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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.

Full-on coverage in the news this morning. The Federal Government kills another one. Yeah. I know. And funny, I approve of the death penalty. However, my problem here is that all men are supposed to stand equal on the scales of Justice ... not all men except those who kill for the government, while not at war.

I am not sure I agree that the Oklahoma bombing wouldn't have happened in the absence of the Waco and Ruby Ridge killings. McVeigh apparently saw himself as a soldier in a war. I saw McVeigh as a sick, dangerous individual and I am glad they put hime down. Of course, there are those persons on federal payroll who should be brought up on charges, and sent after him. If not the shooters, then those that gave the shooters their orders. Bah!

Mmmm. Good morning, anyway. Sorry about last night. I had a busy day, running errands, playing Myst III, and generally being lazy again. Today I am home from work. Everybody's been handed an extra day a week to do with as they see fit, as a cost savings measure. Yeah, that means a 20% pay slash. Now you know even more. Feh.

This is the third time they've taken this measure to save the company. I missed the first, about 8 years ago. The second time was just after Marcia and I married, and lasted over a year, concurrent with Marcia being laid off by Sun, and out of work for a few months. That wasn't what you'd call a honeymoon year. So, are you surprised I am hunting for a more stable position? I love those people, and enjoy my work, but there have to be limits to this sort of thing. I have my sanity to consider. Now, now, none of that sort of comment from the peanut gallery.

Right now, I have nothing else on my plate. There's lots to accomplish today, and not a game play in sight. Y'all have a good'un and I'll catch up with you in the late afternoon - after the phone interview I've got today at 3. Take care!

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Good morning. I had a reasonably productive, although ultimately disappointing day yesterday. I was here all day, and spent a significant fraction of that time working on developing some background material for CSS, DHTML and JavaScript, in order to write up some decent tutorial proposals. It's tricky business, for two reasons. First, I don't want to do ALL the work, then not get the gig. But writing a summary is tough without having the material mostly in place initially. Of course, these aren't written in stone. Advanced material, no fluff is the edict from on high.

The second problem is that if I take too much time generating the proposals, someone else gets the gig anyway. So I think I have enough now to put these disparate bits together into something coherent that I can follow up with several weeks of concentration to build some really nice tutorials. So I'll do that briefly this morning.

By the way, don't let it get you down, but sometimes your fate is determined by a chirpy little 20-something named Shane who read in Phys. Ed. at her local JC. That work qualifies her to read a canned psuedo-psych eval bit of claptrap over the phone, and plug your answers, which don't fit the questions very well, into some matrix that says you won't work out on their team. Please folks, if you do pass out my resume, get it into the hands of hiring managers, and keep it away from the cube drones in HR.

So, I forgot to mention. If you don't keep up with me on the weekends (and I hold you blameless in that), you might not have caught that Chapter 16, on Vim, Emacs and Joe, hit the web on Sunday. Eventually we'll get all the way there - thanks for your patience.

Now to water the garden, then to work with me. Have a great day!

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How-dee! What an ... interesting ... day it was yesterday. Along with all the other hats, I am Mr. Computer Technician. So when one or more of these CompuCrap P1-133 legacy junkheaps decides to emulate an appendix, and rupture... it's my job to patch it up, if I can.

Most of the computers around the shop are of this vintage, with a decidedly frankensteinian flavor. Virtually each one has had one or more parts swapped in from other boxes. Yesterday the maintenance scheme ran out of juice. I no longer had enough dead machines with working parts to assemble one complete working computer. Sigh. That took me the better part of four hours to determine. I might/could have gotten away with it, but at the expense of using one of those Western Digital 2 Gig Caviar pieces of garbage, that already had bad sectors developing. Thanks but no thanks.

So I got accounting to bust free some spare change, and picked up a bottom of the line ASUS/Celery700 box. Put it in Jack's office ... every once in a while the CEO should have the fastest box, at least for a little bit. The balance of my day was consumed with installling software, transferring data, checking to make sure bits work, getting anti-virus definitions up to date, yada-yada-yada.

Then I brought up Jack's ex-computer in place of the dead one, and did most of the twiddly things necessary, and everything was hunky-dorey until... linking to the network printer. Corrupt INF or driver file. Sigh. Dig through boxes of IT stuff that was shelfware left behind from the move better than two years ago... found the installation software for the JetDirect and the HP 6MP, but it wouldn't install. Extreme annoyance. Had already uninstalled old drivers. Accounting without a printer is a very, very bad thing.

With no small amount of trepidation, I headed over to the HP site, to look for drivers. I've read of recent nightmares with that particular venture. Right there on the home page, a big square area labeled drivers. Follow the link, put HP6MP in a seach box and voila, a page full of drivers for virtually every OS Microsoft ever wrote, and nothing for anything else... Oh, right, that's OK - I only care about drivers for NT4 and Win95 (yeah, right, 95). Installed with the NT drivers, added the 95 drivers, and poof! Done! Only 9 hours. ::sigh::

Today I must finish reorganizing the mess that I made trying to build a working computer. Plus we have a return to the documentation effort that I've been working on, some finishing touches on the tutorial proposals I've been working on, and so forth. Sounds busy? Sure and you're right.

So have a lovely day. See you later.

16:45 - Good afternoon. I know, I've been a slacker and not posting a second time, later in the day, recently... but hey, isn't it nice to see that Tom's got something current up and available! No, but really. Reeaaaally.

First off, some gardening snaps for you, "Right here and now! Wolf!" If you don't get that reference, then go read Talisman. Anyway. The garden snaps. First things first, I have to put in an fstab entry for the USB SmartMedia reader, then mount the device and... anyway, enough gory details for the moment. First, "Pride and Prejudice" - here's the first ripening tomato of the season, at left. June. June! Can you believe that? Mmmm. I am not sure, myself.

Following that first snap, we have the whole tomato hedge, which continues to take over. Then we have the flower whose name I cannot remember, nor pronounce. Cockscomb is, I believe, still the common name. Next, the box that has Basil in it is doing absolutely stunningly. Marcia picked up some pine nuts, I have a whole mess of garlic and good extra virgin olive oil - can you say home-made pesto? I knew you could. Wrapping up, we have a couple of shots of tomatoes on the vine. They'll be making an appearance on a salad plate sometime this summer. <yum>

Recently, there have been a spate of auto-responder emails from a correspondent to one of the Agenda Computing mailing lists. That is a badly configured vacation setting - they should automagically ignore mailing lists and other bulk sources when replying. Usually this lites a fire under everybody's butt on your average mailing list. It started to spool up, with people calling for his immediate unsubscription, etc. Then Douglas Sims wrote in with the definitive weirdly appropriate spin on the whole situation - I reproduce his email here with his permission.

Re: [agenda-user] Automatic reply: Where is Ralph Jarvis?
From: Douglas Sims
Cc: agenda-user
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 21:52:45 -0500

I hereby propose that he be kept on the list. 

I was sitting at my desk today in a small office in a giant office 
building, an insignificant tiny dot in a vast sea of corporate 
cubicles, my only contact with the real world being a double-pane 
glass window through which I can catch occasional glimpses of a 
few leafy green trees on the other side of a parking lot... my entire 
world consisting of three computer screens, a telephone, and my 
Agenda VR palmtop.  This is what I see from my window:  

http://eis.promus.com 

And then, at intervals throughout the day, I would get emails from 
Mr. Jarvis, reporting that he is out of the country until the middle 
of July... and my imagination began to work.  Where could R. Jarvis 
be?  Riding to hounds in England?  I picture him clad in smart red 
riding coat and tophat, master of the hunt, bounding across the 
hedgerows... "Tally-ho..."  The fox is sighted and R. Jarvis is off on 
pursuit...  If only Icould be there too, breathing the fresh, clear 
country air...  

http://www.printsoldandrare.com/foxhunting/107fox.jpg

Or perhaps he has gone big-game hunting in the Transvaal?  
There is our R. Jarvis, khaki-clad, sporting a couple of large rifles, 
cruising around in a dusty old Land Rover, camping out under the 
vast African sky, trusty native guide reading the spoor of gemsbok, 
kudu, blue wildebeest, zebra, tssessebe, and various other 
non-domesticated animals.  Even as I sit here in front of this 
computer, R. Jarvis could be waking up with the sun, to walk 
'round the camp, looking for signs of the lions who were howling 
through the night... (or whatever sounds insomniac lions make).  
Or perhaps it's late at night in Africa and R. Jarvis is sitting by a 
roaring campfire, trying to write a shell script on his Agenda VR3... 

http://www.hunts.net/images/domasable99.jpg 

Whatever the case, I wish R. Jarvis much luck in his adventures, 
and I must confess that I envy him.  Perhaps some day I shall 
quit my job and follow his example... to adventure!  mystery!  
romance!   

http://www.claytor.com/Bushpilot/ 

I know I'll never be able to view an email vacation auto-responder in quite the same light, ever again. Thanks, Douglas!

And with that, I'll leave you to your evening, and partake of my own, here. Have a great one, see you tomorrow.

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Good morning. Of course, the problem with afternoon posts, is that it leaves me with less to say, sometimes, the next morning. Such is the case. In case you missed it, yesterday afternoon featured pictures of the Patio Farm, including the first ripening tomato. Also there's an amusing letter expressing a new viewpoint on vacation auto-responders and mailing lists.

Last night I started building KDE 2.2 alpha from CVS. Long build times, but clean looking fast applications appear to be the result. Of course, some bits are pretty broken. For instance, I can't open the Settings menu on KMail at the moment. Not a terrible problem, but one worth looking into.

Additionally, I got the proposals in line for submission this morning for a couple more tutorials for IBM DevWorks. We'll see what comes of those. Today I am picking up where I left off with The Linux Book that Tom and Brian Wrote, so look for more progress there soon.

For now, I bid you adieu, but there should be more of interest up here again this afternoon. Meantime, have a great day!

17:55 - Not only did I not come up with anything new today (at least yet...), but it's too darn hot to think about thinking about it. Over 100 in the apartment right now. Fortunately, I am talking degrees Farenheit, or we'd be discussing parboiled Brian right about now. So, the basil has been selected and cleaned, it's chilling, and I may wait until this heat breaks to make pasta - I am thinking ice cream for supper tonight, if I eat at all. Heat wipes me out in the appetite department.

Wait, wait, there is one new thing - Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Re-release in theatres as a promo for the DVD coming out this fall. Look for show dates and times in your area. Just remember to say "ecci ecci ecci p'tang zuuuuu-poi" anytime you feel like it.

Now for some work on The Book, and a little job board surveying to complement my efforts. TTFN.

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Howdy. Welcome to Friday, and aren't we glad that it is so... Yeah, I know, me too! Thanks for dropping in. I made some progress on Chapter 17 last night, and you can look at it, but it isn't but a tenth completed yet. This is a long, long chapter, and my first chore was to survey the whole thing and remove all of the marks and comments left behind by our fine editorial staff - over 53 comments from the copy editor alone to excise. Pretty OK from here on out though. I have to import the image files and format the text properly. Next day or so.

Greg Lincoln started me down the primrose path of upgrading to bleeding edge KDE the other night. I downloaded sources from CVS, and started building. There's good news and bad news. I am having real trouble building this, because the default library locations for some key external components appear to be in unexpected places within the Mandrake layout. And I am not, Not, NOT going to change distributions this week in order to play on the bleeding edge.

Maybe next week... ::sigh::

Oh, right, I nearly forgot. Dave Farquhar, he of the Optimizing Windows book fame and fellow Daynoter, has stabilized at his new IP address, so asked recently that we change all the mirrors to reflect his new home. I thought I'd share it with you, too, in case you link there directly! It's http://dfarq.homeip.net.

Wow. Time's up already? I haven't even done anything but see that I have about 47 emails left to cope with, and water the Patio Farm, and ... and... OK, I'd better get to it. Y'all take care, see you later.

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It's a good thing that the Patio Farm is all greenery and no livestock, 'cause animals would have been greatly upset with me, as late as I slept in today. <grin> Nah, not quite that bad - I've done all my morning surfing among the Daynoters and various other sites as found on my Start Page. Additionally, I've slogged through the hundred or so emails which accumulated since yesterday evening.

Last night I made pesto (green) sauce for pasta. Start with two or three of cups of fresh (from the Patio Farm, in our case) Basil, a hint of Cilantro (ditto), 6 large garlic cloves, half cup of pine nuts, half cup of Parmesan cheese, 3/4 cup light, virgin or extra virgin olive oil (I use Bertolli Gentile al Palato). Emulsify in blender, any Cuisinart or equivalent. Refrigerate. Boil any pasta to taste (I prefer Penne, cooked al Dente), then add Pesto - no , not all of it - I use about four heaping tablespoons per pound of dry pasta. We should get 4 meals and lots of leftovers out of this. Complement with a oil and vinegar dressed salad, and your choice of beverage. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Then we watched Catch-22 for our evening "out". Marcia commented that it was a really strange movie. Yup. War is weird, as well as dangerous. I haven't seen it in better than 20 years - what a treat!

I have 17 Trillion things to do, and time enough for about 5 of them this weekend. I suppose I'd better get started. I'll report back later today on my successes and failures. See ya then.

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Mmmm. Yeah, well. I've been working on Chapter 17 until my eyes crossed, just past the halfway point. It's time to take a break. So I am going to cook supper. Maybe back later, can't be sure.

It turns out that very little of this weekend has turned out as I anticipated going in. We got some new assemble-it-yourself office furniture to spruce up Marcia's area and make it more useful for her - and there went most of yesterday, right in the hopper. Today we did the shopping and the laundry, and I've been slogging away on The Book.

I've done some more tuning to my environment here, and I am settling into Mandrake-hood once again. I almost weakened and headed back to Debian, but not now, not today or tomorrow or next week. One day, though.

Now for supper - Chicken stir-fry. Have a lovely evening.

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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.