Misc. Ramblings
Week of November 15th through the 19th
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Last Updated: Friday 7:00 am

Monday - November 15, 1999

Wake up! It's Monday. A quick look at the daynotes page finds most of the gang haven't updated their pages yet for this week. Hey, I said; "WAKE UP!" Get moving. I'm waiting for you guys...

Last week I went down to CompUSA to buy an HP 3300Cse scanner. It of course uses a USB port. As I mentioned earlier I installed a Viking USB modem on my wife's PC (Keiki) and think USB is the way to go. I did not change my mind when I installed the scanner next to the modem. Install the software, plug in the electricity, plug in the USB cable, and Bob's your sisters sibling. As simple as that. My wife is, even as we speak (write?) scanning everything she can get her hands on and printing it on one of our color printers (an HP 687 and an Epson Photo 700). Next up is a digital still camera. Recommended.

I saw on one of the Daynotes gang's page that Bo was reviewing several different html editors. He happened to mention the one I've been using for the last six months or so. Specifically, HTML-Kit. I like it as a page editor. I don't know if I would use it for maintaining a large site since it doesn't (as far as I know) keep track of links and such. But as far as working on individual pages, I can't think of anything better. I especially like the Preview and Tidy functions. The preview uses IE (on my system anyway) to show what your code will look like. And Tidy is a function that validates your html for compliance with the official www.w3.org specifications. This is invaluable in that any browser that is html 4.0 compatible should then be able to read your pages if you've first run the pages through the Tidy test. On the downside, it has a spell checker but it's not the best around. But still - Recommended.

Where I live there is an embarrassment of riches as far as ways to connect to the internet at home. Currently, I am using a 56K modem (usually connecting at 49K). But I also have the choice of using ADSL (GTE) or cable modem (Road Runner). Either is substantially more expensive than 56K but probably worth the speed. So, in your opinion, which is better? Operators are standing by (I always wondered what they were standing by, when they were standing by).

Well, the game is over and the Bows WIN!, the Bows WIN! Excuse my exuberance but last year the University of Hawai'i Rainbow Warriors college football team went zero for 12 (a very humbling experience). This year they are now seven and three and are co-champions in the Western Athletic Conference. Hey Dan Bowman, make sure the virtual macadamia nuts are Hawai'ian Host brand. The pound box will be fine (smile). By the way, within minutes of the end of the game coach June Jones for Governor t-shirts were seen in the parking lot of Aloha Stadium. Here! Here! As our f'irn cousins across the pond would say.

Have a good day!

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Tuesday - November 16, 1999

While channel surfing this weekend I saw "Prime Minister's Questions" on CSPAN. Much has been said about our British cousins across the pond and their political system. Most of it bad. But one of the good things, IMHO, is "Prime Minister's Questions." Sure, if you are a want to, you can spin doctor your way through it, but from what I've seen, even when doing so, the truth has a way of sneaking out anyway. And you have to give credit to the Prime Minister that he is able/willing to stand there and answer all sorts of questions raining down from the opposition ("Will the Right Honorable Prime Ministah puleze explain to us why is that the number of street sweepers in his district have increased by thrice, while at the same time spending on school 'mums in my district have fallen to new lows?") Watch it some time. Recommended.

Waiting for Netscape 5.0 is like watching grass grow in the desert. You can wait all you want but it ain't 'gonna happen anytime soon. Alpha milestone 11 is 10 days late as of yesterday and holding with various blocker bugs which keep popping up (though it will probably escape sometime Real Soon Now). Those of us who had great hopes that OpenSource would revive the fortunes of Netscape are slowly realizing that by the time "Gecko" goes gold, it will be way too late. IE will have 99% of the market at that point. You old timers out there (you know who you are) may remember using NCSA Mosaic. From that, did Navigator spring. Long live Navigator. Big Sigh.

Got Apache 1.3.9 for Win32 configured on a server here at work. I had been using MS IIS but I wanted to experiment with Apache. It's interesting that IIS uses .pl for scripts and Apache uses .cgi. This, even though the version of PERL installed (ActiveState 5.005_03) did not change. Of course, this meant changing all of my scripts both as to extension but also internally whenever a script was called - either by another script or by an html page.

There is a way of avoiding the above by changing the httpd.conf file located in /Apache/conf. You need to add the following line: AddHandler cgi-script .pl. You also need to edit the cgi scripts themselves to point to your particular installation directory. For example, #!C:\PERL\bin\perl.exe. As far as I can see, IIS does not care what directory is pointed to in the file, IIS seems to get the directory from an environment variable instead.

It would have been helpful to have read the PERL FAQ on installing in an Apache server but then, who reads the ****ing manuals anyway?

And of course, the default directory structure of each is different. IIS uses "/scripts" and Apache uses the more common "/cgi-bin." So again, one has to do a global find and replace to correct the directory changes. Of course, this is only done because I'm converting applications over from one to the other. You, OTOH, would not do such a thing. Right? Right. Choose one and stick with it. Changing over may not be worth the trouble of figuring out why everything from your page counter to chat to discussion groups to survey pages have all fallen over. On the other hand (third hand?!!!), sometimes you 'gotta do what you 'gotta do...

So, did everyone go to Comdex? I was just wondering why the Daynoters had taken so long to update their pages when it hit me out of the blue. Why of course! Maybe they all went to Comdex! Where else would everyone be this time of the year. Well, OK. Maybe not.

Have a beautiful day!

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Hump Day Wednesday - November 17, 1999

Comdex continuing coverage on many sites this week. Of course, the one I read is from Byte. You should too if you aren't already.

Changing ISP is no fun. There's so many details to try to remember and inevitably, you forget something that jumps up and bites you on the behind. But changing ISP is what I am going to do after almost 5 years to the day with HawaiiOnline (better known as aloha.net).

It all started three weeks ago when I availed myself of one of the new features aloha.net offered. Namely, an alias to my current email account. It seemed simple enough. They had a nice web interface set-up so all you had to do was point and click and voila. You had an alias. Unfortunately, it didn't work that way. The new alias was created but it didn't work. It didn't work because the ID was pointing to an account that had been used by someone else but had been subsequently closed. So while on one hand the ID was not being used now (and therefore passed that part of their script that checked for duplicate IDs), it had been before and was forever tied to a closed account. In essence, mail was being sent to a closed account. However, tech. support said they could fix this and get things working. "Hah!" I said. "We shall see." And see we did. No mail. As it turns out, tech support set things up so that all mail sent to one was redirected to the other and vice versa. But since the other was a closed account, and the open account was pointing all mail to the closed account, all mail sent was bounced back as user unknown. And for three weeks, they couldn't figure out how to fix that. In fact, one tech support person would not believe that there was any problem at all ("Well, the reason you don't have any email sir is that no one is sending anything to you."). To this day, they still can't figure out how to return things to how it was before. Being well and truly fed up with this falderal I decided to change ISPs.

So, step one is to figure out what ISP to change to. A quick scan of The List finds over 100 ISPs with points of presence in the 808 area code. OK, let's narrow that down a bit to the people who have been around at least a couple of years and have an office here. There, that's better. It's surprising how many people have opened their own ISP in the last two years. Even with Hawai'i being one of the most connected locations on earth you've got to reckon that many of these guys won't be around too much longer. So, the short list includes FlexNet and LavaNet (I actually also looked at UUNet but they are geared more towards large businesses and they never returned my email, so there). Both offer about the same range of services except for tech. support. FlexNet doesn't offer any at all. In fact, they pride themselves in deleting users who ask questions that indicate a lack of understanding (In your best Beavis imitation "Uhh, it worked on AOL, why doesn't it work here?"). OTOH, they are much cheaper. $10US/month for FlexNet versus $25US/month for LavaNet (unlimited access for both). What's more, FlexNet will host your domain for NO ADDITIONAL charge. Hmmm, which should I choose?

Having chosen FlexNet, Step Two is the really tedious part. I need to notify everyone who was sending me email to my old personal account at dkseto@aloha.net, that they should now send it to my new account (new account info. deleted here because you, gentle readers, use a completely different account (mail@seto.org) on a different ISP - 9netave.com which is not changing for now). And then, if I decide to transfer my domain from 9netave.com to FlexNet, there will be a period of probably a week or more in which access to seto.org will not be working because I would need to make the change with Network Solutions, hawk, spit formerly known as internic.net. Right now, I don't think I will be doing that because of problems with email (Hey! didn't we start this with an email problem?) with FlexNet. FlexNet offers only ONE, and don't even ask for more because you don't need no steenk'een email. But I may in the future. More as the story unfolds.

Quick Notes
The Honolulu Advertiser this morning ran a Los Angeles Times article about a woman who filed for divorce after 25 years of marriage. "So what?"; you say. Well, the reason she decided to divorce her husband is that on December 28, 1996, she won $1.3 million US from the California lottery. OK, still what's so different? It seems that she decided not to tell anyone, much less her husband or the court that she had this little asset. Unfortunately for her, her husband found out about it and Superior Court Judge Richard Denner determined that she had acted "out of fraud or malice." The end result you ask? All of the money has been awarded to her husband. All of it. Every red cent. Karma nei?

I see that Bob is talking about ADSL vs. cable modems (note that links will expire at the end of the week). I've also been thinking about that and have decided on cable modem simply because it's cheaper. By far. That is, $40/month for cable vs. $80/month for ADSL ($35 to the telco and $45 to the ISP)! It did not take me long to decide even though I would prefer ADSL, it's just not worth double the cost of a cable modem. And then there's the task of deciding which monopoly to deal with, cable or telco. Sheesh. What a choice. More when it's actually installed (December 8th).

It's all down hill from here. . .

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Down Hill Thursday - November 18, 1999

This posting is late but I don't feel bad because a quick check of the other sites show that most of them (you know who you are) have not posted either. So there.

This short exchange with Bob regarding cable modems and ADSL. I just love dealing with monopolies so when I get a chance to deal with two of them (i.e. telcos and cable)...Why, I'm in heaven. ;>

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Seto [mailto:mail@seto.org]
Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 1999 3:45 PM
To: webmaster@ttgnet.com
Subject: ADSL vs. Cable Modem

I am glad to see that you may be able to get ADSL at some point. What startles me the most is the low price. Out here in the middle of the Pacific (Hawai'i) we have to pay GTE at least $35/month for 64K up and 256K down. Then, on top of that, you have to pay another $45/month or so to your ISP. Then to top it off, there is also a maximum average usage of 4GB/month. Cable modem access, on the other hand costs about $40/month, total.

The difference between cable modem (read Road Runner) and ADSL is therefore substantial. And since no one else, other than GTE, is offering ADSL here, it's a "take it or leave it proposition." Hence, things will probably not get any better soon, cost wise. To me, this is what killed ISDN here. And I fear, this is what will kill also ADSL. Down with telco and cable company monopolies!

By the way, thanks for the link on your listing of people with "Daynotes" type pages. I did not know it was there until I was checking my domain logs and saw a referral from there. Much appreciated.

And his reply below:

Well, an awful lot depends on where you live. Some places, xDSL service is cheap and cable-modem service expensive, and others are exactly the converse. The last time I checked, I believe BellSouth was offering unmetered xDSL for $50/month, versus $40/month here for cable modem service. You're welcome for the link.

Robert Bruce Thompson
http://www.ttgnet.com

Two interesting articles in this morning's paper. One is about Bluetooth technology, not to be confused with the King of Denmark (940-981) Bluetooth. Essentially, it's technology to link devices together without cables. It may be gaining momentum, though, as the paper described it, Bluetooth sounds "more like a worrisome dental condition than high technology..."

The other article was a special to the Washington Post. I haven't been able to find it on their web site so I assume it was only in their print edition. But it talks about the strange and twisted road of how a song by a 700 pound gentle giant of a Hawai'ian by the name of Israel Kamakawiwao'ole got to be on a TV commercial for etoys.com You've probably heard it by now, the sound of someone humming "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" backed by a ukulele. Well, that's him. The song was also used in the Fox TV show Party of Five and the movie Meet Joe Black (with Brad Pitt). It's strange how sometimes fame comes only after the artists dies...

Have a good day

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Aloha Friday - November 19, 1999

It's Aloha Friday! And the University of Hawai'i Rainbow Warrior football team plays the midshipmen of Navy on Saturday. As as always, the Bows are three point underdogs. Well, I guess nothing is new. Being the underdog seems to have worked well as a strategy so far so why should we worry about anything at this point? Go Bows!

Speaking of Bows, the Rainbow Wahine (women) volleyball team clinched the Western Athletic Conference title last night by cooking Rice in three sets - 15-1, 15-0, 15-8. Yes, they are that good. The Wahine will play San Jose St. to end the season next week. After that, it's the NCAA tournament. Go Bows!

Choosing Flex.com may have been a mistake. While having no tech. support is OK to a point, they are making it very difficult to use their service. For example, they don't tell you what the name of the ftp server is (In your best Keanu Reeves imitation: Whoa, Dude! They don't tell you the name of the ftp server? Gnarly man). Hmmm, well any semi-geek like me should be able to figure it out. And, sure enough, ftp.flex.com should work. But, and there's almost always a but (hey Svenson!), they do not appear to allow access from other domains. I can't say for sure, because they don't respond to support requests, but I think that's why I can't get access from work. They also don't have telnet (i.e. shell) access at all so all changes to file permissions have to be done via an ftp program (ws_ftp works great). Me thinks a misteak I did make.

So it's back to looking for another ISP. Right now, the leading contender is Aloha.com (not to be confused with Aloha.net my old ISP). I sent off an email to their sales department so we shall see what happens. It's really discouraging right now. No one particular ISP seems to have what I want at a price that is not totally ridiculous. Sigh.

Quick Notes
I see that Dr. Keyboard has updated his diary again. Go have a look. Here, Here or some such rot.

It's Aloha Friday so have a good weekend everyone!

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