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January 29 through February 04, 2001

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Email Brian Bilbrey Email Brian Bilbrey


Orb Grafitti is sometimes a conversation, sometimes a soapbox. I use Linux, and I write about that and related software frequently. I also have a day job working as a dogsbody for a small manufacturing firm here in the SF Bay Area. Also, Tom and I recently co-authored Caldera OpenLinux Secrets, due out sometime in early 2001. I'm glad you've come to visit, and always happy to hear from you.

EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so, I'll pay attention to your wishes.


MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 29, 2001 -    Updates at 7:05

Good Morning. Running late-ish, so I'll keep this short for the time being, and deliver further this evening. We had a lovely time yesterday, down at Natural Bridges (there'll be a couple of pictures) - it was warm enough that the butterflies were up and about, rather than lethargic and ready to sit on someone's hand, like last time. We also toured by the Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, and took a turn up through the USCS campus.

When we got home, Marcia and Natalie watched a couple of chick flicks (yes, Chris, one with the Wide Mouth'd Frog in't) while I played Heretic II, then we played cards into the evening... Marcia killed us. Ah, well. Now, it is raining, so I'd better get out there and play slip-n-slide with the rest of the professional commuters. Back atcha later. Take care!

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 30, 2001 -    Updates at 07:10, 18:30

Good Morning! Yeah, I know, but I was tired last night. We had a busy weekend, and I just didn't feel like doing much of anything. I played Heretic II for a bit, and we had a marvelous beef, peppers and assorted other veg stir-fry for supper, courtesy of my lovely Marcia. Anyway, here's some pictures:

Double Rainbow Casual Torture Robbie intent

First, here's the double rainbow I spotted on my way out the door from work last week. The primary arch was a full rainbow, "touching down" at both ends. The secondary faded out in bits, so I tried to catch the side where the color could be seen - only just slightly, unfortunately. Next is a couple of shots from our visit to Orinda on Sunday. As usual, kid pix take front and center - I am casually torturing Alex in the one picture, but not doing a very good job, since I am conversing about something at the same time. Then I finally got a picture of Robbie where he held still enough that there wasn't any motion blur.

Crowds at the park Natural Bridge Crashing Surf 1 Natalie on the rocks

We found the park was really quite crowded, moreso than on any other visit we've made. I presume that this was a combination of a gorgeous day, and an escape from the Stupid Bowl game. Personally I find it annoying when other people have my ideas, too. Additionally, it was warm enough that getting actual pictures of the butterflies was fairly problematic. However, the sandstone arch out at the beach held still for me nicely. And a little patience rewarded me with a nice crashing surf shot, or two (warning of probably more to come). Finally from that row, we have a snap of Natalie picking her way across the upper tidal zone rocks towards us.

That's all for now, but I have a few more snaps to prepare and post, and will do so this evening, as well as make a start on the Debian pages. I really have to find a way to automate some of this stuff. Take care.


18:30 (approximately) - Evenin'. Like, for once, I am back around the time I said I'd be. Some fun stuff to take note of... I have to paraphrase the following because I can't find a direct quote from an online news source - all I have is last night's newscast soundbite (regarding the faith-based White House Office) to go with - Dubya says, "I think that what we're doing here is constitutional, but more importantly, this is an effective way to provide people with help." Now, again, I paraphrase, but the bolded bit is word for word, and I am trying to figure out why we have an early term President pointing out things that are more important than the Constitution?!?!? Think again, Oh Shrubbery! You take care of the Constitution and the budget, we'll take care of each other, thank you very much!

On the lighter side, a Shrub joke that I enjoyed greatly recently: "Roe v. Wade? Wasn't that the decision on George Washington's mind as he faced the Delaware River?" Hmmm. Now for just a couple more pictures...

Cool upper tidal zone plant More crashing surf

I like these two shots, actually... Just another plant, and some crashing surf. I shot the plant using the D450Z's Macro mode. Really a good thing for close up snaps (say less than 10 inches away, but more than 2). The wave shots are trickier with a "cheap" digital camera, because there's a noticeable lag between hitting the button and the shutter firing. Also rapid fire is ... challenging. There's much more flexibility with such things at the US$1000 price point, but I'd have to be much more into photography, or have a good business reason for a camera of that calibre.

Finally, stay tuned to the Debian 2.2r2 Install page - it's in development as we speak, and I'll be posting text and images to it all evening as I work that info into something that I'll find useful as a reference (WARNING - 111 - that's One Hundred Eleven screen shots, all thumbnailed NEW! spread out over 4 pages, much easier, eh?). It's for you too, if you want. G'night.

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 31, 2001 -    Updates at 07:12, 19:00

Good morning. I've modified last night's post to reflect a change in the Debian Installation walkthrough. As noted, there's one hundred eleven screenshots in this one, so I've gone ahead and broken it up into four distinct pages. Going forward, I am likely to push some shots out, or pull some in, if necessary to keep specific topics together. Right now, the intro's in place, and the first five screenshots are documented. This is going to take a few days, aggravated by a couple of days at Yosemite this weekend.

I had a nice chat with Tom for a bit yesterday evening... Aside from the fun of diapering a kid in a body/leg cast (I told Tom to keep an eye out for your email, John!), everyone is clearly glad to be home again. Additionally, Tom and I discussed the possibilities of me writing some article-scale things. I don't want to get into any book work right now - too many things on the horizon demanding that I not make that kind of commitment. We'll see, we'll see.

Once again, I appear to be out of time. I think I spent a bit too much reading about problems with a specific implementation of a shell script on one of my mailing lists. Sigh. I want more hours in the day - there are too many interesting things to see, do and learn.

I'll be back later. Count on it! TTYL.


Good evening, and welcome to the end of the month. For your evening browsing pleasure (or whatever, given your local timezone...) I offer the following tidbits in the following set of quickies: First, How to hack a TiVo with style, a mini-primer offered by Andrew Tridgell, also of Samba fame, at LinuxConf, Australia. That page is brought to us by Marc Merlin, President of SVLUG and all around crazy Frenchman, who also posted a rather copious general LinuxConf Australia report. Marc can be counted on for extreme photo essays and good notes from many major shows - you can spelunk around his site to find lots more...

Also, absolutely stunning... Last month's stats closed me out at just over 30K hits, and about 11K page views for the last month of the millenium. With mere hours to go on the current month, this site is at about 48K hits and 15K page views, and a net increase of about 1200 unique sites. Whoo-hoo!!! Thanks, folks. Final tally tomorrow morning.

A favorite occasional pastime is to have a look at the search strings that led people to this site, in one way or another. Number one, of course, this month and every other is graffiti, that being the name of these weekly (or is that weakly) scrivenings. Other, odder ones include the following:

That last, I'm sure, is really about Putty SSH, a Win32 SSH client. Some of those others, though... Hmmmm. Anyway, I am off to make supper, then I'll be working further on the Debian install pages. Thanks for reading, have a great evening and I'll catch you tomorrow!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
February 01, 2001 -    Updates at 07:05

Hi, hey there, good morning. The final tallies are in, and including hits on the Orb mirror up on Hydras, this joint stopped just 58 hits shy of 50K for the month of January. Wow. Thanks very much. Of course, that's just a smidge of RBT's numbers, and about - oooooh - 5 minutes on Jerry's site, but what the heck, that's a lot of people hanging about this little soapbox. Thanks!

In other news, KDE 2.1 Beta 2 is out, leading the release by about 3 weeks. I've downloaded the RPM files, and will do an upgrade this evening on Grinch. Let you know what happens then. Yes, as Tom noted (someplace, can't find it right now), the change to the latest version of KDE can hose your icons and menus, as initially configured by the Mandrake installer. So I just rebuild the menu, and plunk in the applications again, with the new icons in their right places. This is caused by a change in the Icon artwork, necessitating a separate home for updated art, I think... Hmmm. Anyway, the new code is much more stable, icons aside.

I only added about a page of text to the Debian Install page last night: my usual rant on partitioning, with some added thoughts on swap files, and what Linus has to say about swap and 2.4.x... We're not talking fascinating here, folks, just useful info. And yes, I'll probably end up indexing this one, adding in page tags to get to bits easily (like, say, partitioning). More as time and events warrent.

Now, I must head out to work. Y'all have a lovely day.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
February 02, 2001 -    Updates at 08:10

Good morning. While it may appear that I'm running late, we're actually right on time. Today is an off day, and we're headed out on a little adventure. So here I sit and write, while I listen to the poor suckers commute by that office window... OK, most of the time that's me, too. On that note, things are likely to be quiet here for a day or so, thanks for your patience. Meantime, here's some mail...

Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2001 07:52:03 -0800
From: John-Mason Shackelford
Subject: Fwd: vmware & eDesktop

Brian,

Google search on vmware & eDektop sent me to you. I have enjoyed
reading your journals. Thanks for making them available.

Have you encountered problems with eDeskop 2.4 as a host distro
for vmware? I've discovered that a glitch in the kernel makes
vmware crash when using raw disks. Apparently a German release of
SuSe had the same problem but they released a fix for it. I
grabbed Caldera's most recent kernel binaries--they call it
2.2.14-6 but I think they've used some of the security updates in
2.2.16, i dunno--but the problem persists. I read somewhere else
that a 2.2.15 kernel could solve the problem without breaking
eDesktop, but I am a little nervous about forging ahead and
breaking eDesktop. I've used it for almost a year, but never
compiled a kernel. I am told that Caldera's distro is "fragile" so
I thought I'd seek some guidence before forging ahead.

Have you encountered the vmware raw disk / eDesktop issue? If so
how did you deal with it. If not, any ideas?

On another note... Before I stumbled onto your site I had begun
cobbling together some php3 scripts to setup a journaling system
similar to yours. Are the scrips you used GPLed and readily
available?

If you'd prefer not to be the world's tech support help
desk--forgive the garbage in your mailbag.
 
Thanks again for posting your journals.
 
John-Mason Shackelford

Good questions, John.

I can't answer them, unfortunately. For the book production work, I
ran eDesktop *in* a VM under Windows, while I wrote in Word.
Additionally, I had a partition or two that booted eDesktop in
various states of upgrade. But I don't recall if I ever installed
VMware under eDesktop.

I presume you're using raw disks to get out from under the 2G
virtual partition limitation? Yeah. Well. You know, there's this
book that should be out soon... . Chapter 7 covers building and
installing a new kernel under eDesktop. You might find that handy?
. Nope, sorry, don't know the actual publish date. Upcoming.
Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop from Hungry Minds (formerly IDG). Still
shows Nick Wells, and not me, at Amazon. ::sigh::

Journalling:

I write in HTML, using Bluefish. No scripts involved. I could GPL
my brain, but then a viral brain is a frightening concept. Thanks
much for reading and taking the time to write. "Tech support"
questions get answered if they interest me.

regards, .b

Perhaps someone else knows the answer to this question... I didn't find anything obvious at the VMware site (they have a pretty good support section supported by a google-ized search engine), or directly at the Caldera site.

In the interim, y'all have a lovely day or two. Like Arnold...

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
February 03, 2001 -    Updates at Infinity and Beyond...

Held over in Yosemite due to popular demand :->

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY   
February 04, 2001 -    Updates at 16:45, 19:35

Hey. Lots to do, many pretty pictures to prep for your Yosemite viewing pleasure. The good news (from at least some perspectives): Home safe and sound, with only sore muscles to whine about. All the rest was wonderful. I'll be back in a while (perhaps an hour or two) with a page full of snaps and some more trip updates. Until then...

OK. Here's the Yosemite picture page - over 120 thumbnails (small JPG files) leading to larger images (in the 40 to 70K size range). There's little text there at this very moment, but some people only look at this site for the pictures, apparently... Huh? Yeah, if you really like one, then I can make the 1280x960 version available. Some of these are going to be nice desktop wallpaper, I can tell. I'll fill in some blanks during this evening, and try to make much of the ALT text match the thumbnails (useful for the normally textmode only browsers amongst you. Take care.

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

All Content Copyright © 1999-2001 Brian P. Bilbrey.