The new old thing

So, I've been using a new version of Internet Explorer on Virtual PC. I installed Internet Explorer 7 the other day (I have a MSDN subscription at work) - but that isn't it, I haven't even tried it yet. No, I installed my old copy of Windows NT 4 workstation yesterday for the first time since 1999. What a palaver that installation is.. fortunately the CD is bootable as I have no floppy drive anymore of course. So, NT build 1381 includes Internet Explorer 2, which is sort-of a browser. It definitely has issues with HTTP: won't connect to Apache sites, HTTP downloads simply don't work. It has no support for CSS or JavaScript (as I can see) or anything developed after 1995. I'm fairly sure I never used IE2 back in the days (see passim) Wonderful! Like stepping back in time. Check out evolt, they have some even older versions too.

I was after the final service pack update (SP6) for NT - that would allow me to access my local disks (there's an addon for Virtual PC which allows the hosted operating systems to swap data with the host but it requires SP6. In fact, very few programs will install on NT without at least SP3) But I couldn't download it from any web sites. Internet Explorer 2 is a working FTP client though, so I went to ftp.mozilla.org and downloaded Firefox 1.0.6 installer - but it wouldn't install. Started, but silently exited. I got the zip version, but I couldn't get WinZip by FTP, and no HTTP downloads were working, and I can't access my local disks. I considered uploading WinZip to a temp ftp locatgion, but my network card is dropping the connection and throwing 4202 TCP/IP errors or somesuch, giving me no chance of making the upload (128k is my upload - I am lucky to get 10k per second)

So I got Mozilla 1.0.2 via FTP: - installed and works perfectly. I don't want to upgrade the install now, I am enjoying the nostalgia of old software. I have a Windows NT Server disc at work (and I've grown my Virtual PC partition) so I think I might install that so I can run Internet Information Server 2!

Untiled

God said to Abraham "Kill me a son!"
Abe said "Man, you must be putting me on?"
God said "No!"
Abe said "What??"
God said "You can do what you want Abe but, uh, the next time you see me coming: you'd better run.."

Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

What a terrible month July was - the bombs killing so many innocent people. Then the second wave of bombers: that day, it seemed for a second like news from a stale cache, when the lack of explosive impact became clear, though, I started thinking about other desired outcomes for the attackers - specifically misdirection with criminal motivation. I imagine a few people in places like Hatton Gardens thought the same and, like me, felt bad when it turned out to be incompetent explosives instead. (1)

Then Jean Charles de Menezes was executed for running away from the police. (2) Now there is the news of the Niger famine, the pictures of starving and dying children that the news organisations know wll prompt us (parents anyway) to donate from well-fed guilt. (3)

The only positive was the IRA ending their armed campaign. They could hardly bomb London again now, though, could they?

You wonder what it takes for people to bomb their own - or, alternatively, what it takes to see your own as the enemy. But then there's the murder of Anthony Walker - I just don't know what to think. I might say "brew a million human beings and one of them will be truly evil" but it's one thing saying it and another seeing it. It looks like I'm grossly understating the figures, as well.

In local news, seven people were arrested in Brighton last night in terrorism related yada.

(1) If you were a criminal mastermind planning something like a diamond robbery, you might consider the option of bribing a moody imam to recruit some idiots to fake some explosions to distract the Met from your heist. Or - much more likely - your screenplay..

(2) It used to be Met policy that any firearms police who actually discharged a round - let alone unloaded eight rounds into a helpless prone person's head - was immediately removed from armed duty. Not as a punishment, not even as a precaution, but as a protocol: the armed officers were trained not to use their guns if there was any alternative. They probably don't do that anymore though.

(3) Imagine being the news producer who has to tell an appeal that No, their famine isn't newsworthy enough to be on the news. No media exposure, no donations, more dead children.

Regret nothing

I am usually proud of my mobile's antiquity and uselessness but I wish I could get this Crazy Frog tamagotchi: I'm surprised no-one connected tamagotchis and mobiles before, the identical screen size should have been a clue. [Edit - I am wrong, of course - Becky has bought an old Samsung 800 which has a "pet" game]

I still sometimes play the Viz "Queen Mum Tamagotchi" for laughs - you feeds her swans and gin, and give her the heimlich when she chokes. Hilarious, but no longer available from Viz - let me know if you want a copy. I have never made her survive more than half a lunchbreak anyway (eventually too many swans get stuck in her throat)

ID me

I once did a match between a database of ~25,000 people to one of ~250,000 - the smaller being more-or-less a subset of the larger. It was a few years ago, but I remember being stuck with nearly a thousand cases where my matching rules had failed, and I wasn't being very strict: I expect a match on surname, first initial, date of birth and title/gender would have been enough for that match (you need title or gender because of "John and Jane Smith - twins, resident at same address, known by initial only").

When you do these kind of matches, you end up with two distinct but closely related problems:

• Two records which appear to be two different people in fact relate to one person
• Two records which appear to be the same person in fact relate to two different people

There can be more than two of course, and these ambiguous or even fictitious (clerks get bored, people lie) records may be in the same database or different - nobody's data is perfect.

I registered my disapproval of the concept of ID cards the other day, I aimed on a whim to be the 10,000th person but missed because I hadn't sussed I had to register to confirm the pledge via an email address and gmail was being very slow. If you secretly wanted to sign up but were too pussy, you can still contribute.

Anyway, after I had done the automated match I had to sit and go through the list of partial matches, deciding who was who and who wasn't. It's a decision only a human being can make (as a programmer I say that advisedly) and they need as much information as they have or can get to make the best possible match. For an ID card that might mean knowing who you call or email, or where you've been, or who you know - to make the distinction the analyst is using all the information she has to decide who you are. As long as you're happy with that.

Windows tip # 1

Alt-tab toggles between applications. I never realised this, I used to use alt-tab back when you'd only have a couple of programs open at a time, but more or less gave up when Windows 95 implemented the taskbar and computers were capable of running a dozen apps or more. I thought that you just used it to tick along the list of applications until you come to the one you need: and, more or less, that's what it does, except it does a very clever thing after that.

I don't know what criteria Windows uses to order the list it offers, but it doesn't really matter: after you have navigated to the new app, it puts where you came from next in the list. That means that no matter how many alt-tab-tab-tab-tabs it took you to get you where you are, it only takes one alt-tab to get back where you were, and so suddenly you're toggling between applications as it does the clever thing again, so now you can alt-tab between the two apps. The same applies to command-tab on Mac OS, unsurprisingly.

From a usability point of view this is a neat feature - at least, once you know it's there it's very useful. But there's no discoverability except accident, so that makes it effectively a useless feature. There's no guarantee I will remember it next week, though obviously writing it down helps :-). Try it: when it's what you need, it's exactly what you want, or is it the other way round..

I found it out from trawling through the Joel on software archives. Always something for a developer there, even if it's just something to disagree with. But he used to work for Microsoft, so finding out about a feature from someone who used to work at the company who produces the product doesn't count as real discoverability in my ibook.

Broadcast news

This blog is now being broadcasted into space, so a big human hello to all my new alien readers. I hope my old alien readers don't get jealous..

Alaska

I submitted a 'sight' (mmm) to Google Sightseeing - a bizarre landscape in the north of Alaska - just beautiful and very weird, which I think looks more like a painting than a map. As you zoom in it just gets weirder: like a mandelbrot set detail is revealed at each level. The whole area is bizarre, the ground looks to have been stretched so thin holes have been torn through. Oh, and on the left hand side is a Lizard Lake. I found the spot totally by accident using this implementation of Google maps, it was where I clicked before I understood the interface. Perhaps it's the middle of the world?

Then I found this and this..so I poked about on Wikipedia and Google: the lump on the left of Alaska - containing the crimson mountains - is called "Seward's Peninsula". The area ref1 map the red mountains are called the Kigluaik Mountains tourist info (maybe can use vitty lie go (vitiligo) card to secure travel to cold holiday destination??)

the weather there - hmm.

this explained by photos - Parts of the Arctic tundra take on a golden brown color in the summer..?

Biggest town is on the south coast of the lump and called Nome. There's no place like Nome, ha ha..

Seward was the man who bought Alaska from Russia (it is an exclave - not physically contiguous with the other North American states) for seven million dollars many years ago. Alaska was regarded as "Seward's Folly" for some time. Must remember to go and check facts vs memory..

Cookbooks #1 - Delia

I have a copy of Delia Smith's Cookery Course Part One (1978, accompanied the BBC televisions series of the same name) and one of the recipes I use from it is for pizza dough. It's striking that even then Delia felt the need to explain what a pizza was:

One of the nicest ways of eating bread is as a 'pizza' - freshly-baked bread dough with delicious fillings melting and bubbling on top

Let's not dwell on how a filling could be on top of anything, and instead remember the times: olive oil was for clearing out your ears, peppers were for foreigners, avocadowhato, rocket was for going to the moon. We used to make nutritious food out of what we had: now we have everything and make nothing, and all the processed food we buy is made of poisons and held together by glue. If you can buy local and fresh, that's the best food you can get.

How to fold a tshirt

By my Hara! I have finally seen the video of how to fold a tshirt. Itchy hoko! Genius.. can't wait to try it.

[Edit] You should see my pathetic attempts! ~Comical.

Reminder: Don't Ever Open Your PC

This is so I don't forget and break it.

I got fed up with arsing around behind my computer so I got a PCI card/front-panel combo firewire and USB2 thing for the iPod, Beck's shuffle, cameras etc. I managed to get it in, but I almost had to stretch the internal wires than connect the panel to the PCI card: as I got it clicked into place and my arm was pulling out, I had exactly half an inch of clearance.

This means I can't now open the box without first shoving my arm in, disconnecting the clips that hold the panel in, and removing the panel. Then I can open the box.

I might wait until Daisy is a bit older and get her to help me. I've no more reason to go in the box now, as it won't take more than 512MB of RAM (thanks a million, Dell, I won't be buying from you again @ £813.99 or any other price) and is thus rapidly becoming useless for any serious work, especially now I am using Virtual PC a lot (it's instructive to use Windows 98 and VFP6 for a change, a reminder of how much things have improved)

Edit: Not only does the front panel no longer work, all the Apple hardware in the house refuses to connect to the PC now they've realised there's a Mac they can connect to. Ho hum..

Wayback

I was thinking about when Microsoft suddenly decided to "get with" the internet, and Internet Explorer was born, and I found a couple of things about ActiveX that I bet you didn't know and I'd forgotten: it was briefly available for Macintosh and Unix..
Anyway, the best ActiveX documents from Microsoft are archived: What Is ActiveX and Activating The Internet - this was their vision (Edited 20060116 :: these documents have reappeared in the MSDN archive now: there's also a crossplatform activex MSDN faq frozen in time and the wonderful Developing Exciting Content and Applications for the Internet and Intranets.)

Before ActiveX, Web content was static, 2-dimensional text and graphics. With ActiveX, Web sites come alive using multimedia effects, interactive objects, and sophisticated applications that create a user experience comparable to that of high-quality CD-ROM titles

CD-ROM titles?? What the fuck are they? Anyway, the intent is clear. They used to say things like

Active Web Content with Impact will attract and retain users.

(What a lot of Capital Letters!)

ActiveX technology activates the Web by populating pages with interactive objects, all based on a common standard and therefore able to work together

Quite ironic, really. You can see where they were going, but it was a bad choice for a mechanism of internet domination, and it's Impact (sorry, it's catching) has hurt a lot more users than it's helped. They found HTML too boring, and anyway, you don't need expensive developer products to create HTML and Microsoft are of course in the developer product business (though Foxpro developers aren't the best people to ask about that) and you don't want to use Visual Studio to write HTML (you really don't..).

Organizations that publish Web sites can use ActiveX technologies to create a customized experience for each visitor to their site. By capturing preferences from each Web visitor, companies can create individual profiles and tailor their content so that each user receives only the information of interest to him or her.

Also known as web sites spying on users and stealing their data. People were more naive back then I suppose.
Looking at these documents, you can see the future of the internet unfolding - an actual source of the phrase "[with ActiveX] you can begin to fully leverage the power of the Internet" is Deploying ActiveX Controls on the Web with the Internet Component Download, which might as well have been called "how to ruin the internet".

Edit: to be fair, as a developer, I use activex controls in apps when appropriate. When the requirements dictate a Windows Explorer interface, you don't want to write your own treeview and listviews (those are the folder list and the item lists) you use the activex controls: they're just another COM control, one with a UI. Rangor is "Mr Treeview" BTW! But in a browser, under the control of a website somewhere? No thanks.. except for my annual virus scan of course. (I use trendmicro, they do a .exe version if you're totally averse to ActiveX). I used to use Windows Update, but it rejects me now because I have the Automatic Updates and Background Transfer services disabled. Yes, I can't manually update because I don't automatically update. For me, the point to note here is that I tust the trendmicro program - the virus scan - to look at everything running on my machine, looks at every file and registry key, and have the option of deleting things it thinks I won't like. I want to give those capabilities to a virus scanner, but I definitely don't want to give those capabilities to "some website".

I remember when as tyro developers me and Rangor (and BB) used to get invited to these Microsoft events, they were coming out of the other side of the Windows 95 launch (an easy sell - who would want to stick with Windows 3) and then went straight into selling Bill's take on the internet, so I guess they were short on attendees. I invariably fell asleep (in full twitch mode) during BG's keynote, as he was leveraging the rich potential of the English language to talk vaguely exhortative boring bollocks. People like us didn't necessarily have access to the internet then: PCs were expensive, internet access was by no means free then either. The first computer I bought cost £200: I got from a friend of RobH's, who was a landlady who had been renting a room to a junkie, who of course ripped her off. She got him back, and part of the settlement was the computer, a semi-jerry-built 66MHz that had been stolen from some company in the first place, as a poke about showed. Anyway, I wandered up the road and spent £87 on an OEM copy of Windows 95, got a Pace modulator/demodulator and an internet account with Demon for £10 a month. (I had to pay for my phone calls too, of course).

We didn't have internet access at work until much later, but we used to get a "pack" at the Microsoft events, and sometimes this included beta versions of upcoming software. One of these included a beta version of Internet Explorer 4, and on install it tuned out that the program included a replacement shell for Windows. Now this was quite a big deal, as the shell handles all user interaction with the PC: here was a whole desktop upgrade, which included the wonders of single-clicking an item to execute it instead of double-clicking. Take about doubling your productivity! Well, we liked it. A lot of people don't, and it has to be said the "lasso" paradigm has it's failings. Sometimes you just want to select an object, and a click executes it instead. I think they should have used a modifier key to allow click to select. So there we were, installing a browser to get an operating system upgrade when we didn't even have internet access (or any HTML documents) to use it on. Anyway! I am boring myself now.

Rangor will definitely want me to mention the time we went along to a Microsoft jolly and got a "Developer Preview" edition of IE4. It was a spiffy black colour, but it destroyed any PC it was installed on. As reinstalling was then still an incredibly tedious business of feeding floppy after floppy into the maw, we stopped after two or three attempts, rechristened it Internet Explorer Martian Edition, cut the CD in half and kept half each as a reminder of what bad code can do. Stuck to our monitors with glue.

I'll finish with one last choice snippet about ActiveX:

[It] can make browsing more enjoyable by providing toolbars, stock tickers, video, animated content, and more. These programs can, however, malfunction or give you content you don’t want. In some cases, these programs can be used to collect information from your computer in ways you might not approve of, possibly damage data on your computer, install software on your computer without your consent, or allow someone else to control your computer remotely.

Who is the mystery author determined to rubbish ActiveX? This is from the IE6 help file..

OK, I give up.

So, who can tell me these things about my iBook:

1. Where is the delete key? Or, what modifier turns backspace into delete?


2. Why don't the extras (pg up, home etc) on the arrow keys ever work? Or, what modifier makes them work, as it isn't the one that's the same shade of gray (fn)?


3. Is "Apple" the same as "Command" or is this another Alt/Options type thing?


4. I'm finding it hard to figure out what key combos I need for "select words" and "select lines". Is there an easy way of remembering?


5. Why does F10 shrink my screen?

Uptown babies don't cry

Ten million children under the age of five die each year, the majority from preventable diseases and malnutrition.

UNHCR

Edit: I found it difficult to comprehend the number 'ten million': at first I though it must be wrong. It's 30,000 each day, more or less, or if you prefer roughly the population of London or two Scotlands. Now I imagine myself walking through a London populated entirely by dead children under five: every year, the city is totally refilled with dead children, who died because they are poor and we are rich.

One generation ago # 2 - swearing

Back in the late sixties and early seventies when I was a kid, Bloody was the second worst swearword, and Fuck was the worst: Cunt was totally off the radar. God or Jesus Christ were blasphemous, along with the associated Hell and Damn. If you said "Bleedin' heck" - admittedly not likely in those more genteel pre-Minder days - you would get a clout, as bleeding means bloody, which is swearing and heck means hell, which is blasphemous and together it makes Bloody Hell which was about as strong as day-to-day swearing went. Everybody knew all the derivations of euphemisms in a way that seems meaningless now - Darn from damn, Gor Blimey from god blind me : perhaps these still hold more currency in the US, given The Simpsons as a measure: Bart's parents scold him for comparatively mild oathing. Not to mention the hysteria when Janet Jackson got her tit out. Imagine if it was her brother MJ!

Anyway, back then the only times I heard my parents swear was when they called other drivers or politicians "shits": it was quite a strong insult then, I suppose it is now if a little out of fashion. Obviously they did swear, everyone did (maybe some of the hyper-repressed of Surrey where I grew up didn't) but they kept it from their kids. A challenge I am facing now: I actually enjoy calling someone a "B" or saying "Oh Sugar". I find it very satisfying is when I am with Daisy and we alternate Oh, SUGAR (after I say it first :-). If you hear me after I lose at pool, though, I am an accomplished swearer: when I was child, my swearword teachers were Sven Hasselt, William S Burroughs, and Harold Robbins. My favourite kind of swearing involves using that most flexible of words, fuck, in as many different consecutive guises (you fucking fuck fucker type of thing)

When the Sex Pistols swore at Bill Grundy (one of my personal favourite memories) they were part of a long honourable line of people prepared to challenge taboos by swearing in the media - Snoopy vs. The Red Baron by The Royal Guardsmen [1966] celebrated "The Bloody Red Baron of Germany" ("Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more"), Supertramp with "Bloody Well Right" (from Crime Of The Century, Ken Tynan who was the first person to say "Fuck" on the television, Bob Geldof saying "give us yer fucking money" during Live Aid. Because it was a taboo, hearing (or even reading) swearing was huge fun for kids: when it left taboo-space and invaded civil society, that deep nervous taboo-breaking humour was eroded away until it disappeared.
I find the constant swearing on the television hugely annoying. Swearing is no longer serving it's purpose: the point of it was always emphasis. When it's got to the point where nothing else will do, you dig into your swear-bag and pull out the first fucker you find: what you are saying is "I don't care [if there's a taboo against swearing] or [YOU don't like it] because [I am PISSED OFF] [or shocked, or insert-emotion-here]". (Did you know Piss used to be swearing, as did Crap? Cock and Dick were, even Bum was borderline)

Now take taking-the-lords-name-in-vain - there's nothing like it to express extreme surprise. From Jesus Christ Almighty! (as they used to say) to Christ On A Rubber Crutch! (as I have been known to say) there's no equivalent for instant surprise in English. Fuck Me! tries but doesn't quite cut it, it always suggests a more reflective reaction ("Well, fuck me") rather than the instinctive CHRIST!

Being an atheist is a bit of a hindrance here. I'd like to have a way of expressing shocked surprise that doesn't involve invoking or offending a God I don't believe in. But now I'm not sure I am an atheist ever since I found out you can be a Buddhist and not believe in god. Unfortunately I make a very poor Buddhist as I am not even a vegetarian, although I do try to step over ants (I hate ants) and not kill bugs generally.

When you swear constantly, the effectiveness is lost: it's not funny any more, because there is no taboo being rattled, it's not shocking, and there's no element of emphasis as it's every-other-bloody-word. It's a load of B!

mickle mackle

I had to switch the scrollbar arrows to appear at the top and bottom of the scrollbar rather than at the bottom

Edit: I have switched them back.

I like the way Finder smiles at me: I miss the smile when I use Windows.

Hey! There's an apple key on the right-hand side of the space bar! I just doubled my productivity.

What's the frying-pan key called?

I AM THE KING

Listening to The Birthday Party Live 1981/82 on the way home tonight reminded me that I finally saw Nick Cave - who currently resides in Hove, actually - sitting outside one of the beach huts on the seafront with friends or family a month or so ago. I pointed Daisy towards him so I had a pretext for looking that way for a minute, but he saw through my not-so-transparent subterfuge, I think.

Switch

A year ago, I listened to CDs using Windows Media Player: I bought a MP3 encoder from Cyberlink systems to rip them, in a bundle with a DVD player that mostly didn't work. Never buy software! Software should be free! (I reserve the right to change my mind later.)

Then Microsoft released Windows Media Player 10, with integrated online stores. Every time I started the program, it connected to Napster and Court TV: nothing I did stopped it from connecting on startup. WMP is actually a great tool for organising music - the way you can drag and drop genres onto other genres (when you disagree with an album's bizarre classification) and also drag and drop artists onto artists (when they can't agree on a spelling) - but it's rubbish for listening to music through. Rangor swears by musicsnatch pukebox, but it has to be free software for me.

So I downloaded iTunes. Rangor pointed me towards it, and when work blocked access to iTunes downloads he found I could get it from apple.com.au - Steve Jobs should buy him a pint of Guinness: for my birthday that year I got an iPod from Becky. For her birthday this year, she got an iPod shuffle from me. This is typed on my 'new' iBook G3 (500Mhz 12") which I just got from eBay.. 384MB of memory and an airport card installed, which means I don't have to buy anything extra and I am well chuffed. It's well worth waiting a week or month on eBay for a bargain to come your way: the secret on this one I think was that it ended at 10.45 on a Friday night.

I last had an Apple computer in the house in 1979 or so: would have been a II. It didn't really work out for me then - a lack of games, probably - but I am liking it now, liking it a lot. I always liked BSD, too. Sometimes the Apple-S in the menu throws me baqck to that summer like Proust's madeleines.

Survival tips for 4x4 owners

How not to kill yourself with a 4x4. The rest of us just jump out the way..

UberGeeks Only

Das Keyboard I think I want one. No, I think I need one (and my shameful secret is - I can't touchtype..)

DalekCity - The Online Home of the Dalek Builders' Guild

Dalek City - The Online Home of the Dalek Builders' Guild. Thanks to S8 for the link.