Tom's Insights - Week of 12/03/01

Week of December 3rd, 2001

Most Recent : December 9, 2001 - 15:00 CST
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Tuesday December 4, 2001

Good Morning. I fully intended to put up a long post last night in an attempt to make up for my dearth of material last week. So much for good intents. My day started deteriorating around 3pm, and went rapidly downhill from there. When I finally mailed off my last edits of the day, it was almost 11pm -- I started my day shortly after 8am. Sigh. Needless to say, I wasn't terribly enthralled with the notion of another hour or so in front of a computer.

So where were we... a lot has transpired since early last week. I'll do a quick synopsis; note that the following is in no particular order of importance. The list is "as the thoughts stream" from my not-yet-fully caffinated mind.

The "news du-jour" is the weather. Winter has arrived in Saskatoon, with a vengence. The temperature this morning is a balmy -30C and the wind is blowing. As Pooh would say, "Oh Bother". I never thought to plug the car in last night as it was only about -10 when I went to bed. Cindy the Malibu was not terribly impressed this morning when Leah decided she'd better drive the kids to school. With some gentle prodding everything worked as advertised, but damn that's hard on machinery.

Late last week I reverted back to Windows XP on my notebook. If you'll recall, I used XP for two weeks, then went back to Windows 2000 because of driver issues with my Linksys card. I'm not sure how to describe it, but working under Win2K seemed so... um... barbaric in contrast to XP. I found that I had quickly adapted to XP's new menu layouts, and REALLY missed the clarity and richness of the desktop (primarily due to the Clear Type technology, me-thinks). So I went back again to XP under the premise that Linksys had been promising an XP compatible driver for my WPC11 card since mid-November, so it should be out RSN right? I'd just brave the CAT cable for a day or two. Mmmm. That was Thursday or Friday last week. Still no driver. I'm not amused. I just might have to venture out into the wind and cold and price a new wireless card -- one that's XP compatible.

I've never been a fan of anti-virus software. IMHO, it typically introduces more problems (in the form of system instability) than it proports to fix, and as a rule I simply delete email containing attachments I'm the least bit wary of. And I rarely, if ever, download anything from sites I don't trust. I rec'd a comp. copy of Norton Anti-Virus 2002 last week, though, and decided to take it for a spin. Kick the tires, as it were. So far, I'm relatively impressed. I installed using program defaults, so NAV automatically requests a file scan before opening a document and checks all email both up and down. And while the aforementioned settings cause a certain latency to all file operations, it's tolerable. The big news for me is that the program is remarkably stable and well-behaved in its interaction with other system services and software. I'm not sure I'm enthused enough to keep the program on my system, but I certainly wouldn't hesitate to install it on a system that demanded a guardian at the gate [Mmm. Note to Self: Put NAV on the 'puter Suzie's currently using... ].

We had our friend Billy over again this weekend (We hadn't seen each other for almost two years, so we have a lot of catching up to do). Billy one of the best chef's I've had the pleasure to know. Damn can this guy cook (Well, actually Leah and I are doing most of the cooking -- Bill's sits and instructs). He knows all the tricks of the trade. He can also prepare just about any dish you'd care to name. This Saturday we did "Belize": Rice and beans, with mango chicken. Sunday was Leah's turn -- lasagnue with from-scratch Caesar salad. Not only are the meals excellent, but we have a lot of fun putting all the pieces together.

If you're running Samba 2.2.x, I'd think seriously about grabbing the latest CVS SAMBA_2_2 branch and building it. The Samba mailing list is fairly traffic, so I don't read every post, but I've noticed numerous replies from key Samba developers relating to such-n-such being fixed in the latest CVS tree. And while most of the bug fixes are minor, there are some key patches address oplock problems with Win2K clients. I also see the new 3.0 CVS tree is in place. Haven't tried it yet, but I'll likely have a look this coming weekend.
I started the process of installing Slackware on my notebook Sunday. I didn't get too far (the base is there and a few of the update packages I want to install) due to the fact we were too busy cooking and eating. I'll have more on this topic over the coming weeks. I haven't revisited Slack for some time now, primarily because many of the package updates I wanted were old or non-existent (KDE, for example -- no, I have no desire to compile 2.2.2 from scratch). This state of limbo has shifted over the last few weeks to the point where most of the important stuff I want is now available in TGZ format.
I had an exchange with my friend Moshe yesterday. He and his fiancee are safe and well. I find myself thinking a lot about Moshe lately, especially given the new round of violence that errupted over the weekend. I guess it's a bit like knowing someone in the US military who's on the ground in Afganistan.

Time to venture forth and get some work done. Be well everyone...

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Thursday December 6, 2001

It warmed up this morning. Minus 26 at dawn. Which is precisely 4 degrees better than minus 30. I can feel it already -- it's going to be a long winter.

Had a bit of a break in the action today, so I spent some time re-grouping. Sorting files, backups, pruning my email folders, and testing/tweaking some XML stuff. It never seems to end. Collect, store, backup, sort, sort, toss out cuz it's no longer significant or important. Humans are an interesting lot.

-oOo-

I'm amassed a ton of useful links over the course of the last few weeks. Some are from my own wanderings; some have been passed on from readers. In the spirit of the season (and in an attempt to clear my Inbox and desktop a bit), I'm going to have a URL night tonight. After all, information is only valuable when shared.

For anyone who, like me, find themselves tinkering with XP, here's a site to bookmark: TweakXP.com. Lot's a good tricks and tips. Here's one of my favorites (with due respect to the person who submitted it)...

Microsoft has tried really hard to prevent you from uninstalling windows messenger. They failed to make it difficult enough because with the directions below you can get rid of messenger very easily.

Navigate to C:\windows\inf\
Open sysoc.inf
find msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,hide,7 in the file and take out the word hide so the line would look like msmsgs=msgrocm.dll,OcEntry,msmsgs.inf,,7
Close the file and save it
Now go to the Add and remove programs applet in the control panel and you will be able to uninstall windows messenger
Make sure to click on the add remove windows components button

Note: You will be able to uninstall other unneeded programs by removing hide from the sysoc.inf file as well. Talk about ta' and da' -- I love it.

Speaking of XP, I'm still using it on my notebook with mixed success. I do all my XML/HTML editing/writing in HomeSite 5 now, and every now and then the program locks up on me. Given that it never did this under Windows 2000, I have to assume it's something to do with an interaction between HomeSite and XP. And while it's annoying, I've yet to lose any work to the problem, so it's not a major issue for me. Mulberry also seizes under XP now and then, but it does this under Win2K as well, so the problem is not OS specific. On a positive note, I believe I'm getting old. I'd getting to the point where I just what things to work, and with a minimum of fuss or muss. In this regard, XP is the best OS to come out of Redmond yet. I wanted to print something the other day, and realized I had yet to set up my network printer since my last clean install. So I opened up the printer folder to run the Wizard, and there was my LaserJet 6L -- automatically sensed, configured, and ready for service. All I had to do was make it my default printer, and I was off to the races. Very cool. In a similar vein, I needed to scan something today, so I dug my HP 6300C out of the closet and prepared for a fight (not the easiest device to set up under Win2K). Imagine my surprise when I plugged the USB line in, and up popped a little bubble from the notification area of the taskbar informing me I had just plugged in a "6300C scanner" and to "hang tough a minute". The hard drive whirred and clicked, and the bubble disappeared. Huh? What now? I put a sheet of paper in the scanner, pushed the start button, and up popped a dialog. "What would you like to do sir? Scan the document into Word? Run the Office Scanner Wizard? Or scan the document and open it in a graphics program?" Now that, folks, is the way device recognition and configuration should work. The only exertion on my part was finding my lost USB cable, and deciding what program to scan the image into. I was impressed.

So impressed I ordered a Dell wireless PC card today on the recommendation of my friend John Biel. Dell has XP drivers for it, and John tells me the OEM puts out a solid product (the card is made by Cisco using the Orinico chipset). He also tells me Linux likes the card and I won't have to jump through some of the hoops I have in the past to configure it. Yippeee!

For all you webmasters out there, here's something I stumbled on the other day: LXP. It's a markup language implemented as a loadable Apache module, that interfaces closely with PostgreSQL. Nifty. Now to find some time to try it out...

I've been using Opera 6 for the last three or four days. I find it much improved over previous versions, and very close to something I could use on a daily basis. Two show-stoppers for me. One, I do a lot of surfing every day, and have a habit of dragging URL's to my desktop for later culling and review. I can't do this with Opera. Seems like a major faux-pas to me, but hey -- what do I know? Two, despite the fact I've got cookies turned on, and tried various different emulation options (Opera can announce itself as IE, Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera), I cannot use Opera to do online banking with my financial institution. When I try to login, I get a message that I need to turn on cookies in order to access certain features on the web site. And then I'm dutifully dumped out. Rats. The above niggles aside, Opera is fast, and very configurable. I especially like having search boxes for Amazon and Google right on the menu bar. I use both services routinely in the course of work-related research.

Roland's been showering me with some excellent, relevant, "gee-I-wish-I-knew-that-a-week-ago links the past week or three. Here are some of the ones I've bookmarked for future reference and/or research:

IOZone is a filesystem benchmark program. The source is available, so you can build it for just about any platform your little heart desires.

Along similar lines, but more extensive, the LTP (Linux Test Project) is a series of scripts developed by some high-budget engineers working for SGI, IBM, and a few others I can't remember. It test kernel functions, IO, and makes sure your partridge is indeed in the pear tree where it belongs.

QuickSwitch is a program for laptop users that allows you to switch network configurations/profiles on the fly.

Trying to configure and/or understand wireless networking under Linux? Here's a must have link: Wireless Tools for Linux. The entrance page is full of links that will take you on all kinds of adventures. Warning. Do not click the aforementioned link unless you have several hours to kill. Hint: Grab the PDF on wireless networking from the documentation URL at the top of the page.

Doc2PDF converts MS Office email attachments to PDFs -- on the fly. Handy if you want to send someone a document produced in office, and you know they don't have the means to read it on the other end.

There. That should keep everyone busy for a day or two. Be good. If you can't be good, be careful.

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Friday December 7, 2001

I made an error yesterday -- the wireless card I'm getting is a branded Lucent card (not Cisco) based on the Orinco chipset. No idea where I got Cisco from; I don't think they even make a wireless PC card. Oh well. Minor detail. I should have it Monday, and I'm told it has XP drivers on the accompanying CD.

Not a heck of a lot to report tonight. Temperature's warmed up (about -20C). I'm almost through XML in a Nutshell. I still don't understand 2/5th of what they're talking about, but it's a good read. XML is not all that hard to grasp; it's the 20 other associated technologies and standards that go along with it that makes things confusing.

Tim Werth and I have had several exchanges regarding the Opera 6 cookie problem I'm been experiencing. From what I understand, it's a bug that jumped into version 6; everything worked as advertised in 5.x. Apparently the cookie.dat (or whatever) file, once convinced to do things one way, does not gracefully accept configuration changes. The solution is to (a) try deleting the cookie file, and if that fails, (b) uninstall/reinstall. I give it a whirl tomorrow sometime and forward my results. It's not a biggie for me; more like an annoying inconvenience. I store my bank card # using a cookie, cuz I'm too lazy to memorize it. So every time I want to logon, I have to go upstairs and get my wallet, then enter my 9 or 10 card # before I can get in.

It's been a long week, and I'm definitely pleased it's Friday. I think I'll go have a game of Half-Life and shoot a few genetically malformed monsters.

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Sunday December 9, 2001

Yuletide time at Syroid Manor -- we picked out our Christmas tree today, and its as close to "perfect" as it gets (damn I'm good :-) ). It's a balsm fir, about 6 feet, nary a hole anywhere, and almost perfectly formed. I can only see one branch that could use a bit of nip n' tuck. I do believe this is one of the nicest trees we've ever had. We'll let it stand overnight and decorate it tomorrow night. I'll try to remember to take some before and after pictures.

For the most part, our weekend was a quiet one. In what has now become a weekly ritual for us, Bill and I whipped up a "gourmet" meal last night. He showed me how to take what would be considered a "garbage" pork roast, trim it, then cut it into a flat form. Next we made a mushroom, onion, and pepper-based stuffing, spread it on the meat, then rolled everything up and tossed it in the oven. Add some roast potatoes and fresh green beans, and you have a meal fit for a king. Deeelicious... Man, was that roast tender. And just the right amount of spice/seasoning.

I haven't spent much time on the 'puter this weekend, although I did spend a few hours tinkering with Visual Foxpro 7.0, Encarta 2002, and Copernic 5.01 Pro. Needless to say, a couple hours doesn't do even one of these programs justice never mind three. I'll save my comments until I've spent some more time with each.

Hope everyone had a peaceful weekend.

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