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Good Morning. Well, as you may know, I wasn't able to make it back into this forum last night. (Visions of Zero Mostel jokes are flying about in the rafters of my mind as I write that. Unfortunately none of them work, since I wasn't on my way to the forum).
However, it turned out to have been a successful day. I translated some material I've written into a custom XML format which is ... interestingly specified, then ran it through the parser several times. Several times because there were errors in the XML, mostly caused by me leaving out closing tags. Unfortunately, the parser is unfriendly, in that it states an error, but doesn't yield a clue as to which of many identical opening tags isn't closed. A line number for the opening tag would be useful, eh?
This is a project documenting some Linux material for $LARGE_CORP, and overall, it looks to be an interesting gig. Once again though, the tool to produce the documentation runs ... in Windows! Along with writing the author of the tool about the error message incongruity, I might as well ask if they have a Linux version, and if not, how well they'd pay to have me port their solution over... <g>
You may have noted the picture of my soon-to-be-arriving Valentine's present, an Agenda Computing VR3 Linux-powered handheld computing device. While it's not here yet (well, duh, I ordered it on Friday night, I don't expect it until Wednesday at the earliest), there's a tale to tell...
When I mentioned the VR3 to Marcia, she asked, "How would you like that as your Valentine's gift? It wasn't what I was planning for you, but it'll do." "OK!" sez I, and hare back to the computer to place the order. It's only later that I learn that she was planning on purchasing some type of photo-quality inkjet printer for me. That's highly amusing because I was planning on getting her ... a photo-quality inkjet printer! The best laid plans of mice and men, don't you know! Instead we got my love some pretty, albeit smallish, diamond studs. Both gifts kind of blow the surprise factor, but there you are.
In other news, the engine in the Blazer is likely history. Last week, following our return from Yosemite, the engine started making some noise. Well, we put it into the shop on Saturday, and they say the oil pump's gone, and taken the engine with it. The only ray of hope here is that we have an extended warranty on this lemon, and engine is among the covered bits. I'm likely to have to do a bit of battle, but there you are. The upshot is that I am staying home from work today to get the truck in service, though I'll actually just work from here. Tomorrow and until the truck is back with us, I'll drop Marcia at work on my way out in the morning, and pick her up in the afternoon on my way home. It's hardly out of my way at all, but a bit inconvenient, because our schedules don't always mesh perfectly. Ah, life!
KDE 2.1 Beta 2 .... You wanted to know about this, eh Greg? Well, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that it installs fairly cleanly, although (bad news) a full install wants a new version of egcs in order to accomodate the latest revision of the KDE IDE, KDevelop. I have chosen not to go there at this time. Additionally, (good news) the whole desktop feels crisper, more nimble, and pages render noticably faster in Konqueror, which unfortunately seems to have problems in HTML code recognition and bookmark handling that it's Beta 1 cousin didn't. Overall, I am happy to keep Beta 2 on Gryphon the Acer Travelmate, but won't be struggling to upgrade Grinch. The official release of 2.1 is later this month, I think, so I'll hold out for that on the main workstation.
And with that, I'd better organize my battle plan for the day. I have a lot to accomplish, and less time than I'd like. Y'all have a lovely day.
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Howdy! After all that, I forgot to mention that it was Ken Scott's birthday, yesterday. Ken is another aspiring journal keeper that I visit on a semi-regular basis. His current page can be accessed here. Why, just last week JHR made him think about Linux really, really hard <g>. Do be patient, though - Ken's servers are on the other end of a small pipe... Even funnier (in my usual, sick sense), last time I mentioned him on these pages, his DNS service went away for a few days... Amazing the facility that one gains - just imagine if I could SUMMON THE POWERS OF CERTIFICATION!!! As the guy in the Dilbert panel said, "Ooops. That's all I remember from the course."
The truck spent a day in paperwork hell yesterday, brought on by the threat of warranty repair. Nobody actually ever wants to pay for such work, and one quote so far is for about seven grand... no wonder they want to dot the T's and cross the I's. It's a good thing I stayed home yesterday - I was back over to the dealership three times, delivering other bits of paper, as the warranty company demanded them. Sigh.
Tom Syroid's having connectivity problems - there's an intermittent piece of equipment inside the Sasktel system that most times prevents him from communicating with the outside world. Tom can ping his gateway and the Sasktel.net nameservers, but precious little else, much of the time. I've been able to traceroute into Sasktel.net but I can only get a good route when it's working... Maybe if I do that again, and send it to him, then he can try pinging back up the chain when the line is down to isolate the IP of the hinky equipment.
Ooops. Gotta run. Dropping Marcia off at work, then headed on to my own. Have a lovely day.
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Happy Valentine's Day! Do nice things for the ones you love. Marcia sent me a Valentine this morning, thumbnailed at left... Smile a lot. Look goofy if at all possible. Just trust me on the sunscreen... <g> Later
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Gooooood Morning, Vietnam! and all other parts of the world, please. I hope you all had a pleasant Valentine's Day. I survived the day by making numerous references to the Massacre, and the evening by spending it snuggled with my lovely Marcia. Tonight we're finally going to head out and use the gift certificate we have for Il Postale, over in downtown Mountain View. This restaurant has had good reviews, but we've kept putting off the evening. So this is it. Restaurant review tomorrow, however you shouldn't have any trouble mistake me for Chris's site or Walder's... I eat things that were originally meant to be food, instead of the internal organs of force-fed geese, or various porcine blood products.
Anyway, we're looking forward to a busy few days and nights out, Saturday we're going to midday with my folks. On Saturday evening, I have an SBay.org pizza meeting. Then Sunday, we're out with friends Pat and Nathan. Monday's a holiday where we celebrate the birthdays of a couple of Presidents who couldn't have taped people, aren't morons, and didn't get caught fooling around with someone other than their spouse.
No real news on the truck front... they're saying that the engine doesn't need to be replaced, instead: oil pump, crankshaft & connecting rods, and other miscellaneous bits. However, apparently they're having trouble getting pricing on the right crank kit, and once they get that, then we still have to get authorization from the Warrantee company. Looks like no work happens on it this week at all, just paperwork. I suppose that's alright, as long as they pick up the tab.
Two items of business. First, Matt Beland, send me an email - I can't get through to you! Second... I've forgotton what's second... Aaargh. Can you tell I'm approaching 40? Of course, with my family's longevity, 40 is merely late puberty, but it appears still to be accompanied by accelerated memory loss. I feel a bit like Johnny Dahlquist blowing smoke at the Gieger counter at moments like this. Sigh. Well, if it was important it'll either come back to me, or turn up to bite me in the ass when the information is needed, but not present. Oh. Oh, right. Has anyone had trouble getting through to this site in the last week or so that seemed like either network problems, or that my server was down? It wasn't, but Tom and I are running into situations where he can browse, but not to me. We're thinking that the problem router lies between us.
I just got through to Tom's site, here's an excerpt from yesterday's post...
So. After much pontification and consideration, the tech and I reached the following conclusions:
We've narrowed things to two probable (but not exclusive) possibilities: A router with a bad routing table or a caching server with a corrupt cache entry pointing at syroidmanor.com. I personally favor the first, as it makes more sense. A bad routing table would explain why people are experiencing sporadic connectivity to my site -- sometimes you're hitting the bad table, sometimes you're not.
Any feedback on this one from y'all? And with that, we're off to begin our day. Have a lovely one yourselves.
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Howdy. Welcome to Friday of a US 3 day weekend. Of course, we have lots planned. This "having a life" thing sure interferes with the computer gig <g> just kidding, hon... WHACK! Ow! Aw, jeez...!
Supper last night at Il Postale was wonderful. We both had lightly killed baby heifer (aka veal). Marcia's was a veal steak with prawns and mushrooms in a delicate sauce, alongside correctly cooked green beans, other veg, and an ignored serving of polenta (a side dish I refer to simply as Italian GRITS, and never cook for myself, politely disregard it on my plate!). My dish was a veal roll of some kind, wrapping up procuitto (??), spinach and provolone. Sides of veg and grits. All-in-all, simply wonderful. However, I needs must correct myself - Il Postale is not in Mountain View as previously mentioned. I became confused yesterday morning. Instead it is in downtown Sunnyvale, next to Sunnyvale Town Center Mall, on Washington Street. Highly recommended!
On the Tom's connectivity front, there has apparently been little progress. We did get an assist from several people who've written Tom directly (though he's having trouble sending replies...) and these fine gents who wrote to me here: John Kopp, Peter Smith, Dave Wooten, and most recently, Michael Dugan...
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 05:25:52 -0500 From: Michael Dugan X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (Win98; U) Subject: Tom's tech troubles... I ran / run the tracert. what do I do with it? can I send the results? Is the results sent? Have a great day Mike
Hi, Michael - If, after running the tracert, you find that the final link in the chain is 142.165.70.133, and can't get to Tom's site, then your data confirms that of several others. If you got all the way through to Tom's site, then you've hit a fortuitous moment. If so, the only thing that would be *really* interesting is if there's an IP address _in between_ the aforementioned ...70.133 and Tom's site, at 142.165.167.14 ! So far as we've been able to determine, 142.165.70.133 is the penultimate hop, somewhere past which (inbound to Tom) is the point of failure. Data that disagrees with this would be useful. Thanks for the help!
On that note, it's time to organize myself to get outta here and into work. Have a lovely day. I'll see you back here later!
20:17 - Yup, it's later. Not much going on at the moment. Nice lunch today at Fiesta del Mar with Nick Lopez, a friend I don't see nearly as often as I'd like. Then home, and laundry, as well as working on massaging the last three years of sales financials into something that can be used to make decisions instead of confetti. Feh. Finally found my major error - I was accumulating sales figures from file to file, rather than resetting the hash in between files. Should be able to finish that project up tomorrow early.
I made supper tonight - a blend of potato, peas, parmesan, finely cubed and browned beef (deglazed with a Cab Merlot), a little salt & pepper, a bit of paprika, bake for 20 minutes, then broil for 5 with a bit more cheese on top. Visually about as exciting as watching a rock grow, but good, solid food none-the-less, and pretty tasty (though I'm biased).
Writing this in Bluefish 0.6. I have been using the 0.5 release that is shipped with Mandrake 7.2, but there are some reasons to upgrade. More complete tag menus is high on my list. Built-in file manager panes, which will be really handy when it comes to the Monday update routine, or when I am working reports (like the Debian install pages, which I keep threatening to complete, I'll link to them when I'm done). Additionally, there's lots of references and other useful tools, including a custom menu that can include user-defined tags, like the ones I had to work by hand for the $LARGE_CORP gig that went out this week. Lot's to explore here, and I might just get around to it in my copious spare time. I unloaded the RPM version, downloaded the source, compiled and installed. Up and running in 5 minutes: a solid tool.
I have several different projects on the go right now, one of which is hooked into generating at least slightly photo-realistic objects for incorporation into advertising materials. There are several different tools to work with, and I'll be reporting on the Open Source ones later. There are some really, really excellent commercial products, both for Win and Linux platforms, but I have corporate budgetary constraints to consider...
I see that my time's up for now, so I'll bid you adieu until tomorrow morning. Oh, and Tom seems to be solidly with us again. Please let *me* know if you can't get to his site - I'll pass the word. TTFN.
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Well, good morning. Welcome to a particularly lazy Saturday morning. This really must stop. There's far too much work to be done, on a variety of fronts. First things first, however...
Jim Allchin: Not a complete nutter, since you don't get to that point in the corporate hierarchy without major steaming heaps of talent, but really now... "Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer," Allchin said. "I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business."
"I'm an American, I believe in the American Way," he said. "I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat."
Thanks for that, Jim! Mr. Allchin probably believed at the time that he was treading the line between attacking a competitor, and slandering a competitor. You see, he probably (my opinion here) really wants to equate Linux and Open Source software with DeCSS. Result there - people arrested, people in court, people not developing competitive products, instead defending their very liberty, and the freedom of speech (as embodied in linking) on the 'Net. Potentially a tactical win for Mickeysoft. We can't address the strategic consequences because no one knows what's going to happen next Tuesday, or whatever!
There are some very lucid views on both sides of this matter... I'll link to the ones I found through Doc Searls here: Blogger Joshua, a program manager at Microsoft (points granted for the Seven of Nine thumbnail in the upper right hand corner <g>). Blogger Craig Burton, and that one really deserves a read. Well-written.
OK, so everyone's writing about the festering Allchin ravings, and it's only been 48 hours or less. Sigh. You'll note several things as you've been visiting here for a while. I rarely rant on Linux, I rarely go off on Microsoft. I use software from both sources, though I try to work with Linux as much as possible because I have so much more control over my environment, and I don't like the direction or methods of the Redmond company. I use Windows at work about 50%. I use Windows at home about 4% (off the top of my head). Of that 4%, without a book on tap, I'd say that 95% of that 4% (would that be 0.039 of my computing time) is spent using Windows as a gaming platform. Why do I need X-Box, I've already GOT Windows 98
However, I am stepping hard on my desire to rant about Linux and Mickeysoft again. There are morons on both sides of the fence, loud and obnoxious. While the sane outnumber the genetically challenged dramatically, loud idiots get heard, again from both sides. You'll note that I didn't link you over to Slashdot, where there's only pretty much a flamefest on the issue. For the most part, I keep quietly using Linux to do as many different things as I can. I encourage Open Source development by buying products and services from Open Source companies. I have bought Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake distributions. I contribute to the EFF, because as Don Marti said, "If you want to use Linux and you don't contribute to the EFF, you're a jackass!"
Right here, at the site of this soapbox, I'll just keep using Linux, thank you very much, as much as possible. I just completed the Heretic II runthrough, and I am thinking of dumping my Windows partition out altogether. I can use VMware or Win4Lin to do what I need to do in Windows for work or business. And I'll support the efforts to build software that renders Microsoft document formats interchangeable. Frankly, I don't care what OS you use on your desktop. I'm just tired of contributing to the Microsoft paradigm - I don't agree with their goals. Sorry.
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Well, good morning. I finally received my full allotment of awake, and realized that I hadn't yet put up a post this morning. As it is, I don't have much time. Mike Strock wrote yesterday to point out the Web Standards new Browser Upgrade Campaign. This is a plea to webmasters to stop writing code for browsers that aren't up to current standards. Fundamentally they recommend only IE5.5, NS6 or Opera5 (or better). No other browsers are mentioned. Hmmm. I haven't tried Opera in a while, I don't like NS6 or Mozilla much, and just say no to IE. I really do like the new Konqueror - it integrates very nicely with the KDE desktop, and is a simply top-notch swiss-army-type tool for file, ftp, network, and Internet browsing. Three thumbs up. Thanks for the pointer, Mike!
As it is, we're hitting the road on our social rounds momentarily - off to Orinda for a bit, then back here, then out to supper tonight with friends Pat and Nathan. Yesterday I was finally successful in massaging the sales data I've been working on to generate some reports. I've run into a host of problems, from quotes and field separators embedded in text fields, to programming errors on my part - mostly due to trying to apply bits of Perl I don't know very well. Turns out the final hitch was that I needed to either reset or undef a hash in between loop passes, to clear the data from processing the previous file. Once that was done, I then identified one other minor glich, and the real data shone through. Huzzah!
On the 3D objects front, I am learning a lot about Blender, but I've got an installation problem, and it's a complex interface. I am getting used to it, however. I may have a couple of test images up in a while. I still need to figure out how to work properly with extrusions and NURBS surfaces. Whew. It may call for a reference book or two, but I'd like to learn this, since graphics is one of my avocations.
OK. Time's up. We must fly. Have a lovely day, and I'll catch you next week! Enjoy your weekend off, Tom!
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