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Orb Designs Grafitti November 19 thru November 25, 2001 Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun Last Week  <--  *  -->   Next Week --> Link to the Current Week <-- Email 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. Short week, eh? We're in partial shutdown for the week - a few people will be in each day, and I'll go in each morning to do tape rotation, check the email (which I could do from here, but then I'll have to resort it there again), and sundry chores. I'll move our gateway from it's current home into the server space, then re-arrange some of our cubicle space. Then today I'll come home around 10 or 11 and do some yard work that I've been meaning to get to. I'll get some before and after pix from that, and fulfill my promise to you of more garden snaps.

Maybe if I am lucky this week, I'll hear about the fate of my book proposal that's been languishing since the big rush to get it out in about 3 days, back in early September. Hell, with a good enough advance, I could have shifted to writing full time, and had half the darn thing written by now. They need a replacement for the current edition out there NOW, it's languishing in the Amazon rankings down in the half million range. Whew!

Now to work with me, back later. TTFN.

1600 - Back, as promised. I spent over 3 hours at work this morning. That's about twice as long as I planned on. Tomorrow should be shorter, then I'll do a half day's coverage on Wednesday. Friday, I'll pop in to cycle tapes for the weekly full image backup.

When I got home at about 11 this morning, I dumped my gear, and headed over to the local OSH. Plants, some edging and a couple of tools later, I was out the door, and on my way home. My goal for this project was to finish up the back yard, more or less. Here's what the before looked like:

Plot in the back corner

Alongside the new fence

The lawn is looking nice, isn't it? I'm pleased, too, thanks. The plan here is to put some more edging along the run parallel to the new fence, and some low ground cover plant there. In the back corner plot, I want to put <cue blaring, jarring music> a shrubbery or four, along with something smaller and flowering in front of those. I was back at the house, and dragging tools out of the garage by Noon. Two and one half hours later, here's the result:

Boxwood and Chrysanthemum

Un-identified ground cover

The yard, raked up

That done, all my clothes went right into the washer, and I popped into the shower. A couple of left-over burritos for lunch, and we're up to the present. Oh, hey, I got a bit of word from Vicki at Studio B about the book proposal - it's ... no news. The AE says the publisher is still trying to get a feel for where the markets are going [tea leaves, entrails .... does anyone know how they do that?] and don't want to say YES! now, then change their minds in two weeks. The publisher is asking for more patience on my part. Meantime, I'll just work at turning out a couple more proposals to shop around at various publishers. We'll see which line hooks a fish or two, and if I get overloaded, then I'll start having to say, "No thanks." Won't THAT be a nice problem to have.

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Good morning. I've been a busy boy. First, in yesterday afternoon's post, you'll see that I did some yard work, and kept my promise to post some garden pix. I'm a bit sore this morning, no big surprise since I am in nothing remotely resembling shape (other than pear-ish, perhaps). One day, one day...

Next, I am working up a site remodel. I've been tweaking image sizes down to address Dan Bowman's concern for dialup user download times - I've got background and logo together down to about 15K. Check the new look up on the Orb Home Page. Now to work with me. Back later.

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Here it is, almost 0700 already, and I am still reading email. Busy morning, eh? I was back last night, although I didn't write anything new. Instead I extended the new theme throughout the site, at least as far as top and second tier pages go. I'm not going back and re-styling all the old Graffiti entries, nor the reports. But the Site Map is updated (and in need of content maintenance), as are the About, Visuals and Development pages (ditto). I hope that you like the new look - I sure do!

Now here's a missive from Holden Aust. Pay attention, folks, he's got some good advice here for running Linux connected to a cable modem, along with other thoughts.

Subject: Re: dhclient and cups and ...
From: "Holden Aust"
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 02:05:08 +0000
 
Hi Brian,

A couple of thoughts about some of your queries from Grafitti: have
the cable modem guy try dhclient, instead of dhcpd. You have to
uninstall dhcpd and then install dhclient, but dhclient worked with
@home cable, where dhcpd did not. He will also probably will need to
edit dhclient.conf to send the cable-specified hostname to the dhcp
server before it will issue him an IP address. This worked with SuSE
7.3 on my Dad's PC. I wasn't at my Dad's when the cable installer
came, but he was very impressed with the speed of the Athlon clone I
built for my Dad (AMD Athlon 1500+ 1.33 GHz, ECS K7S5A SiS 735
motherboard, 512M DDR 2100, 7200 rpm Seagate 40G IDE, Nvidia Gforce
2 32M RAM).

For your printing problems with WINE, are you using CUPS for your
Linux printing? I've found CUPS easier to setup with Jetdirect cards
than the other Linux printing systems. You might want to give it a
try, if you're not already using it.

I spent the last week with my Dad, getting his new dual boot PC
setup with SuSE 7.3 (now available at Best Buy for $39 for Personal
and $69 for Professional versions - also available at Central
Computer) and Windows (he still needs Windows for Print Shop, but
that's all for Windows). He can scan from his Umax flatbed scanner,
pull digital photos into GIMP via a SanDisk Compact Flash Card USB
reader, use Xcdroast with his CDRW, use Kmail for email, and
Konqueror, Opera, Mozilla, or Netscape for web browsing. His Epson
Photo Stylus 870 works great with CUPS and GIMP.

Linux works very well with his @home cable router, once we learned
from Kevin the SuSE guru that dhclient worked better with some cable
systems than dhcpd did.

I did see a few of the Leonids. My Dad and I drove out after
midnight Sunday night about 40 miles north of the "big city". It was
amazingly warm for that time of year (about 60 degrees), but
unfortunately a storm front was moving in and the sky was partly
covered with clouds. There were holes in the clouds and through the
holes we saw some Leonids - quite bright and I saw two parallel
ones. By the time of the projected peak the whole sky had clouded up
so we probably missed the best ones.

Have a good Thanksgiving!

                               --- Holden

Good call on dhclient. I'll post this, which will pass the word appropriately. Cups works GREAT for printing with Linux. I can set up the printer no problem. The problem is getting the Windows applications running under Wine to see the printer. Greg, who's done a lot more with Wine than I have, said, and I quote, "Tricky..." Nice setup for your dad, eh? Happy L-Trypophan Dosing Day.

There's more to share, but I am past being out of time. Take care, see you later.

17:00 - Wow, am I ever flat broken down. The house is sparkling clean, and I am whupped. I need to be in better shape, and/or win the lottery and pay someone else to do the scutter's job. But a deep top-to-bottom every once in a while is a good thing, makes the whole place more livable. On the menu for tomorrow, we have Da' Bird (of course), stuffing, mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli, zucchini casserole... mmmm, what else? There's gonna be a pear pie, I've heard. We'll sit to table at about 1630 tomorrow. I probably won't emerge from my turkey coma until noon on Friday. Heh.

Thanks to Darryl, Dan and Bob for pointing out the error of my ways this morning. Instead of properly preformatting the mail from Holden, I simply pasted it, doing the same for my response. Sigh. When I checked in Konqueror, it looked fine. Turns out that Konqueror now wraps text, even in "preformatted" blocks. Sure looked nice on my machine. However, under NS and IE, I am told that it made for really wide single line paragraphs. I logged into Garcia, popped into Vim, reformatted the text to 68 columns, and reposted, toot-sweet. Thanks, guys.

In other news from email and browsing, have y'all seen the counter-proposal that Red Hat came up with to modify that Microsoft class action settlement offer? Heh. It's a good read, and really too bad it isn't getting much play in the mainstream press. The best analogy I've seen on this settlement from Microsoft was this: If Microsoft were a tobacco company that had gotten caught selling cigarettes to school children, this settlement would be like offering to give the kids free smokes for five years. Hahahahaha.

I'm reading on ZDNet about the new Sharp Linux-based PDA. How utterly annoying it is that they don't provide any links to the product, the manufacturer, the developer's site they mention in the article, and on and on. I keep forgetting why I hate ZDNet so - this is it: Sucky Linkage. Aha. The UK version has a proper link in it. Here's the Sharp developer site for the Zaurus. Nice looking thing, too. Maybe next April, for my birthday, the real thing, neh?

Woops. Time and past time for me to have wrapped this up. Take care. Happy Turkey day, if I don't see you back here. I'll be posting, though. See ya!

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Happy Thanksgiving, for those who 'specially celebrate this day.

By my nature I am a bit of a curmudgeon and a recluse, although I fight those tendencies. I do have a lot to be thankful for, but I don't just show that appreciation one day a year. I tell my lovely wife Marcia that I love her at the drop of a hat, and most other times, too. This is important because not nearly as many people wear hats, so not too many drop, neh? I am blessed in this union, as I am grateful to have lived through some of the behaviour I inflicted upon myself in my younger, stupider days. I'm on plus time now, and mostly take each day as it comes. My family is a joy. I'm especially thankful for the memories of my grandparents: Hershel, Miriam, Philip and Thomasina. They're now all moved on to the next step, whatever that may be. I'm glad of the time I had with them.

Now, today is for food and family and football and parades and ... hey, why am I sitting here? See you tomorrow!

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Good morning. It's possible that I am still actually in a turkey coma, and if that's the case, then you're not really reading this... heheh. Supper was nice, great food, fun with family, lots of dishes, lots of leftovers for the next week or so. Most excellent.

Only one thing to mar the day - our main sewer line is partially blocked again. Noticed after yesterday's showers, so we just faked it, cutting down on water use so that the system stayed drained. Better than coping with Thanksgiving callout rooter people, and guests at the same time. They're probably going to have to redo the main drain, either by lining it, or replacing it. What a pain. Personally, I am sick of having to call out the plumber every three weeks, while the agent and owner keep saying there can't be a REAL problem, since they replaced that line 5 or 6 years ago. Well, duh, there's a problem now. And we're not mis-treating the system.

I was supposed to head into work today, but waiting for the plumber has destroyed that Idea. Ah, well. I'd best sign off for now, and get ready for this guy. Should be the same tech as last time. Take care.

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Ha! I was right! I hadn't put up a post today, yet. Sigh. Sorry, folks. Greg got me talked into a new game, called Wizardry 8, from Sir Tech, out of Canada. Mmmmm. Excellent stuff, good RPG, with a first person view (kind of odd to have a gestalt view from a 6 being party, neh?). Yes, that mean's I've put that empty six gig partition at the front of the /dev/hdc to use, running Win2K, again.

In other news, if you had upgraded your Linux kernel to 2.4.15... you may wish you hadn't. There is a filesystem corruption bug that happens when an unsync'd filesystem is unmounted. Sigh. Here's Marcelo's 2.4.16pre1 announcement. If you're running 2.4.15 now, then run sync a few times. Unmount any network storage (SMB or NFS). Pull down the patch for 2.4.16pre1 from kernel.org, and build yourself a new kernel. You can use the same .config file as with 2.4.15. Setup the system to boot the new kernel. Next, sync some more, and go down to single user mode. Sync some more, then remount all your drives as readonly. Run fsck tools on all drives. Then restart. That's your best chance of escaping without damage - belt, suspenders, rope, and a spotter. Good luck, and never, never upgrade to a kernel that's not a few days old, at least.

Now, it's almost suppertime, and I have some excellent smelling turkey pot pie to go enjoy. Y'all have a great evening.

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Good morning. Getting me out of bed on Sunday mornings is roughly comparable to any reasonable rate of continental drift. No, that's not fair, after all, I am upright, mostly. Perhaps I'm moving more within an order of magnitude of glaciation. Yeah, that's it!

In this next week from last year, I had once again just finished a bit of a remodel (although not as comprehensive as this one). Also, I was writing the Preface for our book, playing with an early release of OpenOffice, fighting apostrophe usage with Bob, and learning interesting things about the interactions of SSH and IPChains. In that spirit, I have some interesting new tidbits to share with you this morning.

First off, do you use OpenSSH (or SSH) for communications between your machines, even internally? Do you think about running Samba or NFS just to make it easier to move files back and forth between systems? Are you running FTP servers just to be able to access another box using Konqueror? Well, have I got a hot tip for you: kio_fish. This is a kioslave (plugin) for KDE 2.x that facilitates GUI access to a remote filesystem via SSH. This is really cool. One caveat: it's a little slow, especially when accessing large directories across the Internet, about on the order of FTP access, although a little slower perhaps, due to encryption. Still, woo hoo! The image at right is a Konqueror (in File Manager mode) viewing my home directory up on Tom's RS-6000 up there in grey Saskatoon.

Next up, are you interested in a comprehensible explanation of some differences between ReiserFS and Ext3? I was, and therefore pleased to find this article by Nick Petreley. He reviews the merits of journalling metadata vs. data and metadata. There are also performance and extensibility issues that Nick raises.

Mmmm. That's all I have for now. More gaming today, and who knows what all else. No Costco run - it's a zoo this weekend, so we stocked last weekend for the eventuality. Anyway, TTFN!

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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.