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Monday, April 12, 1999

There hasn't been anything here for the last couple of days because I was traveling to Houston, Texas for the Winston Drag Racing event.  Congratulations to Doug Herbert, winner of the $100,000 Winston No Bull Challenge bonus in Houston.

While I was in Houston I made a stop by the Johnson Space Center.  It was my second trip there and I enjoyed my return visit just as much as I did the first.   I always marvel at the ingenious minds who developed the space craft and who could think that far into the future.  I personally believe the space program is some of the best money our government spends.  And speaking of space, there was an interesting exchange in Bob Thompson's day notes last week between a reader, Jerry Pournelle and Bob about the cost of developing an ink pen that was used in space.   Check out Bob's notes at www.ttgnet.com.   I think it was last Friday or Saturday this exchange took place.

I have asked pair networks to install the Microsoft Front page extensions for this site.  One thing these extensions bring is that you can now search this site.  I included the search bot on...you guessed it...the search page.   Check it out.

Here's what I think I should be doing: 

  1. Open a FP web (from the server at pair networks) and t

  2. Publish that web to the hard drive on my notebook. 

Make the changes I want to make to the site, like updating these notes and then publish the changes back to the server.

If you're an experienced FP user I'd appreciate some feedback if you think I would be going about this in the right fashion. 

I plan to share my plan with Bob, but I am sure he's busy preparing his taxes this week, so this can wait.  Hopefully,  I've got it right

Tuesday, April 13, 1999

Today is a test.  I am attempting to update this notes page from my notebook computer which is not the normal machine that I maintain this web from.  I know I mentioned this yesterday and my friend Bob Thompson gave me a hint as to how I should accomplish this.  I am opening the page directly from the web and saving the file directly.  I don't yet know how it will affect my copy of this site on the desktop machine elsewhere on the Tucker home network.

For those who follow the stock market there had been great anticipation of Intel's quarterly announcement after the closing bell today.  Intel, as usual, had let Wall Street believe it was going to be a bad quarter and then actually announced earnings that were ahead of the "street's" estimate.  Will be interesting to see how the market reacts tomorrow.  This is typical of both big'uns...Intel and Microsoft.  I think that Intel made more money that it expected, but said sales were down.  Maybe this will give traders the opportunity they were looking for to bid the NASDAQ bellwether down.  Bet you were starting to wonder if you'd logged into an investment site.  Investing and following the stock market are hobbies and INTC is one that I currently follow and invest in.

Does that pesky system tray add some programs that you would like to get rid of?  Try running msconfig from run on the start menu and clicking which programs you would like to load or not load.  Had almost forgotten about this one, ran across it again and thought I would pass it along.  I was trying to get rid of Quicken's download manager and think this may have done the trick.  Note:  This is a trick for Win 9x.  Not sure about NT.

I may have said something about USA.Net in the past when talking about webmail.  The thing I liked about usa.net is they allowed you to pop your mail with your mail reader vs. going in with a web browser.  It now looks like they've joined the bandwagon and are not going to allow you to pop your mail unless you pay a $1.00 per month fee for this privilege.  Now I have to find somewhere else for the kids to have a mailbox.  Bums.

If you are lucky enough to be in a market that offers ADSL you might be interested in a story I ran across on the Tech Web that outlines instances where unterminated ADSL could wreck havoc on the network and maybe even phone system.  Unfortunately I am served by BellSouth, which doesn't seem in any hurry to implement xDSL service.  Heck I can only get one B channel ISDN from BellSouth as my ISP.  I am also served by Time Warner cable whose plans for cable modems are way off in the future.  Makes me jealous that just down the road is a little mom and pop cable operation out in rural Forsyth County (King Cable) has been offering cable modems and its ultra-high speed access for more than a year now.  And Winston-Salem is one of the Top-10 Wired communities.   I don't think so.

Friday, April 16, 1999

You may have noticed that I have really been having some problems here.   I have installed Microsoft's Front Page on my notebook so I can have more flexibility and maybe even update this site when I am traveling some.  We'll see.

I didn't have any trouble installing the software on the notebook.   Managed to get my web host (pair Networks) to make the changes they need to make without any hassle, but when I made my first change to this page and saved it back to the web, then all hell broke loose.  I use shared borders, which give us the links at the top and side of each page.  These borders are important on this site because I use them for navigation.  Well, when I would save this one page it would kill the shared borders and you wouldn't be able to communicate around this site.  My sister wrote me and asked why I had taken Andrew's Greenville TaeKwonDo pictures off when I hadn't taken them off at all.  She just couldn't get to them because the shared borders were gone.

I can not tell you how many hours I have spent scanning the knowledge base at Microsoft to try to determine what was happening.  I posted messages to other webmasters at pair, asked my friend Bob Thompson, uninstalled Front Page on both machines and reinstalled and sent messages to even more newsgroups.  The instructions and helpful hints were telling me to do exactly what I had already been doing.  You don't even want to know about the number of times I have uploaded this site back to pair to get everything back to normal after these shared border screwups.  I was getting very frustrated to say the least.

Tonight, after I had sent the entire site back to pair for the second time, I decided to try a couple of things.  Why?  Because I knew this should work without too many problems and I couldn't give it a rest until I figured out why, even if it meant someone else telling me.

The first thing I tried was to remove the the theme from the initial page on this web.  And then it hit me.  In the shared border region the buttons are generated by the pages in your web navigation scheme.  Well, I always wanted a link that would take you back to Wakeolda Home from no matter where you were in the site.   So I clicked up in the shared border region at the top and added [Wakeolda Home] and inserted it's url of http://www.wakeolda.com.   This wasn't a problem as long as I was publishing my site to the pair server from the same machine and local copy all of the time.  I decided to delete this man made link tonight to see how it would affect the problem I was having. I then went to the note book and made a couple of edits (I used this notes page), saved the file to the root web and then went to the site with Internet explorer and while crossing my fingers the themes and shared borders were still there.  I made some additional edits and the shared borders were still there.  Made a couple more and tested event more.  I was now smiling again.  It seems the system did not like my adding my own links in the shared border region.  And I must confess that I didn't tell anyone I had done this when I was asking for help.  I just ...here it comes... assumed that wouldn't have any affect. Man it looks like I was wrong.  I even added a background color to this page to see what would happen then.  Looks like everything is going great.  I haven't yet published these pages back to my local copy.  Wanted to make sure everything was working before I screwed up the only good copy of this site I had.

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You may remember that I have expressed some interest in Linux in the past.  Why?   Well, when I started this site a couple of months ago I quickly found out it ran on the Unix platform and I didn't know one darn thing about Unix, not even the commands.   So I think I build a Linux box (I heard you can build them out of about anything) then I should be able to play around and at least learn some of the commands, etc. without taking a chance of screwing up the server that hosts this site and others.  Sounds like a good plan, huh?  Also, if and when we ever get full-time internet access (which I hope and pray will include at least one static IP address) I will need to use a Linux box to sit in my network to provide some services to my home network, not the least of which will be a proxy server and firewall.

I was able to attend a meeting of the local Linux group on Thursday evening.  The group is named PLUG (Piedmont Linux Users Group, how cool) and meets in one of the classrooms at Wake Forest University.  Talk about a place that's wired.  The seating is in typical college classroom riser format, but to top that each seat had an RJ-45 connection to the network and the instructor has the use of an overhead video projector that he (in this case) can plug his computer directly into for some cool overheads.

The group was very cordial to this newcomer who admitted was lower on the Unix food chain than a beginner, but that didn't seem to matter.

And you want to talk about getting in over your head.  The program on Thursday night was presented by one of the member of the group, Tom Porter, who spoke on perl programming.  I was impressed by the amount of work that Tom put into his presentation and the accompanying handouts.   A copy of his handout is located on his website and he says he will leave it up there for a while.  I know nothing about the programming language (hell, I could barely write a batch file back in the dos days), but you might find it interesting. I did find that perl is a pretty powerful programming package and might have an interest in it in the future.  I had seen many messages exchanged by fellow website operators at pair that made reference to perl scripts.  Maybe perl is in my future.  One step at a time.

If you live near Winston-Salem, NC and are interested in Linux, then you might to check out the PLUG website or join its listserv.

I realize I have rambled on here, but I wanted to share with you what has been going on and why this site and the notes page in particular had fallen off.  Hopefully, I "m back and in better shape.  We shall see.

Saturday, April 17, 1999

Now here is something that might be popular around my house if I were to let the word get out.  Was crusing through the ZDTV site and found this article on how you can use your PC to play Sony Playstation games by using the Bleem software.   As you can imagine Sony is none too pleased about this and has tried unsuccessfully to stop these entrepreneurs

Here's the blurb I found over at ZDTV:

Yes it's true. Bleem! is an emulator that tricks the computer into thinking it's a PlayStation. There are tons of games that will work. You don't even need a 3D accelerator, although your games will look a lot better if you have one. You can download a demo version of Bleem! here.

Recently Bleem! had a little trouble with Sony. As you can imagine Sony was not too pleased to see PCs emulate its $150 machines for a mere $25. Bleem! seems to think that Sony would be pleased to have its games played on even more machines, but no go. Sony tried to get a temporary restraining order to prolong the release of Bleem! Alas, it lost and Bleem!, though saddened by the delay, is now hot to trot. If you'd like to find out more about how Bleem! won, check out its latest article.

The volume of spam email or junk mail has really increased in my mailbox.   I rate spammers right up there with the fools that fill our snail mail boxes with junk.  I don't think I have ever purchased anything because I received a circular.   Of course, I think the postal service has it backwards.  Instead of giving these heavy mailers discounts I believe they should increase their rates somewhere to the north of first class.  If this dream were to come true, yes it would mean that somedays the postman wouldn't have to stop at our house.  Yes, I have a dream.........

* * * * * * *

One of the central components to Microsoft's 2000 suite of course will be Word 2000.  It looks like Microsoft may be making this code so large when it's released that it may take a full gig just to install the software (that's my guess as these programs keep getting larger).  Anyway, one of the things MS is blowing its horns about with this one is its ability to allow you to edit either word files or html files within Word 2000.  I surely hope this does not mean Bill and the boys are changing the way Word files are stored once again.  I personally think one of the thorns with word is if I have Word 97 installed on my machine and you have Word 95 still then it's very difficult if not impossible for me to send you a file and for you to be able to do anything with it.   I know, you can save the file you want to send as a 95 file, but it immediately starts barking at you that some of the formatting you may have done will be lost.  I hope we are not going down this road again.

Check out the Microsoft Insider if you want to see what the boys in the Northwest are up to now.

I guess when you have billions the first thing you want in more billions.   The only different in Mr. Gates and the rest of us is just the number of zeros to the LEFT of the decimal.   Now the Microsoft Home Advisor is offering you a free PC if you close a loan with them over $125k.  Ha, a PC in every home.  Has an interesting ring.

If you are interested in purchasing a new machine with an Intel Pentium III, our friends at Intel have put together a page that allows you to use C|Net's search engine to find the system you want.

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