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Saturday, August 20, 2001
More X than O 
| | There are times I just flat-out hate Xo. Finding access numbers on their site is hard enough. But try finding their 800 number, which exists and they actually promote. It's not there. Do a search (no, "ask a question") and all the results are useless. I just sat here watching a 1mb file open up in slow motion that ...woops! The browser just crashed. |
| | If anybody wants to solve the puzzle, let me know by clicking on Discuss below. Thanks. |
Too much of a bad thing
| | I'm dialed in right now through my Earthlink account, which has a convenient local dial-up number in Dillon, Colorado. For the heck of it I thought I'd check my Earthlink mail. The mail client immediately started downloading 1258 messages dating back to August 8, 2000. Since nobody has or uses this email address, every item had to be spam. I don't have time to do the math, but the result is a pretty good indication of just how much spam comes down the pike to nobody in particular. |
Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely
| | I'm giving a presentation tomorrow. I'm really up for it, and was grooving on what I'm doing with PowerPoint, a program with which I have a hate/fear relationship, when I made the mistake of doing what has almost always caused crashes in the past: I customized a toolbar. After I tried to dial into the Net from my hotel room (where I came to work in peace), the dialer crashed and I restarted the laptop. When I went to dial again, all my preferences were gone. Dozens of number/password/ISP combinations I've used all over the world were sent to digital heaven. I ran Norton to recover something and just wasted time. Disk Doctor also showed no problems. What happened, obviously, was that when I customized PowerPoint, producing a pref file update, it did something very corrupting to at least one other open pref file. |
| | When I get home I'm going to go up to OS X for an OS and down to Office 98 to make it easier to use PowerPoint (in OS 9.1, of course). I can't replace Office 2001 anyway, because I lost the disk on a plane (along with a half dozen others, all of which I actually liked) and Microsoft won't replace it unless I produce the original sales receipt, which neither I nor my VAR seem able to materialize. |
| | And though PowerPoint in Office 98 was also fearsome to use, all it did was crash. Office 2001 is something else: a huge pile of conveniences I don't need, and dangerous to boot. Literally. |
Clueback
| | These guys want to return one million unwanted AOL promo CDs to their sender. (Thanks to Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords for the link.) |
| | By the way, it looks like AOL is A-OK with doing in junk mail what they decry in junk email. |
Jab on
| | Dave says the connectivity sucks here at Jabbercon, but some guy did what I wanted to do but forgot about while I was getting ready to leave, which is bring along an 802.11b base station. He plugged it into the conference hall's net connection, and now all of us have Wi-Fi. I just tested it at DSLReports.com (which I love) and it came in at... let's see... Speed 263(down)/665(up) kbps. Not bad. |
| | In fact it rocks. I love the way people haul along gear to help raise a conference's barn. Makes me think that the cool thing about Apple's Airport base station is that it fits nicely in a bag. |
| | The conference is just getting interesting. Tim O'Reilly gave a good keynote, but a lot of people were tired, too full of breakfast and in an altutude stupor (it's 9500 feet here). Right now there's a panel talking about interoperability. The speaker is from Jabcast, which is taking Jabber and running with it in just one of the commercial environments where it makes some kind of sense (which it does in almost too many places, and ways... it's a problem). |
| | [Later] Serious hacks are already going on. Lots of exciting stuff. All very inclusive. |
| | Turns out Tim's keynote actually went over quite well. Speakers are referring back to it. One of his main points: early in the Net's history outfits like UUNet started in the noncommercial world and grew into commercial businesses, very successful ones, by just and deploying and selling (mostly as services) free and open source code, plus protocols and conventions that were very simple and therefore very useful and adoptable. |
| | I rudely asked four members of the veteran Jabber development team how old they were. The answers: |
| | Only one of the four is going to college. The rest are too busy. Great guys, too. |
Crashing at altitude
| | Well, I'm at Keystone. I have an aunt and uncle who used to have a condo here. They talked about it all the time, but I had no idea what it was about other than a ski area. I guess that's what it's still mostly about. That and conferences. There's a nice feel to it. The room smells like pine boards and everything is nice and cozy. The elevation is 9500 feet and after living at sea level for too many years I feel like I need an oxygen tank. |
| | Got in about 9:30pm local time and went straight to where I knew the action would be: the bar. Had a good time geeking with the Jabber people, and with Dave and Craig. We picked up right where we left off in San Diego a few weeks ago. |
| | Turns out I'm going to give a big talk on Tuesday. Not sure about the subject yet, but I think it'll be about how the software industry is turning into something like the construction industry. |
| | Right now it's 1am and I've gotta crash. |
| | Or maybe after I check the email, which has been coming in super-slowly for almost half an hour. One big file called "Emanuel.exe from "Dang-Moon Wee," sent to about a hundred Korean addresses, plus me. Twenty-two of these, all identical, came in, one after the other. In the trash they go. |
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