EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I will respect that. If I don't know that you want your email address published, then I won't. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

I really dislike this daylight "savings" concept. As a brief lesson in minor jetlag, it was amusing once. But twice a year? Year after year. Sigh. This is what government is good for. Good Morning and happy Monday to you all.

Jakob Nielsen's new Alertbox is out, recommending a usability study prior to first use of a website. I think he means more than the webmaster looking at it and saying "I done good!". This Alertbox can be found here, at useit.com.

Doing a book with Tom. He.

Hope you have a good porch to sit on pondering your reinstallations.
And a  load of cold beers.


--
Svenson.

Attachment	2000/04/03 09:06

A Belgian entrepreneur is asked to paint a 5km wall along the E40 
highway. Smart as he is he asks a Dutch colleague, Jaap, to do 
the painting. The first day Jaap paints 2.5km. Wow, thinks the Belgian, 
that will be finished here by tomorrow. Wrong. The next day Jaap 
only paints 1.25km. Bad day the Belgian thinks, we will see tomorrow. 
Third day 500m gets painted and that goes on like this. By the end 
of the week all is done but the Belgian wonders about the decreasing 
productivity. "Now", says Jaap, "in the beginning the pot with paint 
is close by but by the end it quite some distance you know."

Now off to work with me. Back about 2, then into the writing. Later.


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Someone, maybe Gary, perhaps Don or Svenson, asked if I would be writing about writing the book, working with Tom, etc., now that the cat's out of the bag, as it were. Well, no, I am too damn busy trying to stuff the stinking cat back in the bag! No, not metaphorically - have your ever attempted to bag a cat? Personally, I find that it is simply easier to punt. Actually, things are going fine, though slower than I would like - three little-ish chapters are reasonably first drafted. I spent the last several hours of yesterday evening doing research (yes, Nicholai Ivanovich, just a moment) for the first of the Big Hunk (tm) chapters - a userspace command reference. (Down, Lobachevski).

Jack was in the office for a couple of hours yesterday, and is doing alright. The search for a new Director of Sales proceed apace, and I continue to work on the new catalog. Trying to fit our whole product line plus intro and art into 12 pages. I think I need a bigger shoehorn.

On the fast surfing front, these are some links I happened across recently, and thought I would share them here. From Rick Moen's pages, the topic of repartitioning and Partition Magic is addressed. Chickmagnet.org came up in discussion on a mailing list last week, with a reference to the "For the Ladies" page. Hmmm. Not very PC. This article on porting Linux apps to DOS appeared on April 2 - do you think they missed by a day? Then there is this (legitimate) article, talking about form and function for the upcoming 2.4 kernel. Lastly, apparently Netscape is due to release Netscape 6, a victim of version number inflation, today. Should be some busy FTP servers around the Netscape campus today.

Have an interesting day. I will. Later.

>- have your ever attempted to bag a cat? 
Yep, BTDT 
It takes some preparration though. 
First you put something moving in the closed bag. This rouses the 
cats intrest. Whenever you see the cat aproaching the bag you 
chase it away. No no, not the bag, just the cat. But don't do it too 
convincingly and make sure the cat at least get one oportunity to 
investigate the closed bag while you are 'not lookin'.  Later you 
open the bag and remove the object and leave the opened bag 
lying around. The cat comes around and you chase it away once 
or twice but just half hartedly, each time picking up the bag and 
putting it down again. The third (or fourth) time you don't chase 
but do as if you're not looking. The cat bags itself. Just make 
sure you pick up the bag fast enough. 

Don't try this trick twice with the same cat though. 

-- 
Svenson. 

The only way I want to bag a cat is right after it's been knocked out and
even then I'd rather do it with a front-end loader than with my bare
hands...

Gary Berg

Wow. It really is Tuesday, huh. Somehow, my body had the impression that it was only Monday, off and on. Probably due to daylight savings time. A & K Cleaners had their first go at this mess today - We have been busy enough that we had not been taking the time to do more than cursory swipes at the cleaning. My old friend Albert has his own residential and light commercial cleaning business and we have contracted with him for bi-weekly cleanings. Good job!

My eyes are crossing already, it isn't even Five Poppa Emma local, and I have 6 hours of writing that I want to crank out - I have most of the next chapter laid out in my head, where it will do nobody any good. So, I'd best have some caffeine and sugar, then get down to nose sculpting. Ah, BTW, the mail stuff appears to be back to normal, with over a hundred messages received during the recent outbreak of daylight. Correction from above - Netscape 6 does the debutante thing in LA with Steve Case tomorrow. The Netscape ftp server, when I checked earlier today, had a Netscape 6 showing in the /pub directory, but it was a dead link directory - one presumes they have a server farm sitting back there, waiting to go live tomorrow. Now, of course, the server appears to be inaccessible. Maybe they are hunkering down for the onslaught.

Maybe back later for a break, who knows? TTFN.


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Hump Day. As the Cat Turns continues...

Bagging a cat is trivially easy if you do it the right way:

1. Shoot cat
2. Drop in bag

Robert Bruce Thompson
http://www.ttgnet.com

>that metaphorically abusing cats
Nah, putting a cat in a bag is not necessary abusing the poor beast. One
cat my brother had just loved bags. You just dropped a bag somewhere and
you could bet on it, if he was home, he would be in the bag less than
five minutes later.

BTW.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, just put it on guard against
squirrels. Bob may argue that a BC is better but I think a cat would be
just as effective.

--
Svenson.

I always was a dog person.  I tolerate cats but wouldn't want one as a pet.
And they always know that my wife doesn't like them and waltz over and try
to become great friends with her .

Gary Berg

Tonight's SVLUG meeting announcement also dropped into the mailbox (clunk) yesterday evening - cutting it rather close - is this a fill-in speaker? I am going to go, because I know diddly-squat about Network Management, except that managed hardware costs twice as much. I look and say, why not make it work right to begin with? We aren't talking people here, people!

SVLUG Meeting Wednesday April 5----7pm, Cisco Building 9

Free and Open Network Management Software from OpenNMS.org

We are leading a revolution in enterprise management! No more closed,
proprietary architectures! No more two-year waits for the next release!
No more exorbitant pricing and expensive consultants! No more ten-year
old technology. We are building the worlds best enterprise management
system and giving it away free and open. If you have ever thought "I
can do this better!" come join us and together, we will do it better.

Visit: http://www.opennms.org/

The following is a brief biography of the speaker Steve:

Steve Giles 
Chief Technologist. Received a B.S. degree in Computer Science from 
Vanderbilt University in 1980. Developed application software for the 
manufacturing industry prior to joining Hewlett-Packard in 1982. Steve 
resigned his post at HP in 1992 to pursue independent consulting and 
co-formed Onion Peel Software in 1994. Responsible for product design 
and customer requirements. 

Steve is a certified OpenView and IT/O consultant and has taught 
OpenView Basics and Advanced OpenView to over 2000 students. 

Steve speaks regularly on network management and business topics 
at international user groups and industry events. 

Time for coffee and a commute - I made some more progress last night - a command reference chapter is like a rock garden - minimalist, hard to make pretty, useful and beautiful done just right. I am working it. Later.

Personal opinion time. Netscape 6 sucks. Hated it. Hated the movie. Pros: Got cool skins, didn't blow away my Netscape 4.7.2 configurations, installs, executes and looks the same in Win2K and LInux. Cons: Sucks. Sucks wiffle balls through a garden hose (tricky). Sucks spit off of sand in the Gobi. Am I making myself clear enough here? Objective, you say. Renders badly. Renders slowly. Didn't import existing profiles. Tricky to understand weasel worded registration thingy (that reappears every time you set up a new profile). Did I mention that the speed of this thing sucks? Maybe it's all the debug code, but it's just terrible. Sorry. Remind me to pull down and stockpile some netscape 4.xx tarballs and windows binaries against a rainy day. Someone will want them, and I will have them.

Subject: Just love your posting...
    Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2000 01:17:33 +0200
    From: Moshe Bar 
      To: [email protected]

Dear Brian

Just wanted to drop you a line for a web site well done. I love it and keep
coming back.

Maybe you hear this every day, so now you hear it yet once more from me.

Good luck for your book venture!

Moshe

Good meeting tonight. OpenNMS is doing some interesting things, and if you are into managed networks, you might want to check them out. Their work is all built on Java 1.2, which means that it is effectively platform independent, and they have working beta software, both in source and .jar format. Interesting - anybody got more hours in the day? I need some. Good night.


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Happy Thursday. I think I fixed Marcia's email, which has been gaffled up at the OpenMail queue on Grendel for the last three days. Make her feel better, drop by her site, have a look around and send her an email. (thus doing me a favor too, by exercising the system. Thanks!)

Speaking of email...

>- anybody got more hours in the day?

I use a trick now, may work for you.
I have my computer on the attic and I did NOT change my clock for
daylight saving there. I did change the clock besides my bed tough.

Result. I got one more hour per day.

But why am I feeling so tired these last weeks?

--
Svenson.

There's a variety of back channel mail on the topic of various daynoters' moves into LInux space, which I will leave for their respective recipients to publish or not as they will. I merely note that I burned a Mandrake 7.02 install CDROM for Bob, which will be winging his way via snail mail today.

Register.com, which is the registrar that Marcia and I use for our domain names and DNS service, has finally figured out that their customer base is a marketable revenue stream. I don't mind the occasional email, and this is the first - we shall see what we shall see - it's not like they are one of the cutrate houses like Joker, where I would expect this to compensate for the lower registration fee. And NSI just stinks - I had thought (perhaps naively) that Register.com was trying to differentiate itself in that regard. Oh, well.

Where does the time go? I must fly. Later.

Good Morning. Proceeding slowly, slowly. Worked away "putting rocks in jars" to use Tom's expression. We are (still) working hard at getting the styles settled, so that work written from this point forward won't have to be rewritten in a frantic rush at the end.

Happy Friday. (What's that mean, anyway? Nothing to do with the end of the work week, because the work never ends! Fortunately, it's fun (mostly), which makes it all right). Now to dive into the mailbag, searching for gems... First rock turns out to be crud - only a few messages on the PBI account, which would normally be OK, except that they did a one hour long service maintenance on the mailserver at PBI, some 30 hours ago, and ever since then... "Customers may experience a delay in sending and receiving e-mail." A delay. I am getting messages from Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, along with the odd current message. I think they blew up the queue. Sigh.

And, no diamonds this morning. DanB will probably do me the 'favor' of attacking Grendel next week, that's a good thing. Ah, over on Slashdot, notice that StarOffice 5.2 Preview is out. Anybody game to see what Sun has been doing with this since they got ther hands on it a few months ago? I'm in!

Starting that download, then I must run. Please do have an interesting and fulfilling day - Catch you later.

Well. StarOffice 5.2 may be a starter. The preview version seems more stable than 5.1. The compatiblity with MS Office (through O2K) file formats is *much* improved. While this download is (a) large (90M) and (b) time limited (dies sometime in June) - I think it's worth evaluating. O2K Standard Edition, Full Version, the thing you have to buy if you got MS Works with your computer, costs $419 at Costco, more at the Mickey$oft online store. On the one hand, if you need it, and it's corporate or business related, then it's worth every penny, because time is lots and lots of money. OTOH, for the home power-user, this SO5.2 appears to be (initially) one clean package. There's some interface issues to get used to, but I could work in it.

.sig of the moment -

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four
Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness.
Think of your three best friends.
If they're okay, then it's you.

Good morning all. Happy Saturday. Oddly, I've been doing research on vim, caffeine free, for much of the last hour. My life is passing before my eyes. The neat and clean three modes of operation that vi genetically passed on to vim have mutated and multiplied, becoming (in a cross between Monty Python and Red Green, with a dash of Dr. Seuss) SIX modes plus FIVE. This is worse than the symmetry breaking that occurred during the rapid inflationary period of the Grinch's heart. Aaaeeerrrgggnnhhh! (and good old Charlie Brown *never* got to kick the ball. Poor kid.) Not to worry. The first thousand pages of the book may be split evenly between vim and bash - between them I am sure that Tom and I can come up with 500 pages on each topic. Hope that IDG doesn't mind too much <SEG>

In other news, Jerry notes that Spamcop is down. I ran a whois on Spamcop, revealing the IP addresses of the nameservers. I tried pinging both - no joy. Just like warehouse.com was yesterday. And how good is it for a business to be totally not accessible? Not very.

Andy Tanenbaum finally got Minix released under a license that is recognized as Open Source - BSD. As he notes, better late than never, although I find a bit of sour grapes flavor to the posting. Hmmm. Then, over here, we find that Babylon 5 has been picked up by the Sci-Fi channel, and will begin airing again in September. Great show - Hoooowraw. Thank Slashdot for the initial links.

Time to start writing for pay. Later.


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Caffeine is flowing, a couple of guffaws have been had, the work day is about to begin. Jerry pointed at an evolutionary comic from Wiley's Non Sequitur, I like the political strip from the following day. Happy Sunday.

The other day, Tom wrote on figuratively sticking his AIX box in an isolation chamber. Today, Bob's soapbox refers to deleting from the wrong directory. Now it's my turn.

Last night, as I was nattering away on the phone with that young Canadian feller, Syroid, I decided to get out of my Windows environment, to reboot Grinch into Mandrake. I had Caldera eDesktop running in a VMware window. Before I shut down Windows, I have to shut down the caged Linux. So, in the terminal window I have open, I type su, the root password, and shutdown -h now. Only nothing happens. Hmmm. Hey, what's ???? I was logged into Grendel, the firewall and server box from eDesktop - I have just executed a halt on my server. "Tom, sorry, gotta run, sigh." Grendel won't reboot without a keyboard attached, and I keep forgetting to change the BIOS setting on that one (including last night).

More later. TTFN.

Here we are, some 10 hours later, with 6 pages knocked down, and one 21 page chapter in the hopper up at Tom's. As Tom said in the beginning, it isn't enough to write, or to write well, one must produce. By my calculations, we need to do 50 finished pages a week from here forward to keep to schedule, with a couple of weeks spare at the back end. I actually did about 30, for which I read the equivalent of a couple of novels in documentation, and caught myself in 17 lies (fixed 16 of them, punted on the last). I need to be able to do better than that.

I plan on turning out another 45 by Thursday or Friday of this week, but since it is command reference (yes, still command reference), that is a relatively straightforward 45. One terminal open to the appropriate info page, another open to the applicable manpage, a third Konsole for experimenting in (finding out what the truth is, when references disagree), all running on Caldera eDesktop in a VMware jail in Win2K, while I write in word. References : Running Linux, Linux in a Nutshell, RedHat Linux Secrets and Unix Power Tools open all around me. Easy. Heh.

Marcia is being a real trooper about my near total lack of free time. It is going to be a long 5 months. We are taking the Ashland trip in July, and will be shifting the Michigan leg of our vacation from immediately following that into early August.

One other problem is eating habits. I am enjoying this work. The problem with that is that I concentrate so hard that I look up at 8pm, and realize that I have had nothing to eat but a bagel at 9:30, a couple of soda's and a handful of potato chips. No wonder my head aches - protein *and* chocolate deprivation.

Having had a little supper, I am now going to spend time with my wife. Have a nice evening - see you tomorrow, or soon. Good night!


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