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Monday - 27 August 2001

Worms in the Wild. You would have thought by now most people would have become clued-in and updated their anti-virus software. But I continue to get infected emails with the SirCam worm. The last one was this morning. Oh well, the updated Norton Anti-virus program detects this one just fine so it is but a trifle to deal with. Until a newer version comes out...

Terrible Termites. Did I mention that the carpenters, who said they were done searching for termites, found more. Termites that is. Two more mud tunnels leading into the house. So additional demolition will be done this week and then, hopefully, they will begin to but things back together again.

Now It Can Be Told. A brave new site has documented proof that NASA faked the moon landing </tongue in cheek>. See the site here and notice the unmistakable, but very subtle, signs. Note the shadows on the "moon" coming from various angles. And notice the cheesy and unprofessional lack of stars in the photos. Proof positive. Thanks to InfoWorlds' Brian Livingston for the link.

As noted last week, graduate school starts up tonight so posts may, on occasion, be short or non-existent [like there's a difference - ed.]. Oh yes, one more thing. Yes, I am playing around with the look of this site again. This time I'm using tables. Please drop me a line if I broke anything or if you don't like how things look. Thanks.

Aloha!

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Tuesday - 28 August 2001

Class in Session. So it was back to the rat race last night (and at least this time, the rats lost). I hurried home, showered, grabbed something to eat and went to school looking for a parking space. The first day of class is always the worst (until some drop out) for parking. The first lot I tried was full but I was able to find a spot eventually.

Then it was a sprint to the Book Store to get my books. I was early enough to get some really clean used books. So instead of paying $100US, I ended up paying a little over $50. Sweet. Got the parking. Got the books.

Now on to class. I got into the classroom about 30 minutes early so I wasn't concerned that no one I knew was there yet. But by a few minutes before 6:00pm, and I still didn't know anyone there I was getting a bit nervous. But soon enough, four people from class last year came walking in. Yeah! There's nothing like sitting in a class of twenty people and not know anyone so I was very happy to have a few friends to sit with.

Unfortunately, four people out of the 22 from last year is rather a big loss rate. Of the four, only one is near my age. All of the others are much younger. Sigh. Oh well, much reading to do so this will be a short post.

White gloves. A young man wanted to purchase a gift for his new sweetheart's birthday, and as they had not been dating very long, after careful consideration, he decided a pair of gloves would strike the right note: romantic, but not too personal.

Accompanied by his sweetheart's younger sister, he went to Nordstroms and bought a pair of white gloves. The sister purchased a pair of panties for herself. During wrapping, the clerk mixed up the items and the sister got the gloves and the sweetheart got the panties. Without checking contents, the young man sealed the package and sent it to his sweetheart with the following note:

I chose these because I noticed that you are not in the habit of wearing any when we got out in the evening. If it had not been for your sister, I would have chosen the long ones with buttons, but she wears short ones that are easier to remove. These are a delicate shade, but the lady I bought them from showed me the pair she had been wearing for the past three weeks and they were hardly soiled. I had her try yours on for me and she looked really smart.

I wish I was there to put them on for you the first time, as no doubt other hands will come in contact with them before I have a chance to see you again. When you take them off, remember to blow in them before putting them away as they will naturally be a little damp from wearing.

Just think how many times I will kiss them during the coming year. I hope you will wear them for me on Friday night. All my love.

P.S. The latest style is to wear them folded down with a little fur showing.

Have a Nice Day - Aloha!

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Hump Day Wednesday - 29 August 2001

Free Shipping? When is "free" shipping not, free that is? When you order something from Crucial Technology (see their site here). Based on the recommendation of one of the Daynoters, I went to the Crucial site to buy some memory. According to the Daynoter and the Crucial site, shipping was free for a limited time. So I ordered two sticks of 256MB and two sticks of 128MB. When I tried to check out, I got an error message saying I had to choose FedEx (which I would have to pay for) rather than the "free" UPS 2nd day. And to add insult to injury, they charge $10 to ship the four sticks which probably don't weigh more than a few ounces, total.

I left a comment about this when I ordered the memory and Crucial responded saying "free" shipping does not apply to Alaska or Hawaii. Believe me when I say this will be the last order I will have with them. Kingston here I come (see their site here).

Mission Impossible. As you may remember, I spent six weeks working on my practicum at First Hawaiian Bank, Trust Division. While there, a manager asked me to get some information about their mission statement. Specifically, he wanted to know if his managers knew, understood, and followed it. The short answers are - No, No, and No.

So in reflecting on why this might be, I came to one conclusion (actually, I came to more than one but I'm going to focus on one): The mission was self-canceling. That is, the mission had the division trying to do two things, each of which alone may have been okay, but put them together and you have an impossible situation.

Namely, and I'm paraphrasing here, the division was tasked with providing world-class services, but at the lowest cost. Notice, it didn't say that level of service at the lowest possible cost. It said at the lowest cost. Period.

Most people realize that the level of service they receive is based on the price they are willing to pay. For example, if you pay for a First Class seat on the Concorde, you expect First Class service. Now, while it would be very nice to pay for a Coach Class seat, but get First Class service - such an airline would soon be headed for a financial dive.

And yet, this is what the bank managers are tasked with doing. Obviously, something has to give and what gave was the level of service. As the cost to the bank went down, the level of service to the customer likewise went down. What is especially interesting, and perhaps a topic to be taken up at a later date, is the number of customers did not seem to decrease (at least in the short-term). One explanation might be that people don't like to institute change, even when that change is in their best interest.

But I digress. So what does this have to do with anything? Easy, yesterday as I was searching for examples of model mission statements, I did a search on Nordstrom+mission+statement. Nordstroms stories relating to service beyond what is expected is legendary. And if nothing else, Nordstroms understands that their singular mission is to provide that service, regardless of the cost. Understanding this, they do not try to compete on price, leaving that to the KMarts and Targets.

But hidden within all of the Google links to Nordstroms was yesterday's little story of the White Gloves. If you haven't read it yet, take a few moments to take a look. PS, while doing that, make sure you are not sipping a Coke or having a glass of milk, when you get to the end of the story.

Frankenstein Sheets. Okay, so some people don't like tables in HTML (you know who you are, or at least, I hope you do). But it's not like frames, hawk spit, now is it?

In either case, Dan Bowman sent me a link (see it here) showing an example of how to create the same effect using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Now I'm still unclear as to why CSS is considered the ultimate in modern HTML but for some reason it is. So, the page you are reading is created using CSS rather than tables. As usual, if anything is broken or looks strange let me know - especially since many browsers have problems with CSS (and not tables - ed.).

Termites 14: Dan 0. The carpenters have been busy outside the house taking the baseboard trim off so they could see where the termite tunnels were. They found 14 tunnels leading from the ground to the base of the house. Each of those tunnels will be covered by the Sentricon bait system. Hopefully, there aren't 14 colonies since it is unlikely that all 14 baits will be taken by the termites. If there are only two or three colonies we have a decent chance of eliminating them. Otherwise, well I don't want to think about otherwise.

Unclear on the Concept Award. There has been a lot of local news about young punks immature, socially deprived boys street racing their Hondas. Especially since two people have died in the past few months. As you would expect, this kind of racing occurs early in the morning hours.

So what is the response of the police? They have begun to ticket cars, during "rush" hour for any infraction that they can find. Hmmm. Rush hour - the worst time of the day to have cars pulled over to the side of the freeway. Rush hour - the time of the day when all of the speed racers are at home sleeping off their night of drinking, dancing, and racing. Hmmm. Makes sense to me. Not.

Kough, Kough. KDE's KOffice version 1.1 slipped out the door yesterday (see the announcement here).

This release includes the following components: KWord (a frame-based, full-featured word processor); KPresenter (a presentation application); KSpread (a spreadsheet application); Kontour (a vector-drawing application); Kivio (a flowchart application); KChart (a chart drawing application); KFormula (a formula editor); and filters (for importing documents created by, or exporting documents for use with, other office suites or office programs).

As usual, if you decide to compile your own (as opposed to downloading a binary) you will need to have the latest versions of Qt, gcc, and kdelibs. Also recommended is KDE 2.2 and a partridge in the proverbial pear tree.

Aloha!

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Thursday - 30 August 2001

Mercury Mailings. Here at work, we don't have Internet email (we have Lotus cc:Mail for internal mail). Why don't we have Internet email? It's probably equal parts lack of vision, expertise, and cajones intestinal fortitude on the part of some people here.

So what I've been doing is using my account at Pair.com. Now, this isn't the easiest way of doing things because Pair, probably rightly so, uses an anti-relay technique to keep Spammers from using their email servers (click on this link to read more about open relays and why this is not a Good Thing).

By anti-relay technique, I mean I have to authenticate (by logging into the POP3 server to check for new email) first, then I have a 10-minute window of time through which I can send email via the relay server at Pair. The sometime problem with this is, for whichever reason, the timer at Pair doesn't seem to get set. That is, I can login to the POP3 server multiple times within 10 minutes but the relay server will refuse to accept my outgoing email.

I've gotten kind of fed up with this so first I tried using a relay server at the University. This worked fine except when the server was down, which was annoyingly often.

It finally got to a point where I decided to setup my own outgoing SMTP server (I still plan to receive/POP3 my incoming mail from Pair so I don't need a full blown mail server). I took a look at a couple of free email programs such as Communigate Pro, All Server, and IndigoMail.

What I ended up keeping, at least for now, is Mercury/32 (see it here) from David Harris. Some of you may know Harris, who is from New Zealand, as the author of Pegasus Mail. I first started using Pegasus Mail, in a Netware environment, years ago and found it to be a good little email client.

Based on my good experience with PMail, I decided to try the Mercury/32 SMTP transport program. The install went smoothly and in no time, I had a working SMTP server. All I had to do then was configure my email client to receive mail from Pair and send mail through Mercury/32.

I haven't had the server running for very long so I can't say how reliable it is, but I can say it appears faster and more reliable then using either Pair or the University of Hawai'i relay servers.

Mail Call

From: Ken Scott
To: Dan Seto
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 7:36 PM
Subject: CSS vs. Tables

Hi Dan. Long time listener, first time caller ;)

Re: your question posed in the 8/29 posting of your journal about why CSS is regarded as better than tables, etc. in HTML layout. The following is my opinion, probably not backed by much more than the fact that it is what I think.

CSS is better (to me) because it allows the web developer to separate their content from their formatting. You might decide that you want a different margin, padding, color, whatever. Instead of having to chase down lots of table and td tags, you fix one style sheet, and everything is instantly fixed. Second point: tables do not render until the entire table has been received, CSS does not have this limitation. Third, by putting all your style info in one page (your .css stylesheet) and referencing it throughout your HTML document, I feel that your pages are going to be lighter-weight. Maybe not by much, but even in these days of cable modems and broadband, speed *still* rules.

Downsides to CSS? Yep, there are some. As you mention, not all browsers (*cough*netscape4*cough*) support CSS. Some support it only partially. But the general trend is for browsers to do a good job of supporting CSS1 and most of CSS2 (don't ask me, I don't understand all of it yet. Check www.w3c.org to see if it makes sense to you yet).

Anyway, just a few datapoints for you. I enjoy hearing about your days in Hawaii. I was born there (Army brat, born at Tripler, moved mainland about 2yrs later. Don't remember a thing), and finally got to visit about two years ago. I really enjoyed that visit, and wish that I would have had the time/chance to see more of where people really live, versus what you see walking along Waikiki, or the shops along the road there.

Take care,
Ken

--

Ken Scott   ken at optikos dot net   http://www.pcisys.net/~kscott

<><      This is the day that the Lord has made;
         Let us rejoice and be glad in it          -- Psalm 118:24

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From: Dan Seto
To: Ken Scott
Subject: Re: CSS vs. Tables
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 06:48:30 -1000

Howzit' Ken,

Thanks for info. I guess I kind of knew some of the pros and cons of using CSS vs. tables but you did a good job of listing those differences. And you're right. But I really don't like having to edit two files (.html and .css) and having to switch back and forth between the two. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to give up .css files (well, I might but see below).

I'm pretty sure the W3C is going to deprecate a lot of formatting tags in html in favor of css or xsl (see this link for more on xsl - http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/). So maybe I should actually be switching to xsl!

It's just having to learn something new. I hate that <g>.

Anyway, it's nice to hear from a native born son of Hawaii (whether you have ancestors here before Capn' Cook or not).

Aloha - Dan

Aloha!

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Aloha Friday - 31 August 2001

It's Friday!

Trash-80 Model 100. So what can you do with that Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 (see it here) that you have in the garage collecting dust? Well, if you're Daniel Craig Giffen, you use a custom version of Apache web server, designed to run on the 2.4MHz, 18-year old portable computer. The PC has 32k (yes, that's kilobytes, not megabytes) of RAM and uses a converted Walkman(tm) for cassette storage (there's no hard drive). It's hard to believe that you could get Apache to run in that environment but if you belive what's there, including the source code, I guess it's possible.

The site that he hosted (I assume it's now hosted on another server since I understand the site is now getting >100,000 hits per day) on this PC is called humanclock.com. He's made it his quest in life to take pictures of people holding a sign showing the time of day for each of the 1,440 minutes in the 24 hours. He hasn't finished doing all of them yet so there is a high probability that the time you see won't be one of the pictures, but keep on trying and you will eventually get one.

By the way, you most likely want the "digital" clock version to look at (samples below):

Have a Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!

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