Jumping the Shark

When I was a kid, we used to go to the Saturday matinee shows at the local movie theater on a regular basis. Unlike what you see in theaters today, there was more than just ads, previews and the feature. There were cartoons, news features, sometimes two features and the serial.

The serial was a longer movie broken into a number of short episodes, each episode to be shown one week. At the end of each episode, usually, the hero or his friends would be in grave danger -- or would seem to perish. The beginning of the next episode would explain how the hero escaped his fate or how what we thought we had seen wasn't what really happened. Sometimes it was pretty lame. Sometimes it was very lame, to the point that none of the kids in the audience could accept the explanation given. This was usually signalled by Boos and other shouts of derision (Saturday matinees were avoided by adults because of the noise factor).

Later, television took over, the Saturday matinee vanished, and this process of inventing a lame explanation for a critical event in a series was given a name: "Jumping the Shark".

I never saw the episode where the water skier supposedly jumped over a shark. I wasn't a watcher of that particular sitcom, whatever it was. But lame explanations tend not to be singular events -- instead, they herald a general decline of creativity by the series writers to a new low above which they will never more ascend.

I've seen the process happen several times. For example, I used to be a fan of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer", the story of a Preppie princess who discovers that she is the chosen one destined to save the world from destruction by a wave of bloodthirsty vampires or die trying. The idea made a decent movie. Then, thanks to really good casting and some decent writing, it became an outstanding series for several seasons. But it's hard to maintain good writing and creative acting for a long period, particular over between season breaks with their equivalent of the Saturday matinee cliffhanger episodes, and they jumped the shark when they killed Buffy off at the end of one season and then started the next season by bringing her back to life. I watched the new season for several months before I realized that the show was dead. They had turned it into a zombie.

The new Harry Potter book just came out, two years late and after the release of two Harry Potter movies. Pretty soon we'll see if Harry has survived the long interval of inactivity or if he, too, has jumped the shark.

Yet Another Weblog

Lycos / Tripod is a Web hosting service that has been around for years. I've had a free site with them that I use for emergency storage and backup. Today I got a newsletter stating that they've initiated a Weblog service, so I gave it a try. I set up a new Weblog under my account at Words by WordJames on Tripod and made one entry in it, to see how it works. If you are curious, drop by and leave a comment for me.

More on Publishing

In the Sunday San Diego Union-Tribune Employment section there is a regular column that discussed the problems of finding a suitable position. The two moderators usually publish a letter they receive, then take turns writing paragraphs addressing the concerns expressed. Both have written books. In a recent column they announced that the newest book one of them wrote was now available, either as a printed, hardbound book or as a free electronic version, complete in every way, that the user could download in any of several formats, to read on his own machine.

Why, you might ask, pay for something you can get for free? But consider for a moment the hidden costs, the convenience factor and the quality of the final product.

Most users will have their own printers. If it is an ink jet printer, making a book copy is likely to be very expensive. Those ink cartridges are not cheap. The nearly 300 pages it will be necessary to print will probably use up at least one ink cartridge. Let's guess the cost of ink at about $40. Using a laser printer, the price of toner might come to half of that. If you print on only one side of the paper, that's over half a ream of paper.

Printing the thing is likely to be quite a job. You would have to break it into pieces and print a few pages at a time or risk major problems when your machine runs out of ink or toner. With my luck I would also run out of paper, requiring a quick trip to the store. Then you have to assemble the pages in order and bind them, even if this means nothing more than punching holes in each page and inserting them into a binder. When you are done, what you end up with depends entirely on how much effort you put into producing it.

You don't have to print it out, though -- you can sit there at your computer and read it for nothing. Then it will be just as portable as your computer is. How much is the author asking for the printed copy? I don't know. I'm not going to read the book anyway. But if you order the book, you will probably get a much higher quality item than producing it yourself, it will probably be cheaper, and you will avoid a lot of work and frustration.

Some people will download the book, read portions of it, then decide whether to buy it or not. If they decide it isn't suitable for their purposes and opt not to buy, they are still left with a good feeling about the author for allowing them to examine the product.

There seems to be almost no down side to doing it this way.

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In a totally unrelated development, Project Gutenberg is looking for people who can record onto DVDs of some kind. They want to record their entire collection of public domain books, now close to 10,000 works, so they can give them away. They have been giving them away on CDs, but it takes too many to hold the entire collection.

Project Gutenberg expects to pass the 10,000 mark in the United States any time now. The PG operation in Australia is healthy, with nearly 200 works in the short time they've been in operation, and Canada is trying to start up a PG operation of their own.

There are many ways you can help PG, but one that is fun is to become a Distributed Proofreader. If you enjoy editing, give it a whirl. Use the same PG link I gave above.

Miscellaneous Topics

The Hazards of Publishing Online

Steve (Grioghair) asked, "Are you never worried about people stealing your ideas and publishing them themselves? (That is what has stopped me from publishing anything across the Net.) It has happened -- people tell me my stories have appeared on other people's Web sites without credit being given. However, I have legal protection, for what it is worth, should I decide to publish my book as a book: the fact that I can establish that it is my work by the dated copies on my machine and as hard copy printouts gives me copyright status that they can't beat. Meanwhile, I know there are people out there so small minded they don't care how they get their glory or money and they won't go away no matter what I do.

I started writing the story in a workshop environment. I found that useful and wanted to continue getting feedback. Placing the story on a Web page hasn't generated the feedback I was looking for, so I haven't been highly motivated to place my revisions and new material out where the public can access it.

I've tried displaying the stories in several different forms, including in textarea windows. I have considered uploading it as either ebooks or pdf files that people can download and read offline. Each time I've mentioned those options, I've been greeted by silence. There seems to be little interest.

I'll find something to do with the Web pages, if only to keep albums of family pictures. But I'm not going to worry about the inevitible jerk who decides to rip me off. When my product is ready for market, it will be far more polished and complete than what goes up on the Internet. I haven't told anybody how the first story ends and nobody has seen any of the second story, which I consider superior to the first.

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The Future of Mandrake Linux

"Do you know if Mandrake will continue indefinitely...as they always seem to be asking for money these days." As I have commented before, I don't think the Mandrake people ever got the idea of how to market a free product. Many companies have had similar problems since the personal computer came out in the 1970s, thinking that they had to protect themselves by making hardware or software that was non-standard in some way or that could not be copied or reproduced. Those who tried the hardest to protect themselves, by that very fact, had the smallest customer base and were the quickest to go out of business.

It doesn't take long for a company to go out of business. If the company is not providing value, then the public will not part with their funds. Unique hardware and protected software does not provide value.

The entertainment industry may also discover that they can't rip off the public forever. They charge about $17, on the average, for a piece of plastic (a DVD) that they've produced for less than $1, they're ripping off the artists for their share of the profits, they've bought off legislators to extend their copyrights almost forever so nothing ever goes into the public domain where it belongs, and they expect the public to continue to support them. The Disneys and the RIAAs have made enemies and may find themselves the object of a revolt.

But that's a slightly different story. Mandrake, specifically, has made a more extreme version of the same mistake that all of these modern companies have been making in considering the public as a resource instead of trying to provide a service to the public. They will go under and someone better will come along to replace them.

This phenomenon seems to happen to technology businesses when their geek founders are replaced by business management, bean counters who were raised on the screw the public style of business. Apple dumped their founders and immediately started downhill until they realized the bean counters were the source of their problems.

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Lindows Operating System

"Lindows? They now have a version 4 available, if you didn't know." Actually, I wasn't aware. But every time I sign on to Lindows and connect to the Internet, the first thing that happens is that they start to update my system automatically.

I read my email under Lindows. Then I turn the machine off and swap hard drives to access the Web under either Windows (high speed interface) or Mandrake (with Galeon and my gftp, which I have yet to move to Lindows). I am constantly powering my system off to swap systems. I was running NewsMonster under Lindows, but it doesn't seem to function well unless I just let it sit there chugging along for several hours, and it never finishes aggregating its information no matter how long it runs. Except for the first couple of times, I haven't even been reading the accumulated info. And I'm still nervous about working as root.

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Publishing Protection and Validation Revisited

Derek had some comments, too: "The point of publishing isn't to sell. You aren't writing because you feel it will make you rich. Grioghair [Steve] makes a valid point. The legalities of internet publishing haven't been fully explored or settled as far as I know. So, publishing is a form of self-protection against someone profiting from your ideas. But moreso, publishing is a form of validation. I, for one, do hope [you continue] to strive to complete and publish your novels, not for any pecuniary reasons but simply to add your voice to the catalog of published works." Okay, that was a bit of a ramble. The first point, that I won't publish to sell, is almost there: if I publish, it will be to share something others seem interested in. Publishing, by itself, doesn't make anybody rich -- a hell of a lot of selling has to go along with it, and selling things is one of my weakest areas.

According to articles I've read in writing magazines, copyright protection is invoked upon publication by any means including print, audio, electronic and plastic (art and sculpture). Once my computer writes my thoughts to my hard drive, in theory they have copyright protection under law. But the authors of those articles cautioned that the opinions they expressed might be open to legal challenge under some circumstances. But if I write something that I share with others, I should still be able to prevent greedy people from profiting from it without my specific permission. That's why I have copyright notices on my site.

There is never any final settlement under law. Everything is open to being reinterpreted in the light of new facts and new conditions. It keeps the lawyers busy and gainfully employed and provides amusement for those of us who aren't terribly impressed by lawyers.

But the biggest reason to finish those two novels is to make up for all of the sleep I've lost because of them. I spent four years dreaming the first story before I even started writing it down. When I got the idea for the second story, there was a period of about two weeks of restless dreaming while my mind worked out the main points of the story. Then I had months when my overly vivid dreams sometimes kept me from restful sleep. I've been sleeping pretty well lately -- it's just a matter of writing things down, cross-checking for blunders and cleaning things up and, hopefully, avoiding the invention of any new ideas -- and I should be able to finish eventually. Writing Weblogs is more fun and more satisfying most of the time, though, and I rarely lose sleep because of them.

It's Back!

My Mandrake 9.1 update is back on the Internet. I was finally able to figure out the last cryptic entry for Gnome PPP and connect to my ISP. Most of my old tools still work but Mandrake itself is still badly broken. I am writing this entry through the Galeon browser on Mandrake, the first time I've been able to do so for weeks.

I tried to load the KPPP program from its RPM file on CD-ROM but Mandrake doesn't recognize the CD-ROMs when I load them. They had that problem during the update, too, so it is a very basic problem with their system. Now that I can connect, though, I'll have to see if I can install from online RPM files.

I think I'll continue using Lindows anyway. It has a comfortable feel to it ... all except for operating as root, which I can probably fix. I've moved a bunch of my files to a location where I can access them from either Linux system or from the Windows system.

My next project is to get the high speed connection working from all three systems. Well, that and I want to get some writing done one of these days.

Derek asked me when my book will be ready to publish; Derek, I thought you understood that I'm not going to make any effort to sell the book if nobody shows any interest in reading it for free on the Internet. I've about given up on the possibility of doing any serious writing using the Clié, so it's just a matter of shutting myself in the basement, turning off the phone and ignoring the signals from upstairs.

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Four Are Not Enough

The mathematics used by Newton and Einstein to describe the universe assumes that the universe is a four dimensional entity with three physical dimensions and a domain of time. But Newton's description broke down because he assumed that certain properties such as mass remained constant under all conditions, even at very high velocities. Einstein's allowing for changing mass with changing velocity, a very simple but basic change, resulted in descriptions of a universe far more strange and wonderful than that of Newton. But it was still a four dimensional universe.

We have been looking into the earliest moments of the life of the universe and into the unimaginably microscopicly small building blocks of matter, the strange stuff called quantum foam. We've looked out to the farthest reaches of the universe, almost as far back as light existed or could move. We've seen evidence that some phenomena on the very largest scales or the very smallest scales cannot be explained by a set of only four dimensions.

How many dimensions are there? Well, humans can only conjecture concerning extensions to the universe beyond the four dimensions they can experience and imagine. If a phenomenon can be described in mathematics using ten dimensions or twelve dimensions, that doesn't mean the mathematics can't be simplified to fewer ... or isn't a special case of a system with many more dimensions.

We may never know. We can't go there from here.

What is Starbucks Up To?

Who should have the rights to works of art and literature? If the rights should be reserved to the artist or author, for how long should the monopoly be preserved? Should the works enter the public domain, to benefit all of the people instead of a select few?

These questions were hotly argued at the founding of our country, with the vast majority against any form of monopoly and in favor of the public good. But it was clear that a total lack of protection would discourage art and literature, so a compromise was found, protection for a limited time. The copyright period of 28 years seemed reasonable.

But the holders of the copyrights were often the publishers of the works rather than the original artists. This became more the case when the art, augmented by technology, was music or movies. The publishers of these works were multi-billion dollar industries and they were not content to lose their monopolies after so short a period. They bought legislators and, gradually, had the monopoly period extended to the life of the author plus fifty years and, soon, to an almost indefinite period. In doing so, they created a new legal entity, intellectual property. They have gotten their purchased lawmakers to pass legislation making it illegal to produce equipment or software capable of reproducing encrypted copyrighted programs and giving themselves, the monopoly holders, the right to invade the homes and businesses of those they suspect of infringing on their monopolies and to commit acts of vandalism against them.

Not long ago, three women went into a Starbucks establishment with a disposable camera. Each took a few pictures of the other two. The manager came over, explained that everything inside a Starbucks is copyrighted and that copying it without permission is illegal, then demanded that they surrender their camera. Other similar incidents have been reported.

On the face of it, it seems stupid. But it may have been a very smart move.

There is no such thing as bad publicity, and Starbucks got plenty of free publicity from their strange actions. It was worth doing for the publicity alone.

But what if Starbucks really believes that the current tendency towards copyright monopoly is wrong. What better way to focus attention on the situation than to show how ridiculous it can be?

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XUL (Pronounced 'Zool')

Another New Computer Language?

I just learned about this rather specialized new language, if indeed it qualifies as a language. It runs under the Mozilla engine on Mozilla or some Netscape browsers but it needs JavaScript to run and can use CSS, HTML, XML, Ruby, PHP or Perl in its programs, which can run either online or offline.

Okay, you have to know a lot of other stuff before you ever begin: JavaScript, HTML and Ruby or PHP as a minimum. But lots of people who design Web pages know all of these anyway and there isn't much in the core XUL itself, making it a natural for those who have been doing Web design. They can drift into XUL programming effortlessly. It will be harder if you first have to pick up the satellite technologies.

XUL programs are said to be solid and the system bugless. XUL is versatile and powerful for RAD (Rapid Application Development). Many XUL-developed programs and games are available for download.

XUL is likely to catch on. You may hear more of it in the future.

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Recovering My GUI

I managed to recover my Graphical User Interface under the new Mandrake installation. I thought it was probably hopeless when the configuration tool Mandrake provided, XFdrake, proved totally useless and I learned that the standard Linux configuration tool, XF86Configurator, was no longer included or available in the distribution. But there was another configuration tool, far more basic and versatile, xf86config, still on the system and working. It even allowed me to specify that my video card was a generic nVidea card. The only catch is that the user has to know enough to copy the configuration file it produces, XF86Config, to the file that actually gets used, XF86Config-4.

A Linux purist, having made these changes, would be able to activate them without rebooting the system. I'm forever rebooting the system anyway, to swap the hard disks with the different operating systems on them, so, after a quick test, I just rebooted. I had a very nice graphic screen ... but the mouse didn't work. I went through the process again, specifying a slightly different mouse setup, and tried again.

Bingo!

Unfortunately, even with the full graphics capability restored, I was unable to convince Mandrake to allow me to dial my ISP. They kept asking me to insert CD-ROM after CD-ROM, apparently never reading the contents when I did. I never approached the point of being able to specify my modem setup.

The Gnome PPP setup was equally useless. I entered all of the parameters, as well as I could figure them out, and the damn thing went through the motions of dialing, but it wasn't set up to allow me to specify CHAP authorization procedures, so the connection never got made. I know that the KPPP program works but Mandrake deleted it during the upgrade.

I'm torn. Should I even bother with the modem? Or should I go ahead and compile the programs I need to connect to the router with my USB wireless device? At this point, it should be just as easy to go high speed.

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Mandrake Strikes Again

They Struck Out

When Mandrake 8.2 came out, they had a special offer in which I could order releases 9.0 and 9.1 at the same time as 8.2; the purchase was also supposed to include an intermediate release between 8.2 and 9.0 but they never sent that release, quickly advancing to 9.0 instead.

Which brings me to my first sticking point with Mandrake: they have a dynamic enough sales organization in the United States but their production and distribution facilities centered in Paris, France, keep screwing up and falling behind on orders. I have yet to receive a product when it was supposed to arrive.

Release 9.1, when it arrived yesterday, directly from Paris, was about a month late.

Except for my very first Mandrake installation, I have yet to have a trouble-free installation. It seems to get harder each time. Their basic installation procedure is very unforgiving. If anything goes wrong at any point, the procedure goes into a loop that nothing can be done about ... except to abort the installation, replace some hardware or bypass a segment of the installation procedure, and start over.

They managed to mung up their already deficient installation procedure this time. In all past installations, the user had the option to upgrade his system, even if this meant skipping a release or two. This time, they set it up so that the user could only upgrade a 9.0 installation. What this means is that once you have upgraded your system you are stuck with it and can't add any new features. I tried it. Once you upgrade, the only thing you can do is a full installation ... unless you first "upgrade" back to the previous release.

This borders on stupidity.

It means you have to get your system set up right the very first time. This has never happened to me. I doubt if it happens to most people. I suspect that many people begin fixing their systems as soon as they start using them. There are still several options open for fixing the system, but there is no point in removing any user options unnecessarily.

The things that seemed to go well in the installation failed when the system was started up, simple things like the CUPS printer setup and the video card setup. I was able to fix CUPS quickly but I still haven't gotten the video working.

I've been installing / upgrading quite a few systems lately: Windows 98SE, Mandrake 9.0 and the Lindows / Debian package. Lindows wouldn't accept my old, obsolete video card (the last few releases of Mandrake also had problems with it and I knew when I built the computer that I would eventually have to replace it). None of these systems had any problems with the generic nVidia card I'm using. But Mandrake 9.1 won't give me a decent display and, as it turns out, it is a problem they knew about long enough in advance to mention in their book documenting the release.

According to a brief note at the back of the book, nVidia cards require a special version of the kernel to function. The installation program is supposed to detect the card and install this special kernel but sometimes fails. The user is advised to find and install the RPMs for the kernel and support modules when this happens. But almost nothing works in Mandrake Linux unless your GUI (Graphic User Interface) is up and running. Searching through the eight CD-ROMs for two unnamed RPM files based on their function is going to be a formidible task. They didn't even bother narrowing it down to a single CD-ROM which contains the files, nor did they specify the file names.

It may take me a few days to find the files.

Today I started using Lindows for my mail. As far as I'm concerned, that transition is permanent. However, I will probably now transfer all of my Web files to the Lindows system and start doing all of my Web development and writing there too. That leaves very little function for the Mandrake system. Even when I get it going, I may well wipe everything and use the hard drive for something else.

Resolving a Mail Problem

When I tried to send my first email message from Lindows, it generated an error message. The message didn't tell me very much, so I had to do some detective work. Eventually I checked in to read the setup instructions on my ISP's Web site. They had changed.

Previously, the setup had specified using all lower case for the smtp information; now some of the information was in upper case. I changed my setup accordingly and it worked.

It was a very simple solution. And it leaves me to believe that the problem I've been having with the smtp connection for my high speed Internet connection under Windows may be equally simple. As soon as I have the time to dedicate to experimentation, I intend to find out.

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