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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. Tom Syroid and I have co-authored a Linux Book. It was cancelled by $LARGE_PUBLISHER, so we're posting it online, here and here. Have a looksee! 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. Busy weekend, as I am sure you can tell. We're beginning to get the book online. The formatting is a bear. While we could take the original Word documents and simply save as HTML, I'd vomit every time I had to do an edit, or work on the data. So I've exported all the data out as text, and then I'm formatting using Bluefish. Not too bad, except for table data, which is a real pain. Ah, well, sorry, this just means some chapters will take a little longer than otherwise.

The good news is that I added Chapter 2 online yesterday, and got 9/10ths of the way through Chapter 3, which is a long'un, with the most screenshots of any chapter in the book: 37. No, you don't have to get a single HTML page with 37 one megabyte TIFF images embedded in it - I used the convert program from the ImageMagick package to do the TIFF to JPG stepdown, then, an adaptation of a thumbnail generation script to resize all the images to 640x480. This still is a collection of 40K to 60K images - it'll be a long download for this one page. Should be up this evening.

Now for some mail, both recent, and left behind from last week (sorry) ...

[THIS IS NOT AN ADVERTISEMENT, Just a sick joke from Mike Strock]

Subject: Thought you might enjoy this...(or not)
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 19:40:10 -0700
From: [email protected]

Brian - 

Given that you are in California, I thought you might enjoy this little
banner ad I saw tonight (you may have already seen it).  I don't know about
capitalizing on another person's misfortune, but I thought it was
interesting (and kinda sad)...

Mike Strock
IS Manager
[email protected]

Thanks!

Heh. You're right, of course, although being adjacent to a
firestation has it's advantages in terms of rotating outage blocks,
which slightly offsets the 2 AM sirens. Even if my site stays up,
does every piece of equipment between me and the net stay up? Who
knows. In any case, there are other bits to life, even if I can't
call any of them to mind just at the moment...  <g>

And then John rang in about my customer service rant of last week... What is there to say? Hmmm.

Subject: Customer Service
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 23:09:53 -0600
From: "John Doucette" <[email protected]>

Hi Brian

I agree with you 100%. I have one BUT. With everyone doing things
electronically these days, the customer service part of the system is often
left out. Everyone wants the computer to do everything, but I have yet to
see a system that does a good job of generating reports for customer
follow-up. Or if there is a report, it takes the coordination of three
different departments to get the report in the hands of customer service.
This is not an excuse but an ugly fact in today's electronic business world.

John

Subject: Linux Book
Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 14:08:24 +0100
From: Jan Swijsen <[email protected]>
To: Brian Bilbrey 
Cc: Tom Syroid 

<quote>
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>)
</quote>

What about mixing the names a bit?
No, Tom Bilbrey or Brian Syroid would be to simple.

But Torian Bilbroid ??
Pruduced at Orb Manor ??

--
Svenson.
Mail at home : [email protected]

You're not well. I like that about you... 

OK. Time's up, gotta run. Have a lovely day - Start reading the book - we'd definitely love to hear from you - a feedback mail link to the both of us for the book will be up and available on the pages tonight. Meantime, take care!

19:57 - Evenin' OK. First be warned. This next chapter, with all the screen shots, is 1.8M ... not bad, considering the initial on that one in Word format with the TIFF files came up over 50M, uncompressed. Anyway, without further ado, Chapter 3 of Tom and Brian's Linux Book is now up. And yes, Tom, that's YAL (Yet Another Logo) next to this paragraph <g>! Check out the header of Chapter 1...

Next, here's the weekly Patio Farm report. Once again, we appear to have lost the Basil. I haven't pictured that, it's just too pathetic. However, it was our only loss this week. In the pictures below, left to right, the first four are the Tomato groups. It's nearly time to prune out a bit and get ready for the big growth spurt that will happen as it warms up again later this month... It will warm up again later this month, won't it? Someone said something about global warming... I haven't seen it this week! Oh, anyway, the other herbs are doing well, and the closing picture on the right is of some odd stalk that the Aloe plant has thrown up. Any ideas anyone?

Now to have some supper, then dig into the next chapter. Take'r easy and slow, folks. Have a great evening!

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Good morning. I've quite had my fill. And I did not even get halfway through the inbox this morning before shaking my head and giving up. It's amusing, in a sad sort of way. I usually have trouble taking flame wars and their less-hot bretheren seriously, because there's such comedic value to watching people mis-interpret one another. It's like a Jim Carrey movie, really. It's also generally why I stay out of them, because I am as inclined as anyone to react rather than think.

There is nearly always a watershed point when someone changes the topic from this and that is wrong, to you and you're - that lights the fuse. I know people who do that, just for fun, on a couple of Linux mailing lists I've hung out on in the past, then stand back and watch the fireworks. There's even one sick thing who takes a deranged sort of glee in posting bad Linux news to the SVLUG mailing list, verbatim from their online sources, from the title to the last full stop. And he posts using Microsoft Outlook (which is evident from his X-Headers). Nearly every time, sparks fly. Feh!

Sorry, folks, but I've just deleted whole steaming hunks of thread. No killfiles, but I ain't listening, 'cause all it is, is hot air and rhetoric. Save that stuff for letters to the editor of your local village rag, I'm not interested in a flame-fest, and if I'm lucky, I deleted the worst of it. No, I don't want to know who said what to who - drop all that crap and get back on track.

The good news is that in conjunction with last night's post, I put up Chapter 3 (WARNING - 1.8M with images), then I managed to bang out Chapter 4 before nonnies, mostly because it's small. Thanks for the kind words, like these...

Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 12:59:21 -0500
From: Jacqueline Clark
To: [email protected]
Subject: Brian&Tom's Linux Book
 
Brian,
 
Thank you for making your book available online.  I was really looking
forward to purchasing it, and am delighted to be able to contribute
directly via PayPal.  I find your site entertaining and most valuable as
I am building a new system for Linux SuSE.
 
Best regards,
 
Jackie Clark

Dear Jackie -

Thanks for your kind words. The book was really a joy to bring to
fruition, then a crushing disappointment to have cancelled. We're
glad to know that our work will be of service to you.

Let us know how the SuSE install goes, will you?

regards,
Brian and Tom...

Then there was this (excerpted) ...

From: "Dan Seto" 
To: [email protected]
Subject: Evil Intentions
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 08:37:39 -1000
 
You are evil Bilbrey. Totally evil. Here I'm struggling to keep my head
above water trying to finish my presentation for tonight's class when you go
ahead and release the first couple of chapters of the Torian Bilroid (isn't
that a painful hemroidal condition ) book on OpenLinux.
 
Sheesh. Well, if I don't finish my work I'll have only you to blame. Well,
Tom and you.

 ...

Heh, heh. Mmmmm. Sorry, Dan ... really! Now I must get ready for work - OK, well, I am ready, but my lunch isn't, and the traffic only gets worse as the morning progresses. Y'all have a great day. See you later!

18:25 - Wow. How cool! About 6 or 8 weeks ago, you may remember, I wrote that KDE Themes tutorial as a testing-the-waters sort of project for Studio B. Then today I got an email...

Subject: Tutorials
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 12:03:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: Wladimir Foo <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]

Hello Brian,

Just took a look at the tutorial section I got through IBM. Must say it looks
pretty darn good. If you ever wanted to feature on the Tucows network
(Unixthemes) please let me know. We are in the process of merging the UnixThemes
with our Windows/Mac Theme sites to form one large archive of themes. Take a
look at it and any feedback you may have feel free to let me know.

Best regards and good luck!

Wladimir J. Foo

I wrote back, politely thanking him, then hared off over to the IBM DeveloperWorks site to see what's what. Last time I checked a couple of weeks ago, there wasn't a sign of the tutorial anywhere. Much to my pleasant surprise, the KDE Tutorial is front and center at the top of the DeveloperWorks main page (at this moment, likely to change at any time). To actually look at the thing, you follow the document link to this page. Then there's a registration thingy to be done, I suppose that it can be filled out with a disposable email address, as usual. Hey, this is kinda fun, when it all works right. Warning, those IBM pages load S-L-O-W, even for me with DSL. Dunno what it'll do to a dialup - maybe it's a database-driven server-side delay, YMMV.

Now, I have a whole long list of things to do, starting with making us some supper. It's mexican tonight - burritos and enchiladas. Anyway, have a lovely night, see you tomorrow.

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You may recall the disgust I was expressing yesterday morning over the contents of my inbox ... well, the carnage evidently continued, and you can get the same picture of the current situation as I now have by reading Bob Thompson's post for this morning. Clearly I missed a thing or two while I was busy deleting the threads rather than reading them, but this puts the mailing list shutdown in a whole new light... My feeling on our association was expressed in another (slightly less) contentious exchange a couple of weeks ago, when I sent a message intended to moderate things a bit, including the following:

A personal note. I don't *ever* expect this bunch of intelligent,
opinionated individualists to agree on much of anything. The way I
look at it, while I might disagree with any one of y'all on any
individual matter, I would trust you to understand and fairly
represent me should I give you my proxy on any matter whatsoever.
Community be hanged, such concepts as loyalty and honor may appear
to be outmoded in this latter dissipated day and age, but you - you I
trust. That's what makes our association special for me.

Also, I miss having the resource that the list represents, as well as an easy channel of communication with the other Daynoters. Chris, what was written by another shouldn't have been said. I hope that you can come "home" again.

I didn't get any further on the book formatting last night. Instead, I went to find a preserved email, and found that my pre-sort mailbox (that place where I stash email from all of my accounts for storage by topic or something else) was full to overflowing. So instead of doing anything else, I simply spent the evening sorting the mail properly. It'd only take me 10 minutes each Saturday or Sunday to do, but I had rather ... let it go. Now it's done, and maybe I'll remember for a few weeks, eh?

Off to work with me now, where I have first to run a little experiment on a CAT5e patch module, then I am going to design a new breakout panel for as DS3 channelizer product (DS3 in, (28) T1 out), this panel will provide wire management for patching the T1 lines. Meantime, y'all have a lovely day!

18:05 - Well, I am back. Busy installing Progeny Debian 1.0 on Gryphon, formatting Chapter 5 for Tom and Brian's Linux Book (online and free), and keeping an eye on the email...

From: [email protected]
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 20:24:44 EDT
Subject: Back Chanel
To: [email protected]
X-Mailer: AOL 6.0 for Windows US sub 10519
 
Brian,
I am sending this to several "Daynoters"(TM) It is a post I made on my NRFPT
site tonight. I do it this way because I will not send an attachment.
    OK, I think I can form an opinion now. I am NOT a member of the 
www.daynotes.com "Back Channel" I am not good enough, smart enough,
literate enough, nor do I have the requisite knowledge to join. Hell, I
wanted to drill out a hard drive! Now, we have grown men, flaming each other
like children. Do I support discussion? Yes. Do I encourage the exchange of
opinion? Yes. Do I support personal attacks on others? No.
    I see true contrition that the argument got out of hand. I see true hurt.
I see ignoring the situation. I see anger. I see intelligent men trying to
salve their pride instead of doing what should be done.
    I see a young man rising above the fray. Twice in a week. And I wonder if
the young are truly better than we, the older ones are.  I have seen this
group go from about four or five people to it's present twenty-seven. I am
disappointed in see the feet of clay.
    I have seen this wonderful collection of individuals help one of their
own - no questions asked. I have also seen them help a small reader with a
REALLY dumb idea. All through the "Back Channel". One would call another and
then the ideas would start flowing.
    As a consumer of the information, I want this exchange of ideas
continued. As a short time member, I felt that I was part of a community of
ideas. I tried to contribute and learn. We, as a world community must be
above this crap. By we, I mean all of us, producers and consumers. I will be
mailing this to certain parties.
 
I think this says all that I can. (See what I mean about not having talent?)
John Vogt
Rochester, NY
 
PS: Use as you will - no copyright)

John -
 
Thanks for the message, the thought, and the intent. Honestly, I
don't know what to say. Some of the behaviour I've seen would do a
Microsoft slam-fest on Slashdot justice. I think the way things have
come down to date suck, and I dislike that.
 
I frequently don't respond to emails right away (or sometimes at
all), when I am likely to put my foot in it. I believe that emails
should be written as though I'm sitting across the dinner table from
the recipient(s), rather than as a grenade-throwing contest.
 
::sigh:: My jaw has *dropped* so many times in the last couple of
days that it just aches. Maybe it'll work itself out. Most kinks in
a community do, one way or another.
 
Matt says this so much better...
 
Thanks,
 
.brian

No, I am not happy about events of the last few days on the back channel. I've played the mediator before on the list, and been ignored. Not rebuffed, just ignored. Then I counselled patience to Tom, figuring this would peter out. But instead it went over the top. I can merely wait and see what shakes out. Today, I saw the sorriest excuse for an apology I've ever seen in my life. I couldn't reply to it, because my only words were nothing I want to inflict on anyone. A pox on the whole pissing match.

Now I want to work on something fun for a while. So I am going to get into the install, and the formatting. I'll post a bit later when I get Chapter 5 up. Ta.

22:25 - Hey, back again... OK. Brian and Tom's Linux Book update - Chapter 5, Installation Troubleshooting is now up. Remember that while the book is nominally "about" Caldera's OpenLinux product, much (or dare I say most) of the material is either generic or easily generalizable to other distributions. Now it's time for dessert, then nonnies. See ya tomorrow!

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Briefly, because I have a horrendous busy day ahead of me. The experiment I did on the patch panel was interesting, but only just. Since we can't actually build the thing that way in production quantities, it simply doesn't matter that the NEXT and FEXT (near-end and far-end crosstalk) numbers were bloody marvelous. But it did give me a couple of pointers for things I can try that will be transferrable to manufacturing, if they work. Mmmm.

Then I got 9/10ths of the way through that T1 breakout panel design - (2) 64 pin Telco connectors and (28) RJ45 connectors all in a one RU space. A few more traces, a bit of verification, and a new front panel design (sheet metal) complete that job. I won't finish this morning, but it'll all be done by tomorrow noon.

Today I have DMV first - it's license time again. The last two were automatic renewals. Then I have lunch with a pair of friends that I used to work with when I was at Nellcor, all those years ago. Maybe we'll be eating burgers at Pete's Harbor in San Carlos, if they haven't already bulldozed the joint. Otherwise it may be Canyon Inn. We'll see. Finally, I have to head down and visit Nick, our accountant. It's time to pick up the taxes. ::sigh:: Doesn't quite break the bank, but I am not happy. Oh, well.

As I posted late last night, Chapter 5, Installation Troubleshooting is now up. Remember that while the book is nominally "about" Caldera's OpenLinux product, much (or dare I say most) of the material is either generic or easily generalizable to other distributions. I'm watching the hits on this site and the mirror up on Hydras at Tom's. I'm glad that y'all are finding this book useful.

Now it's time for me to run. Have a lovely day!

15:48 - Did I do that??? I now have no idea if there was a post up this morning. I wrote it, but I don't know if I clicked on all the right twiddly bits to post both at the Syroid Manor mirror and here. I flipped screens when I got home, saw the ssh prompt, and typed the password, without looking - It appears that I had no post this am, though really, really I did. Sorry, if so.

A successful day so far - With just a bit of a hitch, I got my driving license renewed. Lunch with Mary and Richelle was nice - a great burger joint is Pete's Harbor. Take the Whipple Road exit in San Carlos off the 101, east towards the bay, wind past the dealerships and auto repair places, then past the yuppie pads (cracker box condos-R-US) until you get to the end of the road, at the marina. There's Pete's Harbor and the restaurant. Order a Big Toot (double bacon cheeseburger on a french roll, fries and condements - altogther about 4,000 calories) - Marvelous!

Then I picked up the tax work from Nick, and here I am. Anyway, on to the next thing - I'm trying for KDE 2.1.1 on Progeny, and it isn't going very well, mostly because I'm stupid. Don't update a library you're using, take it from me. So, see you later, p'raps.

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Good morning on this Good Friday. Is that ... offset by the fact that it's Friday the Thirteenth? Perhaps, perhaps. On my rock-station-of-choice, KFOG, when the 13th day of a month falls on a Friday, it's time to play hits from Hell on 10 at 10 (a standard weekday musical feature). You know, Carpenters, stuff from the Disco era, things like that. However, today, in honor of Good Friday, they're going to play covers from Hell - you know, songs that have been resurrected <g>. I imagine that I'll be frightened to hear things like Bill Shatner's Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and other tasty choices from the back and the bottom of the rack. If you want to listen to this online, check out KFOG.com - it's on the air at 10AM and 10PM PDT.

Next, I had an interesting piece of mail on the topic of the KDE tutorial that I wrote for IBM...

Subject:Building KDE Themes for Linux
From: Waldo Bastian <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 16:53:23 -0700

Hi Brian,

Being responsible for large parts of KDEs theme manager I thought I dropped 
you a mail.

"With the introduction of the long awaited KDE 2.0, themes somehow ... 
disappeared. All of the features that were configured by installing a
theme are still present. And there are additional configuration 
possibilities, in droves. So what happened?"

Well, nothing. We were all very busy with getting a more or less stable KDE 
2.0 out and nobody had ported that poor theme manager yet. Since it isn't a 
critical part of KDE (nothing else depends on it) we decided to release 2.0 
without it. In 2.1 we corrected that situation.

For some reason I seem to be the maintainer of the theme manager which is 
really an unfortunate situation since I am probably one of the most boring 
and least creative persons out there. That's probably also the reason why all 
those cool features have disappeared from it. I'm still hoping someone more 
creative will take it over one day :-]

On a  more serious note, the configuration of the "button order" has been 
removed from the themes since I think that this is a change to the interface 
that should be decided by the user and not by a theme. Related to that, it is 
unfortunate that KDE 2.x comes with window decorations with fixed but 
different button orders. I hope that the button order will become fully 
configurable again and that all decorations will honour these settings.

As far as fonts go. I am currently considering to add the possibility to 
install fonts as part of a theme as well. That has some implications though, 
e.g. what if someone accidently uses a font that came with a theme in his 
kword document and then installs another font? Should the font get 
uninstalled together with the theme? Should fonts that comes with themes be 
excluded from the regular font selections dialogs? If you have any ideas in 
that direction, let me know.

As far as the theming of other applications goes. The author of the 
application has to provide the theming possibilities, after that its relative 
simple to add support for it in the theme manager. So I think it is not too 
much work to add theming of the panel in the theme manager as well (again).

What else... ah the lack of a theme-howto. Yes that's unfortunate. I really 
had planned to write something about the new theme manager but you might know 
that developers tend to be slightly allergic to eveything that resembles 
writing documentation. So that's still on my todo list... somewhere. Maybe 
you might want to help me a bit with that, since you obviously are much 
better in writing (english) stuff than I am. I can provide you with all the 
technical details of course. The basic things are this:

* In KDE 2.x themes use a .ktheme extension. It's just matter of renaming the 
.tar.gz into .ktheme, but by that they automatically get detected as being of 
mimetype "application/x-ktheme". Now we only need a nice icon for that 
mimetype. (So many things still todo...)

* As far as the "revised" format goes. All old themes should still work, at 
least those parts of it that we support.

* The name= and description= field still work but have been depreciated.
The recommended way is to use Name= and Comment=. Thanks to KDE's i18n 
infrastructure, you can then provide e.g. 
Name=english name of theme.
Name[de]=german name of theme.

Same for 'Comment'. (This is mostly for the sake of completeness because I 
doubt that anyone will actually provide translated names for his/her theme. 
Besides, translating "Sandra Bullock" or "Southpark'" is rather useless :-] )

* The secret of the theme manager is the theme.mappings file. It's a bit 
cryptic, but it defines how an entry in the themerc file gets translated into 
a KDE setting. So the theme.mappings file is probably the most accurate 
documentation of the possibilities of KDE themes at any given time.

Factoid: Thanks to a patch form "Divide by Zero" (see what I mean with being 
boring, I don't have such a cool nickname), the theme manager will support MS 
Windows themes as well in KDE 2.2.

And now on to make KDE 2.2alpha1....

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
[email protected] | SuSE Labs KDE Developer | [email protected]

Hi, Waldo -

Thanks for the missive. I'll tell you what - let me calendar a
reminder to get back in touch with you in a month's time, or perhaps
a bit more...

Tom Syroid and myself wrote a Linux book with a Caldera twist to it
last year, and we were a week from the printing press when
$LARGE_PUBLISHER cancelled on us. So right now I am busy formatting
the thing for web publication (you can find it hanging off my site,
see the .sig).

I'd be happy to contribute to the KDE doc effort. I'll be in
contact.  Meantime, thanks for the update - I'll post it on my site
for reference.

regards, .brian

Mmmm, yeah. Interesting. I have some more thinking to do on that fonts issue. Regarding the book formatting, some of you may have noticed a small change or two. It was pointed out to me that the backgrounding made it look too much like just one of my regular site pages, oh, and that the fonts sucked... Now, I like to NOT have a fully white background for when I am reading online - it's considerably easier on my eyes to have some shading in the bg, but not wallpaper. I've changed everything over to a nice conservative set of grays, which I hope is more in line with what we're trying to present here.

About the fonts - I have worked in too many different Linux browsers - Virtually every site that plays any kind of games with fonts ends up making some Linux browsers look like garbage, either because the font was selected from the massive quantities found on yer common Windows workstation doesn't mate up to anything reasonable on Linux, or simply because font rendering on Linux is still really sucky. The latter is unfortunately true, although there's hope on the horizon with the anti-aliasing features that are coming with the latest QT library (or so I hear). Thus, for the book, like my own pages, I specify no fonts at all. The material displays in the default fonts as specified in your browser.

I'm glad to take feedback on this, as Tom is busy on several simultaneous projects once again, so I've taken the lead on getting this material out to you. I'll take any suggestions and run them up the flagpole to him in a batch for quick and easy decision making.

Now it's time for me to hit the road. I have to finish designing that DS3 to T1 breakout panel I've been yammering about, do maintenance on the NT and Linux servers and setup for the regular backups, do the webstats and analysis boogie, and who knows what all else'll drop in my lap in the course of the day! Take care.

17:00 -

Some days I just gotta take a stand,
Right or wrong, this is the spot.
This far and no farther I will go,
though forces beyond my ken
propel and compel me whither I know not.

Nobody wins, but that's not the point.
Really.
But sometimes I wonder...
Did I make a difference?
A tiny difference?

If I had it to do again,
I'd be doing it with foreknowledge,
with fear of the known -
That's worse, you know, 'cause
when I go through the script each time,
each time I die at the end of the second act.

Then I watch from the wings,
as the rest of the thing unfolds.
Happy ending, or tragic, doesn't matter -
I'm not in the game anymore.
Not in the game.

Nobody wins, but that's not the point.
Really.
No, really.

It's definitely a Friday the Thirteenth. And worse, sometimes everybody loses. And that isn't right.

However, like in a tornado, there are forces well beyond my control, and for my own sake, I'm letting go of my upset. I did what I could to help, but now it's time to move on. G'night, Gracie.

Oh, don't worry. I'm not going anywhere. I'm too much of a closet extrovert (if there is such a thing, and it's not too terrible a contradiction in terms) to climb off this soap box yet. Beside, as Jerry said, if I want his job then I have to be able to write a million words and be willing to throw them away. Hopefully my little collection of vowels and consonants continues to appeal to y'all. Now I've got to get back to formatting Chapter 6 of our book (or as John Doucette put it in an email today, "The Book" ... has a nice ring to it, put that way, hey?).

Oh, and I'm compiling the 2.4.3 kernel for use under the nicely running (thank you very much, Matt, for the feedback) Progeny installation. BTW, I didn't bother to load KDE 2.0 from the second installation CDROM, instead I added this line to my sources.list file:

deb http://kde.tdyc.com potato main crypto optional

Then I typed (as root):

gryphon:~# apt-get update 
gryphon:~# apt-get install kdelibs3 kdebase-libs
gryphon:~# apt-get install task-kde

And voilá, There I was at KDE 2.1.1, happy as a clam. All told, about 59M of download, so not for the faint of heart on a dialup line, but it just flies on the DSL.

Anyway, now to get down to work. Have a nice evening, and think good thoughts about what was, what is, and what might have been...

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Good morning. There's a bit of sun streaming in the window through the mini-blinds... I can only assume that this means it's one of those "nice" days out there. Bah humbug, I say - oh, wait, the Patio Farm likes sun and warmer temperatures - OK, it's cool (the metaphorical cool).

Last night saw Chapter 6 of the book Tom and I wrote go online. Yes, yes, yes, I know it would be so much easier and faster just to go straight from Word to HTML, but the resultant code would be so crufty that I can promise you I'd never touch it again. This way I'll be happy to read and write and edit and annotate. Maintenance is the far larger portion of the project budget, most of the time, you know.

The only feedback I got on yesterday's formatting announcement was about the fonts - glad I wasn't changing that, because the unspecified font made the chapters easy to read on a PDA. There may be more than that, but I've lost the message ::sigh::.

Now for breakfast and a cup of coffee. Take care, back atcha later...

20:00 - Chapter 7 of the book, on Linux kernel configuration, compiling and installing, is now available for consumption. My hands are shaking, my eyes are crossed, and it's time to take the evening off. So g'night. See you tomorrow.

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Good morning. I've just sent a long mail out, I'll leave you to your Easter supper with that, and Chapter 7 of Tom and Brian's Linux Book, which I posted late last night...

Subject: Errr...
From: Brian Bilbrey 
To: Daynotes II <address removed>
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 09:54:18 -0700

I'm posting this whole thing online, folks. Replies can be onlist or
private of course, but I want my stance, my words to be public...

Did anyone notice that Camelot just emerged from the mists?

http://www.daynotes.com/ is online.

No, I haven't spoken to Tom - I've offered, but it is up to him (you
, Tom, if you're on the list and not routing to /dev/null) to take 
the next step.

*************

FWIW, you may have noticed that in general, I stayed far back from
the front lines on this one. Now, just to get it out of my system,
let me share a few thoughts on the lead-up, and the current
situation, in no particular order.

Most recently first: On Bob W. supposedly staging a coup... 

         The mailing list is a resource for us, period. If it isn't going
to be provided one way, I am damn glad it's being provided
another. Thank you, Bob. 

         The mirror of daynotes as a link list, and public announcement
of such in the wake of the disappearance of Daynotes.com - helpful,
useful, and justified. It's a service that we as a group provide to
our readers. I get enough refers from Daynotes.com to know that for
truth.

         The registration of daynotes.org and daynotes.net. Redundancy is
a good thing, especially since those actions were taken *after*
daynotes.com was deliberately taken offline. If Tom's line had been
dead, then we could have wondered what was going on. But first the
mailing list was removed from service, then the site (and only that
site, out of three served) was removed from the public eye. That
hurts not us so much as the readers that count on it as an ease of
use resource to get to those daynotes pages that they follow on a
regular basis.

         To my way of thinking, a coup is defined as someone who is
displaced from doing a job that they wanted to keep doing. If
someone removes themselves from providing a service, well, then (to
renew the flames of our environmental conversations of late )
nature abhors a vacuum, eh? More directly, Bob and John are working
to provide a resource for the group, and for the group's readers.
Until this morning, there was no indication that there would ever be
choice three again. And honestly, there's nothing indicating that it
won't be withdrawn again...

Now for the bit I'll draw some heat over:

         Tom was perfectly within his rights to do what he did. It's his
machine, his resources, his bandwidth. Period. What grief he went
through over this whole thing, what emotions and agonies, are his,
too. I don't envy him them. 

         Ethically, morally ...? In effect, Tom told a group of neighbors
that he didn't want them to congregate and chat in his back yard
anymore, and that he wasn't part of the group anymore, and that he
was withdrawing the shingle that declared him to be part of the
group. OK. He can do that.

         This doesn't mean that we can't all hang out in someone else's
back yard! As Bob T. noted, the 'Net routes around censorship, and
perceived censorship. If Tom, or anyone else is upset at that, then
what they were expecting was that Tom's hardware, bandwidth and
feelings control the very existence of Daynotes. Errr... say what?

**********

I love Tom and his family dearly - we've been through a lot
together, and as a group we went through a lot with Tom during
Landon's problems. This doesn't mean I agree with everything Tom
says or does (jeez, wouldn't that be boring). But I miss him, I miss
his "voice" as found on these back channel missives, as written on
his pages, on the phone.

Life goes on, the 'Net goes on, and Bob W. - don't give up the
cause. A nasty mail or two causing you to give up sounds an awful
lot like what just happened, eh? OTOH, I understand. If y'all want
me to pick up the torch, just try to hand it to me by the unlit end,
OK? 

.brian  

-- 
Brian Bilbrey :: [email protected] :: www.orbdesigns.com
    "In times of great joy, it is a comfort to know
         that tragedy is just around the corner." -  An Irish proverb

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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.