Death. Taxes. Link Rot.

Maybe a website can escape the first two, but the third is guaranteed. Building a set of useful links and resources on the net is worse than trying to draw up a map of Europe. This past weekend I discovered that a lot of the educational and reference links I'd collected in the past had found their way onto the casualty list. The local library system, for example, used to maintain a very useful and broad-ranging list of online reference materials...which they've now removed and, after a bit of poking around, it appears that they've replaced it with a far less extensive list of subscription-only databases you could find general facts on if only you had an account. Instead of their "homework help" section, they also have a list of links that will only work from a library terminal.

Other resources I'd liked in the past have been replaced with permanent "our website has been taken down so we can update it" sign (why?) or the ever-popular "this site has been moved to the following broken link" page. If the web is like a giant interconnected network of cybernetic nerve cells, half of them are already senile.

Stepping back and taking a more philosophical view, I guess it's all part of the great cycle of life; websites grow, flourish, and then die. Bytes that once spoke of the installation and operation of last year's models of networking equipment, or of the birth and death of elements in the hearts of supernova explosions, don't really die with the websites that once hosted them, but are instead born anew as edited pictures of naked starlets and banner ads with animated monkeys.

It's all part of the same grand plan that has made any book ending in "for Dummies" an automatic bestseller.

Getting back to the emboldened subject with which this particular rambling began, I was looking for some new, functioning links and references and just happened to start out with a search on one of the theories that I'm admittedly a little biased towards, namely inflationary theory, originally proposed by Alan Guth. So, I popped up Google's advanced search page[1] which did cooperatively return 820 hits for "guth inflationary theory" but helpfully suggested, "Did you mean, 'gut inflationary theory'"?

Hmmmm. I haven't tried that search; I guess Google might have been thinking "Grand Unification Theory" rather than the pondering of ponderous effects of too much holiday feasting, but I tend to doubt it. (Okay, I tried it; I got several good matches, but less than half as many as I did when searching with Guth instead of gut. No sign of Cosmology of the Early Universe for Dummies, though.)

[1] (Force of habit; most sites' "advanced search" is easier and more useful; except for Sony's professional division, where the "advanced search" is pretty much limited to helping you find what accessories for their lastest consumer products you could buy on the online Sony Store--I guess they figure that most people who merely think they're looking for details on the command interface for their broadcast editing gear are really secretly much more interested in whether they can get a car adapter for their Walkman in the lastest hip-and-trendy colors.)

Kicking off the new year was an article on the front page of the Denver Post "Denver and the West" section which had referred to me only as a "Denver Entrepreneur," unfortunately neglecting to find space for my name in the article; Westword had my name misspelled my name in their issue, and now the March issue of Black Belt is on the stands with a trimmed-down version of an article I'd been told was going to be out in the February issue, which at least has Julian and Dragon and the Hawk mentioned, but everybody else involved got cut.

'Course, in the movie business, I guess one just has to get used to that. Sport fishermen get to talk about the "one that got away" and actors have at least as much right to rhapsodize over their extensive and dramatic contributions to the cutting room floor.

The other day, I'd blurted out a remark that I liked well enough to add to my "quotes" file: "What's the point of being world-famous if nobody knows about it?"

It suited my sense of humor at the time--but I'd still prefer it if I didn't have quite as many occasions where it seemed so appropriate.

...to the tune of the "Mickey Mouse Theme":

F - I - C . . .

. . . I - R - Q . . .

. . . A - R - R - R - G . . . !

Okay, a little background. I was reviewing some of the behind-the-scenes footage that was done with the Canon XL1 during one of the shoots down at Colorado Studios and I wanted to pull a couple of stills off the DV tapes. This should be easy enough--hook the XL1 up to the firewire port and go to it.

But being the astute and insightful reader you are, you've already guessed that it didn't work out to be quite so simple. It's not like I hadn't been making considerable use of the firewire ports on "Roo" (that's the computer that does the multimedia input and output, MIDI, CD mastering, etc.; "Kanga" is the one with the main drive arrays and CPUs--got that straight so far? "Eeyore" is the gateway/firewall/router between the main treehouse subnets, "Owl" is the electronic librarian, and "Pooh" is the print server, which is a relatively undemanding task, so "Pooh" is a machine of very little CPU); however, heretofore, I'd mostly been using the betaSP decks as source material and running everything through an external hardware transcoder, and thence into Roo's 1394 port. That all worked fine.

But as soon as I plugged in the XL1, everything just slowed to a halt...for about ten seconds...and then it worked fine...for about thirty seconds...and then it locked up again for ten seconds (and so forth).

So, there may be an interrupt problem. I don't know if you've looked through the actual code behind Microsoft's Plug-and-Play management (I haven't), but based on my best attempts to reverse-engineer their interrupt-assignment algorithms, I believe the guts of their plug-and-play handling algorithms look more-or-less like this:

tabulate available interrupts after system resources and integrated peripherals have been allocated

poll AGP and PCI slots high-to-low (or low-to-high if specified in bios)

develop list of expansion card IRQ requirements, initially offset by PCI slot priority

assign all expansion card interrupts to IRQ #11

At least that's my theory.

Now, the actual math behind assigning interrupts in ways that would work is very simple; you can do it on your fingers easily enough--the secret is simply to skip over step number four above. In case you do feel like exercising your third-grade-or-higher-level of mathematical ability, Windows 98SE does feature a provision that gives the sophisticated user the ability to briefly fool himself or herself into imagining that this problem can be solved without requiring the purchase of a new computer.

To do this, you go into the setup menu, select "system," select "device manager," highlight the device whose interrupt you wish to reassign, select "properties," select the "resources" tab, deselect the "use automatic settings" option, select your desired configuration profile, and highlight "interrupt request."

At this point, the "change settings" button will surface and become clickable; clicking on "change settings" will then bring up a message box stating, "This resource setting cannot be modified."

Someone really needs to let the folks in Redmond know that Douglas Adams' descriptions of the user interface options found in the Heart of Gold were satire, and should not used as product design specs.

Just as an aside to any other software developers out there, omitting or disabling basic features that are necessary to be able to use a product for its intended purpose is a Bad Thing[tm] and will make busybodies like myself complain about you in public.

Adding a perky animated character to the error messages is not an upgrade.

And neither is having it blank out all the other windows open on your system and replace all the standard Windows menus and functions with a simulated 3D image of a rusty car fender with clickable bird droppings--or whatever metaphor the marketing department thought would be minimally comprehensible to anyone intending to use the product.

With most mainboards of recent vintage, you have some ability to foil the operating system's efforts to prevent your system from operating. ABIT, for example, has done a good job of making a wide variety of options selectable through the bios, maximizing the tweak-to-screwdriver ratio in troubleshooting or optimizing one's hardware. FIC takes the opposite tack, designing their products so that changing settings involves moving jumpers around or, occasionally, minor physical modifications of the circuit board that can be performed by any competetent electrical engineer using only a pencil-tip soldering iron, a hacksaw, and a small semiconductor fabrication plant.

Unfortunately, Roo has an FIC SD11 mainboard. The manual that came with it gives you a pretty clear indication that the SD11 is, in fact, a motherboard, but shies away from mentioning any more detailed information about the hardware.

"Prices slashed - and so much more!"

Larry Lee (no relation to Julian--I think there are days when 40% of the people I talk to are all named 'Lee') got involved with the Computer Cottage only a few weeks ago, but he's been really plugging away at getting the systems put together and out to people. He came up Friday for a new batch and we managed to fit eight more systems, about half already set up, into his car.

I'd talked to one of the recipients earlier in the week who has a son with cerebral palsy. I'd worked with United Cerebral Palsy in the past and done more with other programs to get systems set up for children with special needs; I'm working largely with off-the-shelf hardware, but there's still a fair amount that can be done to accommodate different people's abilities without the cost of getting specialty hardware. In this case, he's got very limited arm mobility and finger movement, but I looked through my collection of touchpads and we're going to try a smallish touchpad with relatively large and easily-operated buttons that could be worn on the upper chest.

Julian Jung Lee is bouncing between LA and Toronto these days, but found time to meet here on Sunday so we could go over some of the finer details of publicity and planning for the upcoming shoot for Straight Blast.

...and some of the rougher edges as well. Sounds like the shooting schedule may be delayed a bit (the more I heard about it, the more I thought that the February production date was overly ambitious). That's going to depend on everybody else's availability, of course--director Larry Riggins, fresh from Replicant with Jean-Claude Van Damme, has two other projects on the burners (but who doesn't?) and I don't know at this point about Dolph Lundgren's and Mako's schedule (or that of the female lead, whose contract negotiations are still in process).

Why does this make me think, once again, that I really ought to find out if anyone else has already created a film production company named, "Seat of the Pants Productions" and, if not, set one up myself or at least file it as a DBA for one of my existing production companies?

Once again, the rest of the computer world tries to copy whatever annoying, pointless, and/or actively counterproductive marketing idea Apple comes up with. First, everything has to be made in translucent jelly-like colors, even devices like scanners and cameras where case opacity is a highly desirable quality. I'd just butted heads against another of Apple's "how can we keep our users from being confused by features, options, and functionality?" techniques--this one being the clever idea of eliminating SCSI ports from the Mac G3 and G4 since, according to Apple, the simplicity and hot-swap capability of USB has made SCSI obsolete.

So, those of you in the professional graphics/publishing business, just throw away those obsolete high-end film, sheetfeed, and flatbed scanners, and replace them with new, state-of-the-art shoddily-made USB models. Whatever you might lose in image quality, speed, and features will be more than made up for by the availability of new, improved fruity translucent case colors.

Okay, yeah; I know that Adaptec now makes a SCSI card for the Mac, but it was a minor inconvenience to get the equipment in and not be able to hook it up--and the new Macs are already suffering from a shortage of available PCI slots if you're planning on doing any serious sound and video editing.

I think the Apple philosophy is that computer users really should be bus riders rather than car drivers or even taxi passengers. Like a city bus, the computer should just have a designated series of tasks that it performs and the "operator" is there to push the "on" button and then enjoy the rest of the ride. Want to do something different? Just find another bus or buy another computer that's all set up to do that task instead.

But back to what set me off on this little tangent: I just got a flyer from Compaq where they're pushing their new, "Legacy-Free" line of computers. "Legacy Free"? Yes, that means they have removed all those annoying and inconvenient serial, parallel, keyboard, and mouse connectors, to "eliminate the challenge of supporting older technologies."

I'm sure that's a common complaint: "I just hate being able to hook up my printer! Why, oh why, can't somebody make a computer that won't work with non-USB peripherals?"

. . .

BTW, to further simplfy your life, Apple recently announced that putting a "business card"-style or other non-standard CD-ROM into one of their new G4 and G4 cube computers may damage or destroy the drive. Don't you just hate the confusion of being able to read different formats and media types?

I did stop by a store that had the new G4 cube on display and tested their new touch-sensitive, instant-off feature. Yep, if you touch the top of the computer, it shuts down instantly, no matter what you (or the person unlucky enough to be using the computer) might be working on at the time. Back in the old days, you had to rub your feet back and forth for ten or twenty minutes on a dry carpet to be able to bring down a computer just by touching it. Now, there's progress!

• Towards the end of 2001, the new trend in consumer electronics and computer peripherals and accessories will be to make them not only with translucent, jelly-colored cases, but also include flashing lights under the plastic, continuing the trend towards focusing design and marketing efforts on factors that are stupid, useless, or actually decrease the usefulness and quality of the product.

Just you watch; I bet it'll happen. By mid-2002, it'll be the hot trend and it won't be for at least another year before the general public finally realizes that it's as silly and tacky as a transparent telephone with a neon light the shape of a palm tree under its lucite cover.

I haven't been paying as much attention to weirdities in the log files lately, but I do check the error logs pretty often, just to make sure I haven't screwed up anything too badly--or, what's more common, that somebody out there has a misspelled/rogue pointer aimed at some filename I don't have on my site. This morning I did spend a little more quality time trying to figure out a new error (it turned out to be a modification in how one spider I was already familiar with operates which was actually designed to test how a server responds to bad URL requests).

In 2001 (all six days of it at this point), the trygve.com site has been getting an average of just over five thousand visitors a day (5077, not counting direct hits on the image and media files, in case you really wanted a more precise number). A big chunk of visitors come in from search engines and, though most searches that bring people over to the treehouse are pretty ordinary, some are more, well, ... imaginitive. I pulled up the tail end of the current log of where people are coming from and here are a few of the searches from the last three or four hours (and where they led to) that caught my eye:

In Denver, Colorado, there may be some things going on besides a new football stadium and a few murdered children, but if you were relying on the local papers, you might never know about it. I think you could save a lot of trees just by giving all Denver-area residents a pair of sticky notes, one reading, "Jon Benet is still dead," and the other, "the Columbine High School students are too." That way, instead of reading the paper's daily updates on whether or not they're still dead, you could just glance briefly at those sticky notes over coffee in the morning and get on with the rest of your life.

In the event that there's a change in either of these situations, new sticky notes could be issued via bulk mail. Even then, we're still talking about some major savings in paper usage.