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. Here it is, two minutes of seven, and I am just beginning to write. This doesn't bode well for a long post. Ah, well. I did put up quite a bit late last night, on the changes I've forced upon Gryphon the Acer Travelmate, and other such.

This just in - another plane is crashed in New York - no early evidence of terrorist action, instead, an engine apparently fell off. There are a couple of brief stories on Yahoo News, and I can't get to the CNN site right now. If nothing else, it scared the financial markets.

Heh. I like this Op/Ed piece by Richard Reeves, about Americans and their state of mind. Go read it, then have a good day. I'll be back later.

1814 - Good evening. Well, here are the non-fuzzed out pictures from ALS, last week...

Donald Becker	Show Floor 1	Show Floor 2	Show Floor 3	Show Floor 4
Show Floor 5	Show Floor 6	Show Floor 7	Terminal Cafe	Linux Classes

Other than that, I have a step-by-step for installing Debian to write up for a reader - I'll post that here tomorrow. It'll be a model of brevity, with pointers to the right locations for boot floppies and such, and general guidelines for each stage. So I'll see you tomorrow. You can amuse yourself playing spot the Maddog in the pictures above (as in Jon "Maddog" Hall, Chair of Linux International). G'night.

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Good morning. Yes, last night I did manage to post some of the non-fuzzy snaps from the Fifth Annual Linux Showcase, which I attended last week. However, I didn't update the link at the top of the page to reflect Monday evening until about 10 PM, four hours later, when Marcia caught my error. Thanks, Hon...

In another action, please welcome new member David Markowitz to the ranks of Daynoters. According to some, his major purpose in life is to push Mat Lemmings off the bottom of the Daynotes.Org website (which should happen sometime shortly). He's a network engineer who gets to play with bandwidth that I can only dream of. Additionally, Dave has had several pieces published at Linux.Com. Check him out, and give him his fair ration of the abuse and criticism that's reserved for Daynotes members. Welcome!

Now, here's an interchange with another David. With that, I'll see you later; Time for me to head in to work.

Subject: Debian Sid
From: David Thorarinsson <david.thorarinsson AT front.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 08:49:13 +0100
 
Hi Brian,

Sorry to hear that you are feeling under the weather. 

I have been pretty curious about Debian (mostly because of the
praise on your site) so I have decided to give it a whirl. My curiosity has
gotten the better of me. After all, I have only received good advice from
your site so I might as well take the plunge :-)

I looked for Sid on a fast, local server and found it easy enaugh. Here is
my problem: I browsed the Debian site for instructions on how to get Sid up
and running quickly but I found nothing. Their ftp site doesn?t have much
either (even a "quick and dirty" startup guide would probably give me the
push I need). 

I guess I need to get the "debian-installer" catalog as well as the
"binary-i386" from the "main" catalog, as well as the "binary-i386" from the
"contrib" and "non-free" catalogs. I was a bit annoyed that no information
was contained in the "debian-installer" catalog. I have browsed through the
debian website as well but not found anything on getting Sid up and running.


Can you give me a quick push in the right direction? I would appreciate a
few hints on exactly what to get and how to get the installer program
working. 

Thanks,

/Dave

OK. Here goes nothing. To get to Sid (Debian Unstable), I start with testing. Here's one URL... ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/3.0.15-2001-10-18/images-1.44 Now. For a FULL installation set, you need the rescue.bin, root.bin, and 4 driver disks. Also within that directory are several subset or specialty installation floppy sets. I've used the reiserFS disks (rescue, root and one driver) a couple of times now. That, plus a fast ethernet connection is all you need. Even dialup is OK as long as you pick and choose your packages OK, then let it run overnight... but I get ahead of myself. Let's assume for sake of argument that you work with the reiserFS disks. copy the xxx.bin files down to your system. I presume you're running SOME linux already, in which case you copy the images to floppies with (for example): $ dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 ; cmp /dev/fd0 rescue.bin Rinse and repeat for each disk. If you're starting from windows, then look for rawrite2.exe (it'll be someplace around on the debian tree, probably under a directory called tools) start it and follow the directions to make floppies. The cmp command compares to make sure you've got a good floppy image. I always go through this step, because getting partway through an install, then dealing with a corrupt root or drivers disk really annoys me! So. Boot the system with the rescue floppy in the drive (and the BIOS set to boot from removable media first - I usually order my boot sequence to be floppy, CDROM, HD). When the kernel is started, it'll prompt you for a root disk. That is a compressed image of a Linux root partition that is inflated into a RAM disk. Then installation starts. Answer the questions in the order presented to you. All of the options are presented once, in order. Some you need to repeat manually - like setting up multiple partitions. Load drivers from the driver disk(s) you've created, then select those drivers you need to install for your hardware. The good news (at least with the reiserFS disks) is that several common drivers are compiled into the kernel, like the tulip and eepro100 NIC drivers, etc. If you use the baseline four driver disk set, then you'll have to explicitly setup support for every option that you need - that kernel is stripped down, with everything that can be, modularized. Setup networking. Fairly standard set of options. Base installation can be from local or network source. Under the assumption that we're live on a fast pipe, choose the latter, and accept the defaults to automatically fetch down the base.tgz installation and set that up. After a reboot and some configuration, you can set up the rest of your system. Here you should be able to select from either the testing or unstable tree, and use a network source or two. I used the simple task selection, and got a couple things. X Windows, Desktop Environment, and C/C++. There'll be other bits you'll fetch down onesy-twosey, but those work for a workstation install. **** Warning **** I made a couple of passes at Debian installs until I got it right - be patient with the system and yourself through these things, be conservative in your selections, and you'll be OK. HTH, .brian

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Hullo. What's new and exciting? IE running on UNIX you say? I didn't know that, really I didn't, but here it is. Mmmm. Oooooh, that includes Outlook Express. Please note, these don't run on Solaris Intel, just on SparcStations (and the HP workstations, for the HP-UX version. Heh. Thanks to Phil on the UUASC mailing list for that tidbit. I had NO idea! Then, there's a thread on "interesting" Amazon reviews on the CBP mailing list, from the nasty and irrelevant to the just plain funny. Here are a few examples (page down to get to the Customer Reviews), like this one (nasty), these ones (funny, but critical), and another Family Circus (upbeat, but odd), and finally one I've pointed out before here, but recently brought back to my attention, about Ping (marvelous).

With my failure to run AutoCAD under Wine last week, I started on an odyssey to find CAD packages for Linux, both PCB design and mechanical cad, since I use those functions every week. So far, I've surveyed Qcad, VariCAD and LinuxCAD. I might even be tempted to buy a copy of the latter, if only I can find a demo to confirm it's compatibility with the AutoCAD DWG format. We'll see. Also today, I am going to try out my PCB package on wine. One thing at a time, though.

Time to rock-n-roll, though. See you later!

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Good morning. I've very little time today - most of the plans I had for looking at the CAD software under Linux yesterday went away, temporarily. A long-awaited shipment of raw materials came in to work, and everyone including yours truly is hard at work turning said goods into finished inventory to ship off the the customer by Friday. We all wear as many hats as we need to, to get the job done.

I'll note in passing that Moshe's article on Linux vs FreeBSD Revisited at Byte has been Slashdotted, just like the last three. They've gotta love the way that Moshe's writing draws crowds over there. Sells a lot of newspapers, neh? I think it's cute the way Moshe tries to forstall the inevitable flames at the end of his article, too. Hehheh...

Now I've got to run. I'll be back later today with more news, if I can (or if there is any).

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Good morning. Thank goodness it's Friday - this has been a longer week than usual - only 8 hours to go. I'd add "more or less", but what with commute and the likelyhood of running over, just more is common. Anyway, it was a reasonably good day yesterday. I did little work on the production floor, since they're ahead of that game now. I spent much of the day working on a product summary sheet for the Audio and Video Baluns. This is basically a listing of part numbers, descriptions, and a couple of product photos, grouped by function. Not too hard. The most difficult kind of thing to write is a true summary - I've got full page datasheets for each of the products, so writing 50 to 75 words on each is much tougher. We have to do that all the time for product placement in the magazines.

On the CAD front, I've got Protel running under Wine in Linux. Protel is printed circuit board (PCB) design software, and this version I use is ancient. I think it dates to the Windows for Workgroups era, and only handles 8.3 filenames. The program itself works great for my needs, however. What I can't do is print over the network from Wine. Has anyone mastered network printing in Wine? I may just be using the wrong driver, or the wrong port on the printer... Mmmm. Anybody with thoughts on that? I'm trying to print to an HP 2100TN, sits directly on the network with a JetDirect card in the printer.

Now for some humor:

"Christmas with Louise"

As a joke, my brother used to hang a pair of panty hose over his
fireplace before Christmas.  He said all he wanted was for Santa to
fill them. What they say about Santa checking the list  twice must
be true because every Christmas morning, although Jay's kids'
stockings were overflowed, his poor pantyhose hung sadly empty.

One year I decided to make his dream come true. I put on
sunglasses and went in search of an  inflatable love doll. They don't
sell those things at Wal-Mart.

I had to go to an adult bookstore downtown. If you've never been in
an X-rated store, don't go. You'll only confuse yourself. I was there 
an hour saying things like, "What does this do?"

"You're kidding me!" 

"Who would buy that?"

Finally, I made it to the inflatable doll section. I wanted to buy a
standard, uncomplicated doll that could also substitute as a
passenger in my truck so I could use the car pool lane during rush
hour. Finding what I wanted was difficult. Love dolls come in many
different models. The top of the line, according to the side of the
box, could do things I'd only seen in a book on animal husbandry. I
settled for 'Lovable Louise." She was at the bottom of the price
scale. To call Louise a "doll" took a huge leap of imagination.

On Christmas Eve, with the help of an old bicycle pump, Louise
came to life. My sister-in-law was in on the plan and let me in
during the wee morning hours, long after Santa had come and
gone, I filled the dangling pantyhose with Louise's pliant legs and
bottom. I also ate some cookies and drank what remained of a
glass of milk on a nearby tray. I went home, and giggled for a
couple of hours.

The next morning my brother called to say that Santa had been to
his house and left a present that had made him VERY happy but
had left the dog confused. She would bark, start to walk away, then
come back and bark some more. We all agreed that Louise should
remain in her panty hose so the rest of the family could admire her
when they came over for the traditional Christmas Dinner.

My grandmother noticed Louise the moment she walked in the
door. "What the hell is that?" she asked. My brother quickly
explained, "It's a doll."

"Who would play with something like that?" Granny snapped.

I had several candidates in mind, but kept my mouth shut.

"Where are her clothes?" Granny continued.

"Boy, that turkey sure smells nice, Gran," Jay said, trying to steer
her to the dining room.

But Granny was relentless. "Why doesn't she have any teeth?"

Again, I could have answered, but why would I? It was Christmas 
and no one wanted to ride in the back of the ambulance saying, 
"Hang on Granny! Hang on!"

My grandfather, a delightful old man with poor eyesight, sidled up
to me and said, " Hey, who's the naked gal by the fireplace?" I told
him she was Jay's friend. A few minutes later I noticed Grandpa by
the mantel, talking to Louise. Not just talking, but actually flirting. 
It was then that we realized this might be Grandpa's last Christmas
at home.

The dinner went well. We made the usual small talk about who had
died, who was dying, and who should be killed, when suddenly
Louise made a noise that sounded a lot like my father in the
bathroom in the morning. Then she lurched from the panty hose,
flew around the room twice, and fell in a heap in front of the sofa

The cat screamed. I passed cranberry sauce through my nose,
and Grandpa ran across the room, fell to his knees, and began
administering mouth to mouth resuscitation. My brother fell back
over his chair and wet his pants and Granny threw down her
napkin, stomped out of the room, and sat in the car.

It was indeed a Christmas to treasure and remember.

Later in my brother's garage, we conducted a thorough examination
to decide the cause of Louise's collapse. We discovered that
Louise had suffered from a hot ember to the back of her right thigh.
Fortunately, thanks to a wonder drug called duct tape, we restored
her to perfect health.

Louise went on to star in several bachelor party movies. I think
Grandpa still calls her  whenever he can get out of the house.

And with that (which nearly had me passing cranberry sauce through my nose, if only I were eating any, when I read this first), I'll leave you to your day, and proceed with mine. Have a good one. Later!

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Well, good morning, at last. Yesterday, I left work at about 1100, came home, took some TheraFlu, and went to bed, right after lunch. I read for a bit, then napped until Marcia got home, about 1730. I never nap, never. Wow. Can't say that anymore, can I?

Of course, that means there's nothing much to report. I've been back and forth via email with John Lowell about getting dhcpcd running right with his AllTel cable modem connection. Nothing I said actually helped the situation, but at least I kept him talking and explaining things until he figured it out for himself, which is the right way to do things, after all, yes? Then Mike Strock had a question about integrating a writable chrooted FTP account and Apache. I don't play with such things, myself. FTP access is restricted, and I won't run wuFTP, as there are both license and a long history of security problems with that piece of software (the former applies to Pine, as well).

Yesterday's funny email had John Dominik saying, "You really ought to post warnings. I nearly passed "Great Grains" through my nose. And those pecans, boy, would have hurt big-time..." To continue with the trend, here's an email I received at work the other day. I read it, I kept waiting for the pitch - there has to be a pitch - and ... and it ends. No pitch. If you figure it out, let me know.

Subject: Time Travelers PLEASE HELP!! ..
From: [email protected] (by way of Brian Bilbrey <[email protected]>)
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 07:46:15 -0800
 
If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the
technology to travel physically through time I need your help!

Also if you are from any of the following planets and can help me as
mentioned please reply: Vadikar, Nefarious, Tralfamadore, Valnator,
Travers, Edenad

I come to you for help, and need a way of doing this in the following 
way exactly in such a way that there will be little or no danger. I come 
to you in peace. Trust and honesty is an absolutely must!!

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed. I have suffered 
tremendously and am now dying! I need to be able to:

Travel physically back in time.

Rewind my life (including my age).

Be able to (remember what I know now) so that I can prevent my life 
from being tampered with again after I go back.

I am in great danger and need this immediately!

Only if you are a time traveler or nice alien and have this technology 
please send me a (separate) email to:

[email protected]

Thanks

Either this guy is serious, in which case he REALLY ought to get in touch with Frank Drake, or we're looking at a bonafide loony. My guess... well, anyway. Hope you find this as strange and funny as I did. Now I'll leave you to your Saturday. Take care!

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Good morning. Hang on a minute, the coffee machine just beeped... mmmmm, hits the spot. Well, we didn't stay up for the Leonids. I have seen several reports on my email indicating that they were stunning, beautiful and numerous. While I am sure that's the case, I certainly wasn't up for it, although the bug I am fighting right now appears to be in retreat at the moment.

Today in Orb Grafitti history: Last year - I was working on Brian and Tom's Linux Book, trying to finish up the author reviews. Little did we know... Two years ago the topics were QCad 1.3, Red Hat's printtool utility, and Dave Farquhar returning from a break in Daynoting. I also took note of Kryotech. Mmmm. Gone to the dark side with a Flash intro, Kryotech is still around, and building the SuperG2.

Now I've got Moshe on the horn, and lists to make up for Costco and the supermarket. So I'll be back later. Take care!

Sunday evening - Hullo. I did say I'd be back, so here I am. We had a successful pre-Thanksgiving shopping today. This is important, since we're having the meal here this year. Fresh, not frozen, bird, and lots of trimmings are ready. When we got all the food packed away... what did I do? Mmmmm. Not much of anything, really. I jotted down a couple of pages of notes that are going to gel into another book proposal or two. I played a bit of Quake III Arena. I mowed the lawn and watered. That reminds me that I haven't done much in terms of pictures from the yard since I took the tomatoes out. I'll rectify that next week.

This evening, we had supper over at our neighbors. Ham, sweet potatoes, mashed real potatoes, salad and a variety of other things. Topped off with Just Desserts chocolate cake and coffee. Great people, fun dogs (one setter, one shepard/wolf mix). A nice time was had by all. Now I'm back for an email check, and ??? Anyway, have a good night. 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.