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My daughter returned from Saudi Arabia on her birthday! She sent me a much less flattering snapshot from the same year; this one is my favorite.
Love, Dad.
Autonomic means acting or occurring involuntarily; kneejerk and eyeblink are involuntary actions. IBM Research is promoting Autonomic Computing: "An approach to self-managed computing systems with a minimum of human interference." The Manifesto, a 797KB PDF, exposes our present computing environment and then challenges us to share IBM's vision of the future. Intriguing, uplifting and readable.
You'll know the war is over when this page is archived: A CHANGED WORLD-Combating Terrorism. Full coverage of the war on terrorism including morning updates by The Christian Science Monitor, electronic edition.
Quite naturally, if you're running a Fonts site, you could be running a darn big .gif as your index page, like at Typodermic, where Ray Larabie showcases his commercial font foundry. His earlier freeware site at LarabieFonts loads a lot faster and the fonts aren't as classy, but they're free.
Potholes on the road to WindowsXP - PCs at a Crossroads: "The problem is that after years of fighting to keep up with software, PCs now make the grade. In fact, old PCs now make the grade. There is nothing that a 2001 PC can do that a 1998 can't."
Or an 1997, 1996, 1995...my P120 might be slow (it loads documents and images about as fast as a GigaHerze machine on a 56K dial up account) but it gets me here just the same.
WanyWord is a free Text Searcher with BOOLEAN and NEAR Operators and it Edits found files on the hard drive. I live pretty much in a text/hex editor called UltraEdit, making notes, copy/pasting into numerous odd named .txt files throughout the day, saved to monthly recreated directories. DoubleU Any Word picks up where memory leaves off and I don't have to know where I put that odd bit, I just have to know how to find it.
I've been playing with CityDesk this Sunday afternoon. You can view the results at a new sub-site I created called "smallcase." I heard the term used by Rush Limbaugh as in, "oursponsor.com, all small case, no space." It stuck. Then I spun the dial. Rush was a lot more fun when there was a Democrat in the Whitehouse.
InCtrl is now up to version 5 and runs under Win9x, ME, NT4 and Win2K. InCtrl helps you manually undo changes to your system when software doesn't or can't completely uninstall itself. You use it to take a "snapshot" of your system settings before and after you install new software, and then can use the tool to see exactly what changed. In this way, it's similar to tools like Norton's "Registry Tracker," except that InCtrl is free.
Since the dotcom fiasco it should be obvious that custom solutions for standard applications aren't going to be cost effective. Jakob Nielsen sees it as The End of Homemade Websites. He's been wrong before.
This short check sheet on Troubleshooting IPsec VPN clients, should give some idea about why Virtual Private Networking isn't coming to a laptop near you any time soon. On the other hand, you might be interested in setting up the whole magilla. As an intellectual exercise.
Some browsers pass a header with your email address to every web server you visit. To check if your browser simply gives your email address to everybody this way, visit Privacy.Net.
System Toolbox is a site dedicated to System Administrators. They do not discriminate against any server operating systems. And neither should you!
Edgies respond to the question: What Now?
Microsoft Professionals Magazine focus on security: step by step tutoritals on how to protect your Microsoft systems. You're gonna need them, and these are accessible and readable. You're also gonna need to keep up with your Software Licenses.
Do you get out to blogland much?
Each level of mathematics is built upon what came before. The origins lie deep in the intelect of humanity, in recognition of the repitition of phenomenon, the rising of the sun, the measure of the multitudes. Start here and track the path of math from the Babylonians to the theory of relativity.
Software Piracy - Let me count the ways a rose could smell and still be called a rose.
Alternative: like a dollop of honey in your coffee if you usually take a teaspoon of the white or nothing at all...like putting your pants on by sticking a different leg in first. Pleasantly, suprisingly different: alternative.
I haven't read this kind of buzz woven into a cohesive rant in a long time. If you enjoy the confrontation between the cutting edge and the bleeding edge of information archetecture, ammuse yourself.
ID cards: The shields of democracy? In 1976 I was working as a booking officer at the County Jail in Fairfield, California, when the deputies used to bring in illegal aliens (Mexicans) on Sunday evening who were unfortunate enough to be drunk in public and without a driver's license. One night I tried to enlighten one of the detainees who could expect to be bussed to San Diego (and coerced to crossover the border at Tijuana) on Monday by the INS.
I told him that the next time he was approached by an American law officer who demanded his identification papers - so long as he wasn't driving the car - he should tell them: "Fuhk you, I'm an American." That's all. In then America, you didn't have to prove your were American. THEY had to prove you weren't. Times have changed.
That young Mexican was re-detained a couple of months later (after the harvest), and told me he had jumped the bus at Bakersfield and hitchhiked back to Fairfield. He was ready to go home, had a pocketfull of money and would be happy to let Uncle Sam pay his bus fare. That's why he didn't apply my red-neck baiting suggestion during his most recent deputorial confrontation. I hope he tried it the next time, if it were prudent, but I sure as hell hope he doesn't try to do it today. At our age, a couple of weeks in jail would be hard on him.
And then Slate asks: Can the U.S. torture terrorists? What a stupid question! Of course we can. CAN we rape and pillage amongst the vanquished? Of course we can. The question is, "Should we?" Not CAN WE. (!Damned! if the definition of what is "politically correct" hasn't changed in the past few weeks!) The article concludes:
Fortunately, the Supreme Court once found that the indefinite internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent, on the basis of nothing but their race, was not torture; it wasn't even racial discrimination. No doubt they will accommodate the Justice Department this time around as well.
Fortunately???
When a news organization proposes the unthinkable as if it were well within the range of our popular sanctions, it's time to stand up and be counted. Repeat after me: Fuhk you, Slate. I'm an American!
A strategic comparison of Windows vs. Unix: The real question is not 'which is cheaper' but 'which is smarter?'
**Note that "smarter" is much more of an economical evaluation than an intellectual conclusion.
They just make noise in the world...StormCrows: Discontented Saudi Arabian security personnel may be joining Islamic radicals based in the southwestern part of the kingdom. For both the monarchy and U.S. troops based on Saudi soil, this would be an ominous development.
Hawaiian activist Haunani Trask blurts out at a photo op on the University of Hawaii campus at Manoa:
"The United States is angry because somebody came back and blew up their World Trade Center. I would be angry, too. But what made them do that? It is the history of terrorism that the United States unleashes against native people all over the world."
It was irresponsible of her. There is no rational agreement that can be made with psychosis, there is no justification for terrorism. Read: "Fighting Islam's Ku Klux Klan," by Iraqi disident Kanan Makiya, who exposes parallels in the madness.
I'm tired. I should just go to sleep. I've been painting the lanai gates and fences at a building in Salt Lake to make a few bucks and the work is hard. But I just saw the intro to a "LAW AND ORDER" episode that depicted the activity of a snake. You can work around a snake, you can ignore him and hope he bites somebody else. But if you're gonna deal with a snake, you just gotta kill it. Otherwise, every morning when you walk out to get your paper, there might be that snake waiting to bite you. You could, of course, reason with it. "If you bite me, it will mean your death," you could tell it. But it is the nature of snakes that they will bite you. So it will.
How do you deal with snakes?
BTW: I'm a beta tester for City Desk!
The first thing I learned about this software is that it won't load onto a Win95 machine. I don't need any more reason. Sometime this weekend I'll FDISK|FORMAT|LOAD WIN98. It's about time. Then I'm gonna change the admin of this website over to City Desk. Let's see if it can handle...
This weblog is rolled by hand in Homesite v4.5 and UltraEdit v5.2. I've tried Blogger, WebLogger, Greymatter and yesterday I downloaded Movable Type and began reading the documentation of yet another content management solution for running this collection of links and thoughts called Local Knowledge. This morning in my email came notification that Joel Spolsky's CityDesk is going beta on the 15th of October. It's a Windows program that claims to make it easy to manage a web site which changes often. It's a content management program that runs on the desktop, not on the server, and I think it's going to be a smash hit! I hope, I hope, I hope I get to be a beta tester...and you can apply to be one too!
Mark Pilgrim writes. He writes programs, which offend no one, but he also writes a personal online journal which his boss objected to. He's been fired because of it and is looking for work. You can evaluate his potential at diveintomark.weblogger.com.
Announcement: "Dublin Core Metatdata Element Set Approved". It's only taken two years to approve 15 elements but it's a giant step for such a large group of very smart, very involved, very self important organizations. Here's why it's important:
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative brings together librarians, digital library researchers, content providers, and text-markup experts who seek to increase the visibility of resources by establishing a common, low-cost framework for description. The official approval by ANSI (American National Standards Institute)/ NISO (National Information Standards Organization) of this DC element set is a major step forward in more widespread adoption.The Metadata Element Set can be downloaded for free in PDF.
If you're gonna run PHP Coder (see below), you're gonna want to run the rest: Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL. And your gonna find this article VERY helpful: Configuring Windows 98 for Local PHP Development.
NTKnow does the math: "Chuck Norris' character,a college professor, urges students to remember that radical fundamentalists like Bin Laden amount to just 1/100th of one percent of the world's 1 billion Muslims." 1,000,000,000 * 0.01 * 0.01 = a reassuring 100,000. Hmmm, let's do that over again, maybe we made a mistake?
Special Briefing - from the website of the Council on Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs: The Terrorist Attack on America: Background. This is an extraordinarily comprehensive collection of essays, "that contribute to an understanding of the tragic attacks on New York and Washington," from 1975 to the present.
This classification has been used by many writers. It "shattered all the familiar landmarks of his thought" for Michel Foucault. Anthropologists and ethnographers, German teachers, postmodern feminists, Australian museum curators, and artists quote it. The list of people influenced by the list has the same heterogeneous character as the list itself.
Mark Chapman's final goal is a Linux system that would allow him to stop using Windows for anything. View or print his 28-page article in PDF, Can you make the switch from Windows?
The Tax Analyst Policy Forums are where you're going to hear the tertiary repercussions of recent news events.
Here's a handy tip from Microsoft if your anti-viral software destroyed your dial-up software when it disinfected your computer: Remove and Reinstall Dial-Up Networking and TCP/IP Files.
Personally, I'm a firm believer in the following mantra to disinfect Windows machines: FDISK | FORMAT | RELOAD OPERATING SYSTEM, DOWNLOAD WINDOWS UPDATE (Critical Files) and then install the latest version of Internet Explorer. Takes about an hour with a cable modem. Of course reconfiguring for optimal use afterward is a user option.
Obviously, Windows 2000 didn't sell as well as expected and Windows XP isn't either. So when Microsoft Rescinds Retirement of NT 4.0 MCSE Track, it's just covering its own ass with its own paper: certification documentation, that is.
You don't have to hunt for witches at Microsoft. They're stumbling over each others brooms while trying to Control With Fine Print.
Paul Thurrot says:
Microsoft Beats Up on License Offenders
Heaven help the poor sap that tries to sell an old copy of Windows on eBay: If it didn't come in a retail box, chances are you'll be hearing from Microsoft's legal department. It seems that Microsoft employees are monitoring eBay's auctions to ensure that none of Microsoft's OEM Windows versions--which are apparently not transferable--are being sold sans PC. What's bizarre, of course, is that most of this stuff is five year old copies of Windows 95 or Windows 98, software that is useless to people as they've moved on to more recent versions. I've thought about this a lot, and when you consider the company's attitude towards Windows Product Activation, its Licensing 6.0 fiasco, and other similar baloney, it seems to me that it's time Microsoft's licensing practices were examined in a court of law. Do we own this stuff or not? Are their licenses legally binding, or just mumbo jumbo we can ignore? It's time to tell Big Brother to buzz off.
Of course that doesn't mean we have to stop using Big Brother's stuff. Microsoft Office Design Gallery Live: "is the premier site for finding professional graphics, lively Web animations, beautiful photographs, and great sounds." You may find it useful but you might like to look at the EULA first.
The search engine NorthernLight created a Special Edition about Windows XP. You might have read somewhere that it's inevitable. Brian Livingston of InfoWorld disagrees and says, There'll be no XP for me. His article includes a link to an AT&T Labs analysis that should be required reading for XP admirers: Risks of the Passport Single Signon Protocol. Then again, I've found most Microsoft users are as unconcerned as AOL subscribers in regards to their being used by their vendors instead of the other way around. Time will tell.
In response to an alert to users of Office XP (2002) that in order to apply the security patches, they must have access to the installation media (CD-ROM, network share) before the patch will be installed, a Microsoft Security Program Manager assures us this is a feature, not an anti-piracy provision, of the installer software:
"It's actually a resiliency feature of the Windows Installer. It asks for the original install location to ensure the integrity of the local installation by comparing the files on the local system with the original files. It automatically repairs any files on the local system it finds are damaged."
The solution will become commonplace for Microsoft installs: programs and applications will be loaded to the hard drive or a network share prior to installation and the requirements of your software will continue to grow to fit the limits of your hardware.
Web Search Engines FAQS: The present condition of Search on the Internet, tips for using the major search engines and a tutorial on traditional web search.
If you're wondering where those laid off About.com guides went, Eric Ward, publisher of URLwire, has set up the Closed Guide Relocation Directory. A definite plus, the new guides pages don't carry that annoying About.com frame along with them.
Ann Coulter, who used to work at the National Review Online, wrote last month:
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
Building vituperatively on that theme cost her job and made her the butt of kneejerk liberal and conservative derision. But when I ask myself, "What is it that Fundamentalist Muslims want?," I recognize a similar conviction in their stated objectives.
Does Steven Jobs know that we can build our own Mac Clones?
Microsoft has postponed its new licensing program. It will be back.
They've also announced the availability of the Microsoft Security Toolkit, on CD and online and...it's about time.
Now that the war has started, it's good to be able to laugh at ourselves: The New Republic created an Idiocy Watch where we are invited to submit, "the dumbest and most outrageous comments made about America’s war on terrorism by politicians, pundits, movie stars, athletes, etc."
When the editor-in-chief of United Press International (UPI) calls for a retraction from his counterpart at Reuters, the world should take notice. Such things aren't done lightly.
Airline Security: Reality vs. Appearance
Bruce Schneier is an Internet Security expert. A special issue of his latest Crypto-Gram, a monthly ezine, is devoted to the September 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. His observations won't make you feel better about climbing aboard a commercial jetliner until rational policies and procedures are in place.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology posted a Security Self-Assessment Guide for Information Technology Systems, "SP 800-26 of August 2001." Available in Microsoft Word and PDF formats, it provides a comprehensive assessment tool to verify and validate computer security implementations. Usefull, once you get past the bureaucrateese.
Composer, Homesite and Dreamweaver helped me learn HTML by dropping pre-formatted code onto a page that I could instantly load into a couple of different browsers or a text editor. PHP Coder is an Integrated Development Environment for programming in PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (HTML embedded scripting language). It's also an economical (FREE!) learning tool.
Zen and the Art of (WS_)FTP(LE): First posted in 1996, this illustrated tutorial was last updated in 1999 but not much has changed in the File Transfer Protocol. And WS_FTP LE is still free.
There's nothing new in the sentiment but journalists have been sharpening their metaphors in the discussion over Microsoft's tactics.
Time to stand up to Microsoft: Microsoft's relationship to its users is that of the blue whale to krill. Our only purpose is to breed, feed and get squeezed against its giant tongue until every last drop of money is released.
Microsoft "encourages" upgrades with new urgency: After fighting so hard to capture the desktop and office applications markets, Microsoft is chagrined to learn that success means having nobody left to whom you can sell products. The only recourse is to sell them to the same people again.
Everybody's got one: a viewpoint, that is, and William F. Buckley, Jr. has never misplaced his. This Op-Ed piece from the LA Times calls the Islamic world onto the carpet for a show of faith and morality.
One thing that Netscape works consistently better (for me) than Internet Explorer is in accessing ftp sites. Switching between the two has become second nature, copying the shortcut from the latter and pasting it into the former. Am I alone in this, is it a singularity that arises from my operating environment?
All The Worlds Maps: A bold statement, but a search from this site lists links to a multitude of resources from different map sites. It's a keeper.
The Opera-Hater's Guide to Opera - by someone who loves opera. You don't have to like it to appreciate it, something I'm just learning about rap music.
Office Support News Watch: "The following list includes new and recently updated support content for Microsoft Office Products." If fanatical support for MS Office products appeals to you, so will this site.
"Announced today was the Microsoft Security Tool Kit", on the NTBUGTRACK Mailing List, but much more informative is Russ Cooper's evaluation.
Less vitriolic and very general in scope is the SANS Institute's Twenty Most Critical Internet Security Vulnerabilities.
Part 4 of How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts is online. If you haven't been keeping up with this series (that I expect will become a modern classic), links to the earlier installments are provided. BTW, at LinuxISO you can pick a linux distribution and download the files for baking your own cdr installation disks.
StarOffice[tm] 6.0 beta is available for downloading. Last time I jumped in and wound up wrestling with a desktop browser that wouldn't let go. This time I'm waiting for the reviews.
Innovation in (Faceted) Classification: There's always something new under the sun and most of the time it's a new way to look at an old idea.
The Current State of File Sharing: reviews the latest peer-to-peer applications that facilitate the exchange of (primarily MP3) files.
Given Imaging has introduced the Given System, a capsule with a miniature video camera that takes pictures of a patient's intestines. Non-invasive takes on a whole new meaning.
News has knocked out Sex from the top of search engine rankings and has made the changing patterns of what we're searching for much more interesting: Highest ranking searches from Yahoo, Lycos, Google and Daypop.
The name piqued me but perhaps your curiosity requires more goad: The first Oblique Strategy said "Honour thy error as a hidden intention."
Tiny Apps has tiny apps. No matter how big your hard drive is, tiny's cool.
My copy of QNX 4 RTOS hasn't seen much use lately but once upon a time, before internet access became ubiquitous, it was handy to have a dialer and a web browser that fit on a bootable floppy disk.
The MS Word MVPs (Most Valued Professionals) have posted a fix for the Single Document Interface "feature" found in Word 2000. If you're annoyed by the behavior, check out the fix.
The latest release of ASAP Utilities, "with over 300 useful and powerfull utilities to fill the gaps in Excel, and automate frequently used tasks," is availabe for download. For free.