Tom's Insights - Week of 11/12/01

Week of November 12th, 2001

Last Updated: October 26, 2001 19:28

Most Recent : November 15, 2001
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Monday November 12, 2001

Another tragedy hits New York. Man, talk about a dangerous place to live. Authorities are saying there's no evidence to suggest terrorism, but I'm having a real hard time trying to understand how two engines and part of the tail section can simply fall off an airplane without some help.

On a cheerier note, we had a very enjoyable and relaxing weekend here at Syroid Manor. A good friend dropped by Saturday for a catchup (who is not only a computer geek like myself, but also an accomplished chef) so we decided to rotissere a shoulder roast on the BBQ. Yum-yum. Turned out perfect -- you could cut the meat with a fork. We drank beer and chatted long into the night. A good time was had by all.

I've been using XP (Pro, by the way) for a week. In many ways, it's a lot like Win2K -- it simply works. The word on the street says XP is more stable than Win2K, but I never really had any complaints with Win2K. About the only time I ever had to reboot it was when I was mucking around with beta software. Microsoft also claims that XP boot substantially faster than Win2K. I personally don't see any noticeable difference. On the subject of drivers, my Linksys wireless card works, but it seems to "forget" that it's a NIC every now and then. Unplug it, plug it in again, and off it goes. Very odd. On a deeper level, the folks in Redmond must have made some pretty substantial changes to the HAL. I say this because while there's lots of devices supported directly by XP, for those that are not, vendors are scrambling to rewrite their drivers. Dell has XP-specific drivers out for the Synaptic's trackpad, NVidia's video chipset, the built-in NIC/modem, and the Maestro audio chipset. On the other hand, the old version of WinDVD I used under Win2K works just ducky under XP.

What I like best about XP, as I mentioned last week, is the GUI. Fonts are significantly sharper, which for me means less eye-strain. MS has yet to fix one of the major annoyances I've had with Windows since day one -- there's no way to globally change icon style in Explorer (ie, under the View menu). The default under XP is "tiles", but I like the "icon" view. But if I want icon view I have to change it in every single folder I open. If someone knows a trick to force a global change, I'd sure appreciate knowing what it is.

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Tuesday November 13, 2001

Thanks to all who offered the solution to my folder icon dilemma of yesterday. The solution is remarkably simple, and I'm amazed that in all years I've been using Windoz I didn't hear or stumble across it myself. Open an Explorer window; set the icon style to your preference. Now go to the Tools menu and select Folder Options | View | Apply to All Folders. Presto and Pocus. You'd think the Microserfs would put a global option like this under Control Panel | Folder Options... Nope. Too intuitive. Ah well.

To date, everything I've thrown at XP has stuck and run without incident. Today it rained on my little parade -- twice.

I needed to burn a CD and discovered I hadn't re-installed CD-Creator. CD-Creator shipped with the system, and it worked without incident so I just kept right on using it. I decided to go back to Nero, so I dutifully went off their site and sucked down the latest greatest upgrade (5.551), which incidently, had been tested under XP. Cool. Install it, plunk in a blank CD, and... the File | Write CD option is greyed out. WTF? I poked and prodded around the menus for quite some time before I tried the Pick CD Recorder option. The only option was "virtual recorder". Harrumph. It appears my Sony CDRW is not supported by Nero.

So I stuck my factory CD-Creator disk in the drive and installed that. Which promptly brought up one of those ugly "This product has known issues with Windows XP" dialogs. Bother. Given that I was all out of CD-recording software to try, I went ahead and burned the disk anyway. It worked, although Adaptec's interface scrunched up its nose at me when I dragged the files from their folder to the CD panel. Mmm. I really don't want to go to CD-Creator 5, as I've heard horrible things about the product; and I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for Nero to recognize my drive. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Oh well -- it works after a fashion...

For all you authors out there who swear by TechSmith's SnagIt screen capture program, there's a new version on the street -- 6.0. Lots of innovative new features. Highly recommended if you need such a utility. Details here.

-oOo-

The events of the day reminded me a bit of Alice in Wonderland -- what was up is down; what was down is up. Interesting, to say the least. NTSB officials are stumped. As I said yesterday, an airplane does not simply "come apart" in mid-air. The engines were suspect yesterday. Catastrophic failure, I believe is the term. That theory went out the window today. So did ingested birds. They have the cockpit and data recorders, but so far all they have learned is everything happened very fast, and the pilots appeared to be alone in the cockpit. Late tonight I find that the first part to come off the plane was the tail stabilizer. Well, folks, that's why it crashed. But WTF would cause a tail stabilizer to fall off? Mmmm. At the moment, investigators are stumped.

Then there's the the scenes of the Northern Alliance taking Kabul without a fight (or at least not much of one according to reports). It happened so fast, the US government was completely unprepared. And while the politicians smile and mouth words of encouragement, behind the smiles are a lot of perplexed looks. How the heck did they do that?

Finally, the stock market rebounds today when news spreads that the crash of American Airlines flight 587 appears to be just an accident. First time I've ever heard of the financial sector reacting positively to the loss of an aircraft and all aboard. And I certainly don't mean the aforementioned in a derogatory sense -- just a reaction I would have never anticipated. Like I say, topsy-turvy world we live in these days...

Have a wonderful evening.

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Wednesday November 14, 2001

Unseasonably warm tonight. Very unseasonably warm -- about 50 degrees F.

If you noticed a "bump" in my web server service tonight, that was me. Apologies. I decided to upgrade my Apache installation from 1.3.19 to 1.3.22. I used a pre-compiled binary from a site I get most of my AIX binaries from. Problem is, they decided to (a) change the installation location, and (b) compile it with different options. In particular, they didn't compile the source with the typical options regarding modules. Bleh. Bottom line: my configuration file barfed on the new installation. And given that I didn't feel like rewriting my configuration file, I backpeddled to 1.3.19 again and called it a night. I'll probably just built 1.3 .22 from source this weekend, and build it the way I want.

Sorry for the short post -- I'm beat. Long day. At least it's hump day...

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Thursday November 15, 2001

Scarey shit floating on the airwaves the past few days. Check this out. I know a lot of people who would simply brush this stuff aside saying it was all "hot air". I'm afraid I have more respect for our enemy.

Lots to report -- no energy left in my internal reactor tonight. I'll try tomorrow.

Cheers...

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