August 2002 Archives

One of the senior WRIfolk—to whom the phrase more money than sense just might apply—has obtained three and a half pounds of metallic sodium, which he plans to heave into a pond for the amusement of his co-workers.

Be sure to check the classifieds: if the Illinois EPA gives its approval for this stunt, a number of positions at WRI might become suddenly—explosively?—vacant. Exactly how many depends on the body count.

The XHTML saga continues: Mozilla 0.9.4 renders my test XHTML file correctly whether end-of-line is LF or CR+LF.

But wait, there's more: if I remove the CityDesk comment

<!-- Published by Fog Creek Software CityDesk ... -->

from the beginning of the CR+LF version of my test file, Internet Explorer renders it correctly. It seems I have two options:

• Persuade CityDesk to do ascii uploads of articles;
• Persuade CityDesk not to insert its Published by comment.

Neither of these seems very likely to occur.

Poking around in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, I read:

> Who started the fashion of writing essays titled "<pet-hate/> considered
> harmful" anyway?

The origins of this turn of phrase are almost certainly lost in the dim
distant past of the Internet.

I don't know that 1968, when Dijkstra's paper Go To Statement Considered Harmful was published, counts as the ‘dim, distant past’.

Well, well—no baseball strike after all. I was looking forward to the peace & quiet. Maybe next year!

Jacob understands more and more of what he hears. I can say, "Jake, where's your dinosaur?" and he'll bring it to me. He also likes to slide down his slide: he'll climb the steps, slide down, then run back around and do it again.

He'll be seventeen months old on Sunday. Hard to believe.

Dentist visit this morning; seems I have a cavity, so I'll be going back next week to get a filling.

Poor Jake, sent home from daycare for being "grumpy".

XHTML mystery solved, sort of: if the HTML file received from the web server has CR+LF end-of-line characters, Internet Explorer fails to recognize it as HTML, and renders it as XML. CityDesk does binary uploads when publishing, hence the problem. Maybe there's some way to tell it to use ascii uploads for HTML files.

www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1 says that CR and LF both count as whitespace, so it shouldn't matter whether CityDesk does ascii or binary uploads. And it doesn't matter whether a local XHTML file has CR+LF or LF; only files received from a web server are affected. Interesting.

The Internet Anagram Server is www.wordsmith.org/anagram. If, like me, you have trouble remembering this, it's better to use Google to find it: if you start guessing, say, www.anagram.com or www.anagram.org, you will quickly find yourself in an endless storm of pop-up ads that regenerate whenever you try to close them.

Very annoying. I had to unplug the network cable to stop it. Now both sites—I don't know which was responsible, and I don't care—are in my Restricted Sites list. Not that I'll ever go back on purpose, mind.

[All right, I overreacted. Anagram Laboratories, at www.anagram.com, is a security consulting firm in Palo Alto. It's the perpetrators of www.anagram.org who deserve a thermite enema.]

Tried making the main index page XHTML compliant; it got past the validator just fine, but Internet Explorer insisted on presenting it as an XML document instead of HTML. Um...that's not at all what I wanted. I'll have to try again when I have more time.

The RIAA paid for a survey of music downloading vs. buying. The results:

The percentages, taken at face value, don't support the RIAA's piracy is everywhere whining: regardless of their downloading habits, the majority of those surveyed maintained or increased their purchasing over the last six months. How does that prove that piracy hurts record sales?

The survey would also be more helpful if it gave totals for each column. Of the 860 people surveyed, how many are downloading more now than they did six months ago? Perhaps this information was buried somewhere in the supporting charts, but I doubt it.

Poor Jake, crashed into something solid at daycare today: he has a big scratch on his nose. Doesn't seem to bother him any.

Interesting spam in my inbox this morning. It tried very hard to look like a bounced message:

Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 12:53:24 -0400
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON@nsl.2ll2ll.com>
To: <price@wri.com>
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure)

Nice try, vermin.

(It's amusing to read interviews with spammers. They whine about how difficult & expensive it is to find ways around the increasingly clever spam filters people are using. Get a clue—nobody wants spam. Give it up, and find honest work.)

Poked around a bit on the IRS web site, www.irs.gov, looking for instructions to calculate withholding. I don't mean the W-4, I mean the algorithm for calculating the dollar amount to withhold, given a gross income and a W-4. I found the W-4 form, I found a fifty-page document explaining how to fill out the W-4, but nothing even close to what I was looking for.

Tried to look at the internal web page for the Finance Dept. at good old WRI, figuring it would be full of useful information; it may be, but it seems non-Finance people aren't allowed to see any of it. Thanks a lot.

The modem connection is reliable enough—so long as I don't have an ssh session open to WRI. Curiouser and curiouser.

Took out the Unicode em-dash thingies I added a few days ago. I'm not convinced they work everywhere they should.

It's been said that the phrase "I'm not stupid" is never spoken except in demonstration of its own falsehood; I suspect that "I know what I saw" is another, especially when applied to things like flying saucers, ghosts, etc.

Took Jacob to the Sweet Corn Festival. A good time was had by all, the high point being Jake's visit to the petting zoo. The pony ride from Taste of Champaign was there; alas, poor Jake is still too small to ride a pony.

Suddenly—3:00pm—it's raining, and poor Mr. Modem can't keep the connection alive to EarthLink. (Coincidence?) No more web-reading for me.

I've been poking around diveintoaccessibility.org, and coming to the conclusion that maybe I need to upgrade my HTML a little.

Fun with genealogy: it seems that Leroy Burkhardt, the grandson of my great-great-great-grandparents Jacob & Barbara Burkhardt, lived in Hobart, Indiana, in 1944.

Hobart is next to East Gary—excuse me, Lake Station—so perhaps my first cousin three times removed and I were there at the same time. (Unlikely, unless Leroy lived to be 80 or 90, and stayed in Hobart another thirty years.)

EarthLink not very reliable tonight: it's dropped the connection eight times in the last half-hour.

Slate says:

...the music of 'N Sync and Britney Spears is not unlike disco: Both are intellectually underachieving, cookie-cutter styles that have made stars of performers not known primarily for their skills as singers, songwriters, or musicians.

This is, as they used to say in PLATO-land, TRVTH.

The journalists are running out of things to write about, and so have begun writing about each other. MSNBC says:

Wired...implies that the blog's fifteen minutes is already over now that traditional media like Newsweek and USA Today have started blogging, too.

If this were a blog—it isn't—and if I were doing it because other people are, too—I'm not—then I might move on to the Next Big Thing with all the trendy clones.

I do wonder, sometimes, about the Daybook's long-term prospects. Technology changes so rapidly, it's a sure bet that I won't be using CityDesk, or even HTML, for very long. (It might be a long time in Internet years, but laid against the arc of an entire lifetime a few years is scarcely more than an eyeblink.) What will come after?

Cool iPAQ accessory: a dual-slot expansion sleeve. If I had one, I could keep a memory card in one slot and the Socket phone card in the other.

I see that Microsoft Press is offering a 20th Anniversary Edition of Van Wolveron's Running MS-DOS. Um...why? It's hard to imagine getting all soggy with nostalgia over config.sys, autoexec.bat, fooling around with loadhigh to load device drivers & whatnot into high memory so as to squeeze as much free space as possible out of the first 640KB.

I haven't used MS-DOS since Windows NT 3.5 was released, back in 1994. I don't miss it.

More geekstuff: the Smart Device Extensions and .NET Compact Framework—once Microsoft ships the thing—will let me do .NET development for the iPAQ.

(I must remember to visit www.gotdotnet.com more often.)

Poor Jacob, he has a bit of a runny nose. I hope he isn't getting sick again.

Listened this afternoon to Auberge, by Chris Rea, and heard:

You can waste a whole lifetime
Trying to be
What you think is expected of you
But you'll never be free

May as well go fishing

Thunderstorms last night, beginning around 2:45am.

From an MSNBC article:

There are endless personal journals...exposing thoughts and experiences that range from the somewhat profound to the stultifyingly banal.

That's me—stultifyingly banal.

(I've noticed that online news articles seldom contain links to other web sites, even when the other site is the subject of the article. The news sites don't want you to leave: they've already sold you to their advertisers, and so journalism loses to capitalism.)

Hm...Wil Wheaton not only has a web site—www.wilwheaton.net—he has an online store. Perhaps I will buy a few of his coffee cups. Seems like I need a collection of interesting mugs.

Self-portrait in hyphenation: under-rested, over-stressed, foul-tempered...generally unfit to be around other human beings. At least Jacob still smiles when he sees me.

Rather chilly this evening—66° at 8:00pm. Very autumnal.

When casinos started popping up on reservations, genealogy suddenly became very popular: prove a connection to the tribe, get a cut of the profits. Should the notion of reparations for slavery ever make it through Congress, I suspect most of America will turn out to be descendants of slaves, thus deserving of federal funds.

Looks like EarthLink's DNS servers just (9:14pm) went offline.

Had lunch on campus, to check out the Green Street renovations. Very nice, but somewhat confusing—streets that have been one-way for the last twenty years are suddenly two-way, but only sometimes. Some streets are still one-way, but the other way.

The Quad looks much the same as it did twenty years ago. Jake was fascinated with the Auditorium steps, and climbed all the way to the top by himself. (He also protested mightily when I carried him down: he wanted to stay up there.)

Here's a picture of Jacob. It was taken on the 3rd, but only today did I figure out the new image software—Easy Thumbnails 1.8c, Fookes Software, www.fookes.com—well enough to convert the digital camera images to something web-ready.

Saw the word snuck in a newspaper headline this afternoon. I haven't been in an English class since 1979, but when I was, snuck was one of those colloquialisms, like hisself or y'all, that educated people did not use.

I have the notion to replace the hard-coded HTML of the daybook calendars with some JavaScript. That would certainly save time & effort.

The Book-of-the-Month Club tells me that I have six (count 'em, six) Bonus Points I can use now. I used to have ninety-eight book-dividend credits, before they discontinued that program (on the grounds that frequent-buyer points were just too confusing & troublesome); I don't doubt that if I accumulate too many Bonus Points they'll find some way to swindle me out of those as well.

Tried making tea in the coffeemaker. It produced something that looked like tea, smelled like tea—but was too bitter to drink. I suppose I could keep experimenting, but my tea supply is too low just now to waste any.

Another crock-pot project: apple butter. Fill the crock pot with a bunch of applesauce, a few cups of sugar, a little cinnamon & ground cloves; cook until done. I just hope it doesn't end up a charred, smoking ruin like the oatmeal did (twice!).

Stayed up too late, but finished reading The Road to Science Fiction, Volume 3: From Heinlein to Here. I started reading it in May, which works out to less than six pages per day.

Thunderstorms this morning (at 4:30am). Sputnik recorded just over an inch of rain, for which the lawn is grateful.

Seems there's to be another baseball strike, on August 30th. I haven't watched baseball since Don Kessinger played shortstop for the Cubs, so it's difficult to care.

(Don's in real estate these days: www.kessingerrealestate.com.)

The other day, I read a Linux World article that compared ease-of-installation of Windows 2000 vs. Red Hat Linux 7.3. What a surprise, Linux won.

Someone who's had significant experience installing both, and who has no particular bias toward either, might have written a fair comparison; but would a Linux publication have run it?

Internet Explorer annoys me in two ways:

• Whenever I open a second window, it is positioned a few pixels below and to the right of the first one. Since I usually set browser windows to the same height as the screen, this means new windows gradually creep off-screen. I can tell the Windows command shell to always open at (79,0) & 80 columns by 66 rows, but I have no such control over IE.
• The status bar at the bottom of the browser window keeps disappearing. I suspect—but have no proof—that this is due to control-freak web page designers who think they know better than I do how my software should work. I want the status bar on, all the time, and I don't want random JavaScript coders monkeying with it.
• There's no way to disable pop-up ads. (I suspect the reason for this is quite similar to the reason why I can't have my telephone reject calls from telemarketers: customers be damned, there's money to be made!)

I guess that's three. Sorry.

[In the news: Mozilla 1.0 has a pop-up killer built in, but Netscape 7.0—which is based on Mozilla—does not, presumably because AOL needs the ad revenue.]

Red Hat Linux provides all sorts of cool GUI system-administration tools—unfortunately, one must log in as root to use them. The Linux machines at WRI are too locked-down for that, which means I have to find command-line equivalents for everything. This is quite painful.

Very tired lately. A vacation would be nice.

In grocery stores, checkers younger than 21 aren't allowed to scan alcohol, and so everyone in line waits for a legal adult to amble over and take care of it.

But I wonder: who decided that dragging a bottle across the UPC scanner should be the specific action forbidden to the under-21 set? Voiding an item from the purchase also requires a UPC scan; is that allowed?

Local football fans are in a lather: the Bears are in town for the season while Soldier Field gets a few more skyboxes tacked on. I'd just avoid that part of town, but WRI is less than a mile from the stadium. Hello, traffic jam.

Sometime in the last few days, the Internet Explorer icon disappeared from my desktop. I don't miss it—I launch IE from the QuickLaunch bar, or by typing a URL in the Run dialog—but I'm curious what happened to it.

[As of October 2, 2002, the IE desktop icon has mysteriously reappeared. I'm sure I didn't do anything to summon it.]

Jacob was heard to say mommy today—though never when I was around.

He doesn't like the sprinkler. He cries whenever he gets too close to it, and when he gets rained on—which happened this evening—he howls. Poor little guy. The daycare ladies tell us that he loves the wading pool they have. So what's wrong with lawn sprinklers?

A brief rant: the next person to announce, smugly, that...

The Constitution does not contain the phrase, “separation of church and state.”

...by which they mean that their particular sect should be the Official Faith of the Nation—The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.—and all others should be tolerated only so long as they don't get uppity, will be bludgeoned with a spoiled halibut.

Useful web site: www.usconstitution.net. All you ever wanted to know about the Constitution.

Finally got around to setting up the iPAQ again (the old partnership having been lost when I reinstalled Windows on nessus). Installing ActiveSync as Administrator doesn't work too well; after fooling with it for a while, I uninstalled it. Then I—again—gave myself Admin privileges, reinstalled, set up the partnership, did the initial synchronization, then revoked Admin privileges.

An experiment: a newer version of Personal Vehicle Manager. The old version, which I tried last November, didn't work too well; perhaps this one is better.

I've been slogging through Petzold's C# book. As a means of writing Windows applications, the whole C#/.NET thing is actually quite nice. The Win32 API has an alarmingly ad-hoc nature that makes it very hard to learn, but the Windows Forms class library seems a vast improvement.

(I know, I said rude things about .NET when it was first announced. And I frequently rant about Microsoft's evil ways. But I'll be using Windows into the foreseeable future, so I might as well learn what I can about it.)

Morwen B. Thistlethwaite has a web site: www.math.utk.edu/~morwen/. Nothing there about Rubik's Cube; it's all knots and photos of Knoxville.

I'm searching for a cube-solving algorithm, because Jacob has scrambled mine and I'm too lazy to figure out on my own how to solve it.

(Twenty years ago, I was quite speedy at cube-solving. I vaguely recall that my best time was slightly under two minutes, but I could be wrong about that. Alas, I have forgotten all the transforms.)

Jake & I had the evening to ourselves, Jennifer having dinner & a movie with some friends. We watched some television, played with some blocks, went for a walk around the neighborhood: the usual. Now (9:09pm) he's sleeping and I have a few minutes to blather in the daybook.

Edsger Dijkstra has died. Sigh.

I use a half-dozen programming languages in the course of a normal day: cmd (aka the Windows command shell), C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, sh, VBScript. (All right, that's ten. But some of them aren't real programming languages, and some of them I don't really use every day. Work with me on this.) I've come to realize that the language doesn't matter very much.

I suppose it matters a little—you wouldn't implement a disk defragmenter in PHP—but the really important part is the library (aka the class library, the framework, etc., etc.). The language is just a means to invoke library functions; a program is mostly other peoples' code, with a little glue holding it together.

I used to think it would be fun to create my own language. I'm conceited enough to think I could design a good one. But implementing the necessary class libraries is just drudgework. “Look at me! I've just implemented scrollbars!” No thanks.

(Sub-rant: scrollbars are a solved problem. If your project requires you to re-implement them, you're doing something wrong.)

Various of the loyal readership have taken pains recently to point out which topics in the daybook they never read. The implication is that I needn't bother to write about such things: no one cares.

I care.

According to www.deleteddomains.com, www.RentAChicken.com is available. Maybe I should snap it up, and move these pages there.

There are web sites out there whose writers crank out a dozen meaty paragraphs every single day. Where do they find the time?

Big party. Fun, but exhausting.

Big problem: seems like every program I start causes the Office 2000 installer to launch. It trundles a bit, then falls over. Each time, the event log gets a few more of these:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: MsiInstaller
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1004
Date: 8/3/2002
Time: 3:33:10 PM
User: N/A
Computer: NESSUS
Description:
Detection of product '{00000409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}',
feature 'OfficeUserData', component
'{C9AF9050-C8BE-11D1-9C67-0000F81F1B38}' failed.  The resource
'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\UserData'
does not exist.

Knowledge Base article Q298385 tries to blame this on me: seems I installed & ran a non-Microsoft program before running any of the Office programs I installed.

Made myself an Administrator long enough for the Office installer to create the registry keys that were missing; all is well. (Good thing, too: the next step would have been to completely remove & reinstall Office, which would have been a pain and a half.)

(Funny how most problems with Microsoft's products can be fixed by the judicious granting of Administrator privileges. It makes me wonder whether the people who write their installers really understand the Windows NT/2000/XP security model. Probably not.)

Jake's vocabulary is increasing: he says Daddy sometimes, he's obsessed with bubbles, and just tonight he was heard to say baby. Clever lad, is our Jacob.

Two months ago, I received a complimentary copy of Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science [Copyright © 2002 Stephen Wolfram, LLC], as a reward for seventeen months of shepherding along the somewhat fragile process that turns the FrameMaker source document into printer-ready Adobe Acrobat files. I've been reading it in my spare time.

And in my reading, I have come to realize that a new kind of grammar is possible. And indeed, I have discovered that this new kind of grammar is being used in Stephen's book. For while common intuition is to avoid beginning each sentence with a conjunction, or with phrases such as “For while...”, in this new kind of grammar I have discovered it is commonplace. And one might in time come to believe that this practice, coupled with the frequent use of appositives contributing very little to the sentence containing them, is mandatory.

[He'll probably fire me for this.]

The computer is again operational (more or less), following installation of a 60GB hard disk (the 20GB disk is still present, and will be hosting the Linux setup, one of these days). The total downtime was approximately 100 hours.

There are still problems, but I am dealing with them as I can.

I have read that:

...the end is reasonably nigh for Iran's long nightmare of theocratic fascism.

I have also read that:

[The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia] Prince Abdullah could face a palace coup from elements within the royal family sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

I suppose both could happen, but it seems unlikely.