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April 03, 2000
Search Me
Atomized. I was over at Dr. Pournelle's site searching on a link for a keyboard that he was looking for. I knew it was somewhere on his site but not where. I knew it was there because I had sent it to him sometime ago.
So, I figured I would try out his whiz-bang search engine Atomz. Since I sent the link I figured I would try searching on my last name (since it is not common and should not return a bunch of hits). Well, was I wrong. Apparently, Atomz defaults to a "fuzzy" search if it can't find what it is looking for (as far as I can see anyway). So in excess of 380 hits came back. And fuzzy it was. For example, city, st., site, suite, SST, 1st., sweet, SETI, stay, set, sat, swat, and cite. I went through the first 100 hits and then gave up. This kind of search engine is great if you don't know exactly what you are looking for. But even if you do, you may as well as forget using it if this is any indication. YMMV. Not recommended unless you are really desperate.
Oh, by the way, by searching on the word "Aloha" I was able to find it. On the Recommended Hardware Page. And it didn't seem to do a fuzzy search. Don't ask me. Because I don't know. Sigh.
False Alarm. Saturday's mail brought a letter from the University of Hawai'i. I opened it with some trepidation but found only that they have not been able to finish deciding who made it into the Masters of Public Administration yet. They said they will be done in two weeks. Oh well, at least it got my heart going for awhile. Big Sigh.
Speaking of Alarms. A flight of vintage P-40 Warhawk aircraft were seen buzzing the battleship USS Missouri moored in Pearl Harbor yesterday. But not to worry. It was just the start of filming of the movie "Pearl Harbor." Included in the cast are Ben Affleck and Cuba Gooding Jr. Industrial Light and Magic is doing the special effects.
***** Noon Update *****
Whew! Lots going on in the Daynotes Realm. Brian Bilbrey is beginning his dream to be a published author by teaming with Tom Syroid (see Tom's post here). Congratulations and Good Luck, Brian. However, given the horror stories that the others tell about writing a book, please remember to make some time for you and your wife. Priorities. It's all about priorities.
Robert Bruce Thompson and Bo Leuf continued the cat fight as to which browser is alpha dog (to mix breeds if not phylum). Bob came out with what, at first glance, looked like a good point about how all browsers should be able to read pages created by FrontPage just as all word processors should be able to import and read Word formatted documents. The problem with this analogy is that it assumes MS developed and owned HTML just as it did with the Word format. Only. It didn't. Hence, the analogy does not hold up.
Still, to me the question is do you want Microsoft to dominate everything? I don't think so. Otherwise you wouldn't be looking at Linux would you? And how would you like it if Microsoft created their own version of Linux (April Fool's Day notwithstanding)? And what if that became the dominant distribution? Hmmm? I though not. Oh well, use what browser you want. But remember, if you lie down with dogs, don't blame me for getting mange. Or some such.
Times A'changin' I forgot that many of you poor folks had to change your clocks this past weekend. We Equatorians, and Arizonans, don't have to put up with such foolishness. Changing time to suit your needs, indeed. Such wickedness! See a history of this abomination here.
Seeing Double. According to a report by InfoWorld Columnist Brian Livingston ( here), if you have a dual processor system, and you do a clean install of Win2000, it will recognize only one CPU. The procedure to have it utilize both CPUs requires the changing of a driver. Read the article above to see how.
Help Desk Hell. There's an interesting tale of being on the help desk one night when all hell breaks loose due to a DoS attack. See it here at Byte. It answers the eternal question of why PCs hum.