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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 $LARGE_PUBLISHER, so we're posting it online, here and here. Have a looksee! I'm glad you've come to visit, and always happy to hear from you.
EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so, I'll pay attention to your wishes.
Well. Hello. I would normally say Good Morning in this space, but AT&T @Home prevented me from accomplishing my normal morning routine. Bad AT&T, no cookie.
We do have a pair of snaps to share with you from early in the Open House in our new digs. Marcia agonized through an abandoned-feeling first hour or so, as no one turned up right away. William from next door dropped in briefly to let us know they'd be wandering in sometime over the course of the afternoon and evening. Then our neighbors from across the way came by, followed by some of Marcia's crowd from work. That includes Vered and Myrna, pictured at left. William came back after a bit, and you can see us chatting and eating in the kitchen, in the right-hand snap. Mostly we minded our guests, rather than taking pictures, so there isn't much else to share with you, but we did have a good time.
Yesterday was entirely, entirely lazy. Actually, not entirely, but it was undirected, unfocused time. For a while, I had Solaris 8 running on the machine that was once Grendel. You may remember that this machine was our first server, a Gateway PII-233. Now, with all the serving happening from Greg's box Benden up at ACS Datanet, the gateway needs a new role. That is, guinea pig in the Install-O-Rama that's just getting underway. So our new machine name for this workhorse of a box? Ghastly. Why? This is such a fun prompt:
[bilbrey@ghastly bilbrey]$ uname -a
Linux ghastly.orbdesigns.com 2.4.2 #11D SMP Tue Apr 10 03:45:53 CEST 2001 i686 unknown
Anyway, I did several trial installs of various things, without documenting my work, nor reading any docs on the software in question. Just getting a feel for things. Solaris may in fact be interesting, but the HCL is a bit limiting. I'll need to do some hardware selection to make things work as advertised, I think.
Today, I've formally started the Install-O-Rama process, with a form to document each install and take some notes as I go. I am working first through the Linux Workstation distributions. Then I'll attack the Server distros. After that, the target will be the *BSD family. Finally, I have a couple of special requests that I'll take a look at. You'll see what those are in good time. Once I've got a few distro's under my belt, I'll start posting results and impressions. Give me a few days to get this in order.
Now we've got an errand to Home Depot and OSH, I am told. Mmmmm. Sounds like a squadron of yard work demons approaching from out of the sun, at seven o'clock. Break right. <grin> See ya!
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Good morning. While the connectivity gods were smiling gently upon me this morning, very few other things were. The pre-commute day just disappeared, which shot my ability to put up a post before leaving for work. So here I am. The commute itself was pretty good today, although I didn't drive the Benz all weekend, thus forgetting I was about out of fuel. Sigh. Definitely this is a misplaced Monday, or as Greg just put it, Muesday.
Am I mistaken, or is everybody on about this HP/Compaq merger gig? Bah. There's many, many more important things in the world. Like Peter's birthday... Happy Birthday, Pete!
Now I suppose that instead of rambling on here, I'd best earn my bowl of gruel for the day. Y'all have a good'un and I look forward to seeing you later. TTFN.
18:27 - Good evening. Well, I did that, then I came home and used a fork to start turning over the bare dirt out in the back yard. I soaked the whole area yesterday, then started the turning today. Another soaking, and I'll continue the turning tomorrow. After one pass through, then I'll amend and fertilize the soil, and rake it out, then seed it. As long as it's plain dirt, it'll be a dust bowl that fills our house with dirt, and sprouts weeds in the winter. I want a little patch of grass, anyway. The landlord certainly can't complain that I made it look different than bare dirt (much as I'd like to scrape off the bark and do the same gig out in the front, not this month, though).
Oh, good news, too. I've received a serious inquiry from a reputable and respected $LARGE_TECHNICAL_PUBLISHER that should lead to my putting in a book proposal in ten days to two weeks. I am going to be publicly coy about this one until it's a done deal, but please, wish me luck. Now for some humor:
Here are some funny epitaphs from real tombstones:
On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
Here lies
Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good
Die Young.
In a London, England cemetery:
Ann Mann
Here lies Ann Mann,
Who lived an old maid
But died an old Mann.
Dec. 8, 1767
In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:
Anna Wallace
The children of Israel wanted bread
And the Lord sent them manna,
Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna.
Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:
Here lies
Johnny Yeast
Pardon me
For not rising.
Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:
Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake.
In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:
Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw.
A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:
Sacred to the memory of
my husband John Barnes
who died January 3, 1803
His comely young widow, aged 23, has
many qualifications of a good wife, and
yearns to be comforted.
A lawyer's epitaph in England:
Sir John Strange
Here lies an honest lawyer,
And that is Strange.
Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:
I was somebody.
Who, is no business
Of yours.
Lester Moore was a Wells, Fargo Co. station agent for Naco,
Arizona in the cowboy days of the 1880's. He's buried in the
Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona:
Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les No More.
In a Georgia cemetery:
"I told you I was sick!"
John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
Reader if cash thou art
In want of any
Dig 4 feet deep
And thou wilt find a Penny.
On Margaret Daniels' grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:
She always said her feet were killing her
but nobody believed her.
In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
On the 22nd of June
- Jonathan Fiddle -
Went out of tune.
Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that
sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:
Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go.
More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:
Gone away
Owin' more
Than he could pay.
Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr. Wood:
In Memory of Beza Wood
Departed this life
Nov. 2, 1837
Aged 45 yrs.
Here lies one Wood
Enclosed in wood
One Wood
Within another.
The outer wood
Is very good:
We cannot praise
The other.
On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
Under the sod and under the trees
Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
He is not here, there's only the pod:
Pease shelled out and went to God.
The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a consumer
tip:
Who was fatally burned
March 21, 1870
by the explosion of a lamp
filled with "R.E. Danforth's
Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"
Oops! Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:
Born 1903--Died 1942
Looked up the elevator shaft to see if
the car was on the way down. It was.
In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:
Here lies an Atheist
All dressed up
And no place to go.
But does he make house calls? Dr. Fred Roberts, Brookland, Arkansas:
Office upstairs
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Good morning. I'd somehow forgotten that turning over dirt is the source of much more muscular pain than just moving a piddley few tens of boxes. Wheesh... Additionally, I did forget one key piece of info last night that will prevent me from continuing the crushing yardwork tonight - SVLUG. Huzzah. Hurrah... um, I mean, bummer. <grin>
The meeting tonight is a presentation by a couple of engineers fromVovidia.org, an open source communications "community" that's put together (among other things) a piece of software called VOCAL, for VoIP applications. Sounds interesting and informative - whaddaya think, dirt labor or the SVLUG meeting? Yeah, you've got that one right!
To close for the moment, I give you a link to Marc Merlin's LWCE 2001 report. Marc is President of SVLUG (among other things), and takes more digital pictures than any 10 people I know. If you missed LWCE, and want to see it, this is the answer. Have a lovely day, see you later!
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Mornin'... There's almost a bit of a snap in the air this morning. Not cold enough to keep me from wearing shorts, but as Tom noted up there in the great North, the weather has shifted. While Summer isn't over yet, portents of Fall begin to make their appearance about now. For instance, I'll bet you real money that already, someplace around the SF Bay Area, I can find you Christmas advertisements. The last three years running, I've heard my first Christmas/pre-Christmas advert on the radio in this first week following Labor Day. Scary, huh? Heh, speaking of Christmas, let me turn this space over to a guest correspondent:
Subject: Tyan Dual Athlon motherboard for $233
From: "Holden Aust"
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 07:15:55 +0100
Hi Brian,
I'm eagerly looking forward to your reports on your great *NIX test.
That will probably be a good page to point out to people who ask
"What Distro should I use?". Also, good luck with the potential book!
Did you know that Tyan has just come out with a new
AMD-chipset-based Dual-Athlon (or Dual-Duron) motherboard which
uses a standard ATX 300 watt power supply (it has to provide 30A at
5V) for $233. This is the Tiger S2460. Four 64-bit (!) PCI slots, 2 32-bit
PCI slots, AGP slot. Crucial has 256 Meg DDR ECC Registered DIMMs
for it for $43 each. One of these motherboards is on it's way to me now.
This should be fun!
Here's some info:
Tyan's page:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/tigermp.html
Price on motherboard from www.tccomputers.com
Let's see, two 750 MHz Durons for $36 each or two 950 MHz Athlons
for $62 each or should I "splurge" and get two 1.4 G Athlons for $109
each? Choices, choices, choices...
Tom's Hardware says you don't have to use the MP Athlons, that regular
Athlons or even Durons will work fine and that was confirmed recently by
an AMD techie who told me that you could indeed run regular Duron or
Athlons in those motherboards, although I don't think either Tyan or AMD
officially support that. Then again, MP Athlons are only $161.
--- Holden
Woo Hoo! Thanks and thanks!
But ssshhh. Clearly it's too early to be making a Christmas list, especially since I decided it would be foolish to ask for an OC-92 until we actually own a house. Getting phat fiber brought to a rental residential property just doesn't seem right somehow.
About last night's meeting... I decided to bag that plan, and give it a decent burial. I've got too many different irons in the fire. With the possibility of a book coming up fast, I really need to finish some things first. Like the yard, for example. So I got into my grubbies last night, and turned over 2/3 of the remaining dirt, in preparation for lawn work. I figure I'll be seeding two or three evenings from now, with luck.
Now I'd best get myself on the road. Y'all have a great day, see you later.
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You know it's a conspiracy, and I know it's a conspiracy. Bob and I both receive identical e-missives from Holden, and both of us think that the info is interesting enough to post. Heee-heh. That's especially exciting since Bob so rarely posts mail these days. Still, a Dual MP Athlon 1.4 system with a half-gig of RAM for a shade over 600 buckazoids sure sounds like a heck of a lot of fun...
Good morning. Welcome to the weird wonderful convergence of business, politics and computing, where after spending untold millions of dollars hounding Microsoft, our beloved Federales stop short of using the vegamatic approach, and say, "Nah, that's OK, just don't do it again, 'K?" Ooooh, hey, speaking of spending untold millions of dollars to no good effect, did the SPO ever finish their definitive waffling on the failed crucifixion of Clinton? I haven't heard that the report's been issued. I could search out the answer, but I am unlikely to appreciate the full humor of the result, so I'll pass.
Yes, I've been becoming one with the land recently, as previously noted. For the last 3 evenings, I've been getting home, getting into something grubby, and getting out the garden fork (five curved sharp tines about a foot long, just as seen in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre). I am turning over the concrete-like soil in the backyard, in order to amend and fertilize it. As of last night, all the first round is done, and the area shown at right: I've turned it again, and raked it out once.
On tap for this weekend I have several goals. First, I want to finish the backyard and get it seeded (probably about 8 hours of work remaining). Then I have to work up the proposal and first round TOC for the potential new book - that's due on next Wednesday, so I think I'll get a round out by Sunday night so that I have a couple of days to tune it. Also on burners but not forgotten is the Install-O-Rama - I've got 7 distros "tested" and notes taken, four more and I'll post the workstation distro results. Finally, but not least, niece Natalie is coming up for a short visit at some point. I see a very full weekend, don't you?
Now to work with me. Have a lovely day, catch you later!
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Good foggy morning to you. After several days of slightly elevated temperatures (low to mid 80's here), the fog is moving back in, giving us the moderating influence that'll make finishing up my yardwork today not such a chore. The weather liar on one of the local television stations mutters about onshore and offshore flows, but isn't TOO bad at telling us what's happening right now. I rarely pay attention to what they say is likely to happen beyond today. It turns out (and I think this particular advice is in the Farmer's Almanac, or some such) that I am fairly correct much of the time if I assume the weather tomorrow is going to be much like today. Now sure I'd get nailed planning a picnic sometimes this way. But here in the SF Bay Area, micro-climates aside, we really don't have weather so much as we have climate. We aren't blessed with storms that brew up out of nothing in the middle of a glorious afternoon, as the midwest is. Nor do we get pounded by 4 passing thunder and lightning extravaganzas as Florida is prone to experience. Sure, we have storms, but they come at us after a long run-up in the Pacific, and a quick glance at the satellite imagery is all that's necessary to keep up with that part.
Heh. Do you think that my fingertips runneth over in a vain attempt to avoid spade and rake??You might be right... indeed you might. There is lots to do yet, but the worst is definitely over with, I've turned the entire plot once, then yesterday evening I fertilized and limed the whole area. Then I raked out and seeded the first section. Now I need to pick up a couple bags of mulch at Home Depot to start spreading that over the seeded areas. Then I can finish it out, hopefully in just a few hours today. I estimated eight hours left yesterday morning, then put in three last night. We'll see how well my SWAG fares in the face of reality.
Linux news - Mandrake 8.1 Beta 3, code name Raklet, hit the wires yesterday. This is a good thing, since my Install-O-Rama first round included Beta 1, which indeed has major flaws. Beta 3 is much, much cleaner, and although it appears possible to use the interface to kill KDE fairly effectively, I'll report that bug and move on to evaluating the last couple of features that'll appear in the release product, probably sometime next month, I'd guess.
The Billenium is upon us, or nearly so. That is, since 12 AM on January 1, 1970, a billion seconds will have passed when the UTC clock strikes 01:46:40. As they're saying in this story on LinuxToday, "party like it's 10e9 - 1" Let's not forget, however, the dark cloud that hangs over us in the form of the epoch end and Unix clock rollover . . . in 2038.
Finally for now (and really, really, then I'll let you get on with your weekend), I want to direct your attention to an article entitled The Outlook on Evolution and Aethera, by Nick Petreley. In it he reviews the two major efforts to provide LookOut-type functionality on the Linux Desktop. There's plenty of holes to be shot in either, and I want to confirm some of the features myself, one of these days. A good read though, and useful if you're keeping track of when something that works a bit like Outlook is ready, 'cause then you'll switch to using Linux - in brief: Not Yet.
Now goodbye for the moment. Have a lovely day, and I'll see you back here later.
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Well, it wasn't just 5 hours yesterday, more like 8 or so. Not only that, but I've acquired a major sunburn 'cause I wore a tanktop. And the icing on the cake is that I should have done half yesterday and half today - right now every muscle in my body aches. But it's done. At left you can see a shot encompassing most of the area. Using a garden fork, I turned all the soil to 6" once, amended, fertilized and limed, then turned again and raked out. Then I seeded and covered. At the bottom of the space there's lots and lots of rocks in the ground next to the tree, so I segregated those areas with brick edging. Either I'll sift the rocks out and put in some plants up there, or we'll simply bring in more rock, and leave that as a George area...
While I was doing that, for a while Marcia and Natalie just stayed out of my way. Once I had the brick steppers in place so that they could get to the back patio, then they started doing the planting and transplanting thing. We got some new flowers for the hanging baskets, and some chives. Also, the spiders that lived in a railing basket over at the apartment have been moved to MUCH larger pots, as you can see at left. To the right are some baby spider plants, and the chives. You might be able to tell, we like having green stuff about.
Now for the important stuff - First, here's the draft of the proposed SSSCA legislation that's likely to be introduced in the next session of Congress by the lackies of corporate money. Read, understand and learn how content consumers (you and I, formerly known as PEOPLE) are going to take it in the behind, as a result of collusion between the content vendors (not creators, just vendors, those who skim money off the sweat of other's work) and politicians. Heinous, I say. But wait, there's more...
Apparently under some preliminary interpretations of the SSSCA language, it might appear that Open Source software would no longer be legal. That would put a major hink into some major software development, don't you think? There are new Federal crimes defined by this proposed Act, carrying both jail time and fines. Please, go read this yourself, then do what needs to be done. Stop supporting the rapscallions, send mail (not email, USPS mail is shown to be much more attention-getting) to your representatives AT ALL LEVELS of government, and support those that support our rights - the EFF, for one.
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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.