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July 16 through July 22, 2001
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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! Last night's show was a real blast. Michael Flatley can sure dance up a storm - he does stunning well for someone who's not a spring chicken anymore - he's got three years on me!
We had supper at Roger and Myrna's. Joining us were Nina and her sister Connie. Food was chips and Salsa from us, salad from Nina, penne with pesto from us, steaks, grilled veg and bread from Roger and Myrna, and we capped off with a bakery strawberry shortcake that Connie brought. Nice dinner, good friends, great show... what a lovely Sunday evening.
After we got home, we fuddled about for a bit checking email and such, then retired. I couldn't sleep, unfortunately. So I got up and worked in the Thinking in C++ material I picked up from http://www.bruceeckel.com/. Once upon a time, I wrote a fair amount of code in C, but I figure it's time to pick up a new language, at least a bit of one. I'd like to be able to read some of the code for the programs that I run, and while I can already do that to a certain extent with C, I cannot with C++ as well because I don't understand the underlying concepts as well.
So I was at that for perhaps an hour, then back to bed and out like a light. I'll have to re-read that material in a more alert state, but late on a Sunday night it sure was a great soporific. Got a lot on for today, and I have to start by delivering some sheet metal for silkscreening, and pick another lot up, so I'd best get on the road. Have a lovely day, catch you later.
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Good morning. Mmmmm. Let's start off with the geek news - Galileo, the smallest member of my Linux systems, is an Agenda Computing VR3d (that is, developer edition, not quite as whizzy in the hardware as the now available consumer units). One of the lines of software development includes an alternative toolchain for building the apps and userspace libraries, called SNOW (more info here). The SNOW romdisks are FAST!!! I loaded up one yesterday and finally I have an easily useable PDA, rather than just a Linux PDA. There are a couple of application features missing yet, but other than that, I am one happy camper.
In other very good news, unless I am sorely mistaken, we are going to be shifting Hovel Bilbrey out of this apartment and into a house a few blocks off. Nope, we're not buying
I am not sure how I am going to handle the connectivity switch-over. It's possible that I can just get our lines transferred to the new place, with all services including CLEC DSL intact. If that's the case, then I may just schedule that, and when the systems disappear from the net, I'll simply hare off home and move the hardware over, then fire it up. Easy.
I'm also going to make the effort to get into the crawl space and throw in some Cat5E. I'll put in a 12 port patch panel, and run a data line and a phone line into each room. Or something else. I am certainly not going to string coax and data cable over-carpet, as I have it here.
Now to head off the the silk-screeners once again, picking up the metal I left off yesterday. Have a lovely day, and I'll keep you posted. Take care!
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Good morning. Well, the deal is about done. We got a call yesterday that all of our ducks were properly aligned with the assorted planets and other tidbits - today is the first of two "give the estate agent lots of cash" days, this time for the assorted deposits. But we got the house. Woooo-Hoooo!
Linkfest time - In other fun news, it turns out that giving a speech at DefCon can get you arrested. Lessee... here it says the Microsoft is dropping Java support from XP. Not the move of a monopolist, no sir. We'll counterbalance that with an article on the Linux Desktop by Dennis Powell, over on LinuxPlanet. He says (among other things) that KWord (a part of the KOffice suite) might just be ready to be a prime-time word processor. I've been working with the latest KWord myself, and I'm inclined to agree. Nice stuff, and a cute dig at WordPerfect along the way.... Whoa. Sorry. I got stuck reading stuff, which I rarely do at this time of the morning. I'm now offically late, but first...
We've gotten some nice feedback recently on our Linux Book. The only lack is that I am still trying to track down our collected references Appendix. I was sure it was around here someplace. It'll turn up, or I'll regenerate it from original material if I must - those are handy collections of data to have. Also, fortunately (for my relationship with the bandwidth provider), we've avoided getting slashdotted, but if you're wanting to mirror the material, then give me a shout so I can put you on a notify list when either Tom or I update things.
Now to fly, to fly. Have a lovely day, friends. See you later, perhaps.
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Hullo. What's for breakfast? Mmmmm. OK, coffee and ... coffee.
So, good news... We've signed the papers, handed over the deposit, and spent some time measuring rooms and such. The move is on! Huzzah! We'll get the keys at the beginning of the week containing August 1, which is a good thing, since I am having some services transferred over starting then. Connectivity is gonna be interesting.
It turns out that due to PacBell's interpretation of the rules requiring that they not touch any line that has a CLEC service on it (like DSL via Covad, as in our case), we have to schedule the move for our fax/voice line with PacBell, and our voice/DSL line with PBI emerging services (aka the Pacbell DSL people). And until new address propogates to the correct computer in the PacBell system, where Covad can verify our existence properly, we can't have our DSL service turned on (through Covad) at the new place.
So far as I can tell, this is a scam to keep Covad out in the cold, and give PacBell a selling opportunity. Screw'm. I am going to punch my main sites and services up to Benden, the machine that Greg Lincoln's got hosted in a cage at a Verio facility, on a 100MB pipe, so things should be considerably faster in a bit. The site mirror for Orb stays on Hydras as a backup against California rolling blackouts, Earthquakes, etc, etc.
For home connectivity, I am going to go cable. As in AT&T/TCI/@Home cable. If it truly sucks, then I'll head back to DSL land. But for surfing and such, it should be fine, perhaps even a bit faster than what we're used to now (I'm hoping). Additionally, this should give Marcia and I yet another set of email addresses, as backups. Our prime contacts are still through our site addresses, and remain [email protected] and [email protected]
Note that this changes ONLY our backup (aka Out-Of-Band) email addresses at Speakeasy, so if you use those for any reason, please strike them from your records. If you want to use the OOB addresses, then wait until I publish, once the moving hoorah is completed.
Now it's time to get ready to hit the road. Have a lovely day, see you soon.
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Good morning. Sorry for the delay, but I've just been slowly shuffling through my morning. Reading and responding to email, surfing a bit, hanging on IRC - all while sucking on some coffee and noshing on a bit of breakfast. A perfect start to a Friday off.
Regarding the CodeRed worm, I've found some 24 hits in my access_log file over the 11 hours from 0900 to 2000 yesterday. No problems of course, since this isn't an IIS site. But still. That's a LOT of action. Multiply that by the millions of servers out there, whether or not they're vulnerable and you're looking at a LOT of traffic. Mmmm. Nothing since then, though. If I read the alerts right, it was about 2000 PDT when it was supposed to stop spreading, and start trying to nail whitehouse.gov. Bah. Mickeysoft lack of security and bad patching practices - gets us every time.
Now, with both Friday and Monday off, we're liable to be adventuresome this weekend, so there may be not much in the way of content up here, if any. Don't worry, be happy, read the Linux Book that Tom and Brian wrote, to tide you over. And if you're that Acquisitions Editor from McGraw-Hill that my friend Steve Lampen is recommending me to, please, consider the red carpet spread out all over the place.
Take care, catch you soon.
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On travel to Vancouver!
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On travel to Vancouver!
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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.