EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I will respect that. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

Morning. I've had to think a bit already, always trying before my first cup of joe. We're going round and round about Windows 95 and the x86 HLT instruction - there actually are tools to help CPU's run cooler under the Win9x family - check out WinCooler and look for equivalent tools at ZDnet Downloads. Interesting - I had heard of this in passing, but never really regarded it until someone brought the subject up for the second time in as many weeks - then the old gray cells fired off. Call it providence if you will.

More PBI follies - do you suppose they're actually paying someone to do this? They can't send me the mail, and they can't spell our last name correctly. Bah...

Subject: Re :  A brief question...
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 10:08:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]


 Hello User   Marcia Bilbery,
I have received your email regarding the system status updates. System
status will display a new update every two hours.  At times when updates
are more frequent due to changing issues the older status will drop off
the list. 

Thank you for choosing South Western Bell Internet Services.

Regards,

john
Technical Analyst
PacBell Internet Services

Try our online help at  HTTP://support.swbell.net
Remember its quick, hassle free, and is always available!

Subject: case number 6592906 (was: A brief question.)
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 11:29:15 -0700
From: Brian Bilbrey 
Organization: Orb Designs
To: [email protected], [email protected]

Please read this *whole* message, and the preceding chain. Thanks.

********************

Ummm. No. Whoever "John" is ought to actually investigate the question
rather than hitting stock response #546 macro (or whatever). The outage
occurred on 06/23 (Friday) in the early morning. 

When I first checked the status page, approximately 06:45am, the updates
extended back into 06/22 (Thursday), and there was no problem message
(though there clearly was a problem - mail could not be sent).

When I checked the status page again, around 08:00am, there was an
impaired message, stamped 05:03 6/23. Hmmm. A pre-timestamped message.
At this point in time, the list of status messages still extended back
into Thursday.

When I checked the status page a final time, around 10:30am, the
"Impaired" message had cleared, and the 05:03 6/23 message had been
removed from the list of status updates which *still* extended back into
Thursday.

I find it offensive that your firm can't handle legitimate (albeit
complex) questions like mine. Honestly, I'd rather have been ignored
than lied to. I presented you with the information for your benefit, not
to *really* complain, but more in wonderment that an error message
should be _extracted_ from a queue. 

Also, consider replying to the address from which this message is sent,
rather than the parent account email address. However, you need not
reply if you're only going to paste together a few stock answers and hit
send, as "John" apparently did the first time.

Less Thankful than Previously,

Brian Bilbrey.

Now to go tank up the tank, and head off to work. Later.

You may recall a couple of weeks ago, when that nice Mr. Sol fellow reminded us that he is actually a rather effective and large nuclear fusion furnace. Since that time, we've been nicely in the groove of correct summer climate for the Bay environs... Fog in the morning, mid-to-high 80's (F) in the afternoons. Comfortable, without feeling that impending doom of heat exhaustion. Heh.

Not a heck of a lot to go on about this morning - I managed to lose an email from the Warlock, sigh. I have messaged back, grovelling and making what I hope are appropriate amends and sacrifices. Normally email dropping off the side of the earth is not an issue, but JHR had requested my help with ... something ... over the weekend, and I filed the message away until I had time to think of it. Well, I thought of it, but filed it so well that it's going to be a latter-day dead sea scroll - unearthed at some distant future date. Sigh.

I have material and queries out at IDG and at Caldera, awaiting answers that will help us write the current chapter. So. Meantime, I am off to work. Hopefully the day will improve. Have a great one yourselves. Later.

Red hot tomatoes, getchyer red hot tomatoes... That is, the fruit begins to ripen, which is a good thing... as we shift into travel mode in the coming weeks, which is generally a good thing... so our neighbors get to eat our fresh tomatoes, which is... wait a minute!!!

Clearly, that last snap on the right is of comestibles which aren't generally regarded as healthy... but they work for me, hey. That's how all the writing really gets done - sugar and caffeine. Actually, I am always pleased as punch when the tomatoes start ripening each year. One is never sure when growing such large plants in such small pots - they're only in 3 to 5 gallons (vol) of soil and don't hold moisture too well, which means morning and evening watering. If there were an outside spigot, I would consider some form of drip irrigation, maybe even on a timer, but it's all handwatering work, period.

Jacob Nielsen put out another Alert Box this week, and politics and justice aside, he apparently thinks that the Microsoft.NET announcement is both significant and a signal of a paradigm shift in the focus of computing and the Internet. Interesting take - worth reading, with a few good outlinks at the bottom.

A special thanks goes out to Dan Bowman, whose Tuesday update points us to Doc Searls' weblog. Dan recommends the Sunday, 06/25 entry, as well he should.... nice, thought provoking bit of writing from one of the Clue-over-endowed among us.


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Good morning and welcome to the middle of the week. It's Wednesday hereabouts, and on Wednesdays, things are just a little... or perhaps a lot, like every other day, ::sigh::. I am sad to hear of Tom's troubles with his machines. Additionally, I have seen mail that his DNS data isn't propagating correctly. If you want to get directly to his pages on Hydras, try this link, at least for a while. The DNS servers I hook up to still point at the iTool servers. Tom's page on his local machine (the link above) has been updated twice, the iTool account not at all, so check there.

Meantime, I haven't gotten answers from ANYONE on the questions I have out there needing response in order to continue working on the Installation Chapter. I have material I can write, but I'd really rather have some definitive solutions to the few problems I've seen, rather than simply pointing out a slippery spot in the road and warning readers to avoid that one spot.

Still this morning I have to go beam at my ripening tomato fruit, and water them... oh, watering... thanks Jan.

From: Jan Swijsen
Subject: drip irrigation

>I would consider some form of drip irrigation, maybe even on a timer,
but it's all handwatering work, period.

Even if automating would be possible I would advise against it.

You can't, and if you can you shouldn't, sit behind a keyboard+screen
for more than a few hours at a time. After that you ought to get up
stretch out and refocus your eyes for a two or three minutes. Of course
you cannot do any actual work because then the pause is likely to become
too long. And you shouldn't pick up a book to read as that won't relieve
you eyes.
Watering a few pots is an ideal (eye-wrist-..) strain breaker without
being a time gobbler.


When your mouse stares back at you, its time to take a break.
--
Svenson.

Have a decent day and I'll catch y'all later on. TTFN.

The dog ate my post. Really. ::sigh::

Tom's virtual home is trying really, really hard to migrate over to Hydras. Mail appears to be going there, though I can't be totally sure all the time. Earlier I was resolving to 142.165.206.61, now when I point to syroidmanor.com, I get the iTool servers again. Weird.

Anyway, I had written up most of this afternoon update when I went to play over on Grendel for minute. I did something that popped eth1 for just a moment, and the connection dropped - losing my partially written post. There's still good news though - Elian has gone home. America comes out of another challenge looking and smelling like dog crap, Castro gets political miles out of the whole thing, and the kid's mom, who died trying to bring the youngster here, has been firmly piddled on. Fooey. Only cost a few million though. Much better than the continuing Special Prosecution that has yet to convict anyone of anything, after spending more than $50 mil. You'd think for that kind of money they could have pinned something on someone, or fixed a judge, or something, eh?

From the mailbag... a befaddlement at first until I picked up on the belated context:

Subject: noisy kbd
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 15:15:47 -0400
From: jeff b.

hi brian,

what was the conclusion and resolution on the keyboard ultimatum? I really
like the model M like you were using. I have several as backups and for
repairs. One of the second choices in the microchannel PS/2 newsgroup is the
Apple extended keyboardII. The one that retails for over $100--not any of
the recent junk. I guess this not an option for you but it is very nice and
it lasts. Thier first choice? The trusty vintage non-Lexmark model M of IBM
of course.

best regards,
jeffrey

> She does hate the sound of this 52G9700 IBM Keyboard though. It is my
> emergency backup keyboard, pressed into frontline service through the failure
> of a second Gateway keyboard. Only complaint I have about Gateway, actually. I
> am tough on keyboards, though. Looking for recommendations by email tonight or
> tomorrow morning though, as a new keyboard, quiet enough for her taste, solid
> enough for mine, has been mandated and will be acquired on Tuesday sometime.

Hi Jeff.

Wow, confused me for a moment - I had to set the way-back machine for December.
Yup. My personal preferences lie in the same direction as Dr. Pournelle's (as far
as keyboards go) - Northgate from here to eternity and back again, at least until I
can get that direct neural tap.

However, the compromise solution about two days later was a Logitech keyboard.
Reasonably well built, fairly firm action, a little bit of mush at the bottom of
each stroke, but it cuts down considerably on the noise. I have been putting in
yeoman's hours on that puppy, too, and it hasn't even quivered.

Thanks for dropping by *and* dropping a note!

On that note, I am going to prepare some food, then work on Chapter Three. Without any feedback, I can't wait any longer. This needs to be done soon, and I will write based on what works, not what should work if everything in the installer ran as advertised. Tiara Smeagôl.


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Morning. My eyeballs feel like they are about to become prolapsed. Dunno why, I was a-bed by 11-ish. Ah, well. I struggled with a couple more pages of text into Installation, re-read ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar for inspiration, downloaded and burned both discs of Mandrake 7.1. The burning went just fine. I finally remembered to check in the device manager, and by gum, those IDE channels were set to PIO mode. Popped them over to DMA and the CPU load from burning went to 2%. Heehaw. I had applied the optimization to my Linux boots on this machine, but kept forgetting to do so on the Win2K setup.

Other than that, there's really nothing terribly exciting on at the moment. I think I'll go play farmer for a minute, then pop over to work. Have a revision of a new product to design today. TTFN.


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TGIF (Thank Gorkon It's Friday), and indeed it is. The traffic was rather light, not surprisingly, since there are always a significant percentange of people who will take an extra day at the other end, just to stretch a long weekend just a little longer. Not I... Whaddaya mean, "What traffic???". I am already at work - my early time this AM was spent on email rather than update. Had an interesting "conversation" with JHR yesterday - we'll see, since my longwinded round three of yesterday evening didn't make it into his update today...

For those of you that follow Jerry's pages (clearly a dramatic superset *in size* of the high quality readership around this joynt), there was a bump for registration at the Byte site...

I am a Jerry Pournelle fan. I am also a Byte fan. I was sad to see the dead treeware version, even in it's latter day, content-emaciated condition, go the way of the Dodo. I was pleased as punch when Byte online put in an appearance - and have been there every week since. I've been introduced to Trevor Marshall, Moshe Bar and many other fine writers and coders as a result of the online presence of Byte. So off I head, at Jerry's request, to register for the site. I figure that qualified eyeballs get them better advertising rates, which will better support the staff and content providers.

When I got there, after a bit of hunting around, I find that there's no actual thing called registration, but there is "Sign Up Now" for the newsletter at the bottom of the center column, and a similar beast in the left sidebar menu. NP. Off I go. My outgoing email last night picks up the story from there...

However, when I got to the registration page, I first hunted about
for the privacy link. Hmmm. None to be found there. I had to go out
to the Byte home page to see that Privacy links to the generic CMP
"privacy" policy page which basically promises not privacy, but that
they will collect info in this way, and that way, correlate it if
they can, and ... but no promises not to sell, use or abuse. They do
talk about opting out of certain types of advertorial emailings, but
when I went back to the subscribe/registration page, no such opt out
(or in) was available...

So I did the next best thing. Being in possession of my very own
mailserver, I ssh'd into Grendel, created a new user account with no
login privileges, no home directory and no shell. Said new user does
have an email alias, however, which I have forwarded into my main
user account.  It will, however be parsable, and is a brand-spanking
new qualified address. It'll be interesting to see what CMP does
with it.  Besides send me the byte newsletter, I mean. 

The true end of the story is that what Jerry was referring to (as you probably already know if you've been to Chaos Manor in the last few hours) as registration is not yet actually implemented. So don't bother if you don't want to (for the time being)

In other news, I think I learned a couple of interesting things about the partition manager built into the Caldera 2.4 eDesktop installer last night - I am quite ready to write about them now, as is (finally), but would much rather talk to Caldera first, if only they'd return calls or emails. Had a nice chat with Tom last night about that and a variety of other topics.

Now to do what I am paid to be sitting here for. Catch you later.


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Briefly, briefly. Good morning. The sun is streaming in, between the blinds, blinding me, that's for sure. We're out of here and away from the machines for a little bit - back Sunday afternoon late-ish. Over on Marcia's Musings, you'll find pictures of the flowers she's gotten in the last week, from me and from someone at work (hmmm). AND a snap of the slices from our first harvested tomato. Yum.

I mostly finished out Chapter 3 yesterday - pulled together all the noodlings of the last week or so, and put together a bit of response from Caldera tech support that came in yesterday. There is a pothole to avoid in the installer, but it isn't so bad, and people who aren't me may never see this - not too many people have systems that boot Win2K + several flavors of Linux (currently 3, making Grinch a 4 OS box).

I have some thoughts on some of the interactions I have been either party to, or peripheral to, during the last week - I want to ruminate on those for a while - maybe something will come of the thinking that will spill out onto these pages. People are tricky. Got some salsa to make, then a bit of get ready and we're on the road. Later.


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And a feeble update it'll be, too. Back after a quickie trip down the coast to visit with the Bowman's on an overnight. There'll be a couple of snaps up tomorrow, but not tonight - the sun has me thrashed. Couple of bits of mail, but only a couple.

On the Mandrake front, there's a security update for wu-ftp, if you still run ftp. Additionally, there's a problem with the DHCP client. How do I know these things? I subscribe to the security update mailing list for my distribution. How about you?

Now I have some chores and system configuration bits to do - I'll see ya'll next week. TTFN!


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