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Check out the Word Suite for modular processing of text at:

http://www.wordservices.org

Word Services allows any application to link to a speller, grammar checker or other text service as if it is built-in.

It's a huge advantage to the user because a single GUI spellchecker can be shared between all their applications. Also once a program that uses text is Word Services-enabled, the user can add new text services as they are produced without any further effort on the part of the original application programmer.

It is a public protocol. No license fee or nondisclosure is required to use it. There is a free developer kit for the systems that currently support it.

It was originally written on the MacOS, where it used Apple Events and the Apple Object Model (which is also the basis for Apple Script). It was later implemented on the BeOS BeOS where it uses BMessages and the BeOS scripting API which is implemented in the BeOS Application Kit.

I have it in mind to implement it in XWindows on top of the CORBA interface that is used for scripting in Gnome.

I haven't had time to work on a Gnome version yet but if someone else wants to play with this email me at crawford@goingware.com and we can discuss how it could be done.

For some weird reason, web browsing doesn't work anymore when I boot Windows NT on my laptop.

I think there's a hack or a virus or maybe just some corruption.

That's OK for me, I just run Netscape under Gnome from my Linux partition. Get real good network performace.

But when my poor fiance has to use my machine for web browsing, it nearly drives her to hysterics. She's learned how to use Windows and anything different really disturbs her.

Now, you could say "just get used to it and she'll be happy" but I think there are some real serious UI errors in Gnome that will affect its acceptance among people who are not expert users.

Chief among these is the way it switches desktops when you move the mouse off the screen. That really threw her and cause me trouble still. I don't think it should be possible to switch desktops by moving the mouse. I like the way it is done in the BeOS, where you hit a key combo (like switching virtual consoles when you're not running X) or clicking on a window that gives a menu of desktops.

But throwing the whole screen display sideways just because the mouse drifted a little is unforgiveable.

The other problem is that a default installation of Gnome with enlightment clutters up the screen with zillions of little icons. I mostly ignore these except when I have to fish under them to press on a taskbar button in Gnome 1.2. My fiance wanted to know how to get rid of them and I couldn't tell her - she wanted to view a web page full screen so there'd be a maximum view and you couldn't accidentally bring the focus to the wrong window.

While I think Gnome has the stated purpose of making Linux easier to use, I think it is having the opposite effect. I think it is worthwhile to have advanced features that are not installed by default but the default behaviour should be something that a novice can use.

You don't have to make it look like windows - get someone who's never used windows or macos before (hard to find these days, but there are some), sit them down in front of your linux box and videotape them working with the system.

Do these for your individual applications too.

I only use SSH (secure shell) and SCP (secure copy) to access my web hosting service.

There are not many web hosting services that allow you shell access at all, let alone secure shell. One that does is the one I use, Seagull Networks.

The funny thing is I use SCP to upload my web pages. Anyone on the net who wants to can look at my web pages after they're uploaded, but they won't have my password.

Do you use a different password for important sites like your web host from the many websites out there that require passwords for you to register for some service? Good.

Even better is if you use a different password for every website you register one, because some of the websites offering some useful service may be doing double duty as password stealers.

Since most people use the same password everywhere a site can give you, say, a free trial of some porn in return for your password and email and then hack your oaccount.

I would suggest that any university or company do what Apple did when I worked there and require the combination of a password and a cryptographically generated key that's made by some device.

At Apple I had a little credit-card device that showed a different password each minute. I think they basically calculate a new secure hash every minute from the old one, combined with a password that's programmed into the unit but not visible to the user.

See my page on why everyone should use encryption.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

Let's not forget Altavista's 31337 Warez Search, which I discuss in my article Modern Technology and the Death of Copyright.

Interestingly, most of the hot software found in such boolean searches as:

download AND crack AND photoshop AND word AND illustrator

is on public webpages like freeyellow and geocities, and most of the sites are shut down before you get there. But for any shrink-wrap commercial software product you can name, it doesn't take more than an hour or two of searching to find a good download for it.

It happens that Microsoft has a full-time staff doing searches such as these with their own spider to find stashes of Windows 2000; I understand they find and shut down something like 100 sites a day. (Sorry, I tried to find a news report about this to link to and couldn't.)

Maybe Microsoft is able to minimize the impact of piracy this way, but I don't think they can completely eliminate it. Any normal software company simply doesn't have the resources to search out and elimate the warez like Microsoft tries to.

How could anyone hope to control something as popularly appealing and easy to obtain and use as music files?

A lot of people are griping about how SlackWare 7.1 is being released just before kernel 2.4.0 is.

I think it is important to understand that a widely used distribution should not use a kernel until it has been used in widespread production for several months.

Anyone who knows what they are doing can download the kernel source and compile it themselves. I've been using the kernel 2.4.0-testX-acX series on my Slackware 7 installation for some time now, and it works well.

But there is a huge number of combinations of configurations out in the world, and there really is no way that the kernel can be adequately tested by the people who presently are testing it.

Once the 2.4.0 final kernel is released a lot more people will download and compile it than have been using it yet, and guess what? Bugs will be found.

That's why we have minor releases.

But a commercial distribution gets used by a lot of people who do not want to be testers, or would not be competent to diagnose their own systems if there was a problem.

You may say that Slackware is for the hardcore sorts (does that make me one? Gee, but I write MacOS GUI code for a living!.) but the fact is a lot of people will get Slackware for their very first experience with Linux just because they see it on a store shelf somewhere and decide to try it out.

Give Patrick a break.

And remember some wisdom a customer passed to me when I was working tech support in a bygone era: Don't buy version 1.0 of anything.

I've been running slackware for several years now, and am currently running it on my Compaq Presario 1800T Laptop

I've been running Slackware 7 with the 2.4.0-test series of kernels and have generally had good results with it.

One thing I don't like about Slackware though is that it's never had much of a concept of upgrading from a previous version, and so won't automatically delete files it is replacing during an upgrade. This once resulted in filling my root partition during an upgrade and made my machine unbootable.

For that reason I've gotten Debian to use on the server I'm building. But I expect I'll put 7.1 on my laptop.

I don't care squat about the MPAA or Doubleclick. I want to be able to post anything I damn well please on my website without interference from the government.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption. This explains why ordinary people, even your mother and your kids, ought to be using secure encryption.

Also read my note Secure Email Download with SSH on the Be Tip Server. While the tip is BeOS specific, the basic ideas work fine on other operating systems.

Of course, to download your mail via SSH, you'll need a hosting service that provides it at their end, which is why I recommend Seagull Networks. Note that if you upload content to your website with FTP, you're exposing your password to network sniffers. Seagull Networks allows you to use secure copy (scp) for this so your password remains secure.

Finally, I use the Linux Encrypting Kernel under Linux and PGPDisk under Windows to keep important personal info like my Quicken checkbook, and confidential business information like the source code I'm writing for my clients encrypted on my laptop so the theives won't have them if my computer is stolen.

With either one you can create a big file that when mounted with a passphrase is accessible like any ordinary filesystem. I have even found that I can run MPEG movies off a PGPDisks with no loss in playback quality on my laptop which has a 450 MHz Pentium III.

Finally read the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems for significant discussions on privacy issues. It is available as comp.risks on the Usenet News and on the web at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/.

Do you think Microsoft takes care to protect your privacy when designing its products? Guess again.

The scary MSWord residue feature

I recently received a legal document as part of a personal negotiation that I am doing. The document was e-mailed to me in MSWord format. As I was showing it to my lawyer (who happens to be my wife), we decided to put our thoughts inline using the track changes feature of word. After selecting Tools, and Track Changes, we clicked on "Highlight changes in document" and voila, suddenly a whole bunch of red appeared on the screen. We looked at it closely and realized that everything in red represented changes in the document that my counterpart's lawyer had written. We got a good look at the previous version of the contract, as well as a bunch of comments and justifications that the lawyer wrote to his client. It was an eye opening experience.

It appears that instead of selecting "Accept all changes" before sending it to me, the other party to the contract simply turned off the highlighting to the track changes feature.

This is obviously a case of an unsophisticated person misusing a feature. However, it is very dangerous. Lawyers send word documents around all the time, and many of them do not really understand all the features that they use, nor should they have to. I imagine that I was not the first person to see some behind the scenes conversation in an important word document, that I was never intended to see.

Please read my page Why You Should Use Encryption. This explains why ordinary people, even your mother and your kids, ought to be using secure encryption.

Also read my note Secure Email Download with SSH on the Be Tip Server. While the tip is BeOS specific, the basic ideas work fine on other operating systems.

Of course, to download your mail via SSH, you'll need a hosting service that provides it at their end, which is why I recommend Seagull Networks. Note that if you upload content to your website with FTP, you're exposing your password to network sniffers. Seagull Networks allows you to use secure copy (scp) for this so your password remains secure.

Finally, I use the Linux Encrypting Kernel under Linux and PGPDisk under Windows to keep important personal info like my Quicken checkbook, and confidential business information like the source code I'm writing for my clients encrypted on my laptop so the theives won't have them if my computer is stolen.

With either one you can create a big file that when mounted with a passphrase is accessible like any ordinary filesystem. I have even found that I can run MPEG movies off a PGPDisks with no loss in playback quality on my laptop which has a 450 MHz Pentium III.

Finally read the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems for significant discussions on privacy issues. It is available as comp.risks on the Usenet News and on the web at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/.

Do you think Microsoft takes care to protect your privacy when designing its products? Guess again.

The scary MSWord residue feature

I recently received a legal document as part of a personal negotiation that I am doing. The document was e-mailed to me in MSWord format. As I was showing it to my lawyer (who happens to be my wife), we decided to put our thoughts inline using the track changes feature of word. After selecting Tools, and Track Changes, we clicked on "Highlight changes in document" and voila, suddenly a whole bunch of red appeared on the screen. We looked at it closely and realized that everything in red represented changes in the document that my counterpart's lawyer had written. We got a good look at the previous version of the contract, as well as a bunch of comments and justifications that the lawyer wrote to his client. It was an eye opening experience.

It appears that instead of selecting "Accept all changes" before sending it to me, the other party to the contract simply turned off the highlighting to the track changes feature.

This is obviously a case of an unsophisticated person misusing a feature. However, it is very dangerous. Lawyers send word documents around all the time, and many of them do not really understand all the features that they use, nor should they have to. I imagine that I was not the first person to see some behind the scenes conversation in an important word document, that I was never intended to see.

I haven't tried them for colocation services (although I've discussed it with the webmaster) but I heavily recommend Seagull Networks. I use them for hosting several domains I own and always recommend them to people who ask me.

Here's why:

• They allow shell access via telnet and secure shell
• Supporting ssh allows me to use secure copy (scp) to upload content
• I can read my email via a shell login with Pine or Elm without downloading all my mail (important when one uses several operating systems)
• I can write my own CGI's in any programming language I want and install them myself. They provide the gnu development tools.
• They have excellent customer service. I've sent in questions in the middle of the night and got back authoritative answers within the hour.
• Their prices are quite reasonable - $25 a month for basic virtual domain hosting, which might seem high but you get the shell access and secure shell

Write to seagull@seagull.net if you want to ask the webmaster about colocation. That's not really their specialty but hosting is.

I host these domains with them:

• www.goingware.com
• www.wordservices.org
• www.geometricvisions.com

In addition my fiance has two domains there and a friend has two domains there under my account (there's a discount for reselling the service - your first account is free but more under the same billing are cheaper).

I didn't try Linux when I wrote this comparison of the audio performance of MacOS, Windows and BeOS, but I don't think Linux would have fared much better than Mac or Windows:

The Battle of the Bands

I was able to play nine uncompressed CD quality audio files simultaneously and independently vary the volume on each on the BeOS. I was never able to play more than one on the other operating systems I tried. I could play up to two tracks simultaneously from an ISO 9660 CD before the seek time of the head broke up the sound.

I've found in the 2.4.0-test1-acX kernels that audio streams will just plain stop until I click on or drag around an XWindow. Posts I've seen on the Linux kernel mailing list suggest that X is failing to yield the PCI bus at times.

I'm not suggesting though that you should all go use BeOS for your sound. What I do suggest is improving the multimedia architecture of Linux until it can match the BeOS.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

I am a long-time BeOS developer and until recently I was a very active member of the bedevtalk@be.com developer mailing list.

I am one of the few developers to actually ship a commercial application, Spellswell from Working Software. I've kept Spellswell actively maintained over a couple of years, it is now at version 1.0.5.

So I didn't appreciate it when Be announced it was dropping active support for the desktop and "refocusing" on Internet Appliances.

Now promoting the system for Internet appliances is fine, but Be had spent years promoting its system as a platform for multimedia content creation, and in my view it is the best platform for desktop software. Check out, for instance, Gobe Software's Gobe Productive, one of the best integrated applications available.

While Be still has a desktop operating system and gives it away for free, it has made it clear that there will be no further desktop-specific development for the operating system; if a feature or bug-fix makes it into the system it will be because it is needed for Internet Appliances, and not because it is needed for the desktop.

I repeatedly tried to bring this failure to live up to its commitments on bedevtalk and beusertalk and while other professional developers supported my position, I was constantly shot down by the hobbyists and Be's own employees.

Finally I tried to point out the error of their ways in some detail by posting this to bedevtalk:

Some of Use Work For a Living

in which I pointed out that the appropriate response to criticism from developers like me would be for Be employees who subscribe to the list to communicate our concerns to senior management.

How did Be respond?

Tom Maddox, listmaster@be.com, unsubscribed me and asked the list if they'd prefer to have the entire list moderated.

Before you decide to devote time and energy to developing BeOS software, I ask you to consider whether you wish to take the risk to invest your time and money in a system that is only available from a company that has not only proved it cannot keep its commitments, it has stated repeatedly it does not want its dishonesty pointed out to it and will actively work to censor those who would work to correct its behaviour.

One of the reasons I am working to reorient my consulting business to take primarily Linux work is that I feel it is a mistake for any third party software developer to depend on any API, particularly an operating system, that they do not have the source code to.

If you feel you must support a closed-source operating system or API, I urge you to require the API vendor to sign a contract guaranteeing they will support the API forever - both in terms of maintainence and marketing - or else they will reimburse you for your lost revenue and opportunity cost if they fail to live up to their commitments.

I had much the same experience with Apple Computer which is why I became a BeOS developer.

BTW - My fiance told me that being unsubscribed from bedevtalk is like being kicked off the design committee for the Edsel. It's a beautiful OS and the engineering quality is excellent, but the sales prevention team there, uh, I mean the management, is determined to do everything they can to prevent the business from succeeding.

Perhaps Internet Appliances are a good idea, but after the galling lack of marketing cluefulness shown when they were on the desktop I seriously doubt they can get it together to succeed in the Internet Appliance arena either.

If you are an Internet Appliance manufacturer, think about whether you want to make your livelihood dependent on a company with a proven track record of failing to live up to its commitments. Consider that in many was QNX is a better OS for appliance and you can get a developer kit for free.

I don't think Linux is a very good platform either for the desktop or Internet Appliances but because it is free software that problem is capable of being addressed.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

The Cluetrain Manifesto is all about how computers and the Internet are taking away power from corporate control and returning it to the people - both the customers and individual workers at the companies.

Consider that when my former employer Live Picture announced that it was moving from scenic, rural Scotts Valley, California to Silicon Valley, the first thing I did (three hours after the announcement) was type up a page-long resignation with a detailed discussion of why I thought it was a miserable idea - and email it to each person in the heirarchy up in the company from my project manager to the Chief Executive Officer. I understand our expensive new CEO that was hand-picked by John Sculley was pretty furious about it (she got fired about a year later).

Consider further that I could then use the Altavista advanced search for boolean expressions like employment and programming and 95060 (repeated for each of the Santa Cruz County zip codes) allowed me to write the original form of this page:

The Santa Cruz County Computer Industry Index

whose URL I then emailed around the company to help my coworkers find new local jobs so they wouldn't have to commute over the hill.

Individual action has existed throughout history. What the Internet has done is made it much more effective.

Anyone can speak out, and their speech can be accessed by anyone else almost instantly. Companies can try to carefully control communication between themselves and the market (or their vendors) but individual actions such as the one I took when my employer announced a really annoying policy design can make their efforts futile.

Consider that Microsoft is working hard to win over the court of public opinion to prevent its breakup.

How effective is that actually, today? How much more effective would that have been 15 years ago when Microsoft could have controlled the industry media and folks like us couldn't have spoken out effectively.

I feel that the digital revolution has lived up to its expectations in my case because I have chosen to take control of my life.

There's a discussion of what happened to the four day work week below with the consensus that it never came about because of corporatism.

As long as people just stay in their jobs and do what the boss expects of you, the boss can keep turning up the speed on the machine and you have to keep up.

Not all of you are in the position to do what I do, but you could do something appropriate to yourself.

I became a consultant

It is still the case that I work long hours, but usually this is because I choose to. When I take time off is almost always under my control. I work at home, and I could work in the nude if I wanted to (I find office dress in the home office makes me more productive though).

Note that this is different from telecommuting. I used to telecommute too, but it really didn't serve my needs. It invited the corporate master into my home.

It is also different from being a contract programmer for a body shop. Read about my decision not to work with recruiters or agencies and why they are bad for both employers and employees.

There are a few aspects of the digital revolution that made this all possible:

• I find customers almost entirely through the web. I explain how in Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

• Laptops are suffiently powerful that I can use a laptop as my primary development machine for commercial programming on a variety of operating systems. Read about my laptop here. This allows me to travel or live anywhere and have my development system at-hand.

• With good phone service and a high-speed internet connection and online shopping I can operate my business from St. John's Newfoundland and live in a much nicer place than Silicon Valley.

The most important factor in all of this is to make the conscious choice to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by high-tech yourself. If you don't make the choice I'm sure Time-Warner or Microsoft will be happy to make your decisions for you.

Many geeks are shy people who are easily taken advantage of by those with more social skills - such as managers at high-tech companies, salemen and the like. The first step in taking control of your life will come when you can say "no" to your boss.

I learned to say no to a difficult boss and my life at the company got better. I stopped working all nighters. And not too long after that I learned to stop feeling loyalty to a company that didn't care about me and went looking for a new job. Between one friday and the following monday my pay doubled.

Read The Cluetrain Manifesto for more information on how the Internet is restoring personal power to the individual and taking it away from the corporation.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

I feel that the digital revolution has lived up to its expectations in my case because I have chosen to take control of my life.

There's a discussion of what happened to the four day work week below with the consensus that it never came about because of corporatism.

As long as people just stay in their jobs and do what the boss expects of you, the boss can keep turning up the speed on the machine and you have to keep up.

Not all of you are in the position to do what I do, but you could do something appropriate to yourself.

I became a consultant

It is still the case that I work long hours, but usually this is because I choose to. When I take time off is almost always under my control. I work at home, and I could work in the nude if I wanted to (I find office dress in the home office makes me more productive though).

Note that this is different from telecommuting. I used to telecommute too, but it really didn't serve my needs. It invited the corporate master into my home.

It is also different from being a contract programmer for a body shop. Read about my decision not to work with recruiters or agencies and why they are bad for both employers and employees.

There are a few aspects of the digital revolution that made this all possible:

• I find customers almost entirely through the web. I explain how in Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

• Laptops are suffiently powerful that I can use a laptop as my primary development machine for commercial programming on a variety of operating systems. Read about my laptop here. This allows me to travel or live anywhere and have my development system at-hand.

• With good phone service and a high-speed internet connection and online shopping I can operate my business from St. John's Newfoundland and live in a much nicer place than Silicon Valley.

The most important factor in all of this is to make the conscious choice to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by high-tech yourself. If you don't make the choice I'm sure Time-Warner or Microsoft will be happy to make your decisions for you.

Many geeks are shy people who are easily taken advantage of by those with more social skills - such as managers at high-tech companies, salemen and the like. The first step in taking control of your life will come when you can say "no" to your boss.

I learned to say no to a difficult boss and my life at the company got better. I stopped working all nighters. And not too long after that I learned to stop feeling loyalty to a company that didn't care about me and went looking for a new job. Between one friday and the following monday my pay doubled.

Read The Cluetrain Manifesto for more information on how the Internet is restoring personal power to the individual and taking it away from the corporation.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

I feel that the digital revolution has lived up to its expectations in my case because I have chosen to take control of my life.

There's a discussion of what happened to the four day work week below with the consensus that it never came about because of corporatism.

As long as people just stay in their jobs and do what the boss expects of you, the boss can keep turning up the speed on the machine and you have to keep up.

Not all of you are in the position to do what I do, but you could do something appropriate to yourself.

I became a consultant

It is still the case that I work long hours, but usually this is because I choose to. When I take time off is almost always under my control. I work at home, and I could work in the nude if I wanted to (I find office dress in the home office makes me more productive though).

Note that this is different from telecommuting. I used to telecommute too, but it really didn't serve my needs. It invited the corporate master into my home.

It is also different from being a contract programmer for a body shop. Read about my decision not to work with recruiters or agencies and why they are bad for both employers and employees.

There are a few aspects of the digital revolution that made this all possible:

• I find customers almost entirely through the web. I explain how in Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

• Laptops are suffiently powerful that I can use a laptop as my primary development machine for commercial programming on a variety of operating systems. Read about my laptop here. This allows me to travel or live anywhere and have my development system at-hand.

• With good phone service and a high-speed internet connection and online shopping I can operate my business from St. John's Newfoundland and live in a much nicer place than Silicon Valley.

The most important factor in all of this is to make the conscious choice to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by high-tech yourself. If you don't make the choice I'm sure Time-Warner or Microsoft will be happy to make your decisions for you.

Many geeks are shy people who are easily taken advantage of by those with more social skills - such as managers at high-tech companies, salemen and the like. The first step in taking control of your life will come when you can say "no" to your boss.

I learned to say no to a difficult boss and my life at the company got better. I stopped working all nighters. And not too long after that I learned to stop feeling loyalty to a company that didn't care about me and went looking for a new job. Between one friday and the following monday my pay doubled.

Read The Cluetrain Manifesto for more information on how the Internet is restoring personal power to the individual and taking it away from the corporation.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

I have a good friend who worked at the Learning Company for quite some time, and he told me no end of horror stories about an utter disregard for engineering quality, lack of concern for usability, maintainability of code or anything that sounded remotely like common sense.

They'd basically just ship all their applications when they could get them to more or less run and not when they were running reliability. The mere fact that a child's educational program would crash six ways to sunday from normal usage would not stop them from shipping a product.

I could easily see some junior programmer there telling a manager that they could easily write a program to scoop god knows what off a child's hard drive and send it on in for data-mining driven marketing purposes, and this being implemented as a standard feature without being run through corporate lawyers or even a moments thought as to whether this would ultimately get them sued - or arrested.

They have similarly enlighted personnel policies, which is why my friend was happy to tell me these stories on a regular basis.

I'm pretty amazed that the Learning Company lasted as long as it did. I know it had no end of financial trouble - is it still even in business?

Mattel clearly didn't do an adequate due diligence when they bought the company. Or at least they didn't involve any engineers in the process.

Considering what my friend told me, not just occassionally but almost every time I spoke to him during his period of employment there, I'm suprised the engineers could even get their code to compile and link, let alone ship it in a shrink-wrapped box.

Words I live by: Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

You can read about installing BeOS, Windows NT and Slackware Linux on my Compaq Presario 1800T at:

http://www.goingware.com/laptop

Note that the machine came with Windows 98 installed and doesn't support NT; NT was the most difficult installation and still doesn't work very well.

On the other hand I've been testing the 2.4.0-test1-ac* kernels every few days and generally they work pretty well. The only serious problem I had was that my Adaptec 1480 SlimSCSI card didn't work; that wasn't a problem with the laptop itself but some problem in the Linux PCI drivers as well as a temporary bug in the SCSI driver. Recent 2.4.0 kernel patches work great and I can burn CD's off my laptop through SCSI.

If you're considering buying a laptop, I encourage you to read my page on my laptop, as I think the information I give could improve the wisdom of your choice.

Generally I've been happy with how it works, but I'm afraid I'm not so happy with the mechanical design of the thing; there's a ribbon cable in the DVD drive that gets tangled when I close it if it's been opened too far, and the most serious problem right now is that the power adapter doesn't always make good contact so the battery drains even when it's plugged in. Sometimes if I leave the house with Linux running it will power down while I'm away. Note that I've only had the unit for 7 months; if they could have the same electrical design but built for more rugged use I think I'd be happy.

I link to the following under the title "Words I Live By" from my homepage and have it on my site at:

Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

John J. Chapman Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

I found the quote in The Cluetrain Manifesto, which I recommended to the administrators at Beaver County School district to read.

If you'd like to drop them a line, here's their email addresses and here are their fax and phone numbers.

Tell them the hardcopy edition of the cluetrain is well worth buying.

It will be helpful for their 21st Century Project:

Beaver City has chosen a 21st Centruy Project which centers around the "Electronic Highway" with a goal of becoming an electronic "Smart Communities" as an emphasis. Some of the action steps Beaver City will accomplish in this effort are:

• Organizing a "Smart Communities" Committee
• Completing a Beaver City Home Page
• Continue to develop links to information and resources related to the Beaver City area.

I link to the following under the title "Words I Live By" from my homepage and have it on my site at:

Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

John J. Chapman Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

I found the quote in The Cluetrain Manifesto, which I recommended to the administrators at Beaver County School district to read.

If you'd like to drop them a line, here's their email addresses and here are their fax and phone numbers.

Tell them the hardcopy edition of the cluetrain is well worth buying.

It will be helpful for their 21st Century Project:

Beaver City has chosen a 21st Centruy Project which centers around the "Electronic Highway" with a goal of becoming an electronic "Smart Communities" as an emphasis. Some of the action steps Beaver City will accomplish in this effort are:

• Organizing a "Smart Communities" Committee
• Completing a Beaver City Home Page
• Continue to develop links to information and resources related to the Beaver City area.

I should point out, in response to some who have written me, is that I'm not trying to use my Linux box as a mail server. It's a laptop that's not always connected to the net. I just want to use my hosting services like any Mac or Windows user would.

I tried XFMail and Post Office today and couldn't get either of them to build.

I spent about an hour with each of them. Post Office required a bunch of undocumented environment variables to be set in order to get it to build.

I think it's critically important that no software require an environment variable to get it to basically function. If it does, you can be sure the user will select a product from Microsoft or Apple instead.

This is with a Slackware 7 system.

XFMail hasn't been maintained in a year, and although it's taken new life as Archimedes it hasn't been released yet.

It is possible to retrieve it from CVS and build it that way. I'll give it a try

The holder of the domain should take heart from the speech Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations which I quote from the Cluetrain Manifesto

I provide a link to the page from my homepage named "words I live by".

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

John J. Chapman
Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

The holder of the domain should take heart from the speech Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations which I quote from the Cluetrain Manifesto

I provide a link to the page from my homepage named "words I live by".

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

John J. Chapman
Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

So you can watch DVD's on your laptop on an airplane.

Pretty much the only reason I ordered the DVD option on my Compaq 1800T running BeOS, Linux and NT was so that I could watch movies on airplanes. Being a consultant who just moved away from Silicon Valley, I expect to be traveling a lot.

The machine came stock with Windows 98. Installing NT ate my hard disk so now I have to install a third-party DVD player and I'd rather use Linux than try to get a licensed one working on NT.

It is possible to live well here. There is good Internet service in St. John's. I make the same consulting rates for clients in the valley while sitting in my house here as I would in Santa Cruz.

I miss the nice weather and the vibrant art and music scene of Santa Cruz (but I don't consider Silicon Valley a nice place to live at all; Santa Cruz is separated from it by a range of mountains).

I have met people here who are doing significant software and internet work. While I have an advantage in coming here that I already have contacts in the valley, anyone already here can use the same methods as I do to find clients:

Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

BTW - If you get a phone number from Linx Communications it can be a local number anywhere in the US and ring you at home or the office anywhere in the US or Canada (voice mail and fax store and forward too). My business number is in Santa Cruz but rings my home phone in Saint John's.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

I lived in Santa Cruz, over the hill from Silicon Valley, until about a month and a half ago.

I paid $1275 a month for a two bedroom one bath house (half a duplex). It wasn't a very nice place, had no back yard and only a tiny front yard. One car garage and tiny kitchen.

I'm getting married to a woman from Newfoundland and am staying here for a few months until our wedding. In St. John's we're renting a three bedroom house with a large kitchen, two and a half bathrooms, front and back yard. There's both a large living room and a family room.

The rent is US$500 with a US$133 deposit (no last months rent down). In Santa Cruz one of the things contributing to the homelessness that is so common there is that it requires several thousand dollars to move into a place, for first, last, plus a deposit.

But what was getting me about Santa Cruz wasn't the expense. It was the crowding. You couldn't drive across town at 5pm.

I thought that by becoming a consultant I'd get away from those insane Valley freeways, and although I didn't have to commute anymore sometimes I'd want to go downtown to the store or a cafe or something and it would really be a drag.

Housing is so tight that UC Santa Cruz houses students at the old Fort Ord Army base and Monterey and transports them in on buses, an hour's ride.

I used to live in LA and hated it there. I stayed in Santa Cruz because of the rural atmosphere and tight-knit community feel. That's not really there anymore.

We'll be heading back to the states after the wedding but for sure we won't go anywhere near Silicon Valley.

I'm very adamant, and have been for a long time that I will only accept work I can do "from my own office" - which means my home office. You can do this too. Screw the cubes at the valley, stop working for the pointy-haired boss. Throw away your flip tie!

Read how I do it at Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants

You don't have to move to Newfoundland but you'd have the choice to at least not drive on the freeway anymore if you stay in the valley, or at least move somewhere reasonable that you can afford.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Well then I think you would enjoy reading GoingWare's Important note for Recruiters and Agencies, in which I tell them all to get lost - and why.

I give a link to my original policy on recruiters and agencies in which I say that I will work with them under strict conditions - conditions that they would almost never meet, yet I held out the policy to be fair.

But because of the general ignorance and downright rudeness of headhunters and recruiters, I felt it was time to take a stand and not just stop working with them, but be public about it and encourage others to stop working with them also.

Sometime soon I will write a page for employers about why they shouldn't work with recruiters either and what they can do instead.

Right now though I have a helpful page entitled Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants which explains in detail how I find good clients without the use of agencies or recruiters, and how you can too. It also goes into further details of the problems of working with recruiters and why I think they're an all around bad idea.

And if you're a recruiter reading this, be sure to read the Word I Live By.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Well then I think you would enjoy reading GoingWare's Important note for Recruiters and Agencies, in which I tell them all to get lost - and why.

I give a link to my original policy on recruiters and agencies in which I say that I will work with them under strict conditions - conditions that they would almost never meet, yet I held out the policy to be fair.

But because of the general ignorance and downright rudeness of headhunters and recruiters, I felt it was time to take a stand and not just stop working with them, but be public about it and encourage others to stop working with them also.

Sometime soon I will write a page for employers about why they shouldn't work with recruiters either and what they can do instead.

Right now though I have a helpful page entitled Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants which explains in detail how I find good clients without the use of agencies or recruiters, and how you can too. It also goes into further details of the problems of working with recruiters and why I think they're an all around bad idea.

And if you're a recruiter reading this, be sure to read the Word I Live By.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Well then I think you would enjoy reading GoingWare's Important note for Recruiters and Agencies, in which I tell them all to get lost - and why.

I give a link to my original policy on recruiters and agencies in which I say that I will work with them under strict conditions - conditions that they would almost never meet, yet I held out the policy to be fair.

But because of the general ignorance and downright rudeness of headhunters and recruiters, I felt it was time to take a stand and not just stop working with them, but be public about it and encourage others to stop working with them also.

Sometime soon I will write a page for employers about why they shouldn't work with recruiters either and what they can do instead.

Right now though I have a helpful page entitled Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants which explains in detail how I find good clients without the use of agencies or recruiters, and how you can too. It also goes into further details of the problems of working with recruiters and why I think they're an all around bad idea.

And if you're a recruiter reading this, be sure to read the Word I Live By.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Well then I think you would enjoy reading GoingWare's Important note for Recruiters and Agencies, in which I tell them all to get lost - and why.

I give a link to my original policy on recruiters and agencies in which I say that I will work with them under strict conditions - conditions that they would almost never meet, yet I held out the policy to be fair.

But because of the general ignorance and downright rudeness of headhunters and recruiters, I felt it was time to take a stand and not just stop working with them, but be public about it and encourage others to stop working with them also.

Sometime soon I will write a page for employers about why they shouldn't work with recruiters either and what they can do instead.

Right now though I have a helpful page entitled Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants which explains in detail how I find good clients without the use of agencies or recruiters, and how you can too. It also goes into further details of the problems of working with recruiters and why I think they're an all around bad idea.

And if you're a recruiter reading this, be sure to read the Word I Live By.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Well then I think you would enjoy reading GoingWare's Important note for Recruiters and Agencies, in which I tell them all to get lost - and why.

I give a link to my original policy on recruiters and agencies in which I say that I will work with them under strict conditions - conditions that they would almost never meet, yet I held out the policy to be fair.

But because of the general ignorance and downright rudeness of headhunters and recruiters, I felt it was time to take a stand and not just stop working with them, but be public about it and encourage others to stop working with them also.

Sometime soon I will write a page for employers about why they shouldn't work with recruiters either and what they can do instead.

Right now though I have a helpful page entitled Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Consultants which explains in detail how I find good clients without the use of agencies or recruiters, and how you can too. It also goes into further details of the problems of working with recruiters and why I think they're an all around bad idea.

And if you're a recruiter reading this, be sure to read the Word I Live By.

Mike

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

I forgot to mention, I have a web page that explains why regular people, even your mom, should use encryption:

Why You Should Use Encryption

Note that while, yes, encryption is processor expensive, I suspect the work to decode all the JPEG images on a "content rich" website is probably a lot greater than the work required to encrypt and decrypt all those images for transmission.

The beauty of today's modern processors is that there is really no problem with just running encrypting everything. If the BIOS would support decrypting the OS as it boots, most of us would have no objection to encrypting pretty much everything on our disks, maybe even including the virtual memory. Really.

My 450 MHz pentium III laptop has no problem playing MPEG movies off a PGPDisk encrypted volume that is stored either on NTFS or FAT (where the encrypted volume is either NTFS or FAT itself - and you know FAT's not a fast filesystem).

Where the performance issues really count is for the servers and for those you'd certainly want hardware encryption. I'd be happy to donate a couple hundred bucks to Slashdot if it went toward implementing an SSL encrypted slashdot server, wouldn't you?

Clients have no problem with encryption in software. PGPDisk you have to pay for but I believe there is filesystem encryption for Windows PCs that is free. Let's see... ScramDisk, lots of good links at Yahoo 's encryption software page

I remember seeing an australian partition encryption utility there, I recall it implemented an australian government encryption standard as well as the more common ones, but I don't see it anymore.

And of course there's the linux encrypting kernel.

No, there's no reason not to encrypt. I think the main obstacle isn't export controls - it's user interface. Encryption is hard to learn. Compare using an encryption tool to, say, downloading an image from your new digital camera via USB on Windows or Mac. It should be really easy or no one will use it.

Mike

Heh... took me all this time to find the reply button so I could actually post a new topic rather than replying to an existing one...

First, I'd like to thank all the people who have written to me at michael@geometricvisions.com regarding their experiences with manic depression. I'm afraid I'm getting a lot of mail today so I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow to respond to most everyone.

But if you're thinking of writing, please be assured that I take the confidentiality of people who write to me regarding this very seriously. If you like you can encrypt your mail with my PGP key

I want to respond to a number of things that have been posted here and also clarify a few things that were written in Kelly Luker's article about bipolar high-tech workers in the Metro San Jose.

A number of people have posted some very negative things about mental illness or about the mental health profession. While there are instances of bad doctors and certainly a long history of bad science and outright abuse in the history of mental health, there is no doubt that manic depression is a real illness.

This is evidenced by positron emission tomography scans of bipolar patients during various phases. PET scans measure the consumption of radioactive sugar in various parts of the brain.

Manic patients have strong positron emissions from the right hemisphere of the brain, showing that the right hemisphere is very active - suggesting a physical reason for the feeling of creativity and the overabundance of new ideas.

Depressed people have a reduced level of positron emissions relative to a normal patient.

A bipolar patient who is neither manic nor depressed will show a normal level of sugar metabolization.

The illness is thought to be genetic in origin, but the genetic nature of it is not well understood. Several times researchers thought they'd discovered the gene for manic depression but the discovery turned out to be wrong.

It happens that manic depression tends to run in families, but not always. It can appear spontaneously in a family, and after it does it will tend to be passed to successive generations and get worse with each generation.

I don't understand fully why but this is thought to suggest that the disease is caused by a certain morphology of mutation rather than a certain genetic sequence, and that this kind of mutation tends to get worse over generations. Apparently this sort of mutation is understood for other illnesses that do this so they think bipolar depression may work this way too. I'm afraid I don't have a lit reference but I expect I can get some.

Manic depression usually responds to medication. However it is very difficult to treat effectively. The illness varies quite widely in the severity and frequency of its symptoms among individuals, and each individual responds quite differently to the different medications.

It took about twelve years to find the right combinations of medications for me. I didn't work continuously to find the right combo, and in fact I went several years without medication - but it's important for any bipolar reading this to understa nd that you can go years with good health and become profoundly manic or depressed quite suddenly, as I did when I was hospitalized during graduate school during a manic episode.

Another problem is that doctors are often lazy or ill-informed about proper treatment. I was first prescribed lithium and nothing else, even though my most prevalent symptom was depression and I went years with fairly continuous suicidal feelings and no treatment at all for it.

Early on the only direct treatment for manic depression was lithium, so the mental health community seemed to have gotten this idea that lithium was therefore completely effective for everyone. The Only Choice != Effective Treatment

Another problem is that antidepressants tend to provoke manic episodes, especially if they are given without mood stabilizers like lithium, depakote or tegretol. Quite often the new patient's only complaint is depression and the doctor doesn't ask questions that would determine a history of manic behavior, so they prescribe antidepressants without anything to prevent mania, and the patient then has a psychotic episode, as happened to me when I was first given antidepressants and I spent six weeks in a psychiatric hospital.

The doctors then overreact and refuse to prescribe antidepressants at all, and the result is either a miserable life or maybe suicide.

Things are somewhat better now than when I was first diagnosed. Over time it was discovered that a number of epilepsy medications are effective mood stabilizers, and once the first such was found (tegretol) a large number of others followed (I take depakote, or valproic acid). This means that there is a choice for those who either cannot tolerate lithium (as I can't) or for who it is ineffective - lithium only reduces hospitalizations by about 50% overall.

The wide range of medicine and I imagine the overall advances in biology and medical research have combined to yield an understanding of how manic depression actually works in the brain. This understanding has only come about in the last five years or so, so now I understand drugs are under development that effect the processes of bipolar depression directly, by rational drug design.

Most of the existing medications were found to be effective by chance and no one ever understood how they worked.

I understand lithium was discovered because someone noticed that lithium salts made guinea pigs less active so he just fed a bunch of lithium to all the patients in a psychiatric hospital and the bipolar patients happened to get better - most likely the reaction of the guinea pigs resulted from lithium's potent toxicity; regular blood tests are required when one starts taking it because the effective dose is pretty close to the toxic dose.

But basically what got me better isn't just the medication, it was taking responsibility for and control of my treatment. Your doctor only sees you for an hour a week (or 20 minutes a month if you're in a typical state mental health program) while you get to experience your illness every waking moment (plus nightmares during sleep).

So really, if you suffer from this, what you need to do is get informed and get the right treatment. What form that may take I cannot really tell you, but for almost everyone, there is an effective treatment which is not debilitating. If your current medications don't work for you, work with your doctor to find better medications; just give time for the new ones to fully take effect before switching again.

I want to comment on the link between manic depression and creativity. Kelly Luker, the author of the Metro San Jose article, really didn't seem to get it when I explained to her that becoming manic was not a desirable thing. I really did take pains to explain it to her clearly.

Yes, the early stages of mania, or mild mania (called hypomania) do feel pleasurable so she really thought this was something to be desired and all us bipolar programmers were all fired up on our jobs while going through manic episodes.

But that's really not how it is. Mania is a profoundly psychotic state. One goes days on end without sleeping. Thoughts race and crowd the mind so fast that one is able to complete a concept in ones own mind - let alone say a complete sentence to another person. Manic people make extremely poor judgements and often act on them without any regard to the consequences - which all too often come to roost once the manic episode is over and depression sets in.

Hypomania can be a happy and productive time but only in short bursts; it can't be maintained. And for me, severe depression invariably follows any manic phase whether it is mild or severe, so I work very hard to avoid getting manic.

The important thing to understand is that while one feels creative while manic, true creativity only comes during the balanced times (I hesitate to say "normal"), and the work of the manic depressive to heal, as I have over the years in 14 years of psychotherapy, is to learn to live a balanced life without mania or depression.

The link between manic depression and creativity is extensively (and authoritatively) discussed in Kaye Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire. She gives case studies of many famous poets and writers who were thought to be manic depressive (because of suicides, or manic behaviour) or actually known to be, and also quotes such studies as one about a prestigious writer's workshop, many of the attendees of which went on to commit suicide.

Jamison is a coauthor of the standard medical text on manic depression.

Dr. Jamison kept her own illness largely a secret during her training and career as a psychologist. But she discusses her own (and her father's) manic depression in her biography An Unquiet Mind

The subject of my letter Programming and Madness wasn't about how programming drove me nuts - it was about how it made me sane.

After I cracked up and left college I had no way to support myself, I was broke, hungry, miserable, sick, clinically depressed - not just sad but yearning to kill myself almost continuously, sleeping twenty hours a day.

I needed to find a place for myself in the world where I could live contentedly as the geek I had always been. My first love was, always will be physics (I did research on the 60" and 200" telescopes at Palomar Mountain, and did my senior thesis work for UC Santa Cruz at the particle accellerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland). But for some reason I've never been able to survive in the world of physics.

Working with computers, on the other hand, and in the community of computer programmers, I do very well.

It's my experience that there are a lot of other people in the computer industry, and in the scientific and technical world in general, who suffer from mental illness. "Unipolar" depression is most common but manic depression is quite widespread too. I know this both because I see it in others and sometimes we come out of our closet and, at work or on the net, we share our experience with each other. It's been a really long and complicated process for me to get where I am, and a big problem I faced when I first came down with it was a lack of good information. I'm trying to do something about it.

Imagine the day when you could ask a random stranger why the sad face and he'd feel perfectly safe in telling you "I'm clinically depressed". People will tell strangers about a lot of medical conditions, but mental illness still brings up images of Bedlam in a lot of people. And I'm afraid some of the worst stigma is actually self imposed; meaningless comments on the topic of mental illness can often have a devastating effect on someone who suffers from it, causing them to retreat far from the world of light for fear of exposing themselves when often their worst fears are mostly imagined.

I've used this sig for many years, I take it very seriously. Generally only my good friends understand the painful irony in it. I started using it shortly after getting on antidepressants after my first suicide attempt:

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

Michael D. Crawford

(Gotta trust Slashdot to provoke some colorful discussion...)

Being a geek has a lot to do with mental illness. There's more to me than being manic depressive; I was always a social outcast growing up and quite long before I came down with manic depression I had plenty of problems with traditional psychological disorders, of the sort that are effectively treated with "talk therapy" (as was done with me as an adult).

In my case as a child my illnesses, both physical and emotional, drove me into the extremes of intellectual inquiry that leads to such scientific and technical achievements as attending CalTech as first an astronomy major, then a physics major, then (while manic) switching to literature.

I did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes at Palomar Observatory. For my senior thesis at UC Santa Cruz I did some numerical analysis and particle detector shift work at CERN in Geneva.

And I taught myself programming because I was too sick to continue school and eventually started my own software consulting company

You could say I was just one mentally ill person who happened to be smart, but I know I'm definitely not alone. I remember from CalTech that there were a number of people that I consider now to likely have been manic depressive (why did we have a full-time staff psychiatrist for such a small school?) at least one person who was schizophrenic, and a substantial portion of the campus sufferred from major depression.

I know one guy who attempted suicide while I was there and eventually succeeded after leaving school, and I once hitched a ride from a pasadena paramedic who commented on the large number of particularly bizarre suicide attempts that he responded to at the school. I heard about the case of an astronomy professor who wrecked his sports car driving to palomar observatory. So he bought another the next day - cash. It was in that car that he killed himself on the way to the observatory. He held a speed record for the drive from campus to the observatory.

Of course this is all just anecdotal evidence. More substantial arguments are given in the book Touched with Fire by Kaye Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in manic depression. The book gives case studies of many, many creative people who are known or thought to be manic depressive, people who committed suicide or exhibited manic behaviour during their lives, as well as statistical studies such as the attendees at a professional writers workshop many of whom killed themselves later.

Jamison's own study quoted in the book involved some british academics who had been awarded some high academic honor, and also who had sought psychiatric help far out of proportion to the general population.

(Jamison also coauthored the standard medical textbook on manic depressive illness and mostly kept her own illness quiet through her training as a psychologist and most of her career until she wrote a biography that emphasizes her and her father's manic depression, An Unquiet Mind

Something else I want to point out is, I've been around in the mental health game for a long time, been in lots of therapy groups, mental hospitals and such, and I've met people with many disorders. Everyone who wasn't manic depressive could be considered an average person; while I have known a couple unusually intelligent schizophrenics they weren't the usual case. On the other hand, I have yet to meet a manic depressive who wasn't extremely intelligent. This is not to say they are successful; often we are misdirected or we live in poverty because of our illness, but I don't know of a single manic depressive person who isn't really bright.

But what I was really trying to get at though in my letter Programming and Madness is not that programming makes one crazy; it is precisely programming that made me sane. A huge part of my healing process involved finding a place for myself in the world where I could still live happily as a geek. Sadly I've never been able to do that in physics, my first love. But learning to program turned me from a world of sickness and desperation to a life of joy and prosperity.

I still encounter mentally ill people in my work. I've worked in silicon valley companies where I met other manic depressives on the same hall. So in volunteering for the Metro article and posting this on Slashdot I'm trying to make life a little better for others who suffer as I do (and I still do, although not as bad - manic depression is treatable but not curable).

One more factoid. Some study a few years ago found that manic depression was not as common in the scientific community as it was among the artistic and humanities communities. But that is not my experience; the study was done on career members of the communities (college professors in the case of the scientists). It did not include students. My experience of students is that mental illness is just as prevalent as it is among artists and writers. I think one doesn't find so many mentally ill scientists either because they are rejected by the community or because they are successful in hiding their illnesses. I think that is a shame and I'd like to do something to change it.

Michael D. Crawford

My friend Andy Green developed a cross-platform library over the past five years he plans to release as open source soon. Before he does he wants a small number of experienced C++ programmers to give it a good going-over to work the remaining kinks out of it.

I've been using it for the past four months for a simultaneous Mac and Windows development project and I think his API is the best I've used on any platform, even including single platform API's. I vastly prefer it to Java or Mac PowerPlant or even the Be Application Kit.

His API supports XWindows/Posix, MacOS, Windows, and BeOS. It's written in C++. It offers:

• Multithreading
• GUI with a really intriguing layout management system
• Platform appropriate UI renderers (so it looks like Windows when used on Windows, looks like Mac when used on Mac).
• Single-file database API suitable for small data or large (like serving multimedia over a network)
• Platform-independent C++ networking API
• Debugging (debugging allocator, leak detection, deadlock detection, etc.)

There's probably more that I haven't mentioned. If you have a serious interest in evaluating Andy's code, and preferably if you're using two or more of the above GUI platforms, drop a note to me at crawford@goingware.com and I'll send you the URL and a login password.

I should caution that the XWindows implementation needs some work at present; it has worked well in the past but it has fallen behind changes to the internal API and is being updated right now. So it doesn't currently build on XWindows. But it will before we complete the beta test, and having some input from some X folks would be helpful.

Michael D. Crawford

I have worked exclusively from my home as a consultant since April '98. Before that I did extensive telecommuting from perm jobs.

I'm so set on working at home that I put up this page for recruiters to read about how I wouldn't work at a client site:

Recruiters - Please Read This Important Note

If you're a consultant or thinking of becoming one, or just want more power in controlling your destiny, check out this page I wrote recently:

Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Professionals

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare, Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting

I have worked exclusively from my home as a consultant since April '98. Before that I did extensive telecommuting from perm jobs.

I'm so set on working at home that I put up this page for recruiters to read about how I wouldn't work at a client site:

Recruiters - Please Read This Important Note

If you're a consultant or thinking of becoming one, or just want more power in controlling your destiny, check out this page I wrote recently:

Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Professionals

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare, Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting

I have worked exclusively from my home as a consultant since April '98. Before that I did extensive telecommuting from perm jobs.

I'm so set on working at home that I put up this page for recruiters to read about how I wouldn't work at a client site:

Recruiters - Please Read This Important Note

If you're a consultant or thinking of becoming one, or just want more power in controlling your destiny, check out this page I wrote recently:

Market Yourself - Tips for High Tech Professionals

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare, Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting

I have the Xerces library for SAX and DOM access to XML files starting to work on the MacOS, built with Codewarrior Pro 5.3. So you don't need to move up to MacOS X to use XML (or you can use Xerces as a fallback if your application needs to run on earlier systems).

I will be submitting my changed to the Xerces folks at http://xml.apache.org but a little more work is needed before I do. Until then, email me privately at crawford@goingware.com if you want to try it out.

I haven't got it working yet, but I'll also be building the IBM International Components for Unicode (ICU) library on MacOS.

Mike Crawford

I have a couple main problems with Java, that cause me to prefer to program in C++.

My main problem with Java is that it fails miserably on one of the main things it was advertised to guard against - resource leakage.

Because there is no commonly-named destructor or close method in a java class, there is no real easy way to call one without having to think about it. Look through the whole of the Java class libraries and see how many ways there are to instruct a java object to free the resources it holds, how many different names they have.

Further, there is no way to guarantee they get called at any particular time or in any order. The finalize method is too vague to be of any real use.

I read on in Sun's newsletter about using a finally clause for resource termination, so I guess you would do:

try{
Foo a = new Foo();
a.doSomething()
}finally{
a.terminate();
}

and you can reasonably guarantee that the object frees its resources. But compare this to C++:

Foo a;

a.doSomething

// a is destroyed when it goes out of scope

My point here is that Java was hyped as a language where you could write quality, complex code without having to be an expert or having to manually remember to do certain things, but that is simply not true, and the workarounds are worse than the common way in C++ simply because they're not standardized.

Java has been heavily advertised as not having memory leaks, but in my experience memory leaks are one of the biggest problems with it, just because of the garbage collection - keeping a reference to something around and keep megabytes of data in memory! Diagnostic tools help, but really shouldn't be necessary.

My other problem with Java is simply that it doesn't support programming to an OS'es native API's in any reasonable way. If you have a particular function or a few functions you want to call, you can write a JNI library. But before you'll see me using Java in any widespread way, I'll expect to see documented and supported class libraries that interface with the OS I want my code to run on. That's right! I want to target Java for an individual OS.

I know this is quite antithetical to Sun's "pure java" scheme, which is part of its strategy to wrest control away from windows. I'm not saying I want to use Microsoft's Java. What I'd like is to write Java on _any_ platform and get native-quality support.

I wrote an application that used the javax.comm package to do serial communications with a scientific instrument. I was converting a MacOS C++ application to Java so it could be cross-platform. Javax.comm supports enumerating port names as user-readable strings, so on the Mac, the user could see "printer port" and "modem port" when selecting where to communicate, while on Windows, they would see "COM1:" and "COM2:".

The problem was that the javax.comm package was originally written by Sun for Unix, and didn't have the concept of printer and modem port icons. When a Mac user wants to know where to plug in the cable, they expect to see a little picture of a printer or a telephone. The concept just didn't exist in javax.comm.

I know it's kind of a minor and a petty thing, but it really irritated me at the time. Swing is nicer than AWT, but I still see it as least-common-denominator, just with the LCD raised a bit.

I'm a long-time MacOS and BeOS programmer, and I really pride myself on writing nice user interfaces. I just can't get that in Java. What I get is UI's from (pardon me) some OS that doesn't value quality UI design just sort of dressed-up to look like the Mac.

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

I have a couple main problems with Java, that cause me to prefer to program in C++.

My main problem with Java is that it fails miserably on one of the main things it was advertised to guard against - resource leakage.

Because there is no commonly-named destructor or close method in a java class, there is no real easy way to call one without having to think about it. Look through the whole of the Java class libraries and see how many ways there are to instruct a java object to free the resources it holds, how many different names they have.

Further, there is no way to guarantee they get called at any particular time or in any order. The finalize method is too vague to be of any real use.

I read on in Sun's newsletter about using a finally clause for resource termination, so I guess you would do:

try{
Foo a = new Foo();
a.doSomething()
}finally{
a.terminate();
}

and you can reasonably guarantee that the object frees its resources. But compare this to C++:

Foo a;

a.doSomething

// a is destroyed when it goes out of scope

My point here is that Java was hyped as a language where you could write quality, complex code without having to be an expert or having to manually remember to do certain things, but that is simply not true, and the workarounds are worse than the common way in C++ simply because they're not standardized.

Java has been heavily advertised as not having memory leaks, but in my experience memory leaks are one of the biggest problems with it, just because of the garbage collection - keeping a reference to something around and keep megabytes of data in memory! Diagnostic tools help, but really shouldn't be necessary.

My other problem with Java is simply that it doesn't support programming to an OS'es native API's in any reasonable way. If you have a particular function or a few functions you want to call, you can write a JNI library. But before you'll see me using Java in any widespread way, I'll expect to see documented and supported class libraries that interface with the OS I want my code to run on. That's right! I want to target Java for an individual OS.

I know this is quite antithetical to Sun's "pure java" scheme, which is part of its strategy to wrest control away from windows. I'm not saying I want to use Microsoft's Java. What I'd like is to write Java on _any_ platform and get native-quality support.

I wrote an application that used the javax.comm package to do serial communications with a scientific instrument. I was converting a MacOS C++ application to Java so it could be cross-platform. Javax.comm supports enumerating port names as user-readable strings, so on the Mac, the user could see "printer port" and "modem port" when selecting where to communicate, while on Windows, they would see "COM1:" and "COM2:".

The problem was that the javax.comm package was originally written by Sun for Unix, and didn't have the concept of printer and modem port icons. When a Mac user wants to know where to plug in the cable, they expect to see a little picture of a printer or a telephone. The concept just didn't exist in javax.comm.

I know it's kind of a minor and a petty thing, but it really irritated me at the time. Swing is nicer than AWT, but I still see it as least-common-denominator, just with the LCD raised a bit.

I'm a long-time MacOS and BeOS programmer, and I really pride myself on writing nice user interfaces. I just can't get that in Java. What I get is UI's from (pardon me) some OS that doesn't value quality UI design just sort of dressed-up to look like the Mac.

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

When I worked at Medior, Inc., they used GPL'ed code for graphics effects like screen dissolves, wipes, and so on in their multimedia CDROMs. They just went and took the code and never considered releasing the source code.

The CDROM's were usually document retrieval CD's full of sales lit for such large corporations as Tandem, Northern Telecom and FedEx. I couldn't really tell you which CD's got the GPL'ed code and which didn't; but because we tended to just reuse all the source to all the previous CD's on the next CD, the chance are pretty good that the graphics effects got rolled into an awful lot of programs even when it wasn't actually used.

They also did some consumer titles such as the 2Market Home Shopping catalog CD (with such catalogs as the sharper image with products on the CD) and the CD Version of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.

I was pretty angry about them using the GPL'ed code but I really wasn't in a position to do anything about it. It was during a pretty low time in my life and I just needed to keep working.

Medior is defunct now as an independent corporation, but it was purchased by a small networking outfit you may have heard of - America Online who renamed it AOL Productions. AOL inherited all the assets of the company, the source code, rights to everything, most of the engineers and executives. I left just before the buyout.

Eventually AOL Productions was shut down and sucked into AOL. But a lot of Medior people are still working for AOL, including former Medior President and Founder Barry Schuler who is now AOL's President of Interactive Services.

You might drop him a line and ask for the source code for all the CD's that included the GPL'ed graphics effects libraries.

Regards,

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

When I worked at Medior, Inc., they used GPL'ed code for graphics effects like screen dissolves, wipes, and so on in their multimedia CDROMs. They just went and took the code and never considered releasing the source code.

The CDROM's were usually document retrieval CD's full of sales lit for such large corporations as Tandem, Northern Telecom and FedEx. I couldn't really tell you which CD's got the GPL'ed code and which didn't; but because we tended to just reuse all the source to all the previous CD's on the next CD, the chance are pretty good that the graphics effects got rolled into an awful lot of programs even when it wasn't actually used.

They also did some consumer titles such as the 2Market Home Shopping catalog CD (with such catalogs as the sharper image with products on the CD) and the CD Version of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.

I was pretty angry about them using the GPL'ed code but I really wasn't in a position to do anything about it. It was during a pretty low time in my life and I just needed to keep working.

Medior is defunct now as an independent corporation, but it was purchased by a small networking outfit you may have heard of - America Online who renamed it AOL Productions. AOL inherited all the assets of the company, the source code, rights to everything, most of the engineers and executives. I left just before the buyout.

Eventually AOL Productions was shut down and sucked into AOL. But a lot of Medior people are still working for AOL, including former Medior President and Founder Barry Schuler who is now AOL's President of Interactive Services.

You might drop him a line and ask for the source code for all the CD's that included the GPL'ed graphics effects libraries.

Regards,

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

I'm quite happy with my compaq presario 1800T. It came installed with Win 98, and I resized that partition smaller to make room for BeOS 4.5 and Slackware Linux. It works great with both BeOS 4.5 and Linux, although I originally installed Slackware Linux 4 and had to upgrade the XFree86 to get the Rage Pro LT support before SlackWare Linux 7 came out.

One neat thing about it that Compaq neglects to mention on their web site and would have got me all hot and bothered for it is that it comes with integrated ethernet. No PCMCIA needed for ethernet.

There's a couple gotchas with the ethernet though. It uses some variant of the DEC Tulip chip in which the ethernet chip eeprom gets reprogrammed by windows. If you do a soft reboot from windows into Linux or BeOS, then ethernet won't work. If you power down from windows then power back up into BeOS or Linux it will work fine.

Another problem is that you need to wait until the system has come up to attach the 10baseT cable (it's a 10/100 chip).

The machine is a 450 MHz pentium III with 128 MB of ram. A pentium III is significant for laptops because pentium II laptops run the system bus at 66 MHz; pentium III laptops with the coppermine chip run at 100 MHz.

I gave my desktop PC to my fiance and now use my compaq laptop for all my consulting work - software development, server work on linux, gui stuff on windows and BeOS. I vastly prefer using a laptop to a desktop PC for my daily work. I can sit on the couch or the easy chair and I don't have to stay in one place all day. Also I like the active matrix LCD screens, I think they're easier on the eyes than vacuum tube phosphors.

I have a web page that addresses my laptop briefly at http://www.goingware.com/laptop

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

I'm quite happy with my compaq presario 1800T. It came installed with Win 98, and I resized that partition smaller to make room for BeOS 4.5 and Slackware Linux. It works great with both BeOS 4.5 and Linux, although I originally installed Slackware Linux 4 and had to upgrade the XFree86 to get the Rage Pro LT support before SlackWare Linux 7 came out.

One neat thing about it that Compaq neglects to mention on their web site and would have got me all hot and bothered for it is that it comes with integrated ethernet. No PCMCIA needed for ethernet.

There's a couple gotchas with the ethernet though. It uses some variant of the DEC Tulip chip in which the ethernet chip eeprom gets reprogrammed by windows. If you do a soft reboot from windows into Linux or BeOS, then ethernet won't work. If you power down from windows then power back up into BeOS or Linux it will work fine.

Another problem is that you need to wait until the system has come up to attach the 10baseT cable (it's a 10/100 chip).

The machine is a 450 MHz pentium III with 128 MB of ram. A pentium III is significant for laptops because pentium II laptops run the system bus at 66 MHz; pentium III laptops with the coppermine chip run at 100 MHz.

I gave my desktop PC to my fiance and now use my compaq laptop for all my consulting work - software development, server work on linux, gui stuff on windows and BeOS. I vastly prefer using a laptop to a desktop PC for my daily work. I can sit on the couch or the easy chair and I don't have to stay in one place all day. Also I like the active matrix LCD screens, I think they're easier on the eyes than vacuum tube phosphors.

I have a web page that addresses my laptop briefly at http://www.goingware.com/laptop

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

I'm quite happy with my compaq presario 1800T. It came installed with Win 98, and I resized that partition smaller to make room for BeOS 4.5 and Slackware Linux. It works great with both BeOS 4.5 and Linux, although I originally installed Slackware Linux 4 and had to upgrade the XFree86 to get the Rage Pro LT support before SlackWare Linux 7 came out.

One neat thing about it that Compaq neglects to mention on their web site and would have got me all hot and bothered for it is that it comes with integrated ethernet. No PCMCIA needed for ethernet.

There's a couple gotchas with the ethernet though. It uses some variant of the DEC Tulip chip in which the ethernet chip eeprom gets reprogrammed by windows. If you do a soft reboot from windows into Linux or BeOS, then ethernet won't work. If you power down from windows then power back up into BeOS or Linux it will work fine.

Another problem is that you need to wait until the system has come up to attach the 10baseT cable (it's a 10/100 chip).

The machine is a 450 MHz pentium III with 128 MB of ram. A pentium III is significant for laptops because pentium II laptops run the system bus at 66 MHz; pentium III laptops with the coppermine chip run at 100 MHz.

I gave my desktop PC to my fiance and now use my compaq laptop for all my consulting work - software development, server work on linux, gui stuff on windows and BeOS. I vastly prefer using a laptop to a desktop PC for my daily work. I can sit on the couch or the easy chair and I don't have to stay in one place all day. Also I like the active matrix LCD screens, I think they're easier on the eyes than vacuum tube phosphors.

I have a web page that addresses my laptop briefly at http://www.goingware.com/laptop

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

I've gotten all riled up by what I read in the press and online these days, and decided to start doing something about it. The first thing is to write a semi-regular column with commentary and posts to current events of interest.

This column is meant to be accessible to anyone, not just the geek community. You may find it interesting to read, but I'd also like to ask that you forward the URL to your friends or link to it from your web pages.

Today's column in Today's Comments is Modern Technology and the Death of Copyright

Comments and suggest links for future articles are most welcome

Regards, Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

I've gotten all riled up by what I read in the press and online these days, and decided to start doing something about it. The first thing is to write a semi-regular column with commentary and posts to current events of interest.

This column is meant to be accessible to anyone, not just the geek community. You may find it interesting to read, but I'd also like to ask that you forward the URL to your friends or link to it from your web pages.

Today's column in Today's Comments is Modern Technology and the Death of Copyright

Comments and suggest links for future articles are most welcome

Regards, Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

I've gotten all riled up by what I read in the press and online these days, and decided to start doing something about it. The first thing is to write a semi-regular column with commentary and posts to current events of interest.

This column is meant to be accessible to anyone, not just the geek community. You may find it interesting to read, but I'd also like to ask that you forward the URL to your friends or link to it from your web pages.

Today's column in Today's Comments is Modern Technology and the Death of Copyright

Comments and suggest links for future articles are most welcome

Regards, Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

I've gotten all riled up by what I read in the press and online these days, and decided to start doing something about it. The first thing is to write a semi-regular column with commentary and posts to current events of interest.

This column is meant to be accessible to anyone, not just the geek community. You may find it interesting to read, but I'd also like to ask that you forward the URL to your friends or link to it from your web pages.

Today's column in Today's Comments is Modern Technology and the Death of Copyright

Comments and suggest links for future articles are most welcome

Regards, Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com