Recently in WWW.Byte me Category

Over the last 6 weeks I spent more time than I want to think about trying to get a new Satellite (Model A200, or A200-03V, specifically PSAE3C-03V08C) to run an alternative OS to its pre-installed Windows Vista. The laptop was attractively priced, perhaps because it was pre-loaded with Vista, as much as the fact that it was being cleared out for newer models. I think these models were engineered for XP and thrown on to the market with Vista drivers when Microsoft terminated its OEM licencing for XP installations, forcing computer manufactures to pre-install Vista.

Given the resources of the system - processor and memory - it falls short of what it seems to take to run Vista, and running Vista has other drawbacks.I wasn't sure about changing to XP although that is the route I took in the end. One problem, for me and many users is having to buy XP off the shelf. There is a cost factor, and even if I had owned a valid working copy of XP, I needed to get working drivers for the hardware in the Satellite to complement the install set and complete the installation. Another potential problem is losing the recovery functions that Toshiba builds in with its HDD Recovery Utility.

Another piece of reportage and ideas served up by AL Daily. Christine Rosen writing in the New Atlantis on Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism.

This proves topical as I have signed up on Facebook, using some of the message and communication resources.

Rosen's work is pretty good - her essay on cameras, photography and images, The Image Culture, for instance, or her essay on channel surfing and TiVo, The Age of Egocasting.

My old friend Randy has mentioned, in a post called Aaden. Adan, Aden etc. that he recently got some unwanted, unfriendly comments on a blog entry he posted over two years ago, Bad Baby Names. Randy was caught commenting on people who bestow unique and precious names on their unborn offspring.

Shopping for a new computer and some work to set it up kept me busy on Saturday, when I wasn't working on the house.

My Canon G3 digital camera and Sony desktop computer stayed in Winnipeg with Claire. I got a Canon Powershot 410 before moving. I bought it at Shopper's Drugs. It runs on 2 AA batteries. It didn't have a DC adapter and I didn't want to use battery power while the camera was transferring files to the computer over a USB connection. The Canon adapter is expensive and it would have been a special order - which I wasn't going to wait for. A card reader was a less expensive and quicker option. It works to transfer the .JPG files from the camera card to the computer. It seems to be a simple and faster way to move images - plug the card into the reader, and the reader into the USB port, and copy the image files on the card to a new folder or file on my computer. From there I can crop and compress images with MS Photo Editor and attach them to emails or upload them here. I couldn't install the Canon image management software on my Pentium MMX Toshiba, under Win 98SE. The Canon software, which I had been running on the Sony before I gave the computer to Claire, had useful features for organizing files and getting thumbnail views, but I think there is nothing special about that. I can probably get the same functions in Photoshop - it's a question of finding something that works on this machine, or waiting to get settled in and getting a more powerful home computer. Meanwhile I can shoot, save and send so it's all working.

When my future ex-wife started using the Internet, and when her mother and aunt started using the Internet, they used to forward email chain letters to me. I sent them information about web sites with information about virus hoaxes and urban myths, and explained how to bookmark them (I like bookmark - a much better word than Microsoft's Favorite).

Wolfgang Stiller had a site at www.stiller.com/hoaxes.htm. He called his site Stiller Research. Quite a few pages linked to his hoax information page. He had developed a shareware virus checker called Integrity Master. He seemed to be a serious and knowledgeable person, regarded as an authority on viruses, data security and virus hoaxes. Googling the name brings up the president of the North European division of Alcan, an artist in New York, a mountaineer in Colorado Springs, and lots of hits relating to virus information - most of them going to stiller.com. He may be the mountaineer in Colorado Springs.

His hoax page is gone. Googling Stiller Research still brings up hits at stiller.com, but it has become a link farm. Nothing but ads. The page source suggests the site has been taken over by hitfarm, a notorious adware site.

Wikipedia's start page has a daily featured article, an entry selected as the article of the day. For football fans, on November 7, 2005 the featured article is about the Arsenal Football Club which plays in the FA Premier League in England.

The French urban riots made the front page of the Free Press today - a picture of firefighters trying to put out the fire in a burning car. The news coverage is still neglibible. Wikipedia had a problem with the story over the weekend - competing rewrites and disputes over whether the article overstated the role of Islam in the rioting. They had an objectivity flag on the story on Sunday, but they have worked that out. Their article is now called 2005 French Urban Violence.

My friend Randy, who is an academic librarian, recently posted an entry with a section on criticism of Wikipedia. His entry is called Various. He cites an essay called the Amorality of Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr. I have to agree that the linguistic and cultural implications of Wikipedia are being oversold by the usual assortment of technical writers, visionaries, dreamers and loons. I also agree that the quality of the entries is inconsistent but I think it is not as bad as some of these comments suggest.

Over the last few days I fixed the template for the page (Individual Entry Archives) with the Comment Entry fields to fix Typekey Login for commenters. I also experimented with some MT plugins - Stylecatcher, MTProtect, and CCode/TCode. I also spent some time redesigning and editing my web pages.

After trying out different font families, I kept getting the same result as I mentioned in my last entry. Putting two spaces after the period (.) at the end of a sentence did not make a difference. After some research, I realized that this is a function of HTML, my font settings and my justification settings.The entry editing screen is a text editor. When the text is published in HTML, extra spaces are not counted. There is an HTML tag that will insert extra "non-breaking" spaces, and there are ways of automating that in external text editors, perhaps also by MT plugins. Many authorities favour using a proportionally spaced font and letting HTML sort it out. There are some reasons not to use two spaces, because in some applications, the extra whitespace can cause problems. It doesn't seem to matter in an HTML page display in a browser window.

Many claim that the practice of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence started with typing teachers, not grammarians or printers. It was useful to add the extra space in typing with a typewrite, in a monospaced face, and that was considered as good practice. It may still be useful in processing text for output in a monospaced font-face. Adding the extra space in a text processor for HTML output requires special characters. Typing the spaces in the text processor has no impact.