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Email Brian Bilbrey

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.

Good morning. OK, most of the Monday morning roll-over links appear to be adjusted correctly. At this hour, I accomplish this mostly by autopilot - like driving to work. I take the same route because I always take the same route. If traffic requires an adjustment, then I still get to work, but upon arrival, I couldn't tell you how I got there - it's just one of those things.

Before I ran out of steam, about nine-ish last night, I'd managed to get the first day's photos commented and some complementing text in on our weekend at Yosemite. I still don't know what happened to that groundhog on Friday, but it was 70° F on the valley floor yesterday morning by midday - I was in shirt sleeves at 8 AM (and people were looking at me like I were crazy... little do they know!!!). My knee is still quite painful, thanks, though it can bear my weight quite a bit better this morning than the last two days. And I still haven't had an Ibuprofin... that's to go with food, at work in a bit. At left, one of my better snaps from our adventure - there's lots more pix on the page linked above.

Overall, the weekend's email was very light - three days worth this time was only about 135 messages or so. My mailing lists were light, and the usual mail from you lot was virtually non-existent since you read that I'd be gone. Now, with that word, I'd better take the hint, and get gone - there's lots of work to be done, a Board of Directors meeting I have to present at on Wednesday and preparation yet to be done. Besides, I want to get to my desk, have some breakfast and get some meds for that knee in my system.

Y'all have a lovely day - catch you later.

18:15 - My, how time flies when you're pitching clocks out the window... bada-bump. Anyway, lots going with the various computerish things about here... One of the messages found when I arrived home last night was a notice of the release of the latest Progeny Linux beta, for my official testing purposes. I set it to downloading late last night, then burnt the disc this afternoon when I got home. I am installing in a VMware jail as we speak (a good, safe first test load). I would put it on real hardware, except the installer still is having problems with the laptop video sub-system. Not sure what that's about - I'll send off to Support for feedback on that one...

Now I am going to finish annotating my field-trip pages from the Yosemite trip of last weekend, then tomorrow I'll work at the Debian Installation walkthrough. Wednesday is SVLUG meeting night: Eric Allman of Sendmail fame is going to be speaking on a recent enhancement to the Sendmail suite - Milter (Mail Filter), apparently an API of some sort to provide easy plugin access to the passing message traffic for such purposes as virus defence, custom envelope rewriting and more.

If the Yosemite thing goes really quickly, then I might be back. Otherwise, see you tomorrow...

20:15 - OK. The Yosemite trip report is completed. The report is now broken into two pages to ease loading times, I've put in ALT text for each thumbnail and added commentary below each block of thumbnails, setting the context. As a bonus, the middle of Page Two has a high-resolution image of the face of El Capitan showing dots of color representing gear and people on that huge rock. The lower part of page two also has my two favorite shots, both postcard shots for an amateur like me. That's enough work for tonight. I've had difficulty with Progeny inside the VM, and I am done with working on computers for the night. Games are something else. We'll see. G'night!

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Good morning. The good news is two-fold. First, the pain in my knee from thrashing it walking on ice last Friday is now down to just a dull roar, and it just feels a bit tricky - I'll need to be careful on it for another week or so. But this is without any anti-inflamatories in my system at present, so I'll take this for progress.

Speaking of progress, there are two kinds, at least. One is forward, and relates to the Yosemite trip report. It's done: I've broken it into two pages to moderately improve load times, and added a high-res blowup of the face of El Cap with some dots on it representing climbers and their gear in the middle of page two. The snap to the right here is my second favorite shot from our trip, another nice postcard.

Rearward progress is represented by my continued testing of Progeny. I simply refuse to commit my main workstation to the cause at this time. Therefore I'm limited to trying Gryphon (doesn't work - installer fails to achieve GUI-ness) and VMware (the installer gets through the first stage, but is having difficulty with (again) correctly detecting the video environment. I am sure this would work fine on Grinch, but I really don't want to go there. I'll take it to work with me, and install on some temporarily available hardware there in the next day or so. I think I'll like it, but I don't want to beta my main workbox, if you know what I mean.

At work, we're having a BoD meeting tomorrow, and I am developing some data in support of a proposed new marketing push. I want to correlate sales and web data to the assumptions that have been made. Alternatively, I can hope that this effort yields new information about the interests of our customers. We'll see. Needless to say, there's lots for me to accomplish, and like for Craig Twomey, time is very, very short. So I'll head out now, and see y'all later, perhaps.

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Good morning, more or less. Since bad things are rumored to come in threes, I am waiting for the third shoe to drop. As you may have noted on Tom's site, the macaroons at Tiny Minds have cancelled Caldera OpenLinux Secrets. While this may be a blessing in disguise, it's a damn good costume. To work as long and as hard as we did, to make less money than an equivalent period spent flipping burgers, the payoff for me was going to be holding that first book with my name being one of those on the cover.

Second problem - I've got interesting drive noises on my main application server / PDC at work, and in 4 hours of struggling with things last night, I had no luck migrating the data over to a new drive... yet. Yeah, no drive death, and I pulled a full image off of the old drives, but I am having trouble bringing the new drive online. We'll see, but I've got to get going. Between this problem and the BoD meeting, my day is way overfull.

I did have some interesting things to share from my inbox, but they'll have to stay there, awaiting a more propitious moment. Take care of each other!

Well. Welcome back. Two YANTI / tape restore cycles later, the main application / PDC server is up and running. I spoke to Bob and Tom and Dennis and left a message at Tekram... then while I waited for banker's hours to begin, I started reading a variety of online sources. It turns out that pressing F6 during the NT CDROM boot cycle of installation, at just the right moment, brings up an early opportunity to add a third party driver to the installation. This is the hidden feature that threw me for loops. I'd get to the Specify additional storage drivers option, load the driver and whiz-bang - No Hard Disk Found. ::sigh:: Anyway, got past that hurdle, then completed the first YANTI, tried to install BackupExec, went out to the web and picked up SP6a, installed that, then got BackupExec installed! Restored from the full image tape I pulled off the system last night and... it hangs on reboot. #@^($#&@$^#*^@%#% What???

Oh. Well, it turns out since I am using a new drive, and new SCSI controller, the driver for that controller isn't part of the image I pulled yesterday, now is it? Double ::sigh:: Pop the original controller and drives back in the box, leave the Tekram controller in, but not connected to anything, bring NT back up, install the Tekram driver, take a fresh image tape, and repeat the whole process. Then with my whole body crossed, I rebooted ... Voila! Everything's up and running. Even though it wasn't a catastrophic failure, it's nice to know that the system is in place, with weekly full and daily diff backups, and I've learned some new things. Like I am going to pick up replacements for the hardware soon, and install the drivers now, for when the hardware does fail.

Now for some bits from the mailbag...

Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 20:07:06 +0000
From: "Richard F. Booth"
Subject: Your spot-the-reference

web> Needless to say, there's lots for me to accomplish, and like for
web> Craig Twomey, time is very, very short. So I'll head out now,
web> and see y'all later, perhaps.

Ooh, an STR game?  Can I play?

Stephen King, 4 past midnight, ... dammit, what's the story called?  Ah,
yeah, _The Langoliers_.  Best story in the collection by _miles_, imho,
and one of his very best of all.  (I think _last rung on the ladder_ is
my all-time favourite, because I'm a sentimental little idiot.  I really
like 'The End Of The Whole Mess', too.  The bit at the end, where he's
losing the ability to write... fantastic.)

I hope this doesn't mean you're cracking up, anyway!  I must admit, I
nearly am.  The joys of installing OpenSSH on a slightly mangled Mandrake
7.0 box.  Apparently, my PAM was mangled all along and I never noticed.
Hey ho, it's all a learning experience.

- Rick
-- 
[email protected]   http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/rb/
  It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a
  resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to
  physics and chemistry.  -- H.L. Mencken

Spot on, as it were . Played reasonably well in the made for TV
thingy by Bronson Pinochet ???  

Personally I like a life lived like Silverlock. I'll never be a
Golias, but I can strive, can't I?

Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 11:13:52 +0000
From: "Richard F. Booth"
Subject: Re: Your spot-the-reference

On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at two different times, Brian Bilbrey wrote:
> Spot on, as it were . Played reasonably well in the made for TV
> thingy by Bronson Pinochet ???

Never saw it.  They're usually terrible, aren't they?  Other than The
Shining, Carrie, Misery, Stand by Me, and The Shawshank Redemption, I
can't think of a King adaptation I've liked.  Still not a bad tally for
one author, though.

> Personally I like a life lived like Silverlock. I'll never be a
> Golias, but I can strive, can't I?

  Nope, lost me there, I'm afraid!

> Oh, for OpenSSH, use the RPMS from 7.2... I think you'll be pleased.

Oh, I did.  I did.  And when I'd managed to work out that needing an
earlier version of rpmlib meant I had to upgrade my rpm (sigh... which
dickhead wrote _those_ messages!?), and worked out which rpms the
libraries that needed upgrading lived in (easy if you know how, I know,
but why not just give us an rpm-needs-upgrading message), and then
figured out from the kernel logs that it was rejecting my login attempts
because my PAM was mangled, even though telnet still worked, and upgraded
my PAM rpm to try to fix it... now I am pleased.  Except that X
forwarding doesn't work.  (I've enabled it at both ends, but I get some
errors when I try to use it.  Sigh.  Oh well.  I don't _need_ it.)

I feel like The Warlock, some days.  My advocacy's slipping .

Why do all this?  Well, our webserver was cracked into (an IRIX box), and
so the admin turned off all the telnet and ftp (everywhere, since
tcpwrappers isn't installed on that box), and installed the latest ssh
from ssh.com.  So my old ssh's couldn't get in, as it doesn't do the v1
protocol.  Then when I could get in, scp didn't work... I'm now
publishing my web site with

   xargs tar cf - < filelist | ssh -l uname webserver 'tar xvf -'

Elegant, huh? .  Still, it lives at the end of my page-generating
makefile, so I only have to type 
  $ make publish
and then a password.

Still, if that's the worst thing I can find to complain of...

Thanks for the suggestion anyway, amigo.  It's good to have you and Tom
proving that some people can work productively on Linux (as indeed I do).

- Rick
-- 
[email protected]   http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/rb/
  What we need is a girl with very small fingers.
                -- Prof. Alexandre Borovik, to me.

King adaptations -->

Nah. Actually, I liked Langoliers in the TV version quite a bit. Dean 
Stockwell as the writer, a thoroughly believable kid as Albert... I think 
it's out on video - you might enjoy it if you can pick it up as a rental.

Golias and Silverlock -->

What???? Never read Silverlock??? John Myers Myers?? What?

Ah. OK. There, now I am over that. It's one of my pilgrimage reads, along 
with Tolkien, Heinlein, Pournelle/Niven and the Foundation Trilogy.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0441766749

will take you to the Amazon page, though it's out of stock, out of print - 
check the used book store, they're sold out. One reviewer put it this way, 
"If I was could only have one book, this would be it." That's how it is with 
Silverlock. Wonderous. Marvelous.

X forwarding -->

Yeah. You have to trace the startup chain for X and look at the new security 
model - I haven't done so yet, but may one day. I'll keep you posted.

Publishing Webstuff -->

rsync -avzr -e ssh --exclude daynotes * 192.168.1.3:~/orb

works for me, adapted from a Syroid solution.

This evening, I am out to SVLUG, the monthly Linux Users Group meeting for SillyCone Valley. Eric Allman of Sendmail fame is speaking tonight, as I may have previously noted. So let me give Tom a holler, and I'll catch up with the rest of you tomorrow. Hasta.

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Good morning. As you may have gathered if you read yesterday afternoon's post, I solved the server crisis, effectively and with not too much ranting and cussing. Anyway. Today, when I observe that the backups ran properly last night, I'll bring up the old drives and controller in another piece of hardware, randomize the drives a few times, do a low-level format on them, then adjust them with a large ball-peen hammer prior to final disposal. After all, they did have the main accounting database on...

Last night's SVLUG meeting was good. Eric Allman is an engaging speaker, even when challenged by having been in Paris last week and apparently required to be in Stockholm next week. He said he kept this meeting engagement in order to maximize his jetlag. The Sendmail Milter (Mail Filter) interface is well designed and managed. However, since your "milters" have to operate only on the input stream (at least in the current incarnation), you're subject to SMTP timeouts. Certain parts of the SMTP process must be completed within specific time limits, based on the relevant RFCs. For instance, Eric mentioned that you have two minutes to respond to HELO, so anything you want to do after receiving HELO but before you allow Sendmail to acknowledge the HELO must be done prior to the timeout, or Sendmail proceeds without your milter's input. Now really, that's a sort of silly example, since the computationally intensive processes are likely to be in processing body text, say, scanning for virus signatures, etc. This may be trivial in most cases, but as message sizes continue to increase... you get the picture! Overall, a good talk. Three thumbs up.

In this morning's mail run, I find a message from Chris DiBona noting that the Silicon Valley Perl Mongers have secured Damian Conway to come talk quantum superpositions in Perl. Chris thinks really, really highly of him, and I, Perl neophyte that I am, have even hear the name. I may have to go. I don't know yet, since I am quite tired and it's been a drag of a week. Ah, well. I told Marcia that we'll see.

On that note, I'll organize myself and hit the road. Hope to catch you later.

17:22 - I'm ba-a-ack, and with a couple of updates for you on recent topics:

SILVERLOCK COPIES FOR SALE.....  
From: "RICK BOATRIGHT"


Your friend RICK BOATRIGHT thought you might find this page interesting.

Really, not only is the used book store not out of them (Never buy used 
books from Amazon.) but I see here copies as cheap as $2.  

www.abe.com  advanced book exchange, the top book site on the web.  
Makes amazon look sick. 

Rick

This page can be found at abebooks.com, the world's largest network of 
independent booksellers. Books: rare, used and out-of-print; we have them 
all! To view this page online, simply paste this web address into your browser:

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/EmailToAFriend?ph=3&urlid=19720

We respect your privacy! Any and all information collected at this site will be kept 
strictly confidential and will not be sold, reused, rented, loaned, or otherwise 
disclosed. Any information you give to the Advanced Book Exchange will be 
held with the utmost care, and will not be used in ways that you have not 
consented to.

Yup, that's right, and I have been known to forget about ABE from time to time. Thanks, Rick!

Re: Your spot-the-reference
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 21:50:11 +0000
From: "Richard F. Booth"

On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 04:18:20PM -0800, Brian Bilbrey wrote:
> King adaptations -->
> 
> Nah. Actually, I liked Langoliers in the TV version quite a bit. Dean 
> Stockwell as the writer, a thoroughly believable kid as Albert... I think 
> it's out on video - you might enjoy it if you can pick it up as a rental.

I'll keep an eye out.  It'll doubtless hit the TV again before too long.

> Golias and Silverlock -->
> 
> What???? Never read Silverlock??? John Meyers Meyers?? What?

Indeed.  I'm sorry, I'm just a kid (1975) - I've never even heard of it
before.  Or maybe this is a .uk thing?

> Ah. OK. There, now I am over that. It's one of my pilgrimage reads, along 
> with Tolkien, Heinlein, Pournelle/Niven and the Foundation Trilogy.

Well, I've read all the others you mention.  I'll keep an eye out.  And
in return, some recommendations: C. J. Cherryh, Neal Stephenson, and
David Zindell.

> X forwarding -->
> 
> Yeah. You have to trace the startup chain for X and look at the new security 
> model - I haven't done so yet, but may one day. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks!

> Publishing Webstuff -->
> 
> rsync -avzr -e ssh --exclude daynotes * 192.168.1.3:~/orb

Yeah.  Should work, in theory.  Didn't for me - I don't think that the
Linux and IRIX rsyncs play nicely, or something.  Hey ho, I have a
solution, so why worry?  My geek nature _is_ slipping!

Oh, and I see that today's autosig is one I snarfed from your site.  Good
sigmonster, have another spammer .

- rfb
-- 
[email protected]   http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/rb/
  Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff    
  on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it. 
                -- Linus Torvalds

Neal Stephenson rocks! 

Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon. But Snowcrash has my favorite character
name : Hiro Protagonist. Also my favorite badguy: Raven, the guy
with a thermonuclear weapon as the sidecar attached to his bike.
Heh. Neal is buddies with my dad's landlord, Bruce Koball.

Cherryh: Never really bit on that writing style. Not sure why.
Zindell: I'll look for him.

The other bit about rsync...

rsync -avzr -e ssh --exclude daynotes \
	--rsync-path=/usr/local/bin/rsync \
	* syroidmanor.com:/www/graffiti/htdocs

uses the --rsync-path option to specify the exact location for the
rsync executable on Tom's AIX box, since rsync wasn't on my path.
With that option, all worked wonderfully for mirroring in the same
script that I send to my main site.

And with that, I have laundry to deal with, and a decision to make... am I going to attend the Damian Conway talk tonight. Hmmmm. I'd like to, but I am really feeling beaten down a bit, frankly. Also, my knee, in fact my whole left leg, is troubling me quite a bit today. I can take quite a bit of pain, but I like it not one whit. Ah well.

In other news, I finally had a chat with David Rogelberg of Studio B today, after many months of gentle prompting from Bob Thompson (ooh, you face-licker, you) and not-so-gentle prodding from Tom. We'll see what comes of it. He's a pleasant person, nice to converse with, and prompt in his return emails. All good signs. Well, that and he comes highly recommended by people I respect...

By the way, Marcia has posted her version of events on our trip to Yosemite. While many of the pictures are the same, her take on the trip is definitely different - This was her first visit to this spectacular National Park.

Oh, right, the laundry... Ooops. Gotta run. Have a lovely evening, all. Catch you tomorrow. Yosemite. While many of the pictures are the same, you)

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Good morning. Odd thing, I check the online forecast for our area and the blurb has the red asterisk indicating a severe weather alert. Clicking on the detailed forecast link, I see mid-30s to mid-50s (°F), partly cloudy and showers for the next three days. Hmmm. Anyone else see no severity there? I mean, really. No warnings of tornados at area trailer parks, no giant birds in the sky plucking children from their backyard swing sets, no large rocks slated to fall from the sky of any type, from fun size to a full-bore ELE (Extinction Level Event). Boring!

I did attend the local Perl Mongers meeting and hear Damian Conway's talk on Quantum Superposition. Not only has he written an actual module called Quantum::Superposition that permits remarkably natural ways of expressing complex operations on sets of superimposed scalars. It turns out that the methods are extraordinarily parallelizable by nature. Also interestingly, there's another related module written by someone else (who's name I can't recall at this moment) called Quantum::Entanglement, which replicates the wave function collapse feature of state entangled particles from quantum mechanics. Functionally, in Perl quantum entanglement, when you observe a single superimposed variable, reducing it to an eigenstate, all entangled variables also resolve to the required mating eigenstate, based on the assorted probabilities in the situation. Some very cool stuff here, people.

Yesterday, Greg Lincoln wrote to ask how the upgrade to KDE 2.1 Beta2 was going. The short story as of now is... just fine. For some reason I haven't determined, I can't upgrade Grinch, possibly due to some odd interaction between RPM and ReiserFS. We'll see about that once I rotate Grinch's partitions back to Ext2. Mmmm. However, also yesterday, at the prompting of Greg's missive, I downloaded and installed Beta2 on Gryphon. There were a couple of variances from the stated instructions, because there are bits of my system that I choose not to upgrade at this time (like egcs and assorted other bits that are necessary for KDevelop). So I left bits of the install out. I'll exercise the installation today, and report more fully later. Initial impression from a little bit of use yesterday: Crisper, faster, better rendering in Konqueror... Wait and see for the rest.

On that note, I think I'll finish my preparations, and depart for work. Have a lovely day.

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Good morning. Are we having fun yet? I'm following a bunch of interesting threads on Linux, power generation and woes in California, and much more. Additionally, I am looking forward to playing with my Valentine's present from my lovely Marcia - That's right, it's the Agenda Computing VR3 Linux Handheld, as pictured at left. Whoo-hoo! Like I really have enough time for new toys in my life, heh.

Otherly, I'm putting the Blazer back in the shop temporarily this morning, as there's something hinky about the oil pressure, and an engine noise I don't like - probably related concepts... I'm worried that we're holding a late-blooming lemon in our hands. There are solutions to that problem, relatively simple ones, but we'd really rather not buy another car for a couple of years. But the joys of paying for repairs monthly are going to pale quickly!

Also on deck for today is some research and writing on KDE for a quickie commercial project I'm doing, more when I can say more. That being the case, I'll have to get my shoes on, and head out to the mechanics now, then hoof it back here and get to work. Take care, see y'all later today.

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Good morning. Very, very brief for the moment, as we're about to head out to Costco for the weekly. I've spent the morning catching up on mail, sorting out a few directories, working on a graphic or two, checking out security alerts and generally admin'ing the AWN (Apartment Wide Network). There's more work to be done, and I have a bit of commercial writing to finish today, as well. But there's a funny story or two lurking in the background, so if you can come back later, welcome! Otherwise, drop in when you can. Take care.

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