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 August
31, 2007: The Digital Household License
In the wake of releasing my
first ebook on Lulu yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about
what sort of license I will be using to issue future titles. To
get some perspective I've gone back to thinking about how print
books are used, and how people are likely to want to store and manage
their ebooks, once ebooks become a commonplace. (They're still very
much a geek thing, really.)
One insight I had was this: Books drift around the house.
While I was growing up I read my dad's books. My sister read mine.
I read hers. Carol and I have never made any attempt to keep our
libraries separate—though when you happen upon a book on orthopedic
rehabilitation here, it's a good guess that Carol bought it and
that I haven't read it. There are piles of books in odd places.
This is the norm in households where readers live.
Ebooks will drift too. Geek households now have five or six computers,
a couple of PDAs, a few smart phones, and here and there one of
the fledgling ebook readers. Cheap Wi-Fi will allow files to wander
among all of those devices, and wander they will. Big Media is all
lathered up about that, but my reading of Fair Use tells me that
it's not actionable, admitting up front that case law is still catching
up with home networking and will be for years to come.
But hey, ebook drift is a good thing. You want other people to
discover your stuff, and the influence of family is strong. So I
created a prototype license modeled on the way books drift around
the house: The Digital Household License. The gist of the license
is that an ebook may be freely copied among all digital devices
based under the same roof. It'll happen anyway, there's some upside
to it, and attempting to rigidly enforce a "one device, one
sale" interpretation of copyright within a household will only
incite fury and make enemies.
Here's the relevant text from the readme file in "Whale Meat":
By purchasing this
file you have acquired rights to its contents under the Copperwood
Press Digital Household License. This license allows you to freely
copy the file or files to any digital devices based in your household.
This would include computers, PDAs, smart phones, ebook readers,
audio/video players, or whatever other digital devices you may
have in your home with the power to render the licensed files.
In simpler terms, this
means that you may send the files across your home network, back
them up, or share them with your spouse, your children, your parents
or grandparents, as long as they live under the same roof with
you. It does not mean that you cannot take the files out of your
house, as long as the files are stored on devices that "live"
in your household and are considered based there.
What we ask that you
**not** do is share these files with people who do not live in
your household. If you wish to anthologize the work or distribute
it as part of an educational course, please contact Copperwood
Press. Licenses are available very inexpensively for these purposes.
This license does not
expire, and is not limited to the file formats delivered on purchase.
You have the right (which is actually a Fair Use right guaranteed
under Federal Law) to convert the files to formats that we either
cannot deliver (for example, for exotic ebook readers) or which
do not exist at this time.
This license is inheritable.
We hope, in fact, that a century from now, someone in your direct
line of descent will be reading these files on devices that we
cannot yet imagine.
I'm still thinking about how to deal with resale, and may just
have to trust people on it. Again, being a hardass is pointless.
People who know me will not be surprised that I will not, now or
ever, include any kind of DRM in my digital publications. The problem
small publishers face is not piracy, but being unable to rise out
of the noise. Licensing is in many respects the least of our worries,
but it's a base we have to cover, and this is how I intend to approach
it.
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August
30, 2007: A Story for a Dollar
 I
just uploaded a new Lulu project: "Whale Meat," an original
fantasy novelette delivered in ebook form. Like most of what I'm
doing on Lulu, it's an experiment: A story for a dollar. The deliverable
is a ZIP file containing the story in several formats: RTF, TXT,
PDF, HTM, and LIT. One of those formats should be readable on just
about any device you could name.
The story itself is living evidence that I didn't take the advice
of Harlan Ellison at Clarion back in 1973: Don't keep rewriting
it! Write it, proof it, and sell it! Well. I wrote the story
while I was still in college in 1974. I've been fooling with it
now for 33 years. I gave it to a semiprozine back in 1981, rewrote
it again in the late 1980s, another time in the early 1990s, and
yet again this past year. I figured it was time to just cut clean
and put it where people could get it, and in the process test the
viability of the notion of selling short fiction "by the piece"
in ebook form rather than in an anthology. For each sale, I get
80 cents, and Lulu gets 20 cents. I'm good with that.
The story itself is unlike anything I've ever done, and it's really
the only fantasy story I've ever written that I would let someone
else read. The idea came to me after I failed out of engineering
school in 1970 after a single semester. I've always loved math,
but I have a terrible time with arithmetic, and especially setting
decimal points. So although I was poleaxed by the beauty of calculus,
I had a terrible time applying the math to real projects, and understood
very quickly that I was not engineer material. That said, I now
present you with a
calculus fantasy for a dollar.
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August
29, 2007: Botnets and Web 2.0
It's nice, sometimes, to have the big guns like John Dvorak on
your side. He
doesn't much like the Web 2.0 fetish, as I don't, and never
have. His point is one worth meditating on: Microsoft itself, the
Big Kahuna, tripped over its own feet recently and lost the use
of its WGA system for an entire day, infuriating millions of people
and implying that many of them were software pirates when they are
not.
In this case, the problem was a bug in WGA. However, like all server-side
systems, WGA is vulnerable to DDoS attacks. I get twenty or thirty
emails linking to some variant of the
Storm Worm every day, and they are getting cleverer all the
time. The botnets are growing, and virtually nothing is being done
about it. It
may be the case that nothing can be done about it.
Nobody knows how many bots are out there, and most client-side
people don't care, because there's no downside for them personally.
The bots are careful not to call attention to themselves, and don't
noticeably degrade system performance. More is better here, for
both the botmasters and for their feckless PC victims: The more
bots you have at your command, the less each individual bot has
to do to accomplish the botnet's mission, whatever it may be. Command
ten million bots (and if that isn't possible now, it soon will be)
and an individual machine only has to send a server request every
few seconds for the botnet as a whole to render a server unusable.
This looks so much like ordinary user activity that it would be
difficult or impossible to spot an individual bot by examining what
it requests. If more than one attack is underway at once, a clever
botnet could rotate the server target among the individual bots
so that it doesn't look like a user is requesting the same server
every five seconds. The old botnets were cancers. The new ones are
parasites, and becoming gentler and more careful parasites all the
time. Future bots could become symbiotes, but that's another discussion,
one I hesitate to take up here. (Got some great ideas for a Phil
Sydney novel, though, assuming anybody remembers Phil Sydney.)
Microsoft should be glad that there's so much money in spam and
penny stock scams. A 2008-class botnet could shut down WGA for as
long as the botmasters might desire, for the pure spite of it—and
still leave plenty of bot bandwidth for pushing penis pills. The
same is true of any Web 2.0 site out there, including the biggies
like GMail. Nobody's immune, and if there's any master plan for
reducing or eliminating the power of botnets, I have yet to see
it.
So while I use Web 2.0 apps here and there, I've made a conscious
decision not to be dependent on them, especially for my paying tasks.
They add numerous points of failure to a path that for many years
has led from my keyboard and monitor to my hard drive and back.
Some things may require a Web 2.0 architecture—social networking
and online collaboration, as my recent research has been telling
me—but beyond that, heh: I'll stick with the stuff sitting
right here on my own desk, with the CDs on the shelf and spare parts
in the closet.
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August
25, 2007: vbDrupal
I support a small, semiprivate phpBB forum that has recently been
under attack from user-list spammers, who register bogus users in
the hope that search engines will spider user lists and raise the
rankings of the Web stes cited in their bogus user profiles, which
are almost invariably for porn and pills. I've turned on everything
I can to discourage this, but phpBB moronically does not allow you
to simply hide unvalidated users, so the craziness continues. And
fairly recently, my hosting service disabled PHP exec(),
rendering my two instances of the Gallery Web photo album unchangeable
and thus useless. (Gallery uses exec() to call an external
image processing package.)
So I've been sniffing around for alternatives, even if it means
leaving my current hosting service for less paranoid pastures. The
software doesn't have to be free, though it should not have delusions
of "enterprise" pricing, heh. (I've always been willing
to pay for software if it does what I want and isn't needlessly
paranoid.) This may be an opportunity to (finally!) mount hardsf.com
and use it for online SF workshopping, as I've wanted to do for
years. What I'm looking for feature-wise is this:
- An online threaded message board with effective comment and
user list spammer control.
- An online photo album.
- Collaborative document editing.
- A download area for documents and other files.
- Static but fully formattable mini-Web pages allowing users to
post bios and promote their work.
- Built-in group chat for workshops.
- The ability to make selected forums completely private and invisible
to non-members.
The group chat can be done otherwise if necessary, but the rest
is pretty core to the mission. I'm looking at a lot of different
packages, but one that intrigues me is vbDrupal,
a melding of the commercial forum package vBulletin
(which I have visited and like a lot) and the open source Drupal
content management sysyem. My question for this morning is: Has
anybody here used either Drupal or vbDrupal, and if so, what do
you think? Any other suggestions?
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August
22, 2007: Odd Lots
- The Vista network layer slowdown that's been observed while
Vista is playing music may be no more than a change in software
priority. See this
article. (Thanks to Tim Goss for the pointer.) This leads
to the question: Why can't Vista summon the power to both handle
the network at full speed and play music at top fidelity? How
and where is Vista wasting all those cycles?
- Here is a
marvelous photo-essay on "bubble cars," the tiny
little cars that pop up on the scene from time to time (generally
in Europe) and then vanish for reasons obscure. The smart car
(which e.e. cummings would probably have loved, for its case and
its oddness) is the latest to hit our shores, but it's an ancient
tradition. Love those three-wheelers!
- Pertinent to the above, the Dark
Toasted Blend site is a surreal collection of the odd and
the interesting, perfect for browsing on days when you're feeling
under it and can't summon the energy to do anything useful. My
current favorite (even more than the bubble car essay, but hey,
I'm a book publisher!) is Unusual
Books and Book Sculptures.
- One thing that's gotten pretty high on my priority list to acquire
and test is Crossover
Linux from Codeweavers,
a commercial framework for using Wine
to run Windows apps on Linux. Supposedly it runs Visio well, and
that's something I just have to see. Always interested in hearing
reactions from people who have used it.
- Most of you have now heard that somebody has done the painfully
obvious and created a
utility to correlate the IPs of people who are editing Wikipedia
anonymously with the organizations that are listed as owning those
IPs. All sorts of groups have been caught with their hands
in the wiki jar, from the Vatican to the CIA to—gasp! How
could it be?—the Democratic Party. From BBC
News: "...a computer owned by the US Democratic Party
was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host
Rush Limbaugh. The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as 'idiotic,' a 'racist',
and a 'bigot'. An entry about his audience now reads: 'Most of
them are legally retarded.' The IP address is registered in the
name of the Democratic National Headquarters." How very
mature. So...can we please eliminate Wikipedia anonymity now?
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August
21, 2007: Why Vista?
Slashdot aggregated an
item indicating that when you play audio files in Vista, network
performance slows down. Nobody's quite sure what's happening,
nor (more crucially) whether it's a bug—i.e., accidental—or
a consequence of a feature. If the latter, the feature is likely
to be DRM, and while I don't get frothy over DRM if it doesn't get
in my way—I don't for the most part use DRMed content—this
is a case where Vista may well penalize users across the board for
the sake of DRM, whether users are accessing DRMed content or not.
All the more reason to ask: Why should any of us bother with Vista
at all? I spent a couple of hours the other night poking at Vista
on my brother-in-law Bill's new laptop. The system seemed sluggish
to me, even though it was clearly burning cycles furiously and did
its best to cause second-degree burns on my thighs. (Note to self:
Don't use modern laptops in your underwear.) The mouse pointer stuttered,
as it does on my Tablet PC. I don't recall ever seeing mouse
stutter under Windows 2000, which I have used daily now for almost
eight years.
What's the value-add, then? I saw nothing in the UI that seemed
anything other than needlessly different from XP or 2000, and certainly
nothing that made the "Vista experience" easier to grasp
or accomplish. I've heard the argument that Vista protects stupid
users from themselves—maybe, a little—and while there
might be a slim sliver of truth in that, my suspicion is that Vista
exists primarily to protect Microsoft, and through them Big Media,
from their users.
No thanks. That's a war I won't take part in. I've become a little
worried about what will be on my next laptop—it certainly won't
be a Tablet PC, egad—but was heartened recently as a friend
received a slightly broken 2 GHz laptop from a neighbor who would
otherwise have put it out on the curb. He replaced the keyboard
with a spare purchased on eBay, and then nuked XP Home and installed
Windows 2000 from a generic boxed copy. All the drivers for the
specialized laptop hardware were freely downloadable. Now he has
a Win2K laptop, without crapware or DRM booby traps, that runs like
lightning and will not turn on him. Given that I use my laptop basically
for Web and email access on trips, I don't need state-of-the-art.
And that assumes that the state-of-the-art has significantly advanced
on MS operating systems since Win2K. I'm not sure it has. Win2K
already has symmetric multiprocessor support. Does Vista do it better?
Haven't heard—and how effectively can our apps take advantage
of the four or more cores you can now get in retail machines? MIT
recently turned loose a 64-core CPU, expressly to see what software
architectures can do with that many cores. (My guess: Without radical
re-thinking and complete re-coding, not very much.)
As time allows I'm going to get a Ubuntu Feisty Fawn partition
on my SX270 lab machine and spend some quality time with it. A lot
of Windows software runs under Linux via Wine,
and I haven't played with Wine for several years. Time to get back
to it. Failing that, Windows 2000 may eventually become a compatibility
layer for me, running in a VM so that I can maintain my Visio 2000
drawings and my InDesign 2.0 layouts. Vista's most significant feature
may be that it isn't necessary. Paths to whatever you need
to do on X86 hardware probably exist elsewhere. Keep looking. I
intend to.
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August
19, 2007: Cisco's Mutilated Cables
I installed another pair of Linksys PLE200 Powerline netwoking
adapters for Carol's sister a few days ago, and again (as I described
in my entries for June
2-4, 2007) they worked right out of the box, in spite of the
illiterate documentation and the moronically coded management utility.
What is worthy of note this time (I overlooked it the first time)
is the state of the two CAT5 patch cables included with the ~$200
PLK200
Powerline networking kit. Basically, they're mutilated.
One of the two patch cables is shown above. I hope everybody knows
what's wrong here: You can't just hank up a CAT5 cable like it was
a power cord and still call it a CAT5 cable with a straight face.
Making tight 180° bends in the cable kinks the copper conductors
and inserts impedence bumps—think of them as electron turbulence—at
the kinks. This causes packet errors and hugely reduces the
continuous bit rate at which the cable can operate.
It's worse yet when you consider that the PLE200 unit itself is
designed to carry HD video over IP, and it thus asks a lot
of its cables. If you intend to move video over your network, you
should ideally use the newer, higher-bandwidth CAT5E cables, and
keep the radius in any cable bends as broad as possible. I watched
the guy who installed CAT5E throughout our house in 2003, and he
was an artist: The cables turn gently wherever they turn, at radii
that in many cases was 24" or more. (This is much easier
to do when you can place cables before the drywall goes up!)
I've always liked Linksys gear, but my experiences recently have
not been as good as they were three or four years ago. Cisco has
since bought Linksys, and it boggles the mind to think that Cisco
could be behind the kinds of carelessness I've seen in products
I've installed over the last year or so. One hopes it's a coincidence—and
next time I may try another vendor.
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August
14, 2007: Wikipedia on Your Hard Drive
I remember hearing a couple of years ago that Wikipedia
was available as a downloadable file (!!) and you could put
it on your laptop. Got distracted and didn't pursue it, as my three-year-old
Thinkpad was getting pretty full and time was (as usual) tight.
So this morning I see an
article aggregated on Slashdot about how to install Wikipedia locally—and
indexing it so you can perform keyword searches.
Whoa. I sat back, and let it sink in.
There are some reasons not to do this—it takes a fair bit
of time, some geeky and not-inconsiderable screwing-with-bits, and
you lose the up-to-the-minute changes people are constantly making
to the database—but when you're done, you can take Wikipedia
out into the wilderness while you're researching the feeding habits
of the lesser northern verkshquemy, and not have to lug a satellite
system on your back.
The astonishing thing to me was the peripheral fact that all
of Wikipedia can be crammed into a 3.9 GB download. Good god,
I can put that on
a thumb drive. (Ok, there's a catch: You don't get all the pictures.
I haven't tried this yet; I'm not really sure if you get any.) You
could certainly put it into one of the better ebook readers, and
before very much longer, onto a smartphone.
I'm pretty much through boggling, but I'm also doubly certain that
all this wringing-of-hands over things being "not notable"
on Wikipedia is wasted, and mostly bogus. Prior to this morning,
I would have guessed that Wikipedia took hundreds of gigabytes or
worse. If the whole damned thing can fit on a thumb drive, flame
wars about whether accurate material is notable
or not notable is ridiculous, another form of fetishism, and
probably just a power trip. Basically, throw it all in—let
us sort it out.
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August
12, 2007: I Am Not e. e. cummings
I am not e. e. cummings. For a few days in the spring of 1973 I
thought I might be, and started writing little poems all in lower
case. After I had the good sense to reread the poems, I stopped
thinking that I was e. e. cummings. However, LiveJournal,
as good as it is, thinks that I am e. e. cummings. Mr. Cummings
didn't use capital letters a lot, but he didn't begrudge them to
other people who struggled with issues like how to start a sentence
about cummings without using a capital C at the beginning of the
sentence.
So. I do not write poems all in lower case. I am not j. p. duntemann.
I am not jeff duntemann. I am certainly not jeff_duntemann. My name
is Jeff Duntemann. LiveJournal, however, forbids me to be Jeff Duntemann.
It would allow me to be jduntemann, or jpduntemann, or grouchycontrarian.
Because I need a good RSS-capable mirror for my primary journal
site, I bought a
LiveJournal account, and grumbled while begging the system's
gracious permission to be jeff_duntemann, which is not my
name and makes me look a variable in a bad C program.
And that brings me, by the way, to the point of this rant: Hey!
You out there! Yeah, you, whoeverthehell wrote the username management
code for LiveJournal, you are an inferior programmer! (And I'll
bet I know what language you code in.) You are an adolescent, lower-case
character fetishist with untreated pimples and an emotional age
of about 15. So boy, I'm a-callin' you out. I dare you to
stand up here and explain to us grown-ups why there cannot be upper-case
characters in a LiveJournal username. Or that much-despised ASCII
character 20H, which as a character-of-space ought to sue for discrimination
under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And boy, I don't think you're man (or programmer) (or poet) enough
to do it.
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August
10, 2007: Gretchen's Home
Gretchen came home yesterday noonish, looking groggy but not in
terrible discomfort. We sent her up to bed, where she stayed the
rest of the day. She's in much better spirits today, and spent a
good part of the afternoon down with us, watching Jeopardy
with Bill Leininger and coaxing Katie Beth to behave. Katie has
actually been almost unbelievably good—how many 9-month-olds
sleep reliably through the night, from 10:30 PM until 7:30 or 8:00
AM the following morning?
Carol and I are bemused by the evolution of baby technology, even
since the mid-1980s, which was the last time we paid much attention.
(It's hard to believe that our nephews are now 22 and 24.) Gretchen
has a thing called a "Diaper Genie," which is a very clever
gizmo that amounts to a tall, slender wastebasket and a long, long
plastic bag that unrolls axially (like a condom, though I hesitate
to use the simile) and becomes a sausage skin with dirty diapers
acting as sausage stuffing. You pick up the lid, drop a dirty diaper
into the bag (pushing it down if necessary), and when you twist
the lid it seals the dirty diaper into its own little plastic-bag
sausage. Previously added diapers gather at the bottom of the device
like a string of fat hot dogs, and are dumped regularly. Katie's
bedroom thus does not smell of poopy diapers, and because her bedroom
is right next to the guest room, Carol and I are good with that.
Really good.
Katie's formula bottles are modular and easy to clean, with disposable
linings. The formula itself is easy to deal with, with a little
measuring scoop in every can. Two scoops powder, four ounces of
water, shake well, and you're there. Her toys play synthesized music
(classical, at that! She'll know "Carmen" before she can
walk!) and her baby monitor works on 2.4 GHz. We can hear freight
trains going by a few blocks away on the monitor before we hear
them normally.
By contrast, I had a tin toy clock that played "Hickory Dockory
Dock" when I turned a crank. (There was a rubber belt inside
with nubs that plinked against a set of tuned steel fingers, as
I discovered when the poor thing fell apart a few years later.)
It played equally well if cranked in either direction, which is
why I can still hum "Hickory Dockory Dock" backwards 52
years after last hearing it. My folks actually did have a baby monitor,
which was a 2-tube intercom in a Bakelite cabinet that did not suffer
roughhousing very well but survived in my posession (in several
pieces) until we moved from Arizona in 2002. But diapers, eek! The
less I can recall about dealing with diapers in the Fifties, the
better I think I'll like it. (We found the diapers that Carol had
worn in the early 1950s in a box in the basement of her mom's house
this past spring. Squares of cloth. No tabs. And you had to wash
them...)
Speaking of mutant sausages, Pete Albrecht sent me a link to the
story about
the Chicago police ticketing the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile.
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August
8, 2007: If I Had a Billion, Part 5
(Continuing a thread I began in my July 13,
2007 entry.) A gratifying number of people who wrote to me indicated
that they would fund research, in a lot of different areas. I'm
for that; research is much less political than education, and much
more can be done with less money. (Even a billion dollars would
not allow me to buy Harvard and convert it into public housing,
as much as I think that that would improve both higher education
and public housing.)
So. Here's a notion for you: Establish a foundation with our billion
that would fund the evolution of PC hardware, a PC OS, and PC programming
toward parallelism, all on an open-source basis. My plan (call it
Parallelogram) would be to start with Linux and re-think
all pertinent components to make good use of at least eight cores,
figuring that by the time the project matures enough to useful,
Intel will be shoveling cores onto their dies like there ain't no
tomorra.
A major emphasis in the project would be to anticipate exploits
and design them out of the architecture. This is more than just
forbidding the use of unbounded string functions (though that would
be a good start) and would include a minicomputer-style "supercore"
that performs supervisory functions from a memory space that is
inaccessible to any user space. I don't see why the supervisor should
not have its own memory stick on the mobo, nor even why it can't
have a separate CPU, though I admit I'm getting a little out of
my league in suggesting it.
It wouldn't be up to me anyway. With thirty million in annual revenue,
I could hire a crew of superb programmers to crank code and a couple
of genius-level guys like Michael Abrash and David Stafford to architect
it and attack the hard problems. I would try to steal a few guys
back from Microsoft, primarily Anders Heilsberg, whom I would task
with creating a suitable parallel processor programming system.
Key to the effort would be a guy to manage the project from the
top. Somebody like Dave Cutler would be my goal, understanding that
managers sometimes have to be berserk hardasses to make difficult
things happen. (Not everybody agrees that open-source projects need
tough central management, but everything I've read suggests that
they do. There would be no Linux without Linus.)
Hey, it's a game, OK? Stop rolling your eyes. But PC technology
seems mired to me, and one reason it's mired is that hardware and
software (primarily the OS) currently come from utterly different
continents of the mind. The advent of multicore CPUs suggests that
mobo-level hardware and its OS must evolve together, or one or two
of your cores will end doing all your work while the rest twiddle
their thumbs and generate heat. Apple does as well as they do because
they can make hardware design decisions in light of software needs
and limitations, and vise versa. I had an intuition years ago that
hardware and software coevolve, and for that coevolution to go anywhere
useful, the effort must be managed. That's what the Parallelogram
Project would be about. My great fear is that a billion wouldn't
be quite enough, but damn, I would give it my best shot, and succeed
or fail, interesting things would happen.
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August
6, 2007: Gretchen's OK
My sister Gretchen got out of surgery this afternoon, and while
she's understandably groggy, she's in decent spirits and the outlook
on all fronts is good. Many thanks to all who sent their prayers
and good wishes. Katie Beth has been exceptionally well behaved,
considering that her mom is away from her. On the other hand, it
takes all three of us (Bill, Carol, and myself, plus earplugs) to
change her diaper.
Bill will be back at work tomorrow, so Carol and I are going it
solo for a good part of the day. Katie has taken a strong liking
to Carol, and she doesn't cry quite so much anymore when I'm in
her immediate vicinity. And she laughs when I make funny noises.
I guess we're making progress.
More later.
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August
5, 2007: Odd Lots
- Don Lancaster wrote to say that Carl and Jerry were not
the first to build a house-current hot-dog cooker. Don built a
couple when he was in high school, and said that it was a pretty
common school shop project in the shop books back in 1954.
- On a recent "celebrity" episode of Jeopardy, a CNN
news anchor did not know the question to the Final Jeopardy answer:
"It's the permanent member country of the UN Security Council
with the smallest land area." An actor (Harry Shearer?) knew
the answer. A fashion designer said "My apartment" as
a "witty" way of saying, "I have no clue."
The CNN anchor had no clue either, (she said "France")
but you and I might expect that she would know at least a little
about current affairs. Fast forward to the recent DefCon, where
NBC sent a
beautiful blond reporter (looks just like a network cracker,
right?) to act as a mole and try and get the goods for a TV special
on hackers and hacking. They were on to her instantly, and basically
humiliated both her and NBC. The punchline is something that all
media people need to memorize as part of Journalism 101: "Don't
screw around with people who are smarter than you." Which
in this case (in light of my own personal experience with TV news
people) would be most of them.
- The HTML editor I'm looking for has to be utterly WYSIWYG—think
InDesign for the Web—and my big surprise is that such are
almost non-existent. This is a real puzzler; writing HTML markup
from scratch is a mostly idiotic waste of time when what you're
doing is tantamount to page layout. (Web sites with data-driven
back ends are a different matter.) Dropping into an HTML line
editor is something that I do now and then, but the bulk of my
Web content consists of static collections of text boxes with
an occasional image, and you shouldn't need to write HTML manually
to do that.
- Pertinent to the above: NVu
came on the scene looking like a replacement for Dreamweaver 3
(which is what I have used since 1999 or so) but it hasn't seen
a release in over two years and although there's been some (sparse)
muttering from the author on his blog, from here it looks like
it's been abandoned.
- For you Compactron fans out there: I discovered that the 6J10/6Z10
tube consists of a 6BN6 gated beam detector plus the power pentode
section of a 6T9. Circuits for the 6BN6 and the 6T9 are common,
so you can stitch together a one-tube detector/audio module without
circuits specific to the 6Z10. I intend to do this when I get
back home and will report here.
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