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Orb Designs Grafitti
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Email Brian Bilbrey |
Orb Grafitti is sometimes a conversation, sometimes a soapbox. I use Linux most often, 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 Syroid and I recently co-authored Caldera OpenLinux Secrets, unfortunately cancelled by the folks at $LARGE_PUBLISHER. 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.
Good morning. What with the obnoxious changeover to Daylight Stealing Time, even though it's nearly 7:30 as I write this, the sun is just now over the trees and coming in through the blinds, washing out the screen and blinding me. Gee, thanks! Mmmmm. Yeah, I know, grumpy, but it always seems to take me a week or so to adapt to PDT. Proper jetlag seems easier for my body to cope with than this simple one hour jump. Oh, yeah, Patio Farm (tm) pictures. It's doing very well, thank you muchly. Although the alt text for the image at left is "Cherry tomatoes doing well", one of them actually wasn't. I think it was a wax plant, like the wax fruit you see in display windows. It didn't grow, it didn't change, it didn't turn brown, it just sat there... until I ripped it out by the roots yesterday. The replacement isn't a Cherry, instead it's a fairly robust Ace, far enough along that I shouldn't have to protect it from the critters. I took the bird netting off the tomatoes yesterday as well.
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Above, the herbs are generally doing well also, although the Basil continues to be a non-starter (and this is the second batch we've planted). Don't know why, as basil's done well for us under similar circumstances in the past. Additionally, the largest tomato plant (closest, second from the right above) now has several flowers on it already, we should know in a few more days whether we'll get any early sets.
In other news (and the reason for this morning's late post), Marcia's dental surgery is today. So I am not going to work, but instead will be playing at chauffer and nursemaid. Seems fair, she takes good care of me when I'm feeling poorly! Now I am going to head over and get a cup of coffee, and catch up with the Monday morning Daynotes. Thanks for dropping by, I'll see you back here later...
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Hey, folks. I am in a bit of a rush. Marcia is overall doing really quite well following her dental surgery yesterday, so I am headed into work this AM. However, that means that I have some prep work to do in setting things up for her to make things easy to find, to use, etc. So I am out of time before I even get fairly started.
In spite of events and myself, I've made good progress on the Tutorial - 5 to 7 more panels should put the thing to rest, which is good with a due date of next Monday... Do you like the way I publicly flog myself with deadlines? Huh? <g> Anyway, in between bouts of playing nursemaid yesterday, I spend a lot of time living in Tcl-land. Yeah, my brain hurts, but that's the price we pay.
Now, I've got to get organized. I'll do my best to drop back later today with at least a brief update. Thanks!
19:05 - Just a brief update for you - a pair of news flashes. First, Marcia is much better, thanks for asking. A follow up visit this afternoon went quite well, I am told. Another one on Thursday, and so on. But she's in good spirits, and bearing what little pain apparently remains like a trooper.
Second, the Blazer is home. No, we are not amused, but it's home, it's running well, it passed smog, and I have a little more paperwork to acquire from the service center of that dealership, then I can write the open letter about the absolutely worst, most atrocious customer service I think I've ever received, anywhere, for any reason, period! But we did get the truck back, finally. Hey, Bob, can I borrow ...
Third (yeah, third, I can't count, so sue me), a big hearty Daynotes gang welcome to Greg Lincoln (Corrected now that Marcia's noted that I had given him an entirely new last name, sigh, sorry, Greg). I wonder if he feels like that town council did, when they realized that what the architect had brought before'm was an slaughterhouse "The tenants are carried along on the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes toward the rotating knives...." Really, no, don't worry about it Greg. It's just our way of saying Hi, really!
Fourth, in case you haven't been following it, the Daynotes Gang SETI effort is making real strides. This is the group that Bob Thompson (he of the earlier link) organized. In the clubs list, Daynotes is up to number 176. Just for fun, I munged the data about, and found that if the clubs were ordered on a scale based upon results per user, we'd be number 99 on the list. Whoo-hooo!
Now, following these five items, I really, really must get back to work. I intend to be done with this draft of the tutorial tonight, somehow. Not sure how, yet, but I know that this isn't progress towards that goal. All the same, I do like visiting with you. Take care and I'll see ya tomorrow.
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Or should I say, Updates at 08:05. Feh. Booted into Win2K last night to compile the tutorial, and the stinking thing changed my hardware clock for me. Sheesh. How rude.
Good morning. Mmmm. I know, it seems odd to be writing Linux-based tutorials with a tool that only works under Windows. Java-based at that, which means that it should be a simple matter to convert whatever platform-specific bits there are. I've poked that question upstream, we'll see what happens.
In fact, the tutorial is almost done (though I wasn't quite able to finish last night) - I have three overview panels and a resource summary to write, then the first draft is done. Then I'll kick it upstream for review and edit. This weekend will be rewrite, and it'll be in on Monday next, as promised. It's nice to realize that the light at the end of the tunnel is definitely the end of the tunnel, rather than an on-coming engine.
I want to send you to read Larry Wall's first in a series of articles on the pending Perl 6 effort, entitled Apocalypse 1: The Ugly, the Bad, and the Good. Larry is a strange and interesting guy, which is evident from both his writing and accounts from people who've encountered him in the past. One year I hope to be able to hit one of the big Perl events. This article is well written, and gives some insight into the beginning of the process to remodel a major programming language.
Ooops. Time's up. Gotta run. Lest I forget (as I did last night), here's a link to Greg Lincoln's Adventures index page - scroll to the bottom to find the link to the current week's page. Now I've gotta run. Have a lovely day.
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Good morning. Whew, here's a recommendation for you - don't oversleep, then fix the furnace (because the frost and morning chill have definitely returned), finally surfacing to find over 100 emails since last night at 11:30. No spam, no junk mail, and I am not on the kernel mailing list. I am on several lists for Linux, but mostly it's action on the Agenda mailing lists following the positive exposure at Comdex, leading to press on CNN::Tech and CNN Headline News (or so I am told). Cebit, followed by Spring Comdex. What a grueling pair of shows to have to work. I feel sorry for those Agenda folks.
Well, I missed SVLUG last night, or rather I chose not to attend. It might have been interesting - It was about Subversion, a new project that's supposed to be a CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) killer. These products are software project version control systems, allowing check in and out, as well as helping to manage merging of multiple changes simultaneously (though that's tricky business).
I did finish draft one, followed by draft two, of the Tcl/Tk tutorial last night. Since I tend mostly to research, take a couple of notes, then write off the top of my head, rather than in a very structured form, the second draft is always the first real readthrough of what I've written with an eye for the ick factor... yup, that's right, I look for stuff that doesn't make sense, especially (to the best of my ability) for someone who's not actually in my head. I've sent it off for review and editing. Whooo-hoo. Should be spot on time for Monday release.
Now it's time to make a call and see how my morning schedule's shaping up - I dropped off an HP Impedance Analyzer for calibration yesterday afternoon, and since we paid the expidite fee, they should have completed the job overnight. So I should get ready to hit the road. Take care, people.
Well, it turned out that the tail-gunner Charlies from the brains handout line over at the calibration lab failed to actually calibrate the Impedance Analyzer, since they couldn't recognize that I'd dropped the box off with a check to pay for the expedited job. So it sat, untouched, overnight. Maroons!
You know, customer service mostly these days just plain sucks. Things go wrong all the time, mistakes are made, things happen. We can understand that, but talk to us. It's just like the buttheads over at Toyota Sunnyvale (TS). They had our truck, in pieces, for nearly two months. Now this wasn't entirely their fault, though they played a role... but the interaction with a warrantee company from Hell by the name of Portfolio (who completely fulfilled their fiduciary responsibility by dragging their heels, toes, fingernails, and every other friction inducing surface at every opportunity) caused the major part of the problem.
However, in a case like this, I see it as the service organization's duty to take the part of the customer, and make things happen. With each ensuing Customer Disservice Representative, there was never any proactive work done to make the job happen any faster. And unless I called for an update, no information was forthcoming. Since most of what they said turned out to be not true, I guess I am not far off the mark in saying they lied to me. Of course, that could be spun to say that they gave me their best estimate at the time, but then why the heck didn't they call back and say what had gone wrong, and what they were doing to fix it, each time the process went off track.
To me, customer service has no meaning when things are going well. CS is only important, and doing their job well when things are going badly, and they can get the customer to agree, "Yeah, well, that isn't so bad, then." Hey, CS people out there, people who work with CS departments - when you hear that something's gone haywire, be the asshole who asks the right question, "Has anyone called the customer and told them about this?"
You see, nobody wants to make that call. Nobody. There's so much shoot the messenger fear in our society today that absolutely nobody wants to make that call. I know. It is hard, and I feel your pain, but pick up that darn phone and call! As much as you know they're going to hate hearing that due to X, Y, or Z, the product they're waiting for isn't going to be in for two more weeks, or whatever -- Trust me, we hate it a lot worse when the expected date of arrival comes... and goes, and still we haven't heard from you. That's one of my hats at my firm, is to ask the "Has anyone called..." question from time to time. Sometimes I make the call. There are times when I have to say, "We screwed up and ordered the wrong component, and your parts won't be ready for another two weeks. There's nothing I can do to change the time, but we'll pick up the tab to overnight the products when they're ready, and I'll call you when the right bits have come in and we turn on the overtime to get these things out the door. OK?" I really don't like making that call, but I will, rather than let a due date come and go. Am I asking too much of other organizations to do the same thing for me? For you?
Well, we have the truck back, and all the associated paperwork that's necessary to close that deal. While the work itself has apparently been done with reasonable competence, overall, this was a big customer service failure. I can personally, and strongly recommend NOT doing business with either Sunnyvale Toyota or the Portfolio Warrantee firm, and their claims administration firm, First Extended Service Corporation. I won't be doing business with them. Ever.
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In other news, I finally got around to updating the Orb Daynotes Mirror. If ever the main Daynotes site is down, then I have it right at that link for you, bookmark it against that terrible day! I also updated my Start page with Greg's link, and reorganized a little bit. Now I'm done for the night. Thanks, see you tomorrow.
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Good morning. Hmmmm. 7:02. That's 2 minutes from now. Guess I'd better be brief. It is raining out. Not unexpectedly, since I didn't hear anthing about it from our Accu-Lie Weather Guy on the evening news last night. Maybe he said it after they went to commercial break, giggling mightily along the way. Feh. I know, April showers and all that malarky, but, sorry, I've not had enough Spring yet to be ready for rain.
Since I am once again short on time, you'll have to content yourself with last night's rant on Customer Service. Y'all have a lovely day, OK? Later!
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Good morning. The roads are still soaking outside, but there's sun peeking around the clouds, off and on. I have the blinds open, so it's a continuous variation between comfortable screen viewing, and squinty blinding glare. And it's much worse for Galileo, the Agenda Computing VR3d, who's screen is only seen by reflected light, with a naturally glare-inducing touch layer over the LCD. Last night, I rsync'd my data files off of Galileo to Gryphon (my Acer laptop). Then I used the very handy vrflash utility by Jeff Carneal to update to the lastest and greatest kernel, root image, and PMON. The first two are relatively risk free, since I can always re-flash or downgrade if there's a problem. PMON, however, runs the show. It's the boot and flash manager rolled into one, as it were. If, in the course of flashing, PMON gets hosed, then all of a sudden I'm holding a $200 brick. Fortunately, this is not the case.
Then I restarted networking, rsync'd my data back onto Galileo, used chown to make it mine again, and everything was up and running. Now, I hang out on a bunch of the Agenda mailing lists. Since I've been pretty busy, lurking is about all I do. However, I do read and pay attention. There are a number of tweaks to make the Agenda cooler, more fun, easier to use and more. So I headed over to Lego Andy's Agenda pages, to have a look at the compilation of the latest tips, tricks and tweaks. Andy has put together a number of these into a single script that performs all the mods in one pass. Hoo-haw. In like Flint.
Finally, since it's fun for me, I pulled down the background image, and edited it from the plain-jane VR3 X background to the Galileo background you see next to the first paragraph above. Added the text, the shuttle, and Tux hanging out underneath the protective arm of the 'V'. There's lots of new games, mostly ports of parts of The Ace of Penguins, a Linux card games suite - you can see Freecell, above right.
Today, Marcia and I are going to take a small trip up to visit the Home Expo store up in East PA. Since we can't afford to do a house this year, we might as well go look at stuff we'd put in one if only we had it, right? Heh. Ah, well. Also, I am going to start working on bringing Brian and Tom's Linux Book out into the world. (When you see this on Tom's site, it's likely to be called Tom and Brian's Linux Book, but then, we're likely to agree to disagree on that one... <g>) - - - Stay tuned on this one, we're really quite close to posting chapters, folks.
Thanks for dropping by, see you again later today, eh?
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Hi. Did I say today? I meant, TODAY! Mmmm. Good morning. Was a busy, busy day yesterday. I spent most of it working out the HTML format for posting the book online. Did I make progress? You betcha.
That's a live link, as is this one! Yeah, thank you. So far, the TOC is complete and true, the Preface, Chapter 1, and Appendix B are online. We'll get the rest up there as fast as we can format and proof it. Eventually I'll get PDF up there too, but one thing at a time. Full HTML disclosure first. Oh, bear in mind, some of the in-document links won't work until all of the material is posted. But still... Whhhoooooo-Hooooo!!!!!
Then, last night I dropped everything, and we watched the Bruce Springsteen special on HBO. It was simulcast on KFOG, so we wuz rockin'. Loads and loads of fun, great concert video, and I can listen to the Boss all day and night. He didn't play Jungleland, which was too bad, as that's my favorite Bruce song, but they closed the show with American Skin. Excellent! Three thumbs up - check the Springsteen link above for replay times and dates - there are three this month.
Now, I have the edits back from the Tcl/Tk tutorial to go through, do some final tuning, and that goes into the hopper over at Studio B. Then I'll put in a bit more time on formatting for BTLB, do a spot of gardening, and relax for five minutes or so to mentally prepare myself for the coming week.
Maybe back later with updates, we'll see. Certainly there's enough material to keep you busy for a while, now. Later!
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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 by 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.