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. Yes, a late start on the day - we're not working, as today is my grandmother's funeral. Thanks again for all the kind words and thoughts I've received by phone and email over the last few days. They've been a comfort and a help. Also, we let ourselves sleep in as a bit of an extension to our weekend getaway.

We headed northeast through Sacramento on Saturday morning, as though we were headed up to Lake Tahoe via Interstate 80. State Route 49 crosses 80 at Auburn, in the Sierra foothills. Woo-hoo, and off of our beaten track we go. Well, not really, since everything's paved, but the towns we were passing once we got past Grass Valley were all in the three digit population range (discounting tourists, hikers, bikers (of both mountain and motor kinds), etc.) About 4 hours after we left home, there was our cabin, at a nice resort by the name of Sierra Shangri-La. That's our cabin, called La Vista, pictured at left. The only hookups were for water and electricity. No TV, no radio, no net. Excellent.

Wow. How utterly relaxing. At right, the view from our deck. The river is very low, as it's late in the season, and there's a strong hint of drought in the air. Often there's snow by this time. Mmmm. After dropping our stuff, we headed back a couple miles south into Downieville, and looked at all the closed shops at 3:30 of a Saturday afternoon, picked up a pizza, and headed back up to our cabin. A little wander down by the river, then back to a relaxing evening of reading, cards, and conversation. How nice.

After breakfast the next morning (I had cold pizza, Marcia's was a blueberry muffin), we walked and explored for an hour or so, finding assorted ruins. Situated in the heart of Gold Country, at one time Downieville boasted a population of 5000 (rather more than it's current 325). Many lived in stone housed built up above 100 year flood lines, on the North Yuba and other rivers and creeks which riddle the area. There are mining claim signs posted on trees all over, and hillsides still ravished by the hydrolic cannons of the gold miners. Neat place, worth visiting for yourselves someday. Marcia's got all of the pictures over on her site.

Now it's time for some coffee and breakfast, then to organize ourselves for the day's events. Y'all take care, see you back here later.

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Good morning. It's back to the grind, at least for a day or two. Yesterday was full of family and old family friends, some not seen by me for the last 15 years or so. Wonderful fun in its way, though sad too, in this event. Weddings and funerals bring the family together, and more seem to gather for the latter.

I'm rather at a loss for words this morning, so I think I'll pass for the time being. This has been a challenging last few days, and for whatever reason, restless, dreamfilled nights. I'm still a bit groggy, to be honest. Regular programming to resume shortly. Thank, and see you later.

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Good morning. All is well in the neighborhood - I should know, I jogged through most of it yesterday after work. You know, unless I simply throw myself at something, it'll never happen. I did about 3.5 miles yesterday, running about 2.5 of it, and the rest at a brisk walk. Four to five times a week should help with both general fitness and that "good" cholesterol that my doctor was on about.

Things I can do with Linux to replace Windows - an update. Yesterday I spent working with StarOffice 6 Beta. I imported a couple of my common templates, for letterhead and fax cover sheets. The former was fine, including the embedded graphic. Woo hoo! ... then came the fax template. There are LOTS of macros on that sucker, from fill-in fields which describe their contents to little checkboxes next to words like Urgent or Please Reply. Mmmm. One of those little macros consistently breaks StarOffice, at least under Linux. I suppose I should pull down the Win version just to check, for consistency's sake. Anyway, I took the letterhead template, adapted it for fax, and saved.

Now, I am going to be saving my work in the new compressed XML document format that StarOffice 6 brings to the table, since it's an open and human readable standard (Winzip works to uncompress the documents, once you tell it to recognize the file extension. But StarOffice can be set to save documents in any of it's known formats by default, including the latest versions of that .doc binary semi-proprietary thingy.

What doesn't work today? Autocad 97 LT. Not under Wine, anyway. That means VMware or Win4Lin, at least until I evaluate a native Linux package I've got my eye on... I may yet need Adobe Illustrator also, although I imagine that I can save most artwork as large format TIFF or EPS formats for most of my silkscreen and other external needs. We'll see. Now for the mailbag:

Subject: Nitpick
From: Ed Klein 
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 19:38:51 -0500 (EST)
 
On http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/z20000430.html you say that Stan Klein
is an attorney. ?He's not. ?He sure sounds like one tho, don't he?

--E (Stan's son)

Hi, Ed - Heh. My sordid past coming back to haunt me. It was my birthday the day before, what can I say? Mea maxima culpa And yes, although sounding unlike an attorney in that Stan clearly is advantaged in the clue department. Thanks for the heads up - I'll post a correction shortly. regards, Brian

I also have a couple of humor pieces that I've been saving for a rainy day, but as it's clear and about to be sunny out, I'll have to shelve them again. Soon, we hope, soon. I'd best hit the road - long day on tap. Take care.

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LUG meetings are fun. A LUG is a Linux Users Group. SVLUG, here in the southern reaches of the SF Bay Area, is a large (with over 1000 membership) and resourceful group. Last night, with Martin Hellman (of Diffie-Hellman-Merkle) was speaking. One small problem - the meeting space we normally use at Cisco was unavailable. Quick action on someone's part got us another large room in another Cisco building about 1.5 miles away. A map went up on the door, and we had attendance of around 250, in competition with ALS events up in Oakland. Wooo Hooo.

Dr. Hellman, now a Professor Emeritus at Stanford (meaning they can't fire him, but then he's unpaid, so ...), is an interesting speaker. From the development work he's done on conventional and public key cryptosystems, to fighting the Feds on DES keysize and Skipjack, to GCHQ attempting to steal credit for Diffie-Hellman-Merkle, Martin's been in the thick of many important (and/or interesting) events, which makes for an interesting evening founded on a few cryptic equations up on the projector screens. Much fun was had.

Today, I am off to the 5th Annual Linux Showcase (ALS). The keynote this morning is Towards Petaflops Computing with Linux, from Tom Sterling of CIT. Then, after lunch, Don Becker is going to be talking about Home Beowulf Systems. After that, I am jumping on the road to get back home, and get ready to head up into Palo Alto for tonight's Computer History Museum sponsered event - Donald Knuth: Questions Answered. Marcia is teasing me mercilessly about Computer immersion therapy, or something like that. Well. Harumph.

If you love Venture Capitalists, then you may not want to check out this funny from User Friendly. The link just popped up in my email this morning. Heehe.

Now it's time to roll. Y'all have a great day. See ya later.

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And welcome to the latter half of 48 hours in Computer Immersion Therapy. Following Martin Hellman's interesting and mathematics based talk on PKC on Wednesday night, full gonzo day was yesterday. I popped into work long enough to cover the couple hundred overnight emails, swap the tapes and answer a few questions, "Why doesn't my computer do XXX?" Reboot, try again, and call me if it doesn't work. My standard answer, and it almost always works.

Leaving Newark at about 9, I was up at the Oakland Convention Center (embedded in a Marriott) in time to help the Debian guys carry all their gear into the Exhibition Center. Hmmm, smallish place. But more on that later. I wandered next door, and settled in to listen to Thomas Sterling of CIT. Among many other things, Tom was the co-founder of the Beowulf project with Don Becker. According to Tom's keynote, there's a lot going on in the High Performace Computing arena, and clusters are rapidly becoming a big part of that. Neat talk - I'll probably check out his new Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux book, due out soon.

Following that talk, I met up with Holden Aust and a friend of his. We wandered out into Oakland's Chinatown area, and into a small restaurant where we scarfed up some marvelous and cheap lunch. Mmmmmmmm, yummy. Always good to see Holden. After lunch, in the exhibits for a bit... well, the space is sparsely packed - the economic carnage in Linux companies is evident at a time like this.

In the afternoon, the aforementioned Don Becker gave a chat on Beowulf systems, fairly focused on the not-so-do-it-yourself beowulf system software sold by his company, Scyld. He made mention of Mosix several times, and acknowledged that Mosix had solved the problem of "perfect process migration". He also vaguely denigrated Mosix, claiming that it wasn't appropriate for some types of problem, or something. He never actually returned to discuss those points. I get the impression that Mosix is his perceived main competition.

After Becker's talk, I bailed out and drove home through the increasing afternoon commute traffic. I stayed home long enough to print out a map to Xerox PARC, and grab a quck snack. Then I was off to hear Donald Knuth speak in the Computer History Museum lecture series. Excellent. Bright, bright guy - I am so glad I made the effort to hear him. Check out Donald on his home page at Stanford.

Now I'd best roll out of here - there's lots more presentations going on today, and I want to catch Dirk Hohndel talking about XFree86, at 9. Have a great Friday! See ya.

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Good morning. Another fun day yesterday. And when all was said and done, I was bushed. I didn't stay all day yesterday, but came home and finished the laundry, put a couple of plants in their new pots, mowed the lawn, and several other small chores. I am still bushed. I have some pictures in the camera from ALS, but I haven't pulled them off yet. Later today or perhaps tomorrow for those...

Subject: rainy-sunny
From: Sjon Svenson <sjon(at)svenson.com>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2001 23:19:55 +0000
 

I also have a couple of humor pieces that I've been saving for a rainy
day, but as it's clear and about to be sunny out, ....


Well, it is a rainy day over here so you could well sen the humor this
way. If you wait till it rains over there it may perhaps be sunny here 
and then I should not read it or what.

--
Svenson.

Mail : sjon(at)svenson.com
Site : www.swijsen.com
(home2 : jan(at)swijsen.com)

OK. Here goes. Hope it's raining where you are... I think I've made Mat Lemmings proud of me!

...Hope these lighten your day...

Lady Golfer

I was at the golf store comparing different kinds of golf balls. I was unhappy with the women's type I had been using. After browsing for several minutes, I was approached by one of the good-looking gentlemen who works at the store. He asked if he could help me. Without thinking, I looked at him and said, "I think I like playing with men's balls."

Colleen Collins, 31, Ferndale,

Nuts about You

My sister and I were at the mall and passed by a store that sold a variety of nuts. As we were looking at the display case, the boy behind the counter asked if we needed any help. I replied, "No, I'm just looking at your "nuts." My sister started to laugh hysterically, the boy grinned, and I turned beet-red and walked away. To this day, my sister has never let me forget.

Faye Emerick, 34, Ellerslie, MD

Strip Mall

My husband and I took our three kids out shoe shopping one day. We were going from store to store, and the kids were getting restless. At one crowded store, I was standing near a bench when my 3-year-old climbed up on it, grabbed hold of my elastic-waist shorts, and jumped off pulling both my shorts and my underwear to the floor. I raced out of there, much to the delight of the appreciative onlookers.

Patricia Lamond-Stocksick, 35, Lathrop, CA

Curl Up and Die

I walked into a hair salon with my husband and three kids in tow and asked loudly, "How much do you charge for a shampoo and a blow job?"

Melinda Lowe, 39, Seguin, TX

Pad, please!

An insurance man visited me at home to talk about our mortgage insurance. He was throwing a lot of facts and figures at me, and I wanted to follow as best I could, so I told my 6-year-old son to run and get me a pad. He came back and handed me a Kotex right in front of our guest.

Kathy Newman, 46, Winston-Salem, NC

Ho, Ho, Ho

I was taking a shower when my 2-year-old son came into the bathroom and wrapped himself in toilet paper. Although he made a mess, he looked adorable, so I ran for my camera and took a few shots. They came out so well that I had copies made and included one with each of our Christmas cards. Days later, a relative called about the picture, laughing hysterically, and suggesting I take a closer look. Puzzled, I stared at the photo and was shocked to discover that in addition to my son, I had captured my reflection in the mirror wearing nothing but a camera!

Name Withheld

The following are the top four winners of a Most Embarrassing Moments Contest in the "New Woman Magazine."

While in line at the bank one afternoon, my toddler decided to release some pent-up energy and ran amok. I was finally able to grab hold of her after receiving looks of disgust and annoyance from other patrons. I told her that if she did not start behaving "right now" she would be punished. To my horror, she looked me in the eye and said in a voice just as threatening, "If you don't let me go right now, I will tell Grandma that I saw you kissing Daddy's pee-pee last night!" The silence was deafening after this enlightening exchange. Even the tellers stopped what they were doing. I mustered up the last of my dignity and walked out of the bank with my daughter in tow. The last thing I heard when the door closed behind me were screams of laughter.

Amy Richardson; Stafford, Virginia

Surprise!

It was the day before my eighteenth birthday. I was living at home, but my parents had gone out for the evening, so I invited my girlfriend over for a romantic night alone. As we lay in bed after making love, we heard the telephone ring downstairs. I suggested to my girlfriend that I give her a nude piggyback ride to the phone. Since we didn't want to miss the call, we didn't have time to get dressed. When we got to the bottom of the stairs, the lights suddenly came on and a whole crowd of people yelled, "SURPRISE!" My entire family: aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and all my friends were standing there. My girlfriend and I were frozen in a state of shock and embarrassment for what seemed like an eternity. Since then, no one in my family has planned a surprise party again.

Tim Cahill, Poughkeepsie, New York

Priceless

One of the funniest "most-embarrassing-moment" stories I've come upon in a long time was about a lady who picked up several items at a discount store. When she finally got up to the checker, she learned that one of her items had no price tag. Imagine her embarrassment when the checker got on the intercom and boomed out for all the store to hear, "PRICE CHECK ON LANE THIRTEEN,TAMPAX, SUPER SIZE." That was bad enough, but somebody at the rear of the store apparently misunderstood the word "Tampax" for "THUMBTACKS." In a businesslike tone, a voice boomed back over the intercom. "DO YOU WANT THE KIND YOU PUSH IN WITH YOUR THUMB OR THE KIND YOU POUND IN WITH A HAMMER?"

Mom's Advice

A teacher noticed that a little boy at the back of the class was squirming around, scratching his crotch and not paying attention. She went back to find out what was going on. He was quite embarrassed and whispered that he had just recently been circumcised and he was quite itchy. The teacher told him to go down to the principal's office. He was to phone his mother and ask her what he should do about it. He called and returned to his class.

Suddenly, there was a commotion at the back of the room. The teacher went back to investigate only to find him sitting at his desk with his penis hanging out.

"I thought I told you to call your Mom," she screamed.

"I did what she said, she told me that if I could stick it out till noon, she'd come and pick me up from school."

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It's late, and although I haven't much energy, I did get a lot accomplished today, just sitting around. Thanks for your patience with me. The lack of energy apparently stems from a nascent flu bug that is attacking Marcia and I both, although in different ways. I am mostly just achey in my joints, with a little headache and muscle soreness. And I don't have much of an appetite, which is one of those warning signs that I really am ill. Marcia is more afflicted. We'll be fine, of course. The saga, though...

It all started yesterday, with an email from Bob Thompson that he was mucking about without having much fun, using the RC3 release of Redmond Linux. I am impressed by a couple of things with Redmond Linux. But putting a crimp in Bob's day just didn't seem right. I have a two-month old RC, so I thought I'd update that. Then I could sacrifice my current Mandrake installation on Gryphon the Acer Travelmate to the God of Doing Silly Things.

And a very silly thing indeed, to inflict on my poor laptop. Well, sort of. If you're OK with program selection made by people who want to emulate Windows, they do OK. Additionally, Redmond Linux has a couple of excellent tools on their KDE desktop that look a LOT like My Computer and Network Neighborhood. They're proprietary, but if it sells Linux, who's to complain, and someone will replicate the functionality soonish...

But I miss the track of my tale. I used rsync to backup my home directory across the network to Garcia the whitebox workstation. Then I installed Redmond Linux RC3. No hitches at all. I got Bob on the phone. I couldn't replicate his problems, he couldn't get my success. One day, one day Linux will JUST WORK for Bob, then he'll be happier, at least having an alternative. An OS that doesn't load isn't an alternative, at least for the person so afflicted.

Whoops? Yep, a small problem crops up shortly after booting into RL. But first, I pop into the "Network 'hood" application - Poof, just works the way I remember it. They're using Konqueror in File Manager mode to frontend for some cunningly designed scripts that use Samba functionality (or something like that), but it just works. Prompts for passwords appropriately (as I have all shares password protected, even behind the firewalls), etc, etc. But the problem is... no rsync. It's on my list of tools I use literally every day.

"Well." sez I, "I'll just pop onto the installation CD and fetch it from there." It must not be part of the standard installation set, since what would a recent Windows user do with a program like rsync? Ah. Oh. Ooops. Not on there either? Mmmmm.

You know, I don't mind a massively constrained set of packages. Most people flatly aren't interested in opening a menu item called Internet, and finding four browser options, three IRC clients, two AIM-alikes, one for KDE and one GTK-based (and what's the difference anyway), four mail programs and five newsreaders. Perhaps I exaggerate, but village idiot that I am, I've had all that and more installed on one system at one time, more than once. But then I love comparing apples and oranges. Most distributions don't install anything like that much, usually just one or two of each function.

But please, please, please folks. Have the most common and useful options, alternatives and utilities available for installation. Not having rsync available is a real pain. And another example from the land of the missing is Xchat, a gtk-based IRC client. I have that on much of each day. Doesn't take advantage of the unified KDE interface, but then, it doesn't SUCK like ksirc. So there!

Short and long of it is, though Redmond Linux installs quickly (for me), and just works (and please do try it for yourself - it might be just the ticket), I can't live inside the borders they've defined. I've been spoiled by Debian, by package dependency and conflict resolution that works, by truckloads of choices. Yummy.

I had been running Mandrake 8.??? Um 8.1pre ??? on Gryphon, as a side effect of the Linux Workstation Install-O-Rama from a few weeks ago. I hadn't trashed it because it was working for me, and I'd been able to easily make fonts and multiple input devices and the USB Smart Media reader work without any hassles. But too much stuff loaded for what I do with that box.

So today I took Gryphon up to Debian Unstable (which is what works for me, these days). Debian Stable (Potato) is a) Boring, b) too many steps behind the curve in functionality, and 3) Boring. Oh. Did I say that already? Heh. Debian Testing (Woody) is pretty solid, and I use it on server setups. Not a lot changes in that arena, and Testing is on the leading stable edge of many critical server components, from Apache to Postfix to Samba. But for a workstation, where I am tracking the latest released KDE packages, and generally mucking about - Unstable makes a marvelous sandbox.

Once I had Debian installed, and all the programs running right, then I upgraded from the 2.2.19pre17 kernel that comes stock with installation. I went to kernel.org and fetched the latest stable kernel (with a Linus-approved stable VM), 2.4.14. Then I tinker it a bit by adding the appropriate Preemptible Kernel Patch by Robert Love. Build, install and boot (Just like in Chapter 7 of Tom and Brian's Linux Book). I rebooted into the new kernel, figured out what wasn't working by testing things. I reconfigured the kernel, rebuilt and reinstalled. Poof, just works. Excellent.

All the twiddly bits are twiddled, networking and devices are doing fine. Now that's all described, and I'll leave you go for the evening. I did finally get the pictures from the show off the Camera. Most of them, unfortunately, suck, since I am polite enough to not use the Flash on speakers in a darkened area. The pictures come out dim and blurry, but the speaker isn't blinded. I do, however, have some nice, depressingly sharp pictures of a tiny, and uncrowded exhibition floor. Ah, well. Those for tomorrow or Tuesday, then, OK? Y'all have a great evening. See you next week!

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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.