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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. 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... It's a light gray outside, as the dawn light starts to filter down from the eastern hills. I'm pushing a tad later this morning, as I am likely to shift my hours to work a little later into the day to provide better coverage. This is a good thing, because I have several bases to cover this morning here, including some reruns from this weekend.
First, our labor of love is completed - Brian and Tom's Linux Book is as done as it's going to get. The lost appendix has been found, checked and posted. As a result, I've also been able to create a tarball (the Linux equivalent of a zip file) of the completed HTML version, images and all. It is 12 MB, and ready for you do download from these locations:
You're welcome to it - Tom and I certainly hope that you find it to be of use. Please, when you get a chance, read the Preface and click on the Encourage Us link to Paypal if we've provided value. While the web statistics indicate that many people use the material I've published here over the years, and I gleefully provide warped help via email to virtually all comers, there have only been six or seven of you to click that link. Somehow I find that a bit odd. Maybe everyone's been intending to, but never quite gotten around to it? Mmmm. No, don't worry, I am not going to get strident or regular about this rant. At least this way it's clear that I am doing this place and these reports primarily for my pleasure.
At left you see one of the better pictures that I got while at the Monterey Bay Acquarium last Thursday with Marcia and cousin Barb. I really like it. The image link leads to the moderate sized 640x480 - if you want full-rate 1280x960 for desktop wallpaper, here's the high resolution version. I had this as my desktop wall paper while I did as Dan Bowman and several other people requested... I've compiled the various installation reviews I posted over the last couple of weeks into a single page for your convenience: Install-O-Rama 2001 - Workstation Edition. There you are, go to town.
With that, I really should be organizing myself for work. Y'all have a lovely day and I'll see you again soon. TTFN.
18:45 - Mmmm. Wow. Sorry about that. I had to pull the tarball off of this site - the number of downloads was putting performance into the floor - I couldn't login to the box to break that link or disappear the file for the better part of a half hour, the link was so saturated. Next, I have heard of problems reported with the tarball - let me do a test right quick on Marcia's Winbox...
When I select the download link from Greg's mirror at Mazin Software (for example), using Internet Explorer, it pops up asking me to save or open. When I select save, the filename comes up properly as btlb2001.tgz, and the file type is .tar document. Mmmmm. Once saved, I find it in the default save directory, still in the right filename. The .tgz filetype isn't registered with PKZip, although it may be with WinZip - I don't easily have the latter available to me here right at the moment. However, I can take the downloaded file and drop it on the PKZip icon, and it decompressed the archive and opened it. No problems. If you run into hassles with the tarball, and want a hint or two not provided here, drop me a line and I'll do what I can to assist.
In other news, I'd just finished this Linux Workstation Install-O-Rama thingy, and what happens? Progeny announces they're dropping the ball. Well, not really, but they're not going to maintain a Debian fork anymore. Apparently the company is going to complete the transition to a "consulting and professional services" firm with strong Debian leanings.Mmmm. They pushed the envelope for Debian in a way that Corel could have but didn't, and I think Progeny has provided a real service to the community and Debian user base during their innings.
Oh, and I think we'll all stop opening our junk mail, now, won't we...? Good night.
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Howdy. Mmmm. May your Tuesday (and mine) be better than my Monday. I'll just give you the capper - I stayed late at work last night waiting for a meeting .. that never happened. The guy never showed up. We had called, and he was on his way, but that turned out to be a non-truth. Sheesh. I detest that. Give me this much, I am either in place and on time, or I've called to explain the situation under my own motivation, rather than waiting for someone to call me and ask "Where are you?" Feh!
Here's another Monterey Bay Aquarium picture captured by my Olympus D450-Z last Thursday.The jellyfish are really rather mesmerising, and the combination of backdrop and lighting - I'm pretty sure there's a blacklight involved, I checked around, but no Elvis painting on black velvet to confirm that - makes these beasties really stand out. As with yesterday's shot, the thumbnail links to a 640x480 - here's the high resolution version, if you're interested for your desktop or screensaver.
Linux news - I've more testing to do, but last night I fetched the stock Linus 2.4.12 kernel, added in Alan Cox's -ac2 patch (which changes out the VM to something that Alan thinks is better, among many other changes), then added Robert Love's preemptible kernel patches. This is a performance hack, and a good one. I tracked into this both from Greg, and via this /. story. Especially interesting to look at were the benchmark results at the The Linux kernel preemption project. This stuff works - I can definitely tell the difference in smooth scrolling windows, in Audio performance while running other things, and while playing Quake3 Arena. Woo hooo!!! If you roll your own, than this might be something you want to muck about with.
Now, since I had to take a few minutes out of my morning schedule to repair the shower plumbing, I think I'll wrap this up and see y'all later. Take care.
1642 - Not much new at the moment, but thought that I'd rectify my gross negligence in not telling you that Marcia's Bay Area Tourist report is now up for your viewing pleasure. See you again later.
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Good morning. You may have missed it last night - for those of you that like vacation photo reports, Marcia's got her week's vacation (including lotsapictures) with cousin Barb up on her site now. I was remiss about posting this when she finished the page.
Last night was a new adventure - I installed MySQL and PHP, necessitating a remodelling of the Apache install to have PHP built into it. So I've upgraded Apache to 1.3.22. The difference between this and 1.3.19 is mostly stuff for Win32 platforms, but there's one security update that was effected with 1.3.21 for a hole in autoindexed directory listings. Plus there are functionality patches for a few modules. Finally, of course, locally compiled does run faster.
The purpose of all this is to begin to do some experimentation with a CRM package called Relata (http://www.relata.org/). Now that ETS is a little more geographically dispersed, it makes sense to be able to work with a tool that permits local and remote access. Of course there's going to be security stuff to setup as well, from htaccess and IP Blocking to Apache/SSL, but right now I am just learning about how to setup and configure a PHP app. Needless to say, Greg's been helping quite a bit, although I don't read nearly as much of the fine manual as I should when Greg already knows the answer... hehee
Then there's the mail...
Subject: nice picture of ... From: Jan Swijsen <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 14:05:18 +0200 Nice picture of the Microsoft marketing team on your site (I think you called it PA111480.JPG )-- Svenson. Mail at home : [email protected]
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Hullo. Has anyone seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? It sure sounds like Penguin Computing could make use of it. Jerry Pournelle spoke well of Penguin's hardware, both on his site and in the Byte Column back in ... mmm April of 2000? I've met Sam Ockman (founder of Penguin) a couple of times in the context of SVLUG and LWCE, additionally he is a co-editor of Open Sources, the O'Reilly collection of essays on the topic. But enough digression... If the big guys are having trouble selling enough hardware to stay profitable, how can we begin to expect the smaller players to survive? Yeah, and it's a shame, but these are hard times for everyone, everyone.
One bit of good news amid all the flurry of Anthrax, stock worries, business layoffs and more: My Tcl/Tk tutorial finally got unveiled up at IBM DeveloperWorks at the TOP of the preview page. Wooo Hooo!!! In a drawback, the tcltk.com domain was allowed to expire, and is owned by one of the official squatters ... lessee ... Well, hmmm. Certainly it's down, and with it lots of the sub-sites that hosted the homes of Tcl/Tk extensions like BLT (a widget set) and others. At least I found a link to the actual sources for these extensions to give to the IBM editor who discovered the missing site. Oh, anyway, so what are Tcl and Tk, you ask? Well, they're scripting languages that are A: Easy to learn and use; B: Provide command line and GUI capabilities respectively; and C: Introduced fairly well in my tutorial (which does require a one-time free registration at DevWorks).
Sorry, folks, I am clearly not performing well yet this AM - I've had at this for 20 minutes and my concentration is crap. Perhaps the morning commute with caffeine will provide a bit of a lift. Meantime, take care of yourselves and each other - we're all we've got.
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Good morning. How's it going? Mmmm, yeah, me too. Last week I did the fasting blood test, which turned out to be a bit of a bother. Why? Mostly because there was roadwork on the normally-five-minute drive to the lab. 50 minutes later, I was a ravenous, caffeine starved freak on the way to a psychotic outbreak. Don't, repeat DON'T deprive me of coffee and food for over 12 hours, ever. From personal experience, I can tell you it's a really bad idea. However, the context for last week's events are that the extremely not-fun bits of my every other decade physical examination are on for this morning, in just over two hours... I am so NOT looking forward to this. Sigh. The true purpose of a doctor is to give me morphine to ease the last few hours of life. I know they help lots of people, but somehow, I have this persistent image of leech application, blood-letting, and other unsavory behaviour. Can't help it - I am a wimp when it comes to the medical profession working on me. After all, if they were GOOD at it, do you think they'd still call it practicing medicine?
What else is new? Regarding the Tcl/Tk tutorial, this thing that I wrote back in February is now sadly out of date, at least with respect to linkage. Two major Tcl/Tk sites (tcltk.com and scriptics.com) have both disappeared from the face of the web, and I can't find out why. I've got inquiries out. Additionally, there is a site at tcl.activestate.com that I could probably use to replace many of the borked links. One small problem - much of THAT site is non-functional. I need to remember to mirror pages that I use for reference in things that I write for $$$. That way I can at least back up my attributions. There's also Google caches, but that's a little hokey.
Next, my ATAPI burner died the death sometime in the last few days. It's been behaving oddly for at least a week now, and I think it's time to get something that gets toasty at better than 4X. This is a good time to do this, as 16X burners are priced in the basement right now, and anything beyond that speed yields diminishing returns. What's the difference between three minutes and five? Well, it's not worth $100US to me. I don't burn multiple discs every day. I think I'll look at Plextor, since they're so highly recommended by people like Bob Thompson, whose experience in such matters merits the trust.
I mentioned to someone the other day that I have managed to bring back to life a very nearly dead rose bush in our back yard. It's in the picture to the left. I'm watering it every day, and it's starting to produce some gorgeous blooms, like the one shown at right. The color is a traditional deep red, although some of the roses have either white or yellowish highlights. I don't know very much about rose gardening, but I could tell that we had a plant seriously lacking in one fundamental - H2O. Much better now.
From this morning's surfing about, I find Qmail the easy way linked from Dave Farquhar's site. I don't run Qmail, I run Postfix, but my friend Lisa's been struggling with Qmail for a couple of weeks now - let's see if that helps her. Also, you might want to wander over to MoeLabs, the online home of Moshe Bar, Linux kernel hacker and nice guy. He's given the place a bit of a facelift, using PhpNuke, a slashcode-like presentation for a portal site. And keep going back there, the traffic is up, and I hear that there are more changes in the air, so stay tuned.
Finally, there's a pair of problems with the Linux kernel that have finally surfaced. One is a local DoS attack, the other is a local root exploit. Turns out that the 2.4.10 kernel (inadvertently, apparently) fixes the former, and the 2.4.12 (ditto) the latter. Here's the notification email on SecurityFocus - check it out, then upgrade if you're vulnerable. Now to get ready for my appointment, and organize my day. TTFN
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Welcome to my weekend. It's something past 0900, I've been up for about an hour, I woke with and still have a screaming headache. Sigh. Was it something I said? Mmmmm. It feels like a caffeine thing, but I didn't deprive myself yesterday, and this morning's coffee is all internalized, so ... what now? Maybe it's related to the incipient virus that I've been fighting for the last couple of weeks. This cold keeps trying to get a foothold, every time I feel it sneaking in, I dose for two or three days with zinc and echinacea, C and other stuff. Guess it's time for that again, neh?
Subject: Plextor CD-RW drives
From: "Neil Sherin" <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 01:30:44 +0800
Hi Brian,
Just to confirm that if you go for a Plextor CD-RW, you won't regret it!
I've got the 12/10/32A drive and it's almost impossible to create
coasters with this thing. I've been able to watch DVD / VideoCD movies
and still create perfect discs at the same time - and that's
software-based DVD playback.
I agree with you regarding speed - more than 16X is pointless for most
uses. The other consideration is certified media - I've not actually
seen any media certified for more than 16X, but having said that, I
should think BURNProof would actually compensate for this if necessary.
Keep up the entertaining and informative journal. I've also downloaded
your Linux book, so hopefully will get around to reading that now that
the evenings are getting longer.
Take care,
Neil
Subject: RE: Plextor CD-RW drives
From: "Neil Sherin" <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 17:09:23 +0800
The Teac should be a good buy. I know most of their drives are OEM
products and are used a lot in CD duplicator towers, so that is saying
something. As you say, their audio equipment is always of a good
standard. Thanks for the driveropts tip - it will be a useful thing to
remember when I finally move to Linux. At the moment, I use and
recommend Nero - the last few releases of Roxio's CD Creator leave a lot
to be desired.
Neil
Also, I noted this morning that my log files had lots of error messages related to DNS updates to Greg's new box up at Rackshack. Since I'm the backup admin for that box, I thought I'd check things out... A quick login, oooh. named (the DNS daemon) wasn't running, we had an uptime measured in hours, and ... Oh. Must have been a planned maintenance window or something. All the other services were up and running properly, but named wasn't, because it wasn't configured properly to start at boot. That's an easy enough mistake to make, as you really don't expect to reboot your machine. Fortunately, the main services, Apache and OpenSSH, were running along just fine. I modified the startup scripts to start named properly at boot (for the uncertain next time), and dropped Greg an email explaining what I'd found, and what I did. That last bit is important, as a changed system WITHOUT an explanation is a very worrisome thing.
Marcia's Win98 box has been behaving Very Badly for the last few weeks - of course I am not surprised, since we simply transferred the hard drive into a new box. Windows usually doesn't take to kindly to such behaviour, but it booted and ran OK. But it's time to upgrade. So I've backed up her whole system across the network, and now I am going to install Win2K on a newer, larger hard drive, taking advantage of her time at the salon today. I may be back later today, scarred and with war stories to tell. Later!
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Scarred isn't the right word. Flesh flayed from my bones, money from my wallet, and patience | serenity | milk-of-kindness from my psyche - those more clearly express the effects of my failures yesterday. It all ended well, which allows me to be writing this now, but the path wasn't a nice trip.
Good morning. As I am sure that you can tell from the lead paragraph, I am discussing an encounter with products from Redmond in cahoots with funky hardware. Back when Marcia's HP microtower box gave up the ghost, a few months back, I took the shell of my former workstation and added bits from her box and my grud pile to build a working box, in a vain attempt to save money. Actually, it did, for quite a while. That mobo / CPU combination was really an Intel engineering sample I'd picked up from a friend. The P-III wasn't rate multiplier locked, and I had been running it happily at 600 megawiggles for a couple of years before it started acting funky.
Brought back into service for Marcia under Windows 98, the box worked well enough for quite a while. Hardware problems that Linux won't tolerate are sufficiently masked by the fundamental lack of stability in Windows 98. But slowly things have degraded. The short and long of the tale is that it was time to put Marcia in a larger hard disk - she'd run out of space on the 5 gig drive. I popped in a new drive, and decided to try her out with Win2K, since I have a spare licence/CDROM of that about the joint. The install went fine, but once running, I couldn't do ANYTHING without the system auto-rebooting... This isn't good news, Elmer!
I wiped the drive, and popped in the Win98 disc. Got that installed - same behaviour. Mmmmmm. I thought I might have isolated the problem to networking access, so I swapped NICs. No joy. I ran the speed of the processor down from 600 to 500, then to 450. Nada. The previous installation of Windows 98 on the smaller HD had clearly adapted itself to a funky piece of hardware, and no new installation was going to do that, by damn.
At this point, further efforts to make this work on the current hardware are a bit... pointless. So I hared off to Central Computer and picked up a D815EEA2LU, a P-III 800EB, a 256M stick of PC133-CAS2, and to round things out, a new Antec case. Including disassembly of the recoverable bits from the old system, everything went together in about 45 minutes - these new Antec cases are sweet, easy to work in, even for ham-handed me. The balance of the late afternoon was spent in the regular cycle of massive numbers of reboots required to install anything in Win98... yes, Win98 still. It turns out that the only guarantee that everything Marcia needs to run is to put in Win98. This is driven by some work-related hardware bits that don't have Win2K drivers.
So, we left off last night to have supper at Hunan Gourmet, then tried to watch the movie Traffic. I found myself hating the movie by the time we were little more than half an hour into it, and Marcia wasn't impressed either. So instead we broke out a deck of cards and played rummy and chatted a bit before heading to bed.
Today, along with Costco and other errands, I have to finish installing software on Marcia's box. There's really a lot to be done, so we'd best get to it. Y'all have a lovely day yourselves.
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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.