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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. Wow! Are we really in the second half of the year, already? Each year older, time for me seems to flow a little faster. Recently I read that this may be that as commits from short-term to long-term memory become less reliable, our sense of time compresses. Put another way, the less I remember, the faster time seems to have passed. This makes sense in a bio-chemical, mechanistic sort of way, but doesn't sit right with me - of course, I'm actually no good judge of my own memory. I remember what I remember.
Tom has had a successful cutover from Hydras, the RS-6000 to Phoenix, a desktop running some flavor of Linux. Now Phoenix is providing all the external services, while Tom rehabilitates Hydras, switching to AIX 5L (where the L stands for Linux). I believe the implication is that you can run Linux binaries under AIX, now. Of course, you still have to compile them for the architecture, but no more OS call porting efforts are supposed to be needed. If you're interested in such things, keep an eye on Tom's site - he'll have lots to report on this, I am sure.
Also, Tom pointed out to me yesterday that the Linux Standards Base (LSB) has finally released version 1.0. The good news about a 1.0 standard is that it can be adopted by either a push or a pull - most likely both. That is, with several major Linux distro vendors participating, they are likely to start making use of the standard for compliance purposes, or get left behind in the commercial / support arena. Also, major application vendors like Oracle and developers across the community would be wise to develop for the standard, since it is not a moving target, unlike trying to support the variations across several distributions. This will further serve to bring distribution publishers in line or be left behind. This is a Good Thing (tm).
I am only working for wages half a day today, then I'll be home, probably working further on the Linux Book that Tom and Brian Wrote. Over the weekend I put up the HTML-ized versions of Chapter 19, on System Administration from the Command Line, and Chapter 20, The Zen of System Administration. We're in the home stretch now - Just two chapters remaining to convert, and a couple appendices. If I am ambitious, then the chapters may make it out today... We'll see.
Finally, if you like 'blogs that mix business and personal, I've said it before, but be sure to check out Doc Searls on a regular basis. Senior editor for Linux Journal and co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, I read Doc every day. He throws out links to interesting places in all directions, like sparks off the pinwheels day after tomorrow.
No, I don't own stock in Doc, just like I don't get paid for any of the things I talk about here in the Grafitti part of this site. That's not what this is for. This is my soap box, and I am glad you've come by to visit, and hang out for a bit. Most of this site is linked off of the MetaJournal (aka the Site Map), so if you're in the mood for a little spelunking, there's the place to start. Speaking of which, I still need to update that page before I publish this screed.
Take care, have a lovely day, back atcha later, for sure.
19:12 - WhoooHooooo!!!! Good evening. Yeah, good news. One big push this afternoon, and I've got Chapter 23, Serving Inside the Firewall, and Chapter 24, Serving to the Internet, from Brian and Tom's Linux Book formatted and posted. Wow, my eyes are crossed so badly that I'm looking behind myself, but seriously, hooraw! That's it on the Chapters. Two Appendices are waiting to format, but nothing very special there, probably this weekend upcoming, unless I decide to hose them since they were only there because it was a print book. I'll have to ask Tom about that.... Maybe I am really DONE! Could be, could be.
Now, good night. Take care, see you tomorrow.
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Good morning. We're continuing on into the week of Independence day with hot weather. Yesterday afternoon when I sat down in this chair to work on The Book, shortly after lunchtime, it was 86 inside, with all the windows open and all the fans running. It had dropped back down to 88 by the time 11 pm rolled around, as I thrashed about attempting to sleep. In the interim, it hit just under 100 outside, and just over that inside.
There's no AC here, and no insulation to speak of. We're on the second floor, and the heat that accumulates in the attic just radiates down into our apartment. That's why the windows make sense open, even in the heat of the day. Me, I'd insulate the ceiling spaces, and put exhaust fans in the attic - that would drop temperatures by around 10 or 15 degrees in here. Right now, just after 6 AM, it's about 80 degrees inside, and around 72 out. It is gonna be scorchers for the next few, and it's a vicious cycle inside - we never quite cool down as much inside. There is some patchy high fog overhead right now, but that should burn off before you know it.
Oh, right... <Grin> Almost forgot amongst all that whining - I finished doing the HTML formatting for the final two chapters in The Linux Book that Tom and I wrote. Chapter 23, Serving Inside the Firewall, and Chapter 24, Serving to the Internet are now in the bag, and the TOC has a link in every location (except for two Appendices to appear soon). Wow - it's been a long process and we thank you for bearing with us. Enjoy, put the material to good use, and tell your friends...
Remember, while this book is nominally "about" OpenLinux, fundamentally, it's about Linux. The installer section is definitely distro specific, and parts of the GUI references are a bit dated by now, being a year or more old. However, our goal was to write the book we wish we had by our side while learning to use Linux - I think, to a large extent, we succeeded.
Have a lovely day - I am off to water the Patio Farm, then toddle into work for the day. If you don't drop by again for a day or two, then Happy Independence Day, if you celebrate that. Anyway, take care!
18:35 - Thanks, Jackie... Sigh. In my mad rush to finish out Chapter 24 of the book... Wait. I am getting ahead of myself. The chapter page headers alternate between even numbered chapters and odd - Tom and I move about, the logo changes, so-on and so-forth. So for each chapter, I would copy the chapter two back, cut out all of the <body> material below the In This Chapter section, past in the text file I generated from each chapter's WinWord xxx.doc file, then start formatting. At the end of the process, I go back to the top, fix up the meta-tags, chapter titles, etc. Except, doing two whole chapters yesterday threw me so far off I may never get back on track.
So this morning, I get an email from an early supporter of the book release effort, Jackie Clark. She noted that when she clicked on the link to go to Chapter 24, there she was in Chapter 22. Well, I thought I had simply screwed up when revising the TOC last night. So I go to the TOC, click on the Chapter 24 link, and sure enough, I see Chapter 22 stuff... I ssh'd into my home network, then over to my workstation. Dropped down into the btlb directory, opened btlb_TOC.html in Vim and... nothing's wrong. Huh?
I followed the link again, and read a bit. Ah-hah. Sigh. (Now we're back to the right point in the story.) I simply didn't change ANY of the header stuff for Chapter 24. Title, meta-tags, <h1> title all borked. It was the work of 2 minutes to put it right and republish both here and on my mirror over at Tom's. Excellent catch, Jackie! Thanks. Also a big thank you out to Cheryl, for another clank in the BTLB Appreciation Jar.
What a good segue into my topic about aging and memory the other day...
Subject: Getting older.... From: "David Thorarinsson" Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 20:20:33 +0200 Hi Brian, There is another (mathematical) explanation for the fact that time seems to flow faster and faster: When you are 10 years old a year would be a tenth of your total lifetime. When you reach 30 then a year is only a 1/30th of your lifetime. You talked about LSB. Do you know which distributions are participating in the effort? Keep up the good work! /Dave
Mmmm. Another good point, and one which I had failed to take into consideration in my earlier calculations about... what? Hell, I dunno... What *were* we talking about, anyway?According to the LSB homepage, http://www.linuxbase.org/, the current contributors (among Linux Distros I recognize) are Caldera, Debian, Linux PPC, Mandrake, TurboLinux, Red Hat, and SuSE. There are other names in that list, but I don't recognize them as distros (if not, sorry, guys and gals!). Fairly well supported it looks like. Slackware isn't there, although I know, for instance, that Slack is fairly rigorous in adherence to the FSB.
Now, supper's here, so I guess I'd better go eat, 'tho it's hot enough that I am not much interested in food right at the moment. See you tomorrow.
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Good morning. Happy 225, U. S. of A! You know, I still believe in the principles upon which this country was founded:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I note that there are a lot of active verbs in there, like provide, promote and secure. Not a whole lot of implications of lay back and let the GS-8's run things for us, securing their bureaucracy against us, and against politicians who would have us believe they are working in our interest instead of theirs. There are things the assorted governments do well, but those positive traits are mostly hidden by their nasty ways and means.
From a different perspective, as Lazarus Long (an avatar of Robert Heinlein) noted, "...no doubt you mean well but I don't like setups where ID's are necessary. I told myself centruies back to stay away from places crowded enough to require them..." Thanks to our friends at NASA, there is no way to go anyplace else. Feh. I'd be a Belter, if I had half a chance.
Of course there's always the golden rule ("He that has the gold, makes the rules."), but since I am not Elllison, Jobs, Gates, Rockefeller, Kennedy or ... well, the list goes on. But even with enough gelt, you can't necessarily find a place where you can live in peace, lend your neighbor a hand, let your teenage daugher walk to school, not pay usurious (wow, spelled that right on the first try) taxes nor submit to onerous and petty civic laws. Bah - an ordinance on grass height? On my property??? BAH!
Still, all in all, I live in a country where I can complain, and I get to choose between two or more buttheads for President, instead of "voting" for the one that is on the ballot. I am allowed to work with and contribute to organizations like the EFF, that fight actively against the (current) laws of the land, like the DMCA. In a country like China, the EFF would have been up against the wall long ago.
There are bits I'd like to see reorganized, there's far too much abuse that goes on in the election process, especially in campaign spending and contributions arena. I think that they ought to campaign on donations from individuals ONLY. No corporate sponsered or direct contributions. The biggest expense is TV time - make it FREE, but give each candidate a set amount of time to use as they wish. Organize debates - mandatory. If a competitor chooses NOT to show up, it counts against her TV time anyway, and the opponent gets to hold forth for the entire time. Term limits for everyone. Two in any given office or body sounds good to me. Any more is a sinecure. Up or out.
Overall, there are many worse places to live on this ball of dirt, rock and water with a bit of pond scum floating about on the surface. But we could do so much better. It starts with voting. I vote in every election. Do you? Do you prod your friends and family to vote, and to do the same for their friends and family? Voter turnouts are the single biggest disgrace in our country today. Vote, every chance you get. Be involved - belong to, contribute to organizations that fight for things you think are important. You may agree with the DMCA and think that the EFF are morons - so be it, your choice. Support the organizations that make a difference for you.
I know I've rambled. That's my prerogative in this space - I don't pre-write essays to post here (at least that I can remember). I just spout off. If you have an opinion about any of this, please feel free to write and tell me so - I'll post whatever seems interesting, whether or not you agree with me <grin> Now maybe it's time for a wee nap, I got very little sleep last night because of the heat. It was still about 90 in the apartment at midnight. The good news is that things cooled dramatically and unexpectedly overnight. The marine layer moved in, bringing the fog (it wasn't supposed to do that) and temperatures are theoretically going to be in the low 90's today, instead of the low 100's. How nice.
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Hooo, boy, weren't we having fun yesterday. The temperature dropped by more than 10 degreees from the day before, the humidity went up by 15 points, and it was just plain miserable. Marcia's organized for her trip to Atlanta, and I played a new game (well, an old game, new to me) called Omikron.
Apparently I haven't read the right reviews, because it isn't quite as I envisioned it. The gameplay pace is glacial, then suddenly, death from the shadows. Admittedly, that's a lot like piloting a plane - long periods of utter bordom, punctuated with moments of sheer terror - but it's not a lot like life. It's more like being dropped in a really weird place, say Berkeley or Santa Cruz, and attempting to figure out our culture by wandering around the town and attempting to learn about it by talking to people. Only Omikron is less interesting than that.
And also yesterday my system started locking for no good reason whatsoever. My guess - a system-level configuration error in KDE, because I could replicate the problem, but I couldn't make it disappear by removing my local user config files and directories. That was the last straw - I am back to Debian. I plan on staying. I went from a broken Mandrake system to a working Debian (well, two or three tweaks left to make it perfect for now) in about 2 hours last night. Would have been faster, but it takes a while to move a few gig back and forth across the network, encrypted.
I had a nice little email conversation with Bob Thompson on the merits of government (few) and the topics of term limits and sufferage. Bob holds strong, consistent views, not all of which I agree with, but I do see where he's coming from.
Now, to water, and then to work with me. Second Monday this week. Feh!
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Good morning and happy Friday to you all (or especially, happy Saturday for those already there). The temperatures are in the comfortable zone since the weather liars did their job well, warning of excessive heat throughout the week, thus virtually guaranteeing fog and a dramatic drop. Perfect.
There's not a lot going on, and not a lot to tell - oh, Oh, right!. Almost forgot about this one... Stunningly, one of the top bloggers on the web, Doc Searls (whom, you may remember, I mentioned on Monday as a good guy to visit on a regular basis), kindly linked to me on Tuesday, which drove rather a large amount of traffic for a national holiday, on the Fourth. And today (well, yesterday actually), Doc is holding forth on the society of blogging, among other things. Fun stuff.
That might also explain the extraordinarily thoughtful letter I got that had a subject line "Fuck u". The message body was short, stupid and wrong. I looked around me, then said, "Wow, I must be getting slashdotted." Well, that turned out not to be the case - but wherever this poor soul is, he/she/it is confused and needs help. I sent his ISP (hint - a big-ish one associated with Time-Warner) a copy at their abuse address, just for fun, mind you. All one can do for the congenitally rude is to try to keep them from reproducing and training new people in the low art of incoherent insultory. Of course, I hadn't considered the email as an offer...? Mmmmm. No thanks.
I'll have some feedback for you this weekend on the latest KDE Office bits - I've got the latest and greatest version (1.1 beta3, running under KDE 2.2 beta1) running here on Garcia and on Gryphon. So far, more stable, more features, more fun (and less money, but remember that matters ONLY if the feature set lets me do my job).
We'll look at this stuff tomorrow afternoon, as I have a plane to put Marcia on in the morning, for her business trip to Atlanta that fortunately now includes some time with Barbara Thompson. As Bob put it the other day, "Her friend Marcia Bilbrey, whom she's never met..." That's such a weird phrase, expressing the widening of our world, brought about by the connecting powers of this web thingy we all muck about in.
Now to organize and head on in to work. Have a great day!
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Good morning. The post Chris put up that included a bit about how lovely it is to spend time in the company of Eastern Europeans sprung into my mind this morning a bit before 7 when the bimbo without brains turned up downstairs with her boyfriend and perhaps others and started making a minor racket. These people are simply nasty pieces of work without manners or sense. Bah!
In other news, yesterday we at ETS received several pieces of the recent Threat Marketing advertisement from Microsoft. Threatening BSA action. Offering free licensing consultation with some shills at a place called Zones. This is way worse than a PBS pledge drive. These buttheads probably have permission to come in and count licenses and machines due to some click-through COLA during installation of one package or another.
Fundamentally, the single-fold accuses each recipient of being a possible software pirate, and ensures that you clearly understand that even if you bought a license, but can't show it here and now, today, you're considered a pirate anyway. Let's not even talk about ghosted machines, disk images and the like. So call Zones and get more licenses today... Oh, but we've got a shop full of P1-133 boxes, with 32 M of ram and 2G hard drives. What do you mean we can't buy more Win95 Licenses? What, not Win98 either? We can't afford new hardware this quarter... Oh, so we're pirates, then are we? MMMMmmmm.
Here's what it makes me think... First. There are 4 primary programs that people use in our place of business. Email (a mix of LookOut::O97 and Netscrape clients), Word Processing (MS Winword - Office 97), Excel (MS Excel - Office 97) and a client-server app called Visual Manufacturing from Lilly Software Associates. Can I replicate all these functions in Linux (at least on the client side)?
Turns out that the answer is yes. I can get people accustomed to Abiword (or Kword, or WordPerfect, or StarOffice, or whatever) for the WP functions. There are some excellent mail clients for Linux, from Mutt and KMail (my CLI and GUI choices, respectively) all the way up to Evolution and/or Mullberry. For spreadsheet capabilities, I rather like Gnumeric, although no built in charts is a bit of a bummer. But the import and export functionality is superb.
The problem is (or rather, was) Visual. No Linux client. Mmmm. Had a brief chat with Greg, and he helped me out with bringing up Wine and configuring it properly to do what I wanted to do... Run the Visual Client on Linux - success!!! As you can see from the screenshot, I've got Visual running in a KDE desktop, with data pulled from the NT server which is running SQL base. The app is started on a network share (which I used Samba to mount), then local Gupta and SQLbase directories contain the application DLL files. Works like a champ, within certain limits. There's a real slowdown in opening a top-level dialog box. From the error messages, it appears to be a timeout in some type of interaction with the server. But everything works... well, we haven't set up printing yet, but I presume (silly boy) that that's pretty easy.
Now to get ready to run about and get Marcia from place to place, and eventually on an airplane to Atlanta. Busy morning ahead, so I'd better hop to it. Take care, catch you later!
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Howdy. After 17-11 installs yesterday, I finally have Garcia in a state of stability. Yes, there are other choices, but I want to be with Debian. Wanting a stable system, while running Debian Unstable, is an exercise in patience and restraint. There are some really, really nice features like the very latest KDE and KOffice betas.
But like so many other parts of life, it's not so much the endpoint as it is the journey that makes the difference. What I've found is that I can't go straight to Unstable, but have to pass through a working, clean installation that I can then upgrade. It appears that the real hitch is in the installation configuration routines. I had problems yesterday with mice that you wouldn't believe. I was certain that it was a hardware problem. Finally, I broke down and threw RH7.1 on the system, just to see if it was hardware, or my Debian setup. Sigh.
Something was broken in the Debian config, or in the one of the packages - either X or KDE, I would imagine. Also, I couldn't, for the life of me, print except for raw ASCII to the printer port. That won't do either. Greg suggested that I start from Progeny and work upwards. Well, after much flailing about, that's what I did. Now I've got a pretty, solid install running. Everything (well, almost everything) works as advertised. The only hitch is that the SSL packages are being brought into the main package stream, out of Non-US (since crypto export rules have eased). This means that the HTTPS bits of Konqueror are in transition and I can't do secure browsing until that's resolved.
Now for the mailbag, on mail clients...
Subject: Well kept secret
From: "David Thorarinsson"
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 18:41:56 +0200
Brian,
Just read your Saturday posting. You mentioned a few e-mail clients that you know from the Linux world. There is one more that you might not know about. It is called Sylpheed and it is written by this guy called Hiroyuki Yamamoto.
This e-mail client is really good! It is made to be easy to manage, configure and easy on resources. It is in version 0.5.0 at the moment but it might just as well be a 1.0.0 release. It is both fast and stable! The only reason why the author hasn't brought it up to production version is because he wants to add features to it. That said, I would also like to mention that it is already hosting an impressive array of features that you would expect from an advanced mail client. And yes, it is GPL.
Check out http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ for the goodies.
Of course it isn't all sugar and candy. There is no support for HTML mail which some might not like. However, there is a patch for that found at http://www.teledix.net/sylpheed/ (or so I am told). The other slight irritation is that it is based on GTK+ so if you are a KDE user then that might serve as a minor irritation.
If you don't want to change e-mail clients then you should at least send the good word out to your readers. This package is REALLY good. This software gives a polished, solid impression that most other GPL software can only hope and wish for.
Best regards,
Dave
I'll pop this one up for consideration, David. I also experimented with Aethera, a KDE product from the Kompany, an extension of the Magellan code base. Aethera is pretty nice, though bits like import and such aren't quite there yet from what I can see.
I'll check out Sylpheed soon. Maybe close to time for an Email Client roundup. There sure are LOTS of choices.
Now for errands and chores. Then, what next? I don't know. Marcia is safe in Atlanta and out in the town, shopping and sightseeing with Barbara Thompson, and a half empty suitcase... you tell me what that adds up to. Anyway, on with my day. You have a lovely one, yourself.
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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.