Dan Seto j20000218

Week of 14 February through 18 February, 2000
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Jump to Last Update: Friday 7:00 am HST

Happy Valentines Day! Here's to hoping that you remembered your significant others today...

Good Grief. Well, it was not totally unexpected. But still, the loss over the weekend of a giant in cartooning, Charles Schulz, on the eve of the publishing of his last panel, was still a shock. It will be hard to fill the hole left by his passing. My condolences to his family and friends.

Dallas Cowboys. For men of my age it is impossible to think of the National (US) Football League's Dallas Cowboys without thinking of Thomas Wade Landry. Tom Landry was the Cowboys. Quite. Efficient. Not taken to histrionics. To him, his results spoke louder than any words could. Career record: 270-178-6. . .270 wins third most ever. . .Had 20 straight winning seasons, five NFC titles, two Super Bowl wins. May he also rest in peace.

Pair Support. Pair domain support finally got back to me on Friday (11 Feb) on my request (8 Feb) for assistance with the domain transfer. What is interesting is that they said they would submit the change request themselves. This, after saying in the original transfer template that they could not submit the request and that I would have to do it. Hmmm. Can't have it both ways folks.

In either case, as far as I know, everything is OK as far as the domain transfer. And the monthly cost at Pair? $29.95/month USD. This is almost double what I was paying at 9netave.com. I hope Pair lives up to its reliability claims or I will be going through this again in six months.

Analog 4.02. One of the changes I have to get used to in changing hosting services is the switch to a different site stats program (which gives information about the number hits and from where, among other things). 9netave.com uses something called Net Analyze 2.01, see it here. 9netave installed and setup the program when my account was opened (you can see my old sites stats, until they shutdown the site sometime this week, here). It's browser based and includes very well designed graphs.

Pair.com, on the other hand uses something called Analog (see version 4.02 here). This program, as installed by Pair.com, is run via telnet and must be configured first by the user. This means you have to login, issue commands to Analog. Then exit and view the output with a browser. Speaking of output, it is basically numerical with some very simple line graphs. In order to have at least a similar, if not exact output as Net Analyze, I had to download and install two other programs written by other authors that add better graphs (Report Magic) and faster DNS (Quick DNS) lookup respectively to Analog. Now that I have these add-ons installed (everything is running on my PC rather than trying to get it to run on Pair), I now run a batch file that does the DNS lookup, then runs Analog, then runs the graphical add-in. Then finally, I use my browser to take a look at the output. Sigh. For anyone who is interested, the simple batch file is below:

What I plan to do, when I getroundtoit, is to install Net Analyzer to see if it is simpler to use. More when I know more.

The Vagina Monologues. Skip this one if you are offended by the female genitalia. I'm sorry. I know it's early in the morning for some of you. But I could not resist this one. I'm not kidding. Someone wrote a play about vaginas. It's a series of short vignettes. One of the sub-titles is; "My Angry Vagina". Another starts off with the question, if your vagina could talk, what would it say? In two words. Do you think I could make this up? The conservatives will have a field day with this one. See the story in the Los Angeles Times here. Or don't.

Flowering Apples. OK, so maybe apples don't flower. But apple trees do, don't they? Well, what do I know? I'm from Hawai'i. MacWorld Tokyo (Tokyo? Why Tokyo?) opens tomorrow. Rumors say a new PowerBook portable computer and faster iBooks will debut at the show. And of course, Steve "CEO for Life" Jobs will keynote.

Speaking of Japan. The morning paper notes that Internet users in Japan increased 29 percent in 1999 to 18.3 million. This according to a report released by Access Media International, Inc, a consulting and research firm. Access Media has a sample newsletter here. Be warned that it's a 12 page pdf file full of graphs so don't bother if you have a really slow connection. On the other hand, did you know that 1 in 10 households said they would be buying a high definition TV within the next 12 months? Another is that the biggest trend will be the merging of phone and data networks. These and other interesting tidbits can be found there.

Speaking of phone and data networks. AOL is reported to be in talks with Net2Phone, a major player in voice over the net, to increase its stake to a controlling interest. As some have said, phone over the net would be one of the few instances of how users can directly and measurably save money by using their PCs. The downside is the low quality of the connection and resulting hiss, pops, and dropped calls.

Bugzilla. As long time readers [yah, all four months - Ed.] know, I've been following the progress of Netscape 5.0, aka, Mozilla. But hope is fading fast for this hybrid open source browser. I checked the status of build M14, which is due on the wire on 18 Feb (see Milestone Road map here) and found 662 bugs (see here) to be cleared or moved back to M15. Me thinks they will not meet this deadline as they have not met any of their earlier ones. And as I've said before, it may not matter any more (at least on the Win32 front). On the other hand, there may be hope on the Linux front but then, I wouldn't hold my breath there either as Opera is coming on strong.

The Right to Bare Arms. And other body parts. Both Baywatch Hawai'i and Pacific Blue (which may or may not move from California to Hawai'i) have their hands out at the Legislature. They are supporting a bill that would create a $5 million/year USD fund that would be used to supplement funding of the programs. They claim if they don't get the money, they will leave (or not come in the first place in the case of Pacific Blue). Isn't this called blackmail?

Speaking of Arms. As predicted earlier, during the Xerox Building shootings here in November, the call for even more gun "control" measures are working their way through the Legislature. One bill would require re-registering all firearms every five years (yah, just what we need, more government red tape - NOT). Another would require owners to purchase lockable steel safes to store all firearms. This, from a state that already requires you to register your ammunition every time you make a purchase. We've already seen that the only variable that correlates with crime rates is the age of the person. Reduce the number of males in the aforementioned age group and crime rates go down. Create a thousand gun control laws and nothing happens to the crime rate. Hmmm. What should we do? It was Benjamin Franklin that said; "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Historical Review of Pennsylvania - 1759).

Dan "More than you wanted to know" Bowman wrote an extended email to RBT on household wiring and the dangers of overloading extension cords and such. Got to RBT's site here about three-quarters of the way down the page.

Checkbot. Pair.com, the host of this site, uses a neat program that checks for broken links on your site. You can read about the perl based tool (which is required to run it) here. And download the .tar.gz file here. The program steps through your html pages looking for links. It then attempts to follow each link. When it encounters an error, it logs it to an checkbot.html page that it creates. You may not need this capability if your html editor has this already built in. But if not, then you should take a look at this program.

Hotmail Left Cold. MS's Hotmail server (for at least my mail) seems to be down. I could not login when I tried at about 10:00am HST. It is now 1:00pm HST and still can't get in. Could it be? Who knows? And MS won't tell.

Earth to Mars. Well, after getting everyone's hopes up that the Mars Lander was alive and transmitting, the morning paper announces that the telescopes in the Netherlands, Italy, and Stanford University failed to pickup any new signals. No explanation of what was recorded earlier. Perhaps ET needs the correct change?

Synergistic Effects. So what would you do if you were a State Department worker and a company called Synergy International offered a beta copy of a budgeting program for your use? Would you use it? Would you distribute it worldwide? Hmmm. Would it make a difference if the company that wrote the program was a Russian company? And that the first embassy to use the software was in Moscow?

The Department is now urgently contacting all of its 170 embassies around the world ordering them to delete the software immediately. While there is no indication, yet, that it is a Trojan Horse, the FBI is now investigating. A Department spokesman stated; "On the face of it, from what we know so far, it's an extraordinary lapse of judgment." Doh!

Houston, the Elephant has landed. What has 63,000 bugs and flies? Why a Microsoft Elephant of course. Ahem. Make that Windows 2000 Professional. So I watched the unveiling of this behemoth via the net and a fair show it was compared to other unveilings. Especially Captain Picard; "Make it so Numbah Won!" And of course, Carlos Santana for entertainment wasn't bad either. But I digress.

So Win2K is officially launched. Bugs and all. And after much thought and gnashing of teeth, I've decided not to install (much less buy) Win2K, for two reasons. First, it would break our email system here (Lotus/IBM cc:MAil). And secondly, it's TOO DARNED EXPENSIVE. Whisper this in the ear of Mr. Emballmer; "The competition is Linux, not Novell or OS/2!" Yes, I could buy an OEM copy locally for $129 USD. But that would be cheating. Why do that when I could download a Linux distribution? Yes, I understand the MS business model requires gobs and gobs of money to be coming in each year. And yes, they are good at doing that. But. Let me repeat it again; "The competition is Linux, not Novell or OS/2!"

Dead President's Day. Monday is a national holiday. As such, any post I do will probably be done a little later than normal. Although, I at least do plan on doing one. Maybe after I come home from the beach...In the mean time, check out the gracious wife of Dr. Keyboard, Mrs. Chateau Keyboard here.

Surfs Up at Work. The morning paper tells us about a Nielsen/Net Ratings study that finds people spend twice as much time surfing the net at work than at home. Workers spend an average of 21 hours online vs. an average of 9.5 hours at home. Why? Probably because of access to high-speed lines which make downloading mp3 files or viewing content at broadcast.com realistic. On the other hand, Allen Weiner, VP of analytical services at Net Ratings said; "People would perform the same stuff at work using other methods. The Internet has just given them a more effective way of doing it." Other sites that get more hits at work than at home include amazon.com, cdw.com, staples.com and OfficeMax.com. Conversely, sex sites receive half the number of hits at the office that they get from home.

Travel Agents Strike Back. The American Society of Travel Agents is asking the Justice Department to determine if a plan by 27 domestic and foreign airlines to create a web site to sell low-cost tickets would violate anti-trust laws. The Society alleges that the centralized site would lead to price fixing and cause consumers to stop buying tickets through travel agents (doh!).

Windows OpenSource? According to an article from the Bloomberg News Service, Mr. Bill said, if that's all it would take to settle the the anti-trust case with the Justice Department he would make the code open source. But, the spin doctors at MS are denying Mr. Bill said anything even close to that. And the report seems to be taking the comment out of context. Personally, it appears to be one of those off-hand remarks one makes in an unguarded moment and is not meant to be taken seriously. But then, who knows?

But What Does It Mean? The source, for word definitions in the English language, is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The 20 volume, 22,000 page dead tree version lists for $3,000 but is on sale for $995. The CD-ROM version goes for $395 USD. So what else is old? Well, there's a new online version (see the tour here), which debuts next month. The cost? $550/year USD. Huh? Why pay $550/year when you can buy the CD-ROM for less? Hmmm. Well, for those who want the most up-to-date version (it will be updated on a quarterly basis). Or for those who want to filter how the data is displayed. Or for those who have more money than brains?

Misc. Ramblings