Knoxscape deep thoughts
Sunday, April 27, 2003
 
Haven't been able to add much lately. For good reason as yesterday I got married! So not much posting will go on until late May. All for now.
Thursday, April 17, 2003
 
Backup strategies are obviously important to any business. For many of the smaller businesses, we suggest using a daily xcopy mechanism to several computers especially to owner's laptops. It gives them basically read-only copies of their data. There is one circumstance though, where the data is being copied to a win2k3 machine. It is desired that the win2k3 machine have the data encrypted on it using the encrypted file system capabilities. However, the client machine can't cause the encryption to occur. Even though the client machine has the same keys as the server machine. This is because the win2k3 machine is not a domain server. If it were, I think all of the encryption would occur transparently. So I'm considering a mechanism where the client would copy unencrypted data to a unencrypted folder on the win2k3 machine and then a process on the win2k3 machine would apply the encryption using the cipher line command.
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
 
Tsk. Adelphia says that it will take 10 days to get set up for the additional IPs. I think that means in order to avoid being distracted now, I need to make the request so that it occurs during our upcoming honeymoon. I think the most likely configuration is 1) current router, 2) win2k3 box, 3) OpenBSD box. I think I would like to get a NIC card that can have its MAC changed so that it would be easy to change the configuration without having to bother Adelphia, since they use the MAC address to allow access.
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
 
Today I learned that my ISP, Adelphia, allows you to get up to 3 IP addresses on a residential account. It will be an interesting experiment to hook up my win2k3 server directly to the internet.
Monday, April 14, 2003
 
The Google dance is still going. I'm monitoring therapist in Boca Raton, Florida for being incorporated into Google's search.
Sunday, April 13, 2003
 
The Google dance is almost done!
Saturday, April 12, 2003
 
At this point the Google dance is 1/3 complete. It usually takes a few days to complete.
Friday, April 11, 2003
 
a great resource for the Google dance is dance factory .
 
Some of you may not know what I was referring to about the google dance. Google is a sophisticated complex network spread over a number of different geographic locations, perhaps around 10-15. Although Google refreshes all during the month so it has new content, once a month Google's data undergoes a reorganization and incorporates new sites. During this time, the different geographic locations report different results. This occurs for a few days and is known as the "Google Dance". You can access additional locations by using www1.google.com and others. When the results from those additional sites vary you can tell we've entered the Google dance. There's the big three locations that use digits www2... to identify themselves. In the past, it was variations between 1, 2, and 3 that indicated the dance. Now there's more locations, the variation has first showed up in a more obscure location.
 
The google dance may not be in full swing, but she's adefinitely swaying!
Thursday, April 10, 2003
 
As a venture capitalist, people send me business plans. Some of them are almost the same as scribbles on a napkin. Of course, there've been some great ideas born on a napkin. Someone once said about novels, that everyone's got one inside them. I think the same is true about business plans. No one said though, what the quality of that novel or business plan is.
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
 
Since one of the topics we cover here is venture capital and financial matters, I thought i would let both potential investors and entrepreneurs know one aspect of raising money. I belong to an investment organization that meets once a month. It is attended by bankers, venture capitalists, angel investors, and a few angel managers. Typically one or two entrepreneurs presents each month. They have about 45 minutes to make their pitch. They make a presentation which really covers their business plan. I'd say about 1 in 10 appeals to me. In order to present, they must be invited by one of the members.
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
 
Over at the Harvard Blog, Dave makes good points about the use and differences between Open Software and Open Standards. I remember back when the word open was such a rage that everyone used it - if I recall correctly, Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) renamed their operation system to OpenVMS, which of course, meant it was closed.
 
Today I used the Kinko's software to create a printout and take it to Kinko's for printing. A color print job was $0.99 which seemed high. Next time, I now know I can upload the changed file using their software and have it print at the store before I get there.
 
Today's news talks of CBS's Mike Wallaces's experience with depression. In his case, I wonder if the depression was brought on by work burnout. Having gone through a bought of work burnout, it's unpleasant and difficult to recover from.
Monday, April 07, 2003
 
I was using SecureCRT as a client to the OpenBSD server. However, it has a high cost (around $90)...someone suggested putty, so that's what I'll try next. However, I think I'm done for the day, so it will have to wait.
 
Today's post concerns OpenBSD and the installation thereof. I downloaded the 3.2 release and burned it to a CD ROM. I then created the special boot floppy exactly as their instructions called for. Very good instructions. It was pretty easy to install the software and the installation went smoothly even though I was using a machine from 1994 with 16 MBytes of memory. The peripherals immediately worked: software worked with the network and worked with the DHCP of the linksys router, video was fine, etc. I then tried using SSH from a laptop to talk to the BSD box. That worked, but it reminds me of 1980 technology since the software on the laptop emulates a VT100 terminal. Horrors. And then, there's that damned ^H backspace problem to fix, just like I was doing 20 years ago.
Saturday, April 05, 2003
 
With the help of a friend, Ted, I consider the importance of evaluating backups. I have used the archive flag A to control backups so that only if a file needed to be copied, would it be copied. To my surprise, it turns out that MS FrontPage cheerfully clears the archive bit of the folders it manages, so that incremental backup processes that depend on the archive flag do not work for webs that FrontPage manages. This is a bad thing. On to a good thing. Windows 2003 has an automatic feature that keeps copies of files online so that if you make a mistake in a file, you can go back to a previous version very easily. Of course, Win2k3 is a server, so this only works if you have the server software.
Friday, April 04, 2003
 
It definitely annoys me that spammers constantly search the web looking for
emails on websites, and then sending their crappy spam to people. Fortunately,
there's a good solution: You should never directly put your email on a website.
Instead, you should put the script shown below. The downside is that it would
not be rendered correctly on that tiny fraction of people that don't run
JavaScript.






<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">



<!-- Begin



user = "joeuser";



site = "mydomain.com";



document.write('<a href=\"mailto:' + user + '@' + site + '\">');



document.write(user + '@' + site + '</a>');



// End -->

 


Wednesday, April 02, 2003
 
Further along my journey to investigate marriage counseling in Boca, I note that many people do not yet have a web site. I wonder of all of the business in the US, how many have web sites. I would guess over 50%. Certainly soon, it will be well over 90%. I would think that to get close to that 100% mark, it would take government business licenses to be purely entered on the web, and for the the license to have a field that requires your URL to be entered.
 
I've modified the template to have more consistent information here on the knoxscape blog. Let's see if it works. And here's another try. In fact, I think that template modification is like home projects. The absolute minimum number of trips to Home Depot is two. I consider that a success: one to get the initial stuff and one to get the stuff you forgot.
 
The news is that premarital
counseling really works.  It states that premarital counseling means that
couples have a higher chance of staying together in a successful marriage. 
This is obviously a good thing for society.  The study ultimately is
apparently a meta-statistical analysis.   I strongly think that all
couples should get premarital counseling.  However, I wonder if the study
is failing to take in to account that couples that would stay together at a
higher rate are more likely to stay together with or without the
counseling.  I also wonder if the counseling caused some couples to fail to
get married.  In any case, the usefulness of marriage counseling is clear.
Tuesday, April 01, 2003
 

The web and language would be a topic all its own.  But in particular,
consider advertising and language issues on the web.  If you advertise in
Google in Spanish, what percentage of hits are you likely to get as compared to
an English campaign.  As a specific case, consider
Natural
Encounters Online
.  It has both English and Spanish versions.  I
think that the Engish version is about 10 to 100 times more popular, which is
probably an indication of google and the web's lack of penetration into south
America.




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