General

10/28/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

~Mail Follows Today’s Post~

Microsoft hacked! In case you haven’t heard, some hackers in St. Petersburg, Russia, had access to Windows source code for three months and the intrusion was only discovered this week. This could end up being a very good thing for you and me, believe it or not. (And this is even assuming the hackers didn’t fix any of the bugs they found.) As security consultant Andrew Antipass told Wired magazine, “It is interesting in a kind of cruel way that Microsoft has been eaten by the monsters it created.”

Microsoft has always been oblivious to security in their products. The only way they were going to learn was to be bitten, and hard. Now something has happened that calls their network infrastructure into question, the security of their products (which they’ve tried to present as more secure than Unix) into question, and even the integrity of the code they’ve produced in the last three months into question–Microsoft can say what they want about it being impossible to change the code. Of course they’re going to say that. Will the public believe it? Some will believe anything Microsoft says. Others wisely will believe exactly the opposite of anything Microsoft says. Still others (like me) will believe the worst no matter what Microsoft says.

If this incident doesn’t force Microsoft to start taking security seriously, nothing will.

The downside, however, is that if the hackers did indeed get Windows and/or Office source code, vulnerabilities become potentially easier to spot (not that access to Linux source code has significantly increased the number of vulnerabilities–remember, most hackers are script kiddies at best, writing in batch languages, and aren’t any more proficient in C++ than you or me).

All of this overshadowed Microsoft’s Internic entry being hacked (Apple’s entry got hacked too, though less creatively), which you can read about in The Register.

Enough of this computer junk. Let’s talk about music.

Review of U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. If U2 were to call it quits right now and we had to pick out U2’s defining album, this would be it. That’s not to say it’s their best album–it’s awfully difficult to match the raw energy and wonder of Boy, the raw power of Achtung Baby, and if this one sells like The Joshua Tree, it’ll only be because there are so many fewer bands making good music in 2000 than there were in 1987.

That said, U2 seems to have finally answered the quintessential question of how to sound like U2 without sounding like selling out. For the past 13 years, every time U2 released an album, people expressed disappointment that it didn’t sound like Joshua Tree. But others would point to the inevitable single track on each album that did sound like Joshua Tree, then wave it in the band’s face: Can’t you do anything original?

You can divide U2’s music into roughly three phases: 1979-1983 (Boy through War), 1984-1989 (Unforgettable Fire through Rattle and Hum), and 1991-1997 (Achtung Baby through Pop). Although the band has reinvented itself with every album — sometimes for the better and sometimes not — they tend to hold on to their sound for a couple of albums at a time before they make major changes.

But the album title might as well be referring to those sonic changes: This album manages to incorporate all of those previous sounds while not sounding too much like any of the previous albums. You could take the defining song off any previous U2 album, drop it randomly into this album’s mix, and it would manage to fit.

The Edge’s jangly guitar? It’s there. Larry Mullen’s precise, militaristic drumming? It’s there. Adam Clayton’s low, thumping bass? It’s there. And of course, there’s also Bono’s wailing vocals. The experimentation? That’s there too, and that’s the bit that always scares people.

Make no bones about it: U2 is a rock band, and this is a rock record. But listen closely, and the experimental elements are still there. The synths are there. The sequencers are there. So is the drum machine. In fact, they lead off the album. But whereas in the past they have sometimes been the focus, now they complement the band’s sound rather than defining it.

They pull out a unexpected tricks as well. Listening to “When I Look At the World” for the first time, I half expected to hear Frankie Vallie filling in on lead vocals. Bono’s soaring falsetto doesn’t reach as high anymore as Vallie did in his prime, but the crafty veteran vocalist makes what he has left work. Meanwhile, in the tracks “New York” and “Grace,” Bono manages to out-Lou Reed the real article, though as a closer “Grace” is just not up there with U2’s great closing tracks of the past (War’s “40,” Achtung Baby’s “Love is Blindness,” Pop’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” or Joshua Tree’s “Mothers of the Disappeared”).

The biggest surprise is track 8. In that track, titled “In A Little While,” U2 finally succeeds in sounding soulful. So much of Rattle and Hum was contrived, a bunch of Irish guys in their late 20s trying to sound like B.B. King or Bob Dylan, and they clearly hadn’t lived long enough yet to pull it off. Now in their early 40s, they nail it.

The opening track and first single, “Beautiful Day,” is a good introduction to the album. That song’s sonic elements are for the most part present throughout. Like most U2 songs, to the casual listener it sounds good immediately. As one who picks apart lyrics, I initially didn’t like the song because it seemed too superficial. So what if it’s a beautiful day? Even a no-talent Kurt Cobain wannabe like Gavin Rossdale can say that! Only upon closer listening does the real meaning surface: the story of someone who has lost everything, yet never felt better. That sounds a lot like me. It probably sounds like you too, or someone you know.

So, how’s it stack up? Most people rank War and The Joshua Tree as U2’s finest albums. I buck convention and place Achtung Baby (their amazing 1991 comeback) and Boy (their 1980 international debut) ahead of those two. At the bottom, I’d rank October, Rattle and Hum, Zooropa, The Unforgettable Fire, and Pop. All That You Can’t Leave Behind definitely blows away the lesser five albums.

However, the album falls a bit flat after the first four delightful tracks. It picks it back up again for a track or two here and there, but the immediate greatness that grabbed you when you first heard The Joshua Tree or Achtung Baby just isn’t there throughout. And the superstrong emotions that drove and held together those great albums aren’t here.

This is probably the album of the year, and many bands go their entire careers without recording anything as good as U2’s worst. This effort borders on greatness, but just doesn’t quite manage to cross over.

Strong points: The first four tracks.
Weak points: “Peace on Earth;” “Wild Honey;” “In a Little While,” though good, doesn’t seem to fit (seems to be there only to settle a bet from 1989); “Grace” is a good track but ill-suited to end a U2 album.

And a survey. I’m considering a one-day-per-page format, like Frank McPherson and Chris Ward-Johnson use. When marking up by hand, a weekly format is much easier. When using Manilla, it really makes no difference.

If you don’t want to join the site in order to vote, feel free to just e-mail me. Members can vote here. (I do wish there was an option to open discussions and voting to non-members. I can see why some people would want to require membership, but that should be optional. So it goes.)

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Dan Bowman” < DanBowman@att.net >
To: <dfarq@swbell.net>
Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2000 11:03 AM
Subject: Music reviews

Now I’m really glad I spent my discretionary funds yesterday! After reading your review (the class is watching a movie while I make copies),
I’m real tempted to pick up the album.
Then again, I have a Costco run set for after class…

Have a great weekend,

dan

~~~~~~~~~~

Don’t look too hard; it’s not available until Tuesday. I got a chance to hear it a few times and I got sick of seeing reviews from people who just listened to the 15-second clips available on the music store sites and said, “This is the best U2 album ever!” based on that, so I wrote it up. Good practice anyway. I think it’s been 3 1/2 years since I’ve written a music review of any significant length.

I wanted to strike a balance between “this may be the year’s best album” and “this is the best album ever!” because it’s not (it’s not even U2’s best).  Hopefully I did that. But I remember when I wrote up a review of Pearl Jam’s No Code in 1996, people said I was too harsh and shouldn’t have compared it to the past (though looking at that album’s longevity or lack thereof, I’m inclined to think I was right).

Reviews are tricky business but I want to stay in practice, so I may start doing a review a week just to get and stay sharp.

10/27/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , ,

Poor Windows 98 Network Performance. The MTU once again reared its ugly head at work yesterday. A 1.5 meg file was taking five minutes to copy. Forget about copying anything of respectable size–we’re talking about an all-day affair here. A perplexed colleague called me and asked why. Once again I suspected MTU tinkering. After setting the MTU back to the default of 1500 (the best value to use on a LAN), we were able to copy a 53-meg file in about 30 seconds, which was of course a tremendous improvement.

Once again, don’t run the MTU optimizers on computers that’ll be used on a LAN. The slight increase in modem speed isn’t worth crippling your network performance.

Basic Mac/PC networking. A friend passed along a question about how to build a network either a Mac or a PC could talk on. That can become a complex subject (I wonder if it’s worthy of a book?), but here are the basics.

If all you need is for the Macs to talk to Macs and PCs to talk to PCs, go to the local computer store and pick up a 100-megabit hub with enough ports to accomodate your machines, cables for your Macs, and network cards for your PCs if they don’t already have them. Get a quality hub and cards–the only really inexpensive brand I trust anymore is Netgear, and the general consensus is that 3Com and Intel are better still, though they’ll cost you more. I’ve been bitten by enough failures to decide that $15 network cards and $25 hubs just aren’t worth the trouble.

The Macs should just start talking via the AppleTalk protocol once you direct AppleTalk to the Ethernet port through the AppleTalk control panel. The PCs will need network card drivers installed, then they can use TCP/IP, NetBEUI or IPX/SPX to communicate. Best to use TCP/IP to limit the number of protocols on your network. Assign your PCs and Macs IP addresses in the 192.168.1.x range, with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. You don’t need to worry about the gateway or router settings unless you’ll be using the network to provide Internet access as well.

If you want Internet access, you can add an inexpensive cable/DSL router for about $150 that will serve your PCs and Macs without any problems. Assign your router to 192.168.1.1.

Most mid-range HP and Lexmark laser printers will accept a network card capable of talking to both PCs and Macs.

If you want to share files cross-platform, you’re looking at some bucks. You’ll want a Windows NT or 2000 server (AppleShare IP will talk to both, but it’s not as reliable as NT unfortunately), which will set you back about $1000 for the software. Alternatively, you could install DAVE ( www.thursby.com ), a product that makes Macs speak SMB over TCP/IP like Windows boxes will, so they can use Windows file shares and Windows-hosted printers.

I also see that Thursby is offering a program called MacSOHO, at $99, to accomodate PC/Mac networks. This isn’t suitable for large networks but for a small-scale LAN in the home, small business, school computer lab or church, it should suffice. You can download a trial version before you plunk down the cash.

10/26/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

That Mac problem again. I snuck up to that Mac server I was referring to earlier this week, you know, the one that was beyond my capability to fix? I continue to maintain that no Mac is beyond any experienced tech’s capability to fix (just like no PC is beyond an experienced tech’s ability to fix). However, a Mac is a high-maintenance machine. Normal, typical use of a Mac will cause numerous filesystem errors to build up over time. I’ve heard of people running the full battery of utilities suites once a week to keep their Macs happy. Once a month is probably adequate for most.

Anyway, on with the story. The whole department was out for a long lunch, which gave me an hour and a half. That’s long enough to run DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro (this machine has seven drives on it, and some of them are in excess of seven years old so it takes a while). They marveled that afternoon about how their problem had corrected itself. Can a PC do that?

Grrr…. Sure it can. Especially if a tech can get some time alone with it.

Ray, Ray, Ray… Why aren’t you running your site on Lotus Domino and Solaris or AIX? I try to connect to Groovenetworks.com, and what do I get?

Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
An error occurred while attempting to establish a connection to the service.

The most likely cause of this problem is that the service is not currently running. You can use the ‘Services’ Control Panel to verify that the service is running and to restart it if necessary.

Windows NT error number 2 occurred.

On the other hand, an up-and-down Web server is a very good indication that people want your product.

Now that I’ve seen some screenshots and read some more interviews to get into Ray Ozzie’s mind a little deeper, I’m starting to get Groove. This isn’t so much warmed-over Notes, I think, as it is instant messaging done right. It’s instant messaging. It’s file transfer. It’s got a sketchpad for drawing ideas for sharing. Of course there’s a Web browser window. It’s infinitely extensible (like Notes). And it’ll let you talk voice if you prefer.

I did finally manage to download it but I haven’t had a chance to install and play with it yet. But I can already think of ways I’d use it. I’d even collaborate with myself. Leave stuff I need frequently in my Groove space on my machines at work. So what if I’m in the wrong building, or worse yet, I’m at home? No problem, connect to myself and get it. (Don’t laugh; if you think instant messaging myself is bad, you’ll love the fact that I sometimes send packages to myself.) For people like me who are called upon to do three peoples’ jobs, this could be a Godsend. And once those other two people get hired, we can still use Groove to work together.

Bigger than Netscape 1.0? I think those predictors have gotten sucked into the Cult of Ray a little too deep. Is it a big deal? Oh yeah. Bigger than Notes? Probably.

As for multiplatform support… Groove opted to support, for now, the 85-90 percent of the market that runs Windows. In interviews, Ray Ozzie has said Linux and Mac OS X ports will appear. Seeing as three years ago, Linux looked poised to become a force in the server arena but not yet on the desktop and the classic Mac OS looked to be replaced any day with what became Mac OS X, it looks to me like the company made a practical decision to go with what they knew would be around and adjust course as needed. Notes eventually appeared on every major platform, which contributed to its success. I have no doubt Groove will probably follow. I’m certainly not going to hold it against him that the only version to have reached beta is Win32.

10/24/2000

Dave Farquhar General

The death of the PC. Jesse Berst wrote today about the decline of PCs. I made a similar prediction about four years ago in my defunct newspaper column. My observations were strangely familiar: PCs are used mostly for word processing, e-mail, and games. A dedicated word processor costs $200. A WebTV costs $200. A game console costs $150, and a top-of-the-line one costs $300. Unless PCs improve dramatically at these functions and/or come way down in price, they’ll die because it just doesn’t make sense for anyone but an enthusiast to buy one.

What happened? PCs came down in price and got faster and fancier. WebTV struggled. Smith-Corona went out of business. Game consoles did OK. But today, 51 percent of US households own PCs.

The machines changed. And I expect they’ll continue to change. Berst is premature if he thinks the PC is on its deathbed.

Ray Ozzie’s back! Ray Ozzie, the legendary father of Lotus Notes, is finally talking (a little) about his new project. Some people are saying his new product, Groove, could be as revolutionary as Netscape 1.0 was. That seems to be hype.

Groove is essentially de-centralized groupware: Notes meets Napster, if you will. Cool idea, sure, but do we need it? I’m not sure. This seems like warmed-over Notes to me. As much as I love Notes, I’m not sure it’s the killer app. Maybe this re-iteration of that idea will bring groupware to the masses, but I don’t know.

I’m not exactly lucid this morning. I felt a lot better last night, then this morning… blech. I wondered why I came into work, but if I hadn’t, I’d have wondered why as well. Funny how you always feel better at home than at work. Too bad my job doesn’t really allow telecommuting.

Ten Web Site Sins. I just got a pamphlet at work for a Web design class, where they list 10 things not to do. Mostly excessive animation, slow load times, frivolous graphics, stuff like that. The only no-no I do is “Don’t have excessive scrolling.” I’m torn about the daily view versus the weekly view. So I set it to a weekly view; those who prefer the daily can still click the links on the calendar. For a text-oriented site like this, it’s really hard to avoid scrolling. And besides, hitting the page down key is easier on the hands and wrists than clicking all over the place. It’s a good thing I don’t know off the top of my head who invented the mouse, because there are few worse things you can do to your body…

I think going 9-for-10 is pretty good, and every rule is breakable if you can justify it. So I decided to skip that class.

10/23/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Quittin’ time. That means a big bowl of chicken soup, reflection and mail. I usually make my own, but yesterday when I was getting sickness supplies I also picked up some of the instant powdered stuff. Faster that way.

A Mac tech at his limits. One of the organizations I support has asked permission to bring in an outside consultant because they’ve, in something close to their words, found a problem Dave can’t seem to solve. Never mind they didn’t ask me to fix it. And never mind they’re probably chasing the Bogeyman. In my estimation, 90% of Mac problems are either related to extensions conflicts or disk/filesystem errors. This machine loads maybe a dozen extensions, so that’s not an issue. But it’s a wannabe server, so of course it has filesystem errors constantly.

Not that that’s the issue. Find me a tech who isn’t almost always at his/her limits. If they aren’t, they’re not growing. This industry’s so constantly changing that it’s nearly impossible to stay away from the fringes of your knowledge.

And good night. My songwriting partner asked me to call him today if my voice was cooperating. It seems to be. I wrote no usable lyrics yesterday. But I can give him a leftover that I wrote back in 1997 or early 1998. It’s a total Seven Red Seven ripoff, but seeing as that band’s hardly a household name, I don’t think anyone will know, and the song I ripped off from was itself a ripoff of Depeche Mode’s Never Let Me Down Again. That’s all assuming we even use the thing, of course.

I’d best make that phone call… Mail’s all answered and sent, so it may make an appearance tonight. Otherwise, look for it tomorrow.

Strange Windows development. While working on one Win98 box, I decided to see if I could figure out once and for all the optimal disk cache settings for Win98 on another. The preliminary answer is very surprising. On this partcular machine at least, 3072 bytes (3 megs) seems optimal. With higher settings, you get slightly (and I mean slightly) higher benchmarks, insignificant enough to appear not worth investing even one more meg. The difference between 4 megs and anything higher is even less significant.

I’ll have to try this out with some other systems and other benchmarks, of course. I figured optimal wouldn’t be any higher than 8 megs, but I’m a bit surprised to see it at 3. Optimal may depend greatly on the drive involved, however. But I thought a good percentage of you would be interested in that.

Whatever the results, it appears the conventional wisdom of using 1/4 to 1/8 your system RAM for disk caching may be incorrect, at least on today’s high-memory PCs.

I see Naviscope mistakes my logo for an ad. I’ll have to rename the file to fix that. Naviscope is an ad/cookie blocking program that doubles as a DNS cache. A Linux box sitting on your network is more versatile and capable at both, but Naviscope is easier.

Want a real computer? Amiga has changed its mind yet again about the hardware aspect of its strategy. Will we be running on commodity hardware? At least not exclusively, if The Register has its story straight. Unfortunately, at this point I’m afraid anything they might do is likely to be too little, too late. It’s hard for any system, no matter how good it is, to survive seven years of stagnation. Sure, Amiga was 8-10 years ahead of its time. In 1985. By 1993, their lead was really dwindling. And of course, by 1995 the masses got preemptive multitasking and everything else they would have had if they’d bought an Amiga in the first place. And they didn’t seem to mind the wait. That last bit troubles me, but hey.

I’d still love to see them come back and mop up the floor using the rest of the industry (Microsoft and Apple need some humiliation), but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Outta here. I seem to have caught cold, so I’m going to cut myself short. Hopefully it’ll be a slow day at work so I don’t run myself into the ground.

10/22/2000

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Discussions should now be live. Thanks to Al Hawkins for the pointer. (Dan Bowman found it too, but Al said it first.)

And this is the last change for today. Constant changes so you’re always showing up on Weblogs.com’s most recently changed list is a good strategy for getting more hits, but I’ve got a magazine article I need to be working on, and a World Series to ignore!

Speaking of sports, with the Chiefs and Rams playing I couldn’t be too disappointed regardless of the outcome, but my Kansas City loyalties are very happy with that upset. (I’m from KC but live in St. Louis and normally pay little attention to football.)

And discussions… Dan Bowman asked me to turn on discussions “so [he] can make rude comments directly from the browser.” I’m used to rude comments so I kind of like them, but I can’t figure out how I managed to turn off that Discuss button, nor can I figure out how to bring it back.

In Prefs –> Editorial, site access isn’t set to editors only. Anyone have any other ideas?

Thanks a ton.

The page should render faster in Netscape now. I cut it down to three tables (it had been five, for no really good reason). It’s not as fast as I’d like, but Netscape 4.x just doesn’t handle scalable tables very quickly.

My best songwriting ideas come from church. One of our seminarians came up at the start of service and asked what kinds of songs we sing during the week. Are they songs like the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction that put the focus on and glorify ourselves, or on God?

Well, I was writing a song yesterday. The chorus was to go something like “I want to use it all up before You call me home / I want to flame out for you.” It’s speaking to God, but the focus is on me, and it’s works-oriented. Remember, this is Christianity. Christianity has the DH rule. If we’re truly putting everything we have into living for Christ, the work is happening through us, but it’s really God doing it. We’re just allowing it. It’s when we’re taking the bat out of the Specialist’s capable hands and going up there to hack away ourselves that we find ourselves in trouble.

So I bounced it off my songwriting partner to see what he thinks. I may write the lyrics, but I still want his editorial opinion. He likes the idea but not necessarily the exact words. Making it grace-oriented rather than works-oriented will be a challenge.

Getting back to secular songwriters for a minute… I have trouble understanding one-hit wonders. Aimee Mann is basically that, and her huge hit with ‘Til Tuesday, Voices Carry, was one of the first songs she wrote by herself. The first worship song I wrote is decent (better than the one I’m working on now), but will anyone remember it in a year? I’ll be surprised. You get better with time.

And the one-hit wonders who survive illustrate that. Listen to Mann’s latest, and it’s as good as anything Lou Reed ever did. Listen to ‘Til Tuesday’s first album, and the majority of it sounds like the stuff Madonna was doing at the time.

Another Day. It’s amazing once I kick into design mode, how much I just want to change the design just a little… No, wait, better change it back. Hmm. Sheesh, even the location of the search engine tool (it’s working now, not that there’s much to search yet) is a big deal.

Imagine once I get around to scanning a photograph of myself to put up here, how big of a deal that will be. I guess there’s more graphic designer in me than I thought there was, which is strange because I don’t like to draw all that much. But I am creative, so that’s probably where the designer comes from.

I still have to clean up that list over to the left. I like having the search engine there rather than on its own page, so I need to get rid of that page link over there. And so on. It’ll happen later.

I see 254 page reads on yesterday’s post, which is higher than I expected. When I stopped tracking my last site, my high for a day was the day my review of Mandrake Linux 7.0 appeared on LinuxToday.com. That was just under 1,100 reads if I remember right. So for a weekend, on a new site, 254 seems really high. Thanks.

Windows speed tricks. The Register, the great British IT tabloid, has a collection of Windows ME speed links at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/14154.html. I wasn’t impressed with such online collections two years ago, and I’m not impressed now. There’s some good info there, but it’s pretty light. One writer boasts of Windows ME booting his system in 50 seconds. I’ve gotten a Pentium-200 with Windows 95 to boot in 15. (Granted, it was after putting a 7200 RPM hard drive in it, but I’m betting this guy has a 7200 in his system too, and a much faster CPU.) If you’ve got a NIC and a modem in your system, it’s never likely to boot much faster than 30, but come on. Fifty? That’s pathetic for an OS that’s supposed to boot fast.

Believe it or not, turning off the Windows splash screen at boot yields tremendous speedups. Unide c:msdos.sys, then load it into Notepad. Scroll down to [options] and add this line:

logo=0

Now save it and hide the file again. This trick works on all flavors of Win95, 98, and ME. I thought this would only make a difference on pitifully slow machines, like 486SX/20s. I was wrong. Even if you’ve got a 1.2 GHz Athlon, that splash screen slows things down. With Windows 9x, you’re rebooting enough that this is worth doing.

10/21/2000

Dave Farquhar General

Not that I’m complaining in the least. It’s nice to have two days for the price of one while laying things out initially. So, let’s put some real content here, rather than “Hi, I’m Dave and I’m putting together a Web site” ramblings.

A Mac maintenance tip. Alwin Hawkins sent a tip to Dan Bowman, who passed it along to me:

My own personal choice is to burn a CD with a System Folder, DiskWarrior, TechToolPro, and the Apple rescue utilities. When a Mac can’t find a hard drive to boot off of, it will try to boot off the CD drive. Terribly convenient…

Another choice is picking up a cheap refurb external drive (SCSI for old macs, Firewire for new), load it with the tools you need, then stick it in a place where the kids can’t muck about with it.

When your Mac dies, you clip the drive to the external bus and Bob’s your uncle.

Lacking a burner-equipped Mac, that second tip is exactly what I did at work. We bought the biggest SCSI drive available at the time (I think it was a 20-gig), which I installed in an old external enclosure and partitioned. I installed the OS and utilities to one of the partitions; the rest of the space I use for quick-and-dirty backups. Before I make a major change to a system, I drag its drive icon to one of the partitions so I get a full backup, including hidden files, then go to work. If I mess up, bringing everything back is just a matter of dragging the partition’s icon back, then un-nesting the folders from the first two levels (the drag operation creates a folder with the disk’s name in it–just drag the folders to the root of the drive to undo that).

Design anarchy. Designers are used to specifying everything about their work’s appearance. So are computer users. This has been a point of contention since the Web’s infancy. (Designers don’t like to budge after years of classes and experience. Computer users don’t like to budge after years of classes and experience. Being both, imagine the conflicts that go on inside my head! No wonder I’m neurotic…) Centuries of experience have proven that a line width between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 alphabets (49 to 65 characters) provide maximum readability. Tables provide a neat way to hard-code such things.

But readers used to configuring everything about their machines (and chances are there are plenty of those in my audience) don’t like when I do that.

This time, I opted to code my site to scale to screen resolution, then I opened my browser full-screen (I usually keep it at about 680×768 or 800×768). I didn’t like it much. But then I hit the Ctrl-] combination to increase font size (I was using Netscape at the time). Then I hit it again. And again. And I liked it. Then I dropped my screen size to 640×480 and my browser to standard font sizes. Still readable without too much obnoxious scrolling.

So I’ve given up some control. But hopefully that’ll result in better readability on a wider variety of machines.

Corrections from Wednesday

Dave Farquhar General

Oopsies. A couple of them in yesterday’s big collection.
First, Turbo Pascal 5.5 in the link is a DOS program, not a Mac program. The Mac references appear to be because the Mac inspired certain things about that particular release.

Second, the way I replied to Jeff Hurchalla’s mail suggested I hadn’t started writing the Windows/Linux book. What I should have said was, “If I thought the book would cover the expenses I’d have to outlay to finish it,” rather than “..to write it.” All in all I wrote between 250 and 300 pages and probably have another 50 pages or so of notes. I think that qualifies as a start, by most reasonable people’s definition.

Brightmail, plus voice recognition

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

Brightmail update. I promised an update earlier (or at least I implied one) on Brightmail, the free (for private use) spam filtering service at www.brightmail.com. They’ll of course gladly sell your business spam filtering tools–that’s the point of their free service: Get you hooked, so you go tell your boss about it and they get some business.
At any rate, early on it was awful, making me wonder if the volume of spam it blocked was worth the trouble of signing up and then reconfiguring my mail client. Lately, however, it’s gotten much better. Last week it saved me from deleting e-mail offering me a free pager, how to find out anything about anyone, viagra, making $2-$300 a day, making what I’m worth (whatever that is), FWD: Check this out!!!, attention homeowners!, and some cable-stealing scheme. (It sends you a weekly summary, just in case it deleted something legit. The forward sounded like it could have been, but it wasn’t from anyone I know. Some guy named Dave Yaprak, who, as a spammer, should be forced by the rest of us Daves to cease using our name because he’s proven himself unworthy of such a cool name.) During that same time frame, two spams got through: One telling me I can double my money in three months by investing in the Yen, and another offering to sell me 15 million e-mail addresses. So it blocked 78% and gave me something to write about. Good deal.

While I still think it’s too early to deem Brightmail a must-have (I’ve been using it for just under a month now) it does seem to be more effective, and a lot less trouble, than any other anti-spam measure I’ve taken in the past. SpamCop does very little good; and as soon as I talked about Bounce Spam Mail ridding me of that blasted used computer broker that invaded Thompson’s site, they sent me something. It’ll be interesting to see if Brightmail finally rids me of them (I never opt out of spam, because that’s honest-to-goodness verification that I read the account, which makes my address even more valuable to sell to others).

“I never feed trolls and I don’t read spam.” –Weird Al Yankovic

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From: “Frank McPherson”

Subject: Recognition software

I don’t do much with voice recognition, but I certainly work with a lot of handwriting recognition. I think that with any recognition software the user eventually changes their style to accommodate the software. That is, the software may perform at 95% recognition and then the user changes what they do to get the remaining 5%. That’s how you get to a higher rate over a period of time.

Frank McPherson, MCSE

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You’re certainly right about that. And in the case of a writer with voice recognition, that change isn’t necessarily a good thing. I guess the test is whether an editor notices the difference. I know what my writing is supposed to “sound” like, and if it’s different, I’m not happy.

I just got back from a three-hour editing session, with someone who has a very different philosophy and style of editing, so I’m very much tuned in to the ways of writers at the moment. Anything that damages the integrity of the author’s original thought is a problem, from my point of view.

Maybe I’m just too creative or too perfectionistic for my own good. But we’ll see how the Dragon pans out–I’m very willing to give it a shot.

Phone shopping

Dave Farquhar General , ,

Telephones. I’ve been using the same Uniden cordless phone for the past six years, and it’s been a decent phone until the batteries go. So I went out in search of a battery, knowing that this phone is two generations behind the current state-of-the-art. The best price I could find on a new battery was $8, which seems a bit steep considering that a new 900 MHz cordless phone, including battery, costs as little as $20. You won’t get the highest quality at that price, but even today’s junk has a decent chance of outperforming a mid-range 1994 model. So I looked long and hard at new units.
Gatermann had just bought a new 2.4 GHz phone (these rates refer to the frequency at which the phone operates–higher is better, giving shorter, more nimble waves for greater range and clarity) at Radio Shack last week, and I was fairly impressed with it. But I’m a tightwad, so I searched for a bargain. A basic 900 MHz phone should be fine for my apartment, but as long as I was getting a new phone, I figured I might as well get one that could operate a headset, and I couldn’t find a 900 MHz model that could. I did find a Southwestern Bell 2.4 GHz unit that did, for $60. As far as I can tell, both Southwestern Bell and AT&T are still buying phones from Lucent and relabeling them, so your local Baby Bell probably does something similar. I was also glad to see this phone uses an NiMH battery, rather than a NiCad. While NiMH is more expensive, it’s a much better battery technology. Longer lasting, less prone to developing memory (though not immune to it)–it’s just worth looking for.

I also got a $10 headset. I’ve had spasms in my hands while holding a phone a couple of times, so the headset will eliminate that problem.