post at all, on Wednesday evening. Dave not posting 6 hours before a day starts, is like Chris not posting for *more* than two weeks. Dave reports back that ISP troubles are troubling him greatly - no FTP access to his site. Chris also writes to note that his ISP troubles which hosed his diary appear to be about over, and we should see several days worth of material shortly. Rah!

According to the UPS tracking system, the new books from ORA/fatbrain.com were in Oakland this morning at 3:43am this morning, and the Crucial memory was still in Salt Lake City at 1:12 Mountain Time. The opportunities afforded by the connectedness of us all continue to amuse and please me greatly. Have a lovely day, all. Later.

Bill Gates steps down as CEO, Ballmer takes over, Bill retains Chairman's job. News anywhere you care to look. I first heard about 7 minutes after the story broke, at about 2pm PST. Other news nybbles today, from the headlines :

16 feared dead in Swiss plane crash ...
What do you expect, flying in a plane where you can fold in the wing, and fold out toe-nail clippers, eh?

National Academies reports global warming real ...
On a par with a council of bishops in the 16th century confirming that the earth is indeed the center of the universe. Do they have any investment in having their previous statements confirmed? Nah.

Well. Got home about 15:00 or so, and did something I have never done before. I fired up MS Frontpage, 2K, no less. I have never used Frontpage before. But I had lots to do and little time to do it in. I restructured the entire ETS site between 3 and 7 this evening. ETS is the joint that I wageslave for. We have fun, but I wear enough different hats there that some duties fall by the wayside. The site hadn't been updated in a very long time (couple of months, at least), there are new products to promote, and ETS is going to the BICSI show in Orlando, FL, running from Monday through Thursday. All of this needed to go up, and I really wanted to remove all the table action from the site, modify some of the images to load a little quicker, and present just a hair better. Now...

OK, what I like, first (though I really wanted to do things the other way round). It downloaded the whole site for me, replicating the (simple) directory structure. Drag-n-drop works really well in this product. And since I was applying new structure, and dropping the old bits into the new format, this was easy. The publish went fine. I am not doing anything fancy with the site - it is a fast, static page site - no e-Commerce as yet, no dynamic page service, though that is coming.

Now, what I hate ... not necessarily about Frontpage, but about WYSIWYG editors in general. All of them make assumptions about what I, the author, want done in terms of internal coding to make things sort of look the way I want them to. In it's favor, FP is far better than NS Composer is. A drawback is that I can't do some things. It appears to be impossible to use a WYSIWYG editor (and I have used a few) to make a page that looks the same in Navigator and in IE. I have tried. Only reasonable success I have had is with hand coding. If I must handcode, then I do so from scratch. I am probably stuck with FP now for the ETS site, because I have mucked it up with MSTML code. Extrication will not be trivial. This is probably acceptable, since ETS is currently a Win shop, and with some upcoming server exceptions, is liable to remain that way.

Bob tells me that my sense of humor today was especially tasteless, even for me (as regards the Swiss plane downing). Well, I certainly don't try to go out of my way to avoid offending people, but nor do I normally target something and say "Time to be offensive." I guess that my comedic training was morbid, rather than obscene, though some would equate the two. I make jokes about death. Just a bad habit I guess, learn'd at Monty Python's knee. Several people did laugh, a few groaned. Sorry, Bob.

I had a nice, but brief, chatter telephonically with Shawn today. He had run afoul of a program on his Linux box that he needed to compile, and was running into structural difficulties with the organization of the expanded tarball. Mostly when you have expanded a tarball, you just need to cd into the top of the resultant tree, then type

./configure
make
su ...
make install
exit

Hola. I have no way of knowing if you can see this, as my outgoing connection currently appears to be dead. I have one thing to try, off of Marcia's machine, Scotty. Well, dialup works, and the systems status page at Pacbell appears to be OK - something here has changed. More later.

07:45... The system appears to be up again - it was a SF Bay Area DSL problem, according to the PBI system summary page. I am home late this morning, waiting for the printer to open. ETS is having some more brochures printed, and they need to ship out to Orlando today, so I wait, and pick them up when they are done. Now for the email... Hmmm. Anyway, I find it amusing that the Gates-Ballmer thing is appearing in so many different categories of the news, the only one I can't seem to find reference in is . . . Entertainment, where it belongs. Happy Friday.

Bow down unto the clue-free. The MPAA and 8 studios today filed suit in Federal Courts to stop 4 individuals from publishing the DeCSS code on their sites (C|Net story here). They have been unable to figure out that the barn has burned, the dog has died, the crops have failed and the song ended long ago. Elvis has left the building. Almost everyone who currently has a copy of Linux running has a copy of the code. Many kids have been drawn to the Windows version by all the publicity granted by the 'offended' parties. I thing Jerry said it best (paraphrasing here) - The internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. Certainly the spread of the code accelerated madly as a result of the DVD CCA actions in San Jose. This merely turns up the velocity on the metaphorical Santa Ana winds fanning the flames.

This will become one of those open secrets, like strong encryption. Sure you can get it, but you have to go to an offshore site to fetch it. If you want strong encryption for your Linux kernel, I would say, go to kerneli.org, but their NS lookup appears to be failing just now. For another instance, 'free' ssh tools are only available for download from Norwegian and Finnish sites.

If you've been paying attention, then you know that the Flu from Hell is still burning its way across the Daynotes landscape. People have taken to getting excuse notes from Jim Crider. HA! No mercy. I had the dang bug in one mutant form after another for at least 6 weeks, and I am not counting it out, yet. Sigh.

Other places of interest that I want to publish before I forget... Cedomir Igaly's SSH Page is a site where you can pick up an SSH client for Windows compatible with your Linux based 1.2.27 client. There are commercial clients and daemons available, but if you're a hobbyist, as I am, then free is good. Bruce Eckel has the final version of his Thinking in C++, 2nd Ed., Vol. 1, posted in HTML format. Other than final edits, this is apparently the version going to the printers. I have been tracking this project for about a year now. Useful as an online resource, I think that it will be well complemented by a dead-tree-ware version. Then Volume 2. Wow, do I ever have too much to read, eh? Better get something productive going. Later.


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A question of balance (with a tip-o-the-hat to the Moody Blues) is my topic of the morning. The balance in question is how much help to offer the newbie in a newsgroup or mailing list. Bear in mind that in most topics, I rate between a newbie and the village idiot, but I do think about the issues involved (and yes, self-deprecating humor is high art in some circles). Although these issues apply in many areas of human endeavor, from parenting through particle physics, and beyond in all (currently) 11 dimensions, I am going to focus on, oh, let's say, Linux (for some odd reason).

There are several types of questions, and these are able to be rated on a couple of sliding scales. These scales relate to actual difficulty of the problem in question, the ease of acquiring the information required to solve the problem, and the challenge of applying the information so gained. An easy question might be How do I change my password?, but with a little context, it becomes a much more difficult challenge How do I change my password, I've forgotten it and I can't log in? Different, eh? Yes, but some people have been known to write in the first question (or an equivalent), while working in the second context (or an equivalent).

Now the next trick - is this actually a newbie writing, or a lazy person, who hasn't taken the time to pay attention to the newsgroup or mailing list except when (s)he has a question in the queue. Most questions are asked again and again, in one form or another. For example, I have seen question after question posted on one of the mailing lists to which I subscribe, all by the same individual. These questions are often variations on a theme. The answers started out very helpful, with responses ranging from Given these circumstances, and if that is true, here is your answer. to Here are pointers to the three most useful online resources for this question, and here's a couple of tips in solving it yourself. After a while, the quality of responses became slightly more terse, for instance Have you checked the archive (or the FAQ) for the answer? It is there. or simply RTFM!!!. Over time, it became painfully obvious that this person wasn't interested in learning, but was using the list as a brain trust to get her job done, without actually learning anything, nor trying to generalize or apply previous knowledge to at least ask more intelligent questions. Today, it is known that many denizens of the list simply killfile (filter rules to trash) any traffic from that person.

Another aspect of the scale results from the existing level of knowledge. It is clear that someone who writes in, saying that I have just blown away my windows partition upon booting into (say) OpenLinux, please help me, I am probably OK with that, but how do I do anything useful right now today? is like finding yourself in possession of a toddler, just learning to walk and speak. If you are a seriously ill and deranged person, you teach them to talk and walk wrong, just 'cause you can! But most right thinking individuals attempt to help guide and coddle these souls for a while, bringing them away from the dark side, into the light.

What prompted this today is someone writing in, saying (in effect), here are the names of the three major price points of the RH Linux distribution (6.1, 6.1 Deluxe and 6.1 Professional), what are the differences between the product levels, etc. This was submitted to an admin mailing list. Clearly a clue-challenged individual. One reasonably intolerable behaviour is asking questions that are very easy to resolve through online research that takes less time than writing the question did. Sometimes that type of question is a troll, designed to start a flamewar. Other times it is simply an idiot. Rarely, it is the cry in the wilderness of someone who really doesn't know what's going on. This question was repeated twice with no answer given by the time I read them. So, I pop over to the RH site, drill down into the store|products area, snaffle up the URL, and post that in a reply, suggesting that the web is our friend. This is the nicest way to say, Do your own basic research, don't make us do it for you! If you still don't understand, then ask your question with lots of contextual information.

Subject: Newbies, trolls, and the like
   Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 11:45:27 -0600
   From: Dave Farquhar [[email protected]]
     To: [email protected]

Ah, an age old question resurfaces. Rather like the problems Bob Thompson 
has with people asking 47 questions about networking, complete answers to 
which would easily fill a nice-sized book. Or like the problems I had a few 
months ago with a systems integrator asking the same questions over and 
over and basically, as you say, not learning much along the way and using 
the Internet as braintrust to get a job done.

To me, posting a question in a public forum is almost an admission of 
defeat: I've played around with it and haven't found anything, I've checked 
available books on the subject, I've searched the Web with at least 
Altavista and Google, I've searched the Usenet archives at DejaNews, I've 
asked my colleagues in the bullpen or in the cubicle farm, and I still 
don't have an answer. Obviously people need to admit defeat sometimes or we 
wouldn't have this great knowledge base in the Web and Usenet to turn to. 
But I agree, questions like, "How do I change my password?" are pretty 
ridiculous. If you're asking questions like that, you desperately need to 
pick up a Linux book, any Linux book, and read it first.

There are plenty of books out there that talk about research methods using 
the Internet; maybe when people say RTFM, they should add "and this 
book..." and insert a random Internet research title.

Dave

The following is in response to Dave Farquhar...

Whew. Thanks for the feedback. Troubling problem, from time to time, and more like parenting than I would like to think.

Been busy building a mirror of Daynotes, should iTool account become defuncted by the hosting individual, eh? Tom asked me to mirror, and it's up, though not exact - not a scrap of MS or ASP in the lot, now, but 5 hours of scratch labor building it.

<<daynotes>> - Feedback when you get a chance, thanks, brian

That's the last thing we need, is to be parents to the world of trolls, 
newbies and spammers. Yikes, that'd be a really vicious curse, wouldn't it? 
A horde of newbies, trolls and spammers to you!

The page looks good. No MS crap in there, which is good. Makes it 
completely and totally portable, so users can even save the page to their 
local drive and use it from there.

I'm not so wild about that shade of green, but I also realize it's very 
easy to sit back and criticize when I haven't had any involvement in the 
creation of something. Plain old unexotic red and green (what, #ff0000 and 
#00ff00?) look good against black. The muted blue looks good I think, and 
the brown looks good. Whether it's really worth going in and changing all 
those HTML tags by hand is another question, and the answer to that is 
probably no. I do like most of the minor changes you made, like the 
pointers indicating where you are. That's a nice touch.

We could really use a logo, if one of us were to sit down and design one. I 
might be able to once I switch to writing full-time... Do you do much 
graphic design? I did one that looked pretty good I thought, but I ended up 
using the same concept for my own, so using that logo wouldn't look so good 
now. I'll have to look at what other novelty fonts I have.

Dave

Subject: DN mirror
   Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 18:24:40 -0500
   From: Robert Bruce Thompson
     To: [email protected]

Hey, nice mirror. I actually like the neon/dayglo color scheme.
 
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

Our friend and ex-neighbor Heather (pictured at right), was in town for a visit. She moved back to Colorado this last summer, and was here to visit friends, etc., as well as surprise the heck out of Greg, her former apartment-mate. Greg was apparently the only person in the valley who *didn't* know she was going to be in town.

After Heather left, we got organized and went to see Galaxy Quest, with Tim Allen, Sig Weaver and Alan Rickman. Wonderful romp. Very fun. Three tentacles up. I went in looking for a laugh, and found some story to accompany. Odd, in juxtaposition to the way Bill Shatner is pimping Priceline.com these days. Talk about scary. If they found that film, I would find it scarier than the Blair Witch Project. Wheeeeehah. G'night.


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Good Morning. Last night, not so late by my time, quite late by Dave's time, Mr. Farquhar and I were talking about logo's and such. I whipped out a little something and sent it around, Dave came back with some other variations, and seemed to like what I had initially come up with. This morning Bo chimed in, that as a start page, speed of loading is everything, and we ought not have a graphic on the daynotes home page. I see his point, and since the <<daynotes page>> is, more or less our commons, as it were, all of us should agree on it's features.

For the colours of the linked text, there is some debate. Certainly for me, the default blue and purple are too dark to be easily read against a black background - those colors were designed for viewing against white or other light colors. The primary Green and Red look OK, per Dave's (see his bio page) suggestion. I tried initially to pick some colors that weren't too rough on the eye, and that I could read easily against black. So far the voting is running 2 - 1 for keeping the mirror link colours as currently set.

Back on the subject of logos. Still, I liked the idea of having one (or two) so I built on my work of last night with Gimp a bit, and that yields the art you see above, right and left. The images link into the mirror here, and I am looking for feedback on the art and on the mirror. We are out for the afternoon and evening, so I hope that you all have a lovely day. We will.


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