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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.
::sigh:: My troubles are as nothing, still they vex me. Keep reading [oops, see this] - that's one strong little warrior there. And Jan Svenson keeps slogging through - first his dad, then his dad's SO... now, a week after his father's significant other dies, his brother's father-in-law has passed away. As Jan put it (with his usual understated humor), "It does not seem to be a good time to be related to me or my brother." Mmmm. Take care, Jan, if there's anything at all... you know.
Oh, yeah, back to me (heh heh) - I have webstats pages that are auto-hosing. The stats for Marcia's pages, and those for my missionary inlaws the Spoelhofs, are resetting themselves to zero for the current month's data on an irregular basis, and have been doing so for about a week now. I use Webalizer, it's been running flawlessly, and I've changed nothing. Stumped am I, for the moment.
The new Talkabout mailing list continues to grow - we're into 6 figures, if you count four of the zeros to the right of the decimal place <g>! I think the goal of the list is to provide a resource for readers of this page who have questions, probably mostly about Linux, but gardening, salsa and other topics are fine, too. And I am not the oracle, list members can post and answer each other, though I am sure to pitch in my two cents worth. You can subscribe too, either from the page linked above, or use this mail link right here to start the subscription process. No cost, no advertising, and I think I can promise that, unlike the Linux kernel-dev mailing list, you won't get overwhelmed by the message traffic.
Now to water the Patio Farm, and hit the road towards work. Y'all have a great day.
18:35 - ... My apologies, but Perky-R-not-US this evening. I definitely feel like I am coming down with something buggish - a screaming right side of my head headache, fevery and not at all pleasant to be around. I'll probably bail out of this little back room and get some TV time in, something to relax in front of.
However, before I leave you to it, I thought I'd share a couple of tidbits I ran across today. Most important from my perspective, I came across the solution to my rsync using ssh problem, thanks to an SVLUG email from Rick Moen - This page at VA This page in the copy of the former VA Knowledge base, hosted by Rick Moen, discusses the problem (shortly, large files lock up the rsync/ssh combo, hard), and the range of solutions available. If you use rsync and ssh to make local network backups, as I often do, both here and at the mines, this is some seriously good info, folks. (Link above fixed thanks to an email from Rick on 20021116)
Then there's a couple of humor items to wrap with... first this, on furbeowulf clusters, then Silly Admin... So have a good evening, I am off to dinner, then rest. TTFN.
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Good morning. That may have helped a bit - We watched Antiques Roadshow (US version), and something hosted by Sandy Duncan, a ballroom dancing competition. Bed by 10-ish. Still not feeling like the sharpest knife in the drawer, unfortunately - the headache is still there, though reduced. I think I'll save my limited energy for work, and cut this one short for now. I'm sure that I'll feel better, and have something interesting or two for you later in the day. In the meantime, hasta la vista.
18:45 - ::sigh:: We knew that this day was coming, and sooner rather than later... [oops, see this] Kaycee Nicole left us behind yesterday, headed for greener pastures. Rest easy Kaycee, knowing you fought your best. While your body was bowed, then finally broken, your spirit overcame all obstacles, reaching out to touch lives and hearts the world over. We laughed and cried with you - live on in our hearts and memories, Kaycee Nicole, that we might not forget that there is love and beauty and strength and joy in the world. Thank you, dear. Oh, and say hi to Mike for us, Kaycee.
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Now let's talk about growing things for a few... The herbs are doing very well, as you can see from the leftmost pictures above. The Parsley seems particularly lush, and third-time's-a-charm-Basil appears to finally have taken hold. The Tomatoes, which dominate the center of the grouping, are also shooting up like weeds. I've got fruit started on every plant, I think. It'll be a good summer for these, it appears. The Lettuce, pictured at right, is straggling along. I'm not sure about how well that's going to do. The Peas... well, Marcia had 40 peas the other night, and I think that'll be the extent of that - I took out 2 of the 6 that dried in place the other day, and while the other four plants are alive, they aren't doing much of anything - no suckers, no flowers - fairly static, really. Hmmm. We'll see - maybe it's time to replace them with something else!
Tidbits from the Linux side of the fence - first this excerpt from the linux-elitists list, on eliminating that annoying favicon.ico from Konqueror:
Aaron wrote:
I asked on #kde, and for awhile the best responses I got were
"MSIE does it, deal with it", "Ignore the log entries", and "Just
install some favicon.ico file on your server". Not very in touch
with the issue, indeed.
After awhile someone offered some insight:
aaronl: well, there is a way, the GUI option to turn
it off has been removed as people agreed that's too overconfigurable
But I also did finally learn how to turn it off.
aaronl: ~/.kde/share/config/konquerorrc, section
[HTML Settings], put in a line "EnableFavicon=false" (no quotes)
Thanks to Rick Moen for bringing that one to my eyes, courtesy of the SVLUG mailing list. ( Rick's sig today reads: "'Teach a man to make fire, and he will be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.' -- John A. Hrastar" hehheehheheeeeeh). Then a link to an article on using Rsync crossed my path - Learn to use and love Rsync, it rocks!
With that, I bid you good night - take care and I'll see you again tomorrow.
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Good morning. Why, you ask? Well, I figure that any morning I wake up alive and (reasonably) healthy is a good morning. Mmmm. I am going to miss Kaycee [oops, see this], and I never even got to meet her in real life, just in virtuality. Her blog is currently back online, complete with archives... Kaycee can brighten my life , lift up my heart, invigorate my spirit. Read what she wrote [oops, see this]. Maybe you'll be touched by that angel, too.
Me, personally? I am still not feeling terribly chipper, but I'll be fine - I took most of last evening out, just browsing and getting killed at Rummy by my lovely but deadly Marcia. At ETS, Jack and I managed to prioritize my workload well enough that I know what I am going to be working on for the next few weeks - a new suite of products for pushing video and audio signals over twisted pair wiring. I know, not very exciting, but it's a living, more or less.
Back later, probably... in the meantime, consider celebrating Towel Day on the 25th. TTFN
17:45 - Good evening. There's no other word for it - I am puttering this evening. My concentration is shot. I am fidgeting about with IRC, and following up on a few links, while Marcia sautes a few pork chops for supper. Smells yummerlicious already!
The Talkabout mailing list is gaining in membership, we're a quarter of the way to the century mark, which is fun. You too can join our mailing list community if you desire - either follow the link at the beginning of the paragraph, or use this mailto link for Talkabout to subscribe. A forum for each of us to help the other a little bit, with more feedback than direct one-to-one email gets. For those that have joined already, glad to have you aboard!
Randy has re-opened Kaycee's posts: They're available as a memorial, [oops, see this]and a testament to her warrior spirit, and her strength and love. We've made a donation to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in her name, we specified that they send it to the Kansas chapter, since that was Kaycee's home state.
Have a nice evening - I'll be back in this space tomorrow AM, hopefully feeling a bit more chipper (physically, anyway - chipper at all is hard to achieve when the alarm goes off at 05:30 each day). Take care of yourself and each other.
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TGIF (more or less) - No, I haven't lost my mind (some might say one can't lose what one never had, evil, horrid people.), but since tomorrow Marcia and I are taking the day off tomorrow, just to play hookey, I don't see why I can't call this Friday.
In truth, I got very little done last night, which is OK. I worked up the images for Chapter 13 of The Linux Book That Tom and Brian Wrote, so hopefully that'll be forthcoming shortly. Then we are facing a batch of chapters on the topic of command line tools, usage and resources - John Ricketson's Klingon Dictionary, if you prefer. That'll take us through Chapter 19, then after that, only a couple of 20+ and the appendicies remain. Headed in the right direction.
Had a nice chat with John Doucette and Greg Lincoln (who will be posting in his journal again one day, I am quite sure) last evening, on a variety of topics. We discussed how to manually discern and cope with a chain of package dependencies using RPM, and the merits of assorted browsers, window managers and some such. This reminded me that it's about time to shake up my world again a little bit, and muck about with WindowMaker. Not today, perhaps not until next week sometime, but soon, soon. I have a couple of screenshots from last night's explorations - I'll try to put them up this evening.
Have a gander at Tom's post of last evening... He does a good quick walkthrough on adding disk space to a filesystem under Linux (in this case, a clean install of e-Smith). Check it out!
OK. The sun's in my eyes, which means it's time for me to organize and hit the road. Y'all take care, I'll see you later, right here.
18:35 - Back in the saddle. Futzing around this evening with Galileo the Agenda Computing VR3d. I've upgraded it again to the latest versions, just in time (probably) for a new set to be released this weekend in the drive to ship consumer product on Monday. That deadline is still firm, according to what the Agenda people say on the mailing list.
Also, I've tried and failed to get the USB webcam that came with the ACER up and running. But in this arena, I seriously don't know what the heck I am doing. The right things are in /dev, the modules load, but when I try to run xawtv... nada. I'll keep after it, you can be sure.
Let's see what I've managed to accumulate in the temporary mailbox, in anticipation of your interest... Mmmmmm. How about the together we stand document from Bruce Perens and other luminaries? Then, back on the Agenda-related front, we have an article on the O'Reilly network about Linux on PDAs. That's it - not a lot, today. Now it's close to supper time, so I'll stop with this, and work on Chapter 13 this evening. No promises, however. TTFN.
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Good morning. Sorry for the delay, but while we're doing laundry, I thought I'd finish up with Chapter 13 from Brian and Tom's Linux Book, on the topic of GUI System Management tools (eg COAS and Webmin). I got about 3/4 of the way through it, by a little after 10 last night, then stopped with the plan of finishing it up this morning. Plan comes together!
Had a nice chat on IRC with Moshe this morning - He's settling in to his new place in Israel, although the accelerating levels of violence there are disturbing to him (and me, too). He's started on his fourth book, CVS for Coriolis ... Heck, I dunno, ask Moshe! Of course, I will know, soon, since I'll look it up one day soon, and read the book when it's out - CVS is a nice way to keep track of a variety of files that need versioning and document control, it's not just for code anymore.
Oh, hey, before I leave you behind (we're going to the beach today), follow this link to Doc Searls' place and read down for a bit - he's got some good bite on the whole OS/Mickeysoft/Torvalds/Mundie/Perens/Allchin shindig. Now we're outta here for a while - have a lovely day!
20:10 - Pulling down Debian 2.2r3 right now, although I am not sure why, honestly. Wait a minute. Let me go kill that download. I don't need 4 ISO images - All I need is a couple of floppy images and the base system file on my system here... My setup is flatly too complex - and I don't use the barest fraction of what I've got installed. It's time to get back to basics here, folks. Along with housecleaning tomorrow, I'll be running a few backups across the network, then I'm gonna blow Grinch entirely away, and give him a Debian personality transplant. It may be time for a rename here. We'll see.
We got to the coast today, as you can see. We went out to Half Moon Bay out Highway 92, then headed south a few miles to Martin's beach. It's a privately owned spot, they charge 5 bucks to drive down and park beside the beach. There were three other people there today, which was the best of all - similar to the deserted appearance of Yosemite earlier this year when we went off season. But the weather today was marvelous. Probably about 70 degrees (chilled down a bit by the offshore breezes), sunny and special. Perfect beach day.
When we got there, we walked off down the beach, the surf was aggressive and fun, but the tide was out, which let me get out on the rocks, and have a bit of exploration of tidepools and the inter-tidal zone. Then we walked back, and pulled out a picnic lunch. After lunch, we went antique hunting in HMB for a bit - came away with nothing, but saw some cool stuff. Marcia's got more pictures posted here.
Now we're going to pop Deep Impact into the disc player and settle in for a nice quiet evening. Y'all take care and I'll see you tomorrow morning.
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Good morning. Busy day around here today. Morning's for cleaning - but first I went to the post office to pick up a package that couldn't be delivered yesterday afternoon...
That's right, my care package from Progeny Systems for being an official beta tester. T-shirt plus a retail boxed set of the software, including boot and module floppies, binary and source CDs, last minute warnings and cautions, and a printed User Guide of some 290 pages or thereabouts.
I've talked about Progeny before, and it's a nice leg-up into the world of Debian - Greg Lincoln got into Debian via Progeny, and is now running a system blended between Progeny and the Woody version of Debian... Huh? you say... Debian distro versions are named after characters from Toy Story. The in-process version (which will eventually become stable) is called Woody. It's currently in a testing phase, which implies mostly stable, but at your own risk when installed. Since that's actually the case with a release.... Heh.
There's lots to learn about these distributions at their respective sites: http://www.progeny.com/ and http://www.debian.org/. Go and read, when you have the time. I'll be back in one of these days having a completed Debian install report (which has languished half-finished for months now) followed by a Progeny install report.
Meantime, I need to start organizing to clean this joint up. I prefer the firehose method, but Marcia thinks that is a bit dramatic. Oh, yeah, Marcia's got her photo-report up from yesterday's adventure.... Anyway, have a great day - I'll be back later.
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Howdy... well, today is later, isn't it? I would call what I did yesterday a Thompson © Deep Cleaning, except that I'd have to pay him for using the phrase, and given how hard I worked at it, he should be paying me for having to live the words... <g> However, the apartment is in much nicer shape now, and I got to all the nooks and crannies that the $$$ cleaners missed week after week. 5 hours worth of sweaty work, though - makes a body just want to flush the whole place out with a fire hose, and buy all new stuff.
Following that, I rebuilt my main workstation. Grinch is dead, long live Garcia! I'm running a stock low-mileage Debian Woody-testing installation, nicely configured. The window manager is WindowMaker, the browser is Konqueror, the OOB external mail client is KMail, I have The Gimp for image work, Bluefish for HTML, X-Chat for IRC, gFTP for the occasional transfer that I don't do with Konq, plus I've finished (just this morning) with reconfiguring the WindowMaker menus into the format I want them, with terminal window items custom configured for the remote work I do, color coded. I'll have screenshots one day soon, but we have a busy day planned.
Oh, how big? The loadout is a shade over 400 Meg, not counting 800 Meg in my home directory, and 3.6 Gig of MP3 files in /spare. Yup, only 400 Meg. The last Mandrake 8 install I did used maybe 2.6 Gig or so, and Red Hat full loadout on Gryphon comes up to 1.9 Gig. Oh, and windows is gone. It'll probably re-appear in a VMware or Win4Lin window one day, but not today.
We're off to my folks for an Open House, to visit with some old friends and have a nice relaxing afternoon. That's after the stock Sunday morning Costco run, of course. Now to get ready to go. Have a great day out there, people. Take care!
21:50 - Well. Wasn't that interesting. A really remarkable piece of fiction. Touching, but I am so fond of truth. Whoever that was, they write very well, evocative and with great verisimilitude. Mmmm. Nice.... Feh!
We had a nice visit today, just got home a few minutes ago. Busy day, lots of old friends and happy faces - - and I got to play with Alex for a while too, which is always very centering for me. Now I have a huge stack of emails to catch up on, and a couple of other things to do, so I'll catch up with you tomorrow, ooh, err, next week... uh, whatever <g>.
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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.