Monday, March 29, 2004

I was busy yesterday, as usual. Morning meetings at church, then I went over to show someone the travel trailer that we're selling for Pam's mother. The lady seemed a bit interested, and was going to bring over her husband a bit later to peek inside the windows. They are experienced 'trailers' ("campers"?), looking to trade up from their 17 footer. It has the floor plan that she likes. I also showed her the Kubota tractor, and told her about all the woodworking tools (planer, router, table saw, and more) that we need to sell off. She said that her son might be interested in those things, so maybe I'll hear back from her.

After dinner last night, we went over to get the grandkids so that they could spend the night. It's a paid holiday Monday for us (Cesar Chavez' birthday). Christine (their mom) was out of town, and Jared (the dad) had to work, so it was easy for us to take care of them to help out. We got home about 9:00pm, and we played with toys for a bit before they went to bed. We followed a short time late.

The kids didn't wake up until 6:30am, which wasn't too bad. We cuddled in bed for a while, then got up so they could have a bath (they really enjoy the oversized tub in the master bath). Then we all got dressed and went downstairs for a breakfast of pancakes and eggs. The pancakes were pink (by special request), and the eggs were scrambled. (When our kids were growing up, we liked to make colored pancakes in special shapes. And once we had green eggs with ham; which were tasty as long as you didn't look too closely at them while you were eating.)

We cleaned up and then headed off to the zoo. It was a nice day today, sunny, a slight breeze, and temps about 78 (F). The Sacramento Zoo is not large, just enough animals to keep the kids happy. We rented a wagon for the kids to ride around in, and also saw a short wildlife show. The kids enjoyed it all.

Then across the street to FairyTale Town. It's a small kid place, with things to do out of children's story books. There's the "Crooked Mile", a tree house, three little pigs house, and other things for kids to play on. It's been around for a very long time; I used to live in that neighborhood so my mother would take me there when I was a tot.

Then it was off to lunch (Mickey-D's, of course), then over to the airport to pick up Christine. We took them all back to their house, got our car (we were using their van, since they have all the car seats for the children), and came home. I had no major projects to do, so I sat out on the back patio and finished up "Liberty" (Stephen Coonts). Then we had dinner out there (from Panda Express), and have been relaxing ever since. It was a pleasant day.

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

One of the things I've been trying to do with the iPaq is to get the data from the calendar and contacts in Outlook synced into the iPaq. Nothing was getting into the iPaq though. I had some sub-folders in the Calendar and Contacts folders, each subfolder contained a grouping of entries. There's a separate calendar for church-related stuff, and one for my personal (non-work) calendar. There are similar sub-folders in the Contacts folder. But I couldn't figure out how to get the subfolder information into the iPaq.

Of course, I was doing it the wrong way.

Although it is intuitive (at least to me) to have subfolders, that's not the correct way to do that. Outlook is built to have categories, not sub-folders. Everything should go into the main Calendar or Contacts folder, with each record assigned to one or more categories. When you think about it, that's a good way to do it. You can have one contact (person) assigned to multiple categories. And when you want to send email to someone, since everyone is in one folder, you can just type in part of their name and it will grab the appropriate record.

You might think I was pretty smart to think of this. But it wasn't my idea. I just Googled a bit on the problem, and found a site that explained it all to me. Which is how I learn a lot of things. Google for an answer, search the support sites, look at some site's HTML code, grab some sample program files, and all of a sudden it seems like I know what I am talking about.

Just a secret between you and me, OK?

Anyway, once I figured out the solution, it was easy to create a few new categories, then select all the records in a subfolder and assign them to the right category. Then move the records into the main folder, and "Robert turns out to be your father's brother". I got that done, did a sync or two from the laptop (where the Outlook data is) to the iPaq, and voil-lay!

I was quite proud of myself. Of course, I am easily impressed.

Last week, I had mentioned that I was able to surf the net on the iPaq, and that some pages worked better than others. Some sites seem to display their content so that it fits on the small iPaq screen. I thought that it was related to how those sites are 'built', but hadn't gotten too deep into the 'why' of it.

Mike Barkman (over at the Icarus Kronicles, one of the "Daynotes Gang") sent a message that said:

It's because the page designer opted to set a fixed page width in pixels, which the iPaq browser is honouring. We *try* to use percents where possible (these reformat to screen width) but tables often get totally screwed up unless the columns are anchored. As very few people look at web sites with PDAs (unless they really need to) I guess we just try for the best looking format for the most viewers.

That sounds reasonable. It's always bugged me when a site has pages that are wider than my browser window, however wide it is at the time. Especially when printouts of their info have to be manually shrunk so that the printed content is not too wide. And some sites have text that is a bit too small for my tired old eyes, so the Text Size command is useful to increase the size of the text. Except for those sites that used fixed rather than relative sizes, which causes the Text Size command not to work.

One of the things I have tried to do with the pages I design is to not use fixed point sizes or positioning. Table widths are set to percentages of the page. Font sizes are set to relative sizes (small, extra small, etc) rather than specific point sizes. You should be able to size the window on this site to any width and still not have to scroll left/right to read the text. And that's why this site look fine on my iPaq.

So, I'm sticking with Mr. Barkman's explanation. By the way, he lives in New Zealand, so his daily journal entries are interesting to read. You ought to stop by. His photographic gallery is also quite impressive. In fact, you might as well stop by his home page, as there are many interesting places to go from there.

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

The usual stuff today. Played a bit with the iPaq out 'on the street', wandering around a couple of blocks downtown to see what wireless signals I could find. Many were locked, so couldn't access them. I did find one T-mobile link at the local Starbucks, but didn't get in because I don't have an account. Maybe I'll try again during the morning to see if I can latch onto an ad-hoc network.

The weather was great today, so we stopped by Costco for a few things, including "Brother Bear" DVD for the grandkids. Although I may watch it myself before they get it. We got home in time to barbeque, after I spent a bit of time cleaning off the grill from the last outing of chicken breasts with BBQ sauce. Pam's mother came over for dinner, then they went out to do a bit of grocery shopping.

While they were gone, I worked on the "Guys Garage Sale" web site. It's the stuff out of the in-law's garage that aren't needed anymore. It's not ready for public consumption, yet. But I'll put a link here, just in case someone is in the neighborhood.

Tomorrow is "Loofs Lirpa Day". Be careful what you read.

Thursday, April 1, 2004

I sent this out to my private mailing list this morning. It could be important, so this post is a bit earlier than usual.

Word is out today about a new virus that seems to evade most virus detection, and seems not to have caught the attention of the anti-virus guys. The virus is 'benign', in that it doesn't do any actual damage to the computer, other than affecting the system clock. This might cause problems with date-oriented programs, such as timekeeping programs, or spreadsheets that rely on the system clock for variables or formulas.

It appears in a message that does not have an attachment, so does not require any active action on a user's part to open or run the attachment. Although details are sketchy, it does seem to activate when the message is opened or read. It also seems to affect other mail programs in addition to Outlook. There is also an indication that it will affect many of the open-source based mail systems.

Although it is still not widespread, one security research firm has designated it as the "Sloof Lirpa" virus. It remains to be seen whether this virus will become widespread. There is indications that it will only affect computers today, and may be just a once-a-year problem.

The standard mantra applies.

Regards,
Rick Hellewell, edudytiruces@digitalchoke.com

Friday, April 2, 2004

In my haste to send up yesterday's alert about that new virus, I forgot to change the 'dateline' in that green box, so it had the wrong date. I just corrected it.

As it turns out, this virus, although apparently widespread, did not do the damage that I expected. A closer analysis of the source code indicated that there was an obscure bug related to the date processing subroutine that caused the virus not to work as it was designed. And the code was also set to remove itself today (April 2), so the threat has passed. I hope that none of your were inconvenienced by the alert. But, the 'standard mantra' still applies: "Update, Virus Protect, Firewall, don't open attachments".

At work, I did some fine-tuning of some BindView reports for auditing our network. I'm concentrating on the user objects for now, looking for incorrect configurations. There is a weekly report that looks for inactive users (haven't signed on for 90 days). I'm working on one that analyzes new user objects recently created. Another audit report looks for 'night owls'. It runs at 1:00am each weekday, looking for user id's that haven't logged off the system. As expected, I found a goodly number of them. Some of them are valid, like user id's used by backup processes, but most are just lazy people that didn't shut down their computer when they left for the day. Although some of them might be password-locked, I suspect that most aren't. Leaving your computer signed on is not a good thing. It's like leaving your front door open at night when you go to bed. Hard to say what might wander in your front door.

Our prior home was in a quiet rural area. The properties around that area were three to five acres, and our house was on a small lane with about a dozen other houses. So it was pretty quiet, and not much risk from passerby. It was not unusual to leave the garage door open while we were gone, and we had no problems with anything disappearing. I did leave the front door wide open once during the day when we left for some errands. No critters -- two-legged or four-legged -- came in, but it could have been possible. There are lots of those around the house: turkeys, possums, rabbits, coyotes, deer, the occasional mountain lion.

One night a couple of years ago, Pam went outside to get something from the car. It was quite dark, with only the exterior garage light on. She claims that she heard an unusual sound, and immediately jumped up on the car. After a bit of reflection on that action, she immediately came back into the house, somewhat frightened. I went outside with a flashlight, but couldn't see anything.

The next day, we took a walk down the road. In the mud on the side of the road were big kitty-cat paw prints. And one of the neighbors told us a few days later that they had found a freshly killed deer in the bushes at the edge of their property. I never saw the lion, only the tracks. It was common to hear the coyotes yelling at night, and once at dusk I saw one running across the road. When we first bought the house, it came with a couple of geese. That first year, the geese disappeared. I looked for them, and found just a shell of feathers in one part of the property. We figured that the coyotes had a nice picnic that night.

A nice weekend coming up. The weather looks to be really nice, with temps in the 70-80's (F). I'll probably spend some time at the in-law's, doing some mowing and spraying the weeds, along with some more cleanup in the garage.

And, here in the States, Saturday night is the start of "Daylight Savings Time", where we set the clock one hour forward until fall. I enjoy that, it means that the end of the day it is still light enough to enjoy barbeques and walks around the neighborhood.

It also means that it is time to change the batteries in the smoke detectors. So that's on my list for this weekend; I suggest that it might also be on your weekend list.

... more later ...
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