Nov 86 Mousehole
Volume Number: 2
Issue Number: 11
Column Tag: Mousehole Report
Mousehole Report 
By Rusty Hodge, Mousehole BBS
WORD
Tax Free
Thought you might like a peek on the progress of Microsoft Word 3.0. I know, I
know. Up to now it was Word 2.0, but it appears Microsoft feels the jump all the way
to 3.0 is warranted. I think they are right. Even the first beta shows the outstanding
level of design and performance improvements. Some of the features are already
public record (built-in spell checking, outlining, etc.) but a lot of the subtleties must
be seen to be believed. The outlining is completely interactive with the text, making
idea editing not only easy, but promoting a new level of working with writing tools. It
is fantastic. Goodbye and good riddance to ThinkTank, Acta. (Welcome to More,
though.)
The spell checker has dictionary-based hyphenization. There is moderate
kerning control. There are style sheets (like in the upcoming Pagemaker 2.0) that
make for powerful formatting ability. There is a preview page function that really
gives you a lot of control over your document's final appearance, and a clever way to
insert page numbers anywhere you want automatically, as well as built-in indexing,
table of contents, line numbering, etc. Built-in graphics ability for lines, boxes, etc.
Nice pagination, and some of the best features: real interactive rulers and customizable
menus.
And much, much, more, of course. Very well done, very well thought out. And it's
a joy to use (when it stops crashing). All indications are for a long and careful test
period to fix everything right. Microsoft really wants this one to be right, like Excel.
There's lot of competition, what with Word Perfect and all, but the competition's going
to have a hard time of it given Microsoft's expertise with the Mac interface showing up
so superbly. This is one incredibly powerful program and is thrilling to use. It is also
hungry: it uses up 625K of RAM and takes up 2 disks. If they have an offer for an
upgrade....do it!
Hard Disk Shutdown
Rusty Hodge
Corsair showed me something on the Dataframe. If you do a shutdown and then
turn off the Mac after the beep, when you re-turn it on, the Dataframe and the ProApp
and apparently all the other drives will boot in about 20 seconds less time. *If* you
turn off without shutting down (or even just reset), it will take 20-30 or so seconds
to do something, who knows what, before it boots. What magic thing happens if you do
a shutdown? You got me, but not doing it must cause some sort of disk media check.
That's Why
Randy Saunders
For all HFS volumes there is a thingy in the volume header called the "clean
dismount" indicator. This tells the file system that the disk was correctly updated
before it was ejected. If this is not on then when a volume is mounted, the file system
goes out and checks the catalog B-tree and extents B-tree to make sure they don't have
any apparent damage. I don't think it can do much to fix it, and none of my disks have
ever failed, but you probably get a cute bomb box.
When a disk is first written to, the "clean dismount" is reset. If you turn your
Mac off it never gets set back on, and the file system does its little number for 10-15
seconds (for 20 MB). If you don't have RAM cache on, you almost assuredly have good
stuff on disk, but the power could have failed while you were copying folders (or some
busted program could have hosed things) so it's really not safe to assume the disk is OK
when it only takes 10 seconds to check.
By the way, I never turn my hard disks off. They take 30 seconds to spin up and
that's a lot more time than the mount check takes. I just select "Shutdown" and hold
the mouse down and turn the MAC off. One blink of the active light it probably a seek to
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