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2002-11-09Yahoo! News - The SAT Revolution. I have been reading Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. I have also been reading about social construction. That the SAT could be abandoned as an "intelligence" test and replaced by an achievement test is a momentous step. I wonder what will be next. Notizie auto Europa stimata in calo del 3/5 % nel 2002. 09-11-2002 Francoforte - Secondo le ultime previsioni della JD Power-LMC, le vendite di ottobre in Europa occidentale registreranno una flessione meno pesante delle stime iniziali, grazie alla domanda in crescita nel mercato principale, la Germania. Nei 10 mesi, il decremento dovrebbe risultare del 3,5 % per una intera annata stimata in calo del 3-5 % sul bilancio del 2001. Loose EndsWork on the green colorInstead of using bright green, I am experimenting with deep green, dark green, and perhaps medium green. This is all by way of experimentation to stay in the standard color map. It looks like dark green is the winner for my use of green to identify pending items.Reconfiguring BloggerAll of my work with Blogger is done from Centro, my desktop workhorse system. And my web site development is all done on Compagno, my laptop on the same household network. I am going to move everything I need to compagno where I have access to my own site development images:1. Move Passwords. The first job is to move my Blogger passwords over to Compagno and have the logon cookie setup over on Compagno too. I am going to use the opportunity to clean up passwords in the secure caches of both machines. [Done] 2. Clean up orcmid.com/blog/ area. There are some standard maintenance arrangements that I need to provide here in the directory that carries the Orcmid's Lair blog for now. I will get those done and ... 3. Create special security for orcmid.com/blog/. I don't want to use a general FTP account for Blogger updates to my site. Instead, I am going to set up a new account and password to just the blog section, that will be the account I use for FTP by Blogger. Then I can also look at creating teams with some associates of mine, using private blogs perhaps. 4. Clean up Earlier Pages. The archive rolls over again tonight. I want to have the archives I have so far be very stable and I want to back them up on my development-site image of the hosted site too. Saint Cloud State University, Saint Cloud, Minnesota. My brother-in-law is on the faculty here and his birthday is this week. I thought I would see how he is doing around campus. STIX Fonts. A project that I want to follow, because I want to use a general scientific and mathematical font for my work on The Miser Project. Tuning the BlogThese are some maintenance items and further thoughts on tuning up the blog pages and archive.General TweakingPurplizing the date linesPurplizing. I have modifed the date lines to be more prominent (larger maroon type) and of form yyyy-mm-dd. I have also made each date line to be an anchor (that is, an <a> element) that uses that same date form as the name of the point and that shortcuts to itself.Later, I need to figure out how to make the link be a relative one to the archived (permanent) place of the posting. Cross linking everythingLinkable Date Items. I have modified the Lair page template to present dates more prominently and also to create the dates as bookmarks.It is a bit painful to start doing the cross-linking though. Scrolling up and down the Blogger editor, and maybe another couple of open pages, to find the URLs, to add links from other posts and days, and so on, is way more that I am willing to do at my most compulsive. I also realize that I have not done an important thing, and that is to purplize the date: make it a link to itself that can be used to generate a permanent archive-targetted URL. Now that I think about that, I may not be able to do it. I will need to figure out the name of the archive file, and I am not sure how to do that, except perhaps with fancy scripting. Researching some ideasViewFromTheHeart - Bringing Ordeal to Chaos. An Interesting Blog that also has a nifty calendar into its archives. I still want to do that. I took a look at the HTML for this one and that is kinda interesting. All the computational work is done on the server it would seem. And there are a potload of in-line style definitions to make this page work. I will mull on this much more before doing anything about it.Tuning my date stamps. I also realized that there is nothing wrong with just having the new date format be purplized to itself. It won't ground on the permanent/archive URL without my figuring out what archive page a date is on, but I can worry about that later. I take back what I said about obsessive. I have been typing everywhere, to get more spacing between sentences and to force indentations and such. And I said I wasn't very obsessive. Adjusting colorsI am also adjusting the color scheme. I have not been careful about using the standard pallette so I need to go through the template and check that. I also need to go through the files and see where I have specified color in various places.blogcomments; an ASP based commenting system for weblogs - design - noipo.org. Another ASP-based Blog Comments addition. Oddly casual "license" and another one to look into. sneaker.org.& And also an interesting site for reasons I can't explain, unless it is the Green Apple color. sneaker.org. An appealing comment package. The configuration requirements are ones that I can easily satisfy. Search/Select a Category > Blogger 101 > Miscellaneous > How do I add comments?. Something I want to be able to do at some point. And something I want to be able to authorize, perhaps. Will take a look at the server-side scripted ones. 2002-11-08OOPLSLA 2002While at OOPSLA sessions, most of my notes are in a handwritten notebook and yet to be digested and organized in a digital form. So here I am jumping to the end and beyond, excluding the middle.The Conference EndsI don't know what I expected. It was different than the actual event.Driving homeI left OOPSLA shortly before 17:00 on the final day. The last session for me was Part II of the debate on whether Objects Have Failed. There was something unsatisfying about that endeavor. It is as if we are floundering and, for me, wallowing in it a little bit.Walking to my parking spot (still blue but this time aisle B, my having arrived later when the parking was tighter, in terms of availability and of fit. I was wondering how many cars too many were being admitted to the garage because the system didn't know about the number of people who parked so as to make the adjacent spot unusable. That was earlier. Now I am leaving. The exit from the garage is easy and the Seattle street traffic is still light, at 17:00 on a Friday evening. I feel calm, relaxed, and somewhat drained. As I turn on the radio and skip over the traffic reports I hear the unmistakeable guitar of Jefferson Airplane and the wail of Grace Slick. I would like to tell you that it was White Rabbit, but the song was actually Somebody to Love. I think that was an appropriate ending to the day's sessions and the conference itself. Next was Runaround Sue with the oldies set continuing until finally, as I arrived home, Honkeytonk Woman, played by request. Satisfaction would have been too much, now that we appear hell-bent on winning the Vietnam War at last. Earlier ... the Objects Have Failed debate Loose EndsNOVELESQUE - A novel In Progress. This page has that calendar I want, or something like it, as well as some customizations to ponder.MIT to create digital library. Aims to save scholars' output By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 11/4/2002 CAMBRIDGE � Never shy about pursuing epic concepts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today is formally launching one of its boldest projects in years: an effort to create a long-term "digital library" encompassing virtually the entire intellectual output of MIT scholars and researchers. Trust or treachery? - Tech News - CNET.com. About the proposed security technologies such as Palladium and TCPA and how the technical community is distrustful of these technologies -- the sponsors are not trusted. Debugging Blogger?Well, I wanted to publish some Blogged items while getting oriented this early morning, and instead I received an error.Publishing Difficulty. When I clicked the orange Publish button, this is what I got for my troubles: Error 103:java.sql.SQLException: Could not allocate space for object 'BlogSettings' in database 'blogger' because the 'PRIMARY' filegroup is full. (server:page) Problem Entering Discussion. I followed the trouble-shooting link, to discover that Error 103 is not listed. The advice at that point is to go to Discussion. I have never succeeded in doing that. What I get for my troubles is
As I make these notes, posting is becoming very slow, and publish is now simply failing without any messages. The orange Publish button is gone now and I think I will stop for now while I am ahead of the game. This is the second time I have had an inscrutible experience with Blogger, although the first time was more challenging. What I notice is how dependent I am on a central service between (decentralized) me and my (decentralized) web presence. I do want something that has the content-management portion be under my local control, be usable off-line, and work to publish and archive on sites and blogs of my choosing. Meanwhile, I am expecting the status entry on the Blogger home page to tell me about these little outages and the system restarts that obviously are going on somewhere. But there is nothing but reference to the hacking of the system that occured and how they have repaired from it. Later tonight I had the experience of having the Blogger Editor not be there. That is, the host vanished from beneath me while I was blissfully editing away. It wasn't until I attempted to post that everything got lost. This is more resolve for further decentralization/distribution of blogger functionality so that there is not this dependence on a potential single point of failure that fails for me more often than I like. It has me be nervous about how much I am entrusting to the Blogger engine on some host somewhere. Network MarketingNetwork marketing does not appeal to me. Althugh I may mistakenly equate network marketing and multi-level marketing, the idea still doesn't appeal to me.As a business opportunity, network marketing seems to be something that would take my attention off of what is important to me. So it is a personal matter about what works for me and where I want to be putting my energy. I confess that I am also baffled by the business models that promise income without effort and without assets, or seem to do so as far as I can tell. Figuring that out is also something that I don't want to spend too much time on. Figuring out MLMsSo here I am anyhow. It seems that VIcki and I know a large number of people who are engaged in one form of MLM or another. We have avoided digging deeper into ones having to do with long-distance service, various kinds of algae, and one kind or another of food or vitamin supplement. I had a presentation on Amway (what a presumptive name) many years ago and wasn't interested enough to dig deeper.When someone invited us to hear a presentation on Melaleuca, part of the idea was that the products were valuable and useful and we could look at it simply as being a customer. I liked the idea of evaluating something that we could look at for its tangible or direct value to us, as opposed to some prospective value. I am the kind of guy who keeps track of every penny spent. Really. Ever since I got some mastery of how to use personal-finance software, I keep track of everything. And it is a moment of accomplishment for me when I can account for my out-of-pocket cash spending to the penny. Financial planning is not so great, but I have the tools and am yet to use them powerfully. I mention that, because that is how I am approaching being a Melaleuca customer, and I am not quite sure where that is going to take me. Except there is a monthly spending commitment, and the idea is to be satisfied that we actually obtain greater value for ourselves. So suddenly we are becoming a little consumer testing laboratory. Checking Up on MelaleucaWe have been preferred customers of Melaleuca for one month. We have placed an initial order and one monthly order. This weekend, we will place our second monthly order. This already introduces a contrast in how we do some purchasing that involves more tracking and planning than we are accustomed to.Although I did some research on the Internet at the start of our Melaleuca adventure, there is more work to do, and I keep promising myself to do a spreadsheet on the business model and figure out where the money goes and how the process is sustained. Meanwhile, I ran into more information on my MSN home page last night. Direct Selling Association. The DSA provides information on various direct-selling approaches. Monte Enbysk suggests that there is some protection against illegal network marketers if one is found to have been a member of DSA. Monte Enbysk - Network marketers: pros or cons? - Microsoft bCentral. Well, we are a customer of a network marketing organization, so this seemed like a good thing to check out. 2002-11-07All About WikiThe Original WikiWard Cunningham's original Wiki continues to serve as an avenue to much material, including material on the implementations of the Wiki Nature. Here I am looking to scratch my interest in Wikis and Blogs enought to take some steps toward operating my own as part of nfoCentrale.net.Locating some Wiki descendantspikipiki. Here's the headquarters for PikiPiki with its spare implementation. Interesting starting point for a clone, as has already occured. GPL.Piki Piki. I had noticed Martin Pool's Piki Piki before. One nice feature is it runs on anything and it doesn't use a database engine. Don't know how it scales, but I like the basic idea and would like to find a running one to calibrate. Pikie Pikie. This is another Python-based WIki that includes weblogs as well. The implementation site wasn't up when I followed the link, but this WikiWiki page will serve as a placeholder for now. Wikki Tikki Tavi. I tend to like this one, thoug Moin Noin has more appealing presentation. (Blogger works even better for me and I am looking for some kind of mind-meld between Wiki and Blog, I guess BloghiBloghi, with the Italian spelling for precision?) MoinMoin Wiki. a very nice Wiki implementation in Python. I like this approach. Still looking for one that works in ASP though, and I am not adverse to a Python-to-Javascript port, as weird as that might sound. AspWiki. This is an AspWiki site. The advantage of AspWiki, if any, is that it is implemented in ASP using Access as the database. (My ISP supports ASP and Access on the server, so I need to pay attention to this puppy.) JASSwiki. I am not so sure about this one. But it implements categories, which are nice to have. It is not clear whether the implementation is consistent with WikiWiki. The site does not appear to be in great shape. Open Wiki, OK, now I have moved on to looking at some other wikis. I am in particular interested in ones that use RSS, RDF, CSS, and the like and that are implemented using ASP. This is one of those. Keys to the gateway into WikiWikiSometimes it seems like you need a cheat-book for entering a Wiki, not unlike a hyper-linked text adventure. Heh, heh.WikiWiki Category Category. I got here only because the double-title caught my eye. The very thing I have been looking for, something like a roadmap to WikiWiki. And it is an inversion. That is, it works from pages referencing their category page, and therefore being discoverable (indexed) under that category. Gosh darn. What a concept. Considering there are over 21,000 pages in WikiWiki, something that cracks through the simple entrance page. OOPSLA 2002Objects Have Failed DebateAt OOPSLA, there is a two-part debate on the challenge, "Objects Have Failed." Ward Cunningham's Wiki was offered as a place for people to add comments, take sides, and make suggestions. Now some material has begun to appear. As I glean these, I get into my interest in Wiki's as well (and moreso above)Objects have failed discussion on Wiki WikiObjects Have Failed Discussion Here is the anchor for Wiki posts on the Objects Have Failed Discussion. This is tied to a debate at OOPSLA 2002 that will conclude on Friday, November 8.Various Ideas On Why Objects Have Not Failed. The references to Wiki are in support of the Panel/Debate on the charge that Objects Have Failed. Wiki Wiki Web. The original Wiki, as well as I can tell. I go here because there are interesting things on this Wiki. As far as Wiki engines go, I prefer some of the later ones. later ... The Conference Ends earler ... Wandering OOPSLA 2002 before the conference starts Loose EndsOh, I had this flash about putting memorable links on some of these pages so I could thread stuff more easily. Haven't done anything about it. This is the placeholder.I notice I am making this harder and harder for myself. When will it ever end, when will it ever end ... a href="http://www.aiim.org/standards.asp?ID=25019">Implementation Guidelines for Web-Based Document-Management. I keep losing this link. I don't want to lose it anymore. The one on the AIIM Standards page is directly to the PDF, and that doesn't work for me for some reason. PDF's don't open in my browser anymore and I haven't debugged it. And anyhow, I prefer to download PDF's and view them off line. So there is a link here. Open SecurityFreeRADIUSGleaning some security itemsHuman Firewall - Be aware. Be secure.. The ISO reference caught my attention. OK, there is a lot more available on security than I have been paying attention to in my little world. I was overwhelmend already. Here is what you'll find here: "This survey gathers metrics on how organizations manage security and enables information security officers to benchmark their practices against those of other organizations. The survey has been developed according to ISO 17799 international security standards to reflect best practices from a global perspective."SecurityFocus Online. Well, I am getting over the edge here. An useful bookmark, perhaps. Where did the HOME title disappear to, though. SecurityFocus HOME Tools: FreeRADIUS. An interesting appraisal of FreeRADIUS in the context of HOME Tools. (Unless I have an incorrect parsing of that phrase.) security.oreilly.com -- Welcome to the O'Reilly Security Center -- computer books, computer security, online privacy. The O'Reilly site for information about FreeRADIUS, RADIUS, and much more to do with security. FreeRADIUS??. Here is an Asian site on FreeRADIUS. I thought that would be interesting to have available to see. What I also notice is that the characters may not have been captured properly. The characters do capture properly in "free radius 0.7.1 インストール (Solaris8編)" all in proper Unicode (UTF-8?). But in the captured title of the link at the start of this post something odd occurs, giving something like インストール which reduces to (two) question marks. The handling of Unicode consistently in browsers and tools like this is going to be imporant. Well, I am satisfied that it can work, as long as we watch for the little foul-ups that are possible. SecuriTeam.com � (DoS Attack Against FreeRADIUS (Other RADIUS Servers Affected)). This is an useful analysis. It is not so important that FreeRADIUS was attacked in February 2002 (and has since been repaired). There is information in here about the nature of DOS attacks, how their impact can be limited even if the attack can't be constrained, and some other issues about uncooperative network operators! FreeRADIUS -- getting the code. Here are the available downloads. There are some nice links on the main page. This software is in public beta and the version numbers are like 0.7.1, so there is that to consider. oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: RADIUS. Hmm, interesting. It is related to AAA, it does have a relationship to LDAP, Web Authentication, and so on, and it appears to provide some overall mechanisms that are required within an AAA framework. RADIUS, Securing Public Access to Private Resources. Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service is widely deployed, it says. I couldn't figure out why this book was listed as related to interest in wireless communication until I saw "Dial-Up" in the title. The subtitle had me thinking about browser-based access, because that is what I thiink of as public access. But the open-source aspect might make it worth exploring further. 2002-11-06Loose EndsHere is a dangling bit of material to be tied into something.Distributed collaborationBerkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). The successor to the platform that SETI@home uses, intended to be a way to build collaborative projects. Something to watch for the Miser Project.Another ACM Ubiquity articleJin-Ye Cai - Random Thoughts and Prime Numbers - ACM Ubiquity. An interview with a few interesting anecdotal accounts of movement in computation theory and how it might relate to the rest of it, or not.I have been working backward through ACM Ubiquity articles and blogging the ones that I want to be able to find again more easily. Here's a new one, posted this week. 2002-11-05Sourcing XMLI want to support document processing using interoperable standards. The obvious document representation to look at for future application is based on XML.It is not that easy. It wasn't easy with SGML, which is not exactly a household name. Can we have a complete open-standard representation and appealing reference-ware for documents and records with XML, and if so, when? Finding ToolsThere are lots of standards and lots of discussions, many tools, libraries, and products, and at least one new XML DTD for some interoperable purpose introduced every day. Where do we start and how do we make headway in all of this.Finding an XML editorI'd like a really good XML editor. It should let me do basic things, it should let me work at the XML tag level and it should let me work in some DTD/Schema-guided way. It should be better than a toy, like the Blogger Editor is better than a toy.I am also interested in a really good text editor, and a simple text formatter. A la ROFF, even. I miss Borland Sprint at this point. Part of it is to be able to work with multiple character codes and language selections and produce simple text documents as well as simply-formatted text documents. And then I want an XML editor too. Something to move me along. Here are some of my limited results at finding an editor. <oXygen/> XML Editor. I am not adverse to a commercial solution, especially if there is an advantage in usability. <oXygen/> is appealing in that regard, and a licensed edition has a professional license for $65. This is still a java-based solution, so it would seem just as easy to tinker with jedit at this point. I looked at some of the materials with oXygen and felt that this wasn't fully a commercial product at this point. Don't know why now, and I need to look again. These are the pointers I am saving for myself right now. I continue to look around. jEdit - Open Source programmer's text editor. Well, this is a programmer's editor, but it is being used as the foundation of a lot. (Eclipse may be an alternative here as well, depending on the kinds of plug-ins it has for XML.) There is an useful suite of plug-ins for exactly what I want, so this is a clear candidate, and a relatively mature development with heavy use. Well, I have Java2 SE 1.4 ready to install, I guess it is time. I'll be taking a Java course sometime next year, so why not get started, aye? Treebeard Project - A free, open source, xslt ide / editor. Here is a promising open-source tool that does provide the direction I am keen about. I have resisted going over to Java. I know that will change, and this may be where I start. There are other appealing cases that rely on the Java platform too, so I need to pay attention to this one as a possible valuable case. It isn't exactly an XML editor, so I won't take on this alpha level release as my place to start. The Apache XML Project. The Apache project has some important components coming along, based on a variety of platform technologies (Java, JavaScript, C++, Perl, you name it). There isn't an integrative editor or IDE yet, as part of Apache proper, but the plumbing seems to be coming along well. Something to watch, but not anything I can use now. Altova - Markup Your Mind!. Altova's XML Spy is the product that is mentioned to me. There are evaluation copies, and the Home/Casual package retails for $99. Looking at the capabilities, and considering that I am a commercial user, the Professional package is what I would lean toward, and $399 is pricey. Some things of particular interest are packaged at the Enterprise level, and those run $1000 and up depending on how enterprising your enterprise is. So I am a cheapskate here. I don't want to start down this road at the evaluation end or even the Home/Casual end knowing where the path is taking me, along with whatever support and updates will go for over time. I also want to credit Altova for being straight about providing pricings, downloads, and a well-provisioned web site for finding out what is available. I prefer to continue my search for something in the open-source arena that provides workable open tools to use with an open, publicly owned format. Mastering BloggerBLOGGER. There is discussion of changing the Blogger site. I just don't want them to change the Blogger editor just yet. I think I may be getting the hang of it and I don't want to have to figure it out again.Setting Clocks?I have a mystery about how time is reported. The time stamps that show up in the Posts list of the Blogger Editor are apparently in GMT (my local time seems to be 7 hours earlier). I could not figure that out, and was trying to see how I had gotten my master page (on blogger.com) and the real page and archives on my site out of sync. It isn't that. It is just that Blogger uses local time everywhere it shows me time except in the posts list of the Blogger Editor. I only noticed that because I was trying to do some cross linkings for topics that straddled midnight and that would be separated by the archiving process. An incoherent situation, of course. Now I am busily doing time corrections in my head so that I can match up entries in the blog page view with the posts lists view and understand where time breaks show up.Managing Archive StructureI have not been paying attention to the full capabilities of the tool bar that comes up along with the Blogger Editor page for my blog. There is an Archive menu item on the Blogger menu bar, and it provides the controls I need. Also, there are more settings that I have been oblivious to.Rolling off the main pageMy settings are for the main page to show the latest 7 days. There are now more than 7 days of posts to this blog, and I see it working, finally. For example, right now, on November 5th, the earliest day on the page is October 30.This leads to interesting situations concerning continuity and organization. For example, I often work on a series of related posts across midnight. Also, there are breaks in the continuity when themes are picked up from day to day, such as this topic. I am seeing the different kinds of organization views that I would like to have work smoothly and also not take too much maintenance effort. At this time, planting cross references is a bit tiresome because I need to use an open page to give me the URLs that I plant in the posts I am editing, and there is lots of scrolling up and down in two open browsers to find things that are to be connected. One possible aid would be to have the re-posting of an edited (updated) post not always take me to the top of the post set I am working on. I spend too much time scrolling the posts window (below the black bar and next to the nice calendar in the Blogger Editor) back down to where I was to review what I just did and maybe do more in the vicinity. Discovering archive controlOh, there's manual archive control too. If I look at the menus and explored them, I might have the answer to more questions. I just saw where I can control the republishing of archives. I will see if that takes care of the mysteries that I had been experiencing. Also, I see that I can take archives out of the index at some point.This may support me in ideas I have about eventually pruning the archives and scooping material off into side articles. Not sure. There are practices around leaving archives "pure" that may matter here. I still might want to annotate an archive with links to later or consolidated or refined / continuing material, but not alter the original content (much). Still looking it over ... Reading the settings. Gee, was that there all along. It seems that my Settings are for showing the past 7 days at all times. I didn't start at the beginning of a week so truncation hadn't set in just because I was in archival week 2 of my Blog page. OK, so I wonder what else I have not been paying attention to. I could also change the order of posts within dates, but I think it is too late. I have been accomodating myself, and the use of headings and links, to the most recent-first sequence. We'll keep it that way. More on Monday ... 2002-11-04Maintenance side note. I have modifed some posts that are not part of the current archive, and I find that the archive that holds them is not updated (yet), but the current page has been changed. The current page is still dragging around everything I have ever written on this Blog, so I can't wait to see how that gets dealt with over. If there is something I am supposed to be doing, I don't know what it is. Continued on Tuesday ... And there are earlier discussions on Blogger archiving and how it is training me as I learn what happens and what I can control. 2002-11-03Wandering OOPSLA 2002The world of Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications.Getting SetDigging Around in the registration kitEclipse Tools Project. OK, no fair, this URL was to my CD drive, but it was an easy way to make a Blogger post. What I want to mention is that one of the components that can be loaded as an Eclipse plug-in is support for FTP and WebDAV. I am always interested in where WebDAV support shows up. Earlier this was promised work, and now I see they have an implementation. Eclipse is also offered as an IDE with nice integration with CVS. I bet it works with SourceForge too, and that gets interesting.Eclipse.org Main Page. And it's IBM once again, this time with a little help from some friends and the Eclipse project. The Eclipse BOF is Tuesday night, while I am in Italian class, so there's nothing to do for it unless I go to the reception afterwards just to say hello to Gregor Kiczales and find out about his new business. There's a CD with Eclipse 2.0.1 builds for the usual suspects. I am fascinated by Eclipse, but every time I start to follow their news lists, I see how deep in the bowels of things they are and stand back and wait. By now it should be stabilizing and it would be good to see how well it holds up. One thing I appreciated about this open-source effort is that, although highly Java-centric, it is friendly to the plaftorm it is built for, and the Windows versions are COM friendly and also Windows UI consistent. I think they did the right thing in how they handled UI libraries to achieve platform integration. And one of these days I may actually install it. The disk is nice and I am coming to appreciate the OSI certified lable on releases. developerWorks: Linux. THe next piece, from IBM, is a dual-CD Linux Software Evaluation Kit from developerWorks. It was interesting enough for me to look through the introductory material. I wonder who else is giving me things in my registration kit. IBM Research | Technical Disciplines | Computer Science. The next promotion piece is a booklet on Computer Science @ IBM Research, with all the qualities of a good stockholders report. Very slick, very impressive. MSDN Academic Alliance Home. Beside the usual program books and schedule information (and a page of last-minute schedule changes) there are some freebies about future conferences and also from two vendors. There are exhibits, and it will be interesting to see what the mix is there. Microsoft's registration package insert for OOPSLA 2002 is a promotion piece for Visual Studion .net, Academic. The theme, and the web link are for the MSDN Academic Alliance. There are some interesting .NET presentations, including Eiffel .NET and Cobol .NET (there's a range of platform capability for you), and a chance to win some nice goodies at Booth #205. OOPSLA03: HTTP 404 - Pagina non trovata. Another item in the OOPSLA2002 kit is the OOPSLA 2003 calendar-poster with a countdown for October 26-30 in Anaheim. The URL given on the poster is, ahem, only 95% done, but I guess no one told the customer. But the paper due date of March 21 is far enough away that I could delude myself that I might submit something. Maybe they'll have the web page up by then. [OK, OK, my web site isn't in that great shape either, ok mister.] ECOOP 2003 17th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. This conference has an announcement in the kit for OOPSLA 2002. The deadline for techical paper submissions is November 24, so you'd all better be rapid writers to make the cut. I don't know why I kvetch about this, I wouldn't have thought to submit anything if I'd known sooner. Early RegistrationOOPSLA 2002. The first workshop that I am interested in starts at 8:30 on Monday morning, so I want to go in on Sunday evening and pick up my registration materials, badge, and whatever other goodies they have for me. I am preregistered so this should be easy.The first thing I need to do is figure out where I saw the information about a Sunday registration. I am wandering the pages of the site, looking at the program-at-a-glance and other materials, all with no luck. I download the Zipped PDF of the complete conference program and 'lo, the first page is an OOPSLA 2002 At a Glance with all of the major timelines, including Sunday Registration, 15:00 pm - 19:00 pm. (I just love a woman in uniform as much as the next guy, but why do I have to be told that 15:00 is pm? Isn't that the whole point of 15:00?) I am a local and I think I can find the Convention Center. Naturally, I-5 is its ordinary stop-and-go self, it being 5:30 in the afternoon (uh, 17:30 hours, m'am, roger that) and already dark. I am on the wrong side of the road (being in the right lane) when the exit comes up, which is on the left, 2 lanes over (but not 3 or I'll end up on the ramp to the express lanes and woosh right out of downtown). The fellow that I cut off two lanes over wasn't happy about it, and so he zoomed over to the near-empty far right lane and off into the distance. I could make a novel out of speculating what that was about. I do find the convention center, and even the parking lot. I've been in this massive structure before and I already know that by the time I get to the entrance of the parking lot, I am already completely disoriented, and by the time I park I have no idea where I am except up off the street and indoors. So I write all of the available codes (D 203 Blue) on my parking ticket and follow the blue-painted path in the same direction as the white-painted pedestrians on that path. I keep following the blue paths until I pass through a doorway and find myself on a floor of a fancy multi-story atrium structure. The event signs say that OOPSLA 2002 (just one activity in the convention center) is "thru the 4th floor South" or something else just as mystifying. The guy who designed the on- and off-ramps on both sides of I-5 must have been at work here. It is easy to find the OOPSLA booths, I discover when I go through the most-likely doors at the escalator landing onto the 4th floor. There are six people behind the registration booths for every one of us trying to register. I picked the right time for my purpose. It doesn't take long to be checked in. I unzip the carry-all with almost unreadable small-green-blotch OOPSLA 2002 logo that they give me and put all the goodies in it, to be analyzed and scrutinized later. Going down the escalator, I am noticing how dark it seems here, with closed shop windows all lit up but the place has that dark feeling, like being in a subway station at an empty hour. Or out on the street downtown on a Sunday evening, which this is, except indoors. There are tables in the foyers at the floor changes, and some people sitting at unlit tables. The Starbucks is closed but someone is quietly sitting behind a potted-tree practicing his guitar in the near dark. I notice the exhibition of public art and the display of artistic glass, then realize that I have descended one level below where I came in from the parking garage. So I do a U-turn at the next landing (cutting an ascending group in half, apparently) and head for the parking structure, this time going against the tide of painted little people on the blue-painted pedestrian walkway. I descend from the parking lot, paying my $4 for 0 - 3 hours (I was there exactly 17 minutes). Ah yes, Seattle has become a big city. Continuing on the errands I have strung together as part of this adventure, I follow the signs that say they will take me back onto I-5. All that manages to do is take me around and in front of the Convention Center just the way I entered it the first time. I go on past and don't see another I-5 direction at all. There is what looks like an entrance to the express lanes only and I don't want that diversion. So I continue uphill and decide that the thing to do is find a familiar place. I turn right and drive to Madison, the street I take two nights a week from Italian class at Seattle University. This will get me on I-5 any direction I want to go. What I want to do is get on northbound just past Seneca, stay on the left-lane on ramp and never merge, taking the next off ramp (also on the left) to Mercer Street and my route along Westlake to the Fremont district. Yes really, the best route for what I wanted is to get on I-5 North just long enough to get off again. I figure it must have been a senior project for the traffic engineering department at the University of Washington. There is no way to figure out a route for the first time. It only works if you've done it before and don't need those missing signs and clues about exits on the opposite side of the road from where you are. I'm on a familiar path now, and that's all that matters, until I return in Monday morning rush hour, looking for parking when there'll be more activity than tonight. When I get home, Vicki wants to know how early to set the alarm, and can she have that great carry-all bag when I am done with it? I am not at all sure. I fance the bag and do not fancy heading into Seattle at the same time and in the same direction as morning rush hour. I organize my life contrary to that. Show me the way to Santa FeMSN Access Phone Number Locator I can never count on finding this page two times in a row. It takes a little to get to this from the top of MSN, and then in MSN Explorer there is no way to blog it (but there is another way).The great thing about completing this page is that at the end of it I am asked to rate the experience and whether the page was helpful to me or not. Great fun. The page that processes those submissions is unavailable. Neato. (A continuation of my current struggle with MSN.) Santa Fe New Mexico lodging hotels- the Historic La Fonda Hotel on the plaza So, here is a Santa Fe phone number. There are 3 local ones plus one Los Alamos one for MSN Dial-Up connectivity. I think I'm covered when in Santa Fe. This is all so I can be sure to be on-line enough that week during my first course of the on-line M.Sc in IT program I will be working on then. Metadata Registry Open Forum 2003 I have been using the wrong URL for this activity for a few months, and then found the correct one. This is in Santa Fe, so I should be able to find a number, say for the hotel, yes? Meanwhile, I need to update the link in some of my older posts to use the corrected URL. Rolling Over the ArchiveAh, there you are!Well, when I published for the second time, the archive showed up.There are interesting delay/lag effects that mystify me. Meanwhile, the default or current page has a whole week's worth of stuff and so does the posts list, below the editor window of the Blogger Edit page. But the new archive only has November 3 material. Fascinating. At some point I expect the current page to be trimmed off, but it hasn't happened yet. I really am on-line to find a Santa Fe phone number, so I will stop this now. So where is it?Ah, more inscrutibility. I love it. Yes it is a new week, my timestamp archive links are to a new archive page, and it isn't there. Hmm. Hmm. Also, viewing my posts here in the Blogger editor shows continuity back through all of the dates. When I view the current page it takes me all the way back to the very beginning and my first post too. So, there is something I don't get about archive roll-over, just yet.The odd part is that the November 3 posts are linked to a November 3 archive page, and it isn't there. A little adventureThe other major event of the day is going to be having ended my first archival week on Blogger, so I get to see what it is like to roll over to the next week.I am not going to test it now, but I want to see if it is still possible to edit past pages or whether the edit button vanishes. Just curious, and it impacts how I think I want to configuration manage my blogs. Struggling with MSNI deserve it, right?Interesting thing about MSN dial-up service. I want to know that I will be able to have dial-up connectivity via MSN dial-up when I am in Sante Fe next January. First, it took me a while to get to a place on the MSN site, via MSN Explorer, that would let me look up access numbers without actually changing my access number. But it does require that I know a complete phone number, not just the (505) area code, which is evidently all of New Mexico. OK, makes sense, but now I have to go discover a properly-formed Santa Fe phone number so I can see what the availability of connectivity will be.
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