Site Map
Current Week
Daynotes Gang
Orb Designs Grafitti
April 16 through April 22, 2001
Last Week <-- * --> Next Week
--> Link to the Current Week <--
Email Brian Bilbrey | Orb Home Site Map Current Week Daynotes Gang |
Orb Designs Grafitti
|
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. Well, the taxes are gone, the cupboards are bare - nay, barren - as my needy Uncle Sam has once again hit me up for monies over and beyond what I give him every two weeks. The bit that galls me is the Social Security stuff which everyone, including the normally 7-faced politicians, admits is going to be bankrupt ... just about the time that stinking pittance might come in useful. Right now it shows as paying around $1800/month if I retire at 70. Now that's not likely, given my family history, but right now, that amount wouldn't pay the rent on a move-in-today two bedroom apartment in this complex. Feh!
Well, harumph. I was starting to get exercised over that one, wasn't I? <g> Anyway, in other news, I made some more progress on Tom and Brian's Linux Book over the weekend. While I can't remember for sure, I think it was Chapter 6 up on Friday night, Chapter 7 up on Saturday night. Then as I went through, I decided that I didn't like the formatting of many of the images, which I had rather run roughshod over, in my glee at getting the materiel out to you. I've also done the balance of the Word to Text conversions, so I shouldn't have any further reason to boot into the Windows partition.
You see, I can easily open and read the documents in Abiword, but the DOC to text conversion is less than stellar for one reason only - smart quotes. I started out my end of the writing without them, because so many coding examples want double and single quotes as typed, rather than mated right and left quotes that don't translate properly - especially mistaking a left single quote for a left tick. But I was quickly put into my place by the editors at $LARGE_PUBLISHER, who needed smart quotes. So, like some FrontPage gubbage that appears on my browser from time to time, the smart quotes all translate to '?'.
So I booted into Win2K yesterday, fired up Word, popped in the Book backup CDR, and proceeded to open the remaining chapters and appendicies, and save them out as text, since word does the "smart" to regular quote conversion OK - all I have to do is acknowledge that I am losing valuable formatting data with each export to text format... heh heh.
I've run into one problem this weekend. You may recall that I am running a Beta of Mandrake 8.0, let me check: yup, Beta 2. Twice the system caused me problems this weekend. First time, just the display froze, then gave a little shimmy and disappeared, coming back with the GDM login prompt. X had reset. Yeah, I lost about half an hour's work there.
The second time, the display froze as it did the first time. This round though, no reset. The machine was hard-locked. While I might have been able to kill the process that was causing the problem, that would have required me to be able to access the box. Often when I have had this sort of problem (often in the sense that I am always testing beta software on this machine), I can login from one of my other machines via ssh and kill the rogue process by hand. Not this time.
I think it's XMMS, the player I use for the MP3 collection. I'll forgo music for a few days, and see how things go. It may be time to take this machine to a stable distribution... I really don't need 2.4.x on this box, like I do on the laptop.
And with that, time's up. I need to hit the road, so y'all have a great day. I'll see you later!
20:07 - Evenin' It's nice to be back, and home. I slept in both days this weekend, and the payback for that relaxation was that I had grave difficulty getting to sleep last night. I was up until after midnight, which isn't high on my fun list when the alarm goes off each day at 5:30. Oh, well. I shouldn't have too much trouble sleeping tonight.
I received a confirmation that XMMS was the probable bad guy in my weekend system lockups:
Subject: XMMS From: Kershner, Jim Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 16:32:25 -0500 I think that you will find that your culprit is XMMS. I have had nothing but grief with it using either as a MP3 player or a streaming audio player. Under Mandrake 7.1 it continually locks up to the point of having to kill the process or in playing streams it continually drops the stream were my employees running Windows and Winamp have no problems at all. Not good for someone who is trying to push more Linux into the workplace. Jim Kershner MIS Director www.wizardskeep.org/mainhall/journal Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
Hi, Jim. Yeah, as I noted, that's my suspicion, too. I can easily swap to Kmp3 for playback. Not so sure about streaming though, not that I do a lot of that. ... Every time there's another windows virus/worm, I get a little closer to bringing the company around. There's only one "gotta have" app, and it's our Visual MFG system - I wonder if they haven't ported to *NIX. I suppose I oughtta look one of these days. .b
Have a look at that message from Jim - you'll note that he is keeping a journal. Actually, he has been for several months now, from the look of things. Check him out. But you can probably forgive him for the broken link into my site... I do <g>.
Then, over on the recent kernel traffic (for 16 April 2001), there's a message to Linux and kernel developers, purportedly from Linus, but then, who's to know for sure. Do pay attention to the date on that message - the KT covers two weeks...
OK. Enough fun. I've been (theoretically) busy helping Tom out by reviewing a nice bit of writing he's done for the IBM Developer Works site, on securing a Linux Box. Keep your eyes peeled over there - he's got some good info you'll be wanting to have.
G'night. See you tomorrow.
Top / Site Map / Orb Home / Email to Bilbrey
Hello. Yup, I was right. No problems falling asleep last night. I don't actually remember hitting the pillow - I may still have been in transit <g>. Also, I didn't get jack-diddly done on book formatting last night; I was just too wiped out.
However, I did do some pruning and configuring on the Progeny Debian installation that's running on Gryphon the Acer Laptop. So far, this configuration appears to be quite solid. By the way, a major point in Progeny's favor is that it was the first distro to automatically pick up that there was a device at /dev/ps2 (the touchpad) and /dev/input/mouse (where the USB Intellimouse is found), configure and make use of both simultaneously. Sometimes in typing, it's handy to just use the touchpad, rather than trekking all the way over there to use the mouse. Additionally, the touchpad still works, even if the mouse isn't present. The only thing I'm not sure of is reliablility of hot-plugging the mouse. I think that worked, once, but I'm not sure. I wasn't testing for that.
The other issue with Gryphon is that it goes where I do. This means that it lives on multiple networks, and I don't like having to open up a bunch of GUI tools just to edit the network settings each time I go from work to home or vice-versa. So I setup copies of the pertinent files (/etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/network/interfaces, yup, that latter is different than in a RH derived setting) configured for the home and office environments respectively. Then I wrote a pair of scripts. Each script shuts down networking, links the specific network files to their generic names (for instance: ln -sf /etc/network/interfaces.office /etc/network/interfaces), then restart networking.
Now that's work for root, but I neither want nor need to have root access just to run a config script for my own purposes, on my own laptop. But instead of giving the scripts SETUID so that they run as root, instead I installed and configured sudo. Sudo lets you do access control by user and program, with or without password protection. So when I get to work, I merely type sudo netoffice, and the script runs, voila!
Ooops! Time's up. I have some organization to take care of before Albert comes in to clean today. Meantime, take care of yourselves and each other. Questions about the above? Send them, I'll see what I can do to be clearer this evening. Buh-bye.
17:40 - Howdy. Yup, I'm back, but only briefly - it's time to get back to formatting The Book. I have all of Chapter 8's images processed (26 of them). It's an intro to KDE chapter... KDE 1.2 ::sigh:: a bit behind the times, I know, but for now this is what you get. There's a 2.0 sneak preview chapter we wrote last fall, and one of us will probably do somthing on KDE 2.2 when it comes out (skipping over the 2.1.x series to play catch up).
The Patio Farm ? is doing fine, thanks. Maybe some pix tomorrow. However, before I shelve them, I thought I'd share with you my recent reading list:
At the bedside now are Farnham's Freehold, another RAH classic, and Linux Journal. And now I see on the Studio B site a reference to a speech by Doug Adams. Like I didn't already have enough to do. Sheesh. Thanks for the pointer, Tom!
Now to work with me. I'll be back, at least to announce my progress, or that another chapter's out and ready! Later...
20:55 - OK. The next in line, Chapter 8, is online. That makes 10 elements out of a total 31 (counting 27 Chapters, 3 Appendices and a Preface, not counting the Table of Contents). That reminds me, Tom or I ought to ask Moshe one of these days if we can use the forward he graciously wrote for us, back when this project was going to be committed to dead treeware.
SERVICE ALERT!!! I am told by Speakeasy that bringing the new DS3 online in the SF POP will result in improved service for our line, which is among those transitioning to the new pipe. This also means a service interruption, currently slated for 7 to 9 am tomorrow. If this happens after I leave for the day, and the modem doesn't resync, then that's it until I get home in the afternoon. Be warned.
Now I have a little job to do for Barbara Thompson, then I'm going to close down for the night. Take care and see you tomorrow.
Top / Site Map / Orb Home / Email to Bilbrey
Good morning. First a repeat from last night's news...
**********
SERVICE ALERT!!! I am told by Speakeasy that bringing the new DS3 online in the SF POP will result in improved service for our line, which is among those transitioning to the new pipe. This also means a service interruption, currently slated for 7 to 9 am tomorrow. If this happens after I leave for the day, and the modem doesn't resync, then that's it until I get home in the afternoon. Be warned.
**********
Now for a bit of new reader mail:
Subject: Progeny guest in VMware From: "Tim Tipple" Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 22:20:09 -0500 Hi Brian, I discovered orbdesigns.com by searching google for "progeny vmware" as I'm trying to kick the Progeny tires on my laptop within the safety-net of VMware for Windows 2000. All seems fine except that I am having some trouble configuring X-Window. I've previously installed several RedHat and Mandrake versions within VMware and have always chosen Generic VGA compatible initially then switched to using VMware tools later. I see from your Feb. log that you had problems with Progeny beta on your laptop and were in the process of installing it within VMware - did you have any luck with this? I know that you finally got it to install outside VMware but how about within? I would be glad to hear of any success or failure reports in this area. Cheers! -TimT.
Subject: Re: Progeny guest in VMware To: Tim Tipple Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 20:46:39 -0700 Hi, Tim - Thanks for reading... and writing. Let's see, now: Mmmm. I've never used VMware on the laptop. What sort of problems are you experiencing? Did everything look OK through the first stage installation? If so, is the problem cropping up when setting up the X-Server in the second stage install? From what I can remember of that, it seemed that VMware presents a chameleon's face to the installer, and Progeny, which is apparently doing some pretty aggressive probing, becomes easily confused when all the answers are "yes". You might just want to resort to a dual boot, in this circumstance... I don't think I ever resolved it to my satisfaction. Don't know how much help that is, but there you go... regards, .brian
Subject: Re: Progeny guest in VMware From: "Tim Tipple" Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 23:21:24 -0500 Brian, Thanks for such a prompt reply.... From your comments on http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/2001/z20010205.html it sounds like you were installing Progeny inside VMware on your laptop due to installer problems with the laptop video sub-system; but after re-reading it I can see that you must have been speaking about two different machines there. Anyway, the problem I am experiencing is just after the stage two starts: it reports that it could not auto-detect my graphics hardware - which seems a bit strange as stage one performed its duties without so much as a murmer. From a little digging at the VMware support site, it seems that XFree86 4.x is not yet supported (no SVGA server included) so that is probably the cause of my troubles. They have some information on how to install/config a suitable driver but I can't see how I would be able to use that untilo after the installation is complete. I think that I will attempt a dual boot instead; keeping my Windows 2000 CD ready in case disaster strikes - again. Last time I tried to install Progeny rc1 on this laptop, GRUB overwrote the NT boot loader which was a bit inconvenient... I shall pay closer attention to the GRUB setup this time. Thanks for your comments and ideas, -TimT.
After which I pointed out that both Grub and Lilo (the two contenders for the Linux bootloader crown) have no problems with acting as boot manager for a Win2K partition. The only real problem child for these is WindowsNT, which really wants it's own bootloader. For that, I've installed lilo in the Linux boot partition, rather than the MBR, then used the NT bootloader to call Lilo.
In other news, Samba 2.2.0 is formally released. From Jeremy Alison, here is the press release, and the technical release notes, but be patient, their server looks to be a little busy this morning.
It's time for me to organize and move on into the day. Y'all have a lovely one, yourselves. I'll catch up with you later. Meantime, check out Chapter 8 of The Book - posted last night. Take care!
18:45 - Evenin'... Now we know what Speakeasy means by a "nominal" downtime - about 2 hours. All in all, not too bad. I came home at about 11:30, and have been working steadily on the ETS site upgrade that got sidelined last fall. A couple of new ideas gelled, and I've implemented them enough to get a sample up in front of the boss tomorrow.
Also tomorrow, I've got a possible Linux gig to check out, I'll let you know how it goes.
Tonight, I have some more dev work I want to do, as well as a major software upgrade to Galileo (the Agenda Computing VR3d)... Apparently the handwriting recognition stuff has been majorly worked over, and is supposed to be much better now. I'm champing at the bit on this one...
Right now, supper's ready (as Phil Collins is wont to say, from time to time), so I am outta here. Have a great evening!
Top / Site Map / Orb Home / Email to Bilbrey
Good morning. I've been through most of the overnight email, forwarded bits to this account and that account, saved one for a rainy day, but just read most of them with interest, filed the information away in the little gray cells, and punched delete. Now I won't necessarily remember what I read. However, I will remember a thing was written about, and that it was done. As someone said about atomic weapons, just knowing the thing can be done is more than half the job. All the rest is tech work, especially if you have good web search skills, and the resources of a good mailing list or two.
That's only a bit of a red herring - I didn't actually get around to working on the formatting of our Linux Book last night. I worked until about 7 on the ETS website remodel, trying to work the list prices into an attractive, yet useful, format that complements the minimal product data and links to the PDF data sheets. Mmmm. Tricky. I'll probably have a new set of samples up over the weekend, in the testing zone of this site.
So, on the plate for today, Jack and I are having lunch with one of our board members regarding a couple of new product concepts, then this afternoon I am going to meet with some people about maybe some Linux/admin work. We'll see how that goes, wish me luck.
With that, I'll call it a post, short as it is, and head onto the road. Tonight, I'll put up an update on Galileo (the Agenda Linux handheld) - the upgrade went well last night. For now, let me check conditions (it was raining last night!): dry roads, gray sky, but it looks more foggy than cloudy. Mmmm. Anyway, have a lovely day, I'll see y'all later!
Top / Site Map / Orb Home / Email to Bilbrey
TGIF. I know that I sure appreciate it. The meeting I had yesterday afternoon about some systems and webdev stuff appeared to go well, we'll know more next week. Also the product concept I came up with for ETS to do a modular, rackmount panelized version of many of the Video and Audio Baluns seems to have gone over well. Now to do a couple of reference designs for the actual modules and mounting frame.
Tonight niece Natalie comes in via train. We'll pick her up and head out to dinner, probably at Hunan Gourmet down in Murphy Square here in Sunnyvale - excellent Chinese cuisine. I don't know how much "free" time I have this weekend, some tomorrow in the AM and early afternoon. During that span, I'll try to crank out a couple more chapters for posting.
On the Agenda front, they're releasing images fast and furious, getting ready for the consumer release, which is theoretically on next Monday. Hmmmm. We'll see about that. Actually, nearly all of the functionality is there, in both the applications and the HWR is much, much better. But there are a few kinks left to work out, and still no sign of the synchronization software. For me, I can just use rsync to back up the data to my laptop and desktop. Tell that to a suit running Win2K and LookOut.
Currently I am running the 4/17 root disk, there have been two releases since then, which are supposed to pick up several of the remaining bugs... maybe today I'll upgrade again. Now to work with me. Take care, maybe see you later, probably tomorrow.
Top / Site Map / Orb Home / Email to Bilbrey
Good Morning! My brain is currently running in compound low, so I'll be mercifully brief, and then back later...
Last night I was reading Doc Searls on the topic of .Net, Hailstorm, passport and the like, coming our way courtesy of Microsoft. So I figure, what the heck, and type www.passport.com into Konqueror (the KDE file manager and browser - an excellent tool - and come up with this...
Microsoft JScript runtime error '800a138f' 'aszSplitHTTPLANG[...]' is not an object /UTILS/SetLCID.asp, line 78
This page works in Nutscrape, so I think that it's Konqueror that isn't up to snuff. Shucks. You mean I don't have the opportunity to give MS all of my personal and private information directly? You know and I know that they buy, sell, trade and merge the info all the time. But still, mmmmm?
Last night was fine, picking up Natalie... except her train was late, and the SJ train station is across from the stree from the Shark Tank (aka the newly-rebranded Compaq Arena), where Bono, The Edge and their buddies were playing a couple of sets. It was a ZOO! We got Natalie finally, and got out of there. Headed up to Hunan Gourmet, where we had egg rolls, pot stickers, Kung Pao chicken/beef/prawns, snow peas and chicken, and Marcia's favorite green beans and shredded pork dish. Yup - way, way too much food. Lots of left-overs for this weekend.
Now to go get some coffee, and see what's going on with the download - I'm fetching down Mandrake 8.0 release. I've got all of the extras disc already, and something failed overnight on the installation disc, so I've had to start over with that. See y'all later.
15:47 - A brief update, then back to work... So far, using Mandrake 8.0 is simply stellar. Period. All the rough spots from the betas appear to be gone, there's an excellent installation HTML tutorial with sychronous GIF (hawk, spit) slide shows presenting a great howto - the install is fast and clean, there are nice reasonable package sets to choose from, followed by the ability to fine tune one package at a time, with automatic dependency checking that seems to work.
And yes, font anti-aliasing is present on the desktop. Fonts still aren't as good as on a Windows box, but this is a huge leap forward in continuing readability. I have some more widges and squidges to get into place to make this box mine, but all in all, I am terribly impressed. This will probably displace Progeny on Gryphon, and even Mandrake 6.2 on my workstation at work... yeah, I know, but I count on that box, and I've got better than a year of continuous uptime on my desktop box at work - amazing, isn't it?
I have a bit more to do with this, then I am back into formatting Chapter 9 - there's lots of graphics in this one, which makes it a bit more of a chore than the straight text formatting versions. More on Mandrake 8.0 as I continue to work with it. Later...
Top / Site Map / Orb Home / Email to Bilbrey
Good morning! More family stuff today, but I got Chapter 9 done and online yesterday, so check it out.
Gotta a lot to do today, so I'll see you tomorrow.
I guess you could call that previous entry a lie... since clearly, I am back. We had a fun day - I spent a bunch of time playing with Alex and Robbie, always an exhausting yet fulfilling pastime. When we got home, Natali and Marcia settled in to watch the Oscar-winning Wide Mouthed Frog (kudo's to Dr. K for that moniker - ruined her for me, of course) in that Erin Brockovich thingy. So I got to work on YAC (Yet Another Chapter) of Tom & Brian's Linux Book. The latest offering on the block is now Chapter 10, about a few selected KDE applications.
Now it's time for some cake and ice cream, then I have a mission to teach the two young women how Trivial Pursuit is correctly played. So with that, I'll leave you to enjoy your evening.
Top / Site Map / Orb Home / Email to Bilbrey
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.