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Orb Designs Grafitti December 10 thru December 16, 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. Yes, we have a Sally. Here she is:

Personally, I think she looks like a 9/16 scale model of a Labrador Retriver. Maybe the Cocker Spaniel heritage is only reflected in the size contstraints, a bit of tail plumage, and the wattle under her neck? Mmmm.

Saturday morning, we went out to the PetsMart over in Newark, near where I work. There, Furry Friends Rescue was having a showcase of the dogs available for adoption. We'd sent in an email application for Sally the night before. Marcia was terribly excited, and worried that if we were late, someone else would scoop up Sally first. So we showed up about half an hour early. Some of the organization's volunteers were there, but the dogs weren't.

Around noon, we went over our application with Emily, who was running the showcase. She checked with our estate agent to confirm that we were allowed to have the dog. All was good, except two missing factors. First, we had not yet met the dog (Sally and her foster mom were running late - they had a long drive up from Morgan Hill). Second, their policy requires a home visit and certification before they'll release the dog. That's tough to schedule, same day. So regardless, we weren't taking Sally home on Saturday. Marcia was sad.

Sally turned up a short while later, and Marcia and she played for quite a while. Emily wandered over and asked if I got along with the dog, too. I replied, "Sure, when and if Marcia will let me!" We all laughed, me somewhat ruefully. There wasn't anyone available to do a home visit that afternoon, but someone would call us that afternoon or Sunday morning, and we'd hopefully be able to pick up Sally sometime Sunday. So we got ready for Marcia's departmental holiday party. Ten minutes before we left, Wendy from Furry Friends called and asked if she could come over... I handed the phone to Marcia. It was determined that we'd call her at a friend's house near our place, when we got back from the party.

This was a potluck, nothing official, but all of Marcia's co-workers and most of the significant others in attendance, over at Myrna, Roger and Laddie's house. There's Laddie, to the right. Since Marcia and I are terminally prompt (or rather, congenitally incapable of being fashionably late), we turned up 5 minutes shy of spot on time, and had some time with our hosts and their fun dog Laddie. Always, our visits to Laddie's house are the occasion of a present for the little guy. This was no exception, and as you can see from the picture, he's working at demolishing it, not ten minutes after he snatched it out of my hand.

The party was fun. Everybody brought food and drink, and we ate very, very well. Things wrapped up with a gift exchange routine where each ensuing gift recipient could steal, or take a new gift. Always a vicious scene, I was safe by being the peanut gallery, instead of participating like everyone else! After that, we said our goodbye's and headed home. Marcia called, and 10 minutes later Wendy was coming up our front walk.

We chatted for about an hour, while she checked out the house, the yard and fence (the latter two with a flashlight). All was well, and Wendy headed out at about 11. Ten short hours later, Marcia was on the phone with Sally's foster mom, "Have you heard from Wendy yet?" The answer was no, but we could come on down, she was sure everything was fine, and she'd hear from Wendy before we got there. That was the case.

A quick run down to Morgan hill, some more paperwork, and we were on the road homeward bound with our new friend. She's a little skittish about car rides, so Marcia rode in back with her, and we'd draped the seat with a blanket in case she got too tense or affected by motion sickness. No problems, though. Sally explored the house, received her guests (she had several, who came over to meet her, neighbors and from Marcia's office), and generally took ownership of the place in a rather passive way. She'll need a while to settle down and realize this isn't just another layover for her, that this is home. You'll be able to see more of our extremely laid-back muttly on a page that Marcia's put up for her. Heh.

In other news, I was successful at installing Solaris 8 inside a VMware machine. I didn't get the X server running, but since it would be limited to 640x480, that's just as well. I exported the display to my Debian GNU/Linux desktop, and ran Sun's GUI administrative tools from there to exercise the system. Cool.

Whew, where does the time go? I'll be off now, so y'all have a great day. See you back here soon.

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Good morning. All is quiet on this western front, at the moment. Our Sally turns out to have a real talent - She's a world champion napper. She'll take a nap at the drop of a hat, she'll take a nap over chasing a cat. We did go for a nice walk around the neighborhood yesterday late afternoon, and we'll keep that up, as both of us could stand to lose a few extra pounds.

I'm mulling how best to respond to the publisher's questions, as they attempt to determine how much my writing time is worth to them... Frankly I'm a bit fuddled. Maybe it's just a negotiating game, something I'm not very good at. I've figured out to a +/- 10% figure how long this book will take to write, and I'll not settle for a sub-minimum wage. I'm valued at 50 bucks an hour salaried, and 75 to 90 as a contractor - true verified figures. There's no book that I can afford to do for less than the people around here make at Costco and Starbucks. Ah, well, maybe it's just me.

Meantime the stats page for this month show that this is going to be a banner month, with pages and hits up by around 30% over the previous month. I'm please to have you join me here, and would be happy to hear more about you, and what interests you have that brought you to my site, and what sort of material you're looking for that will yield more value for your time spent reading - please, let me know.

Now it's time that I headed into work. Among my projects over the next three weeks, I'm preparing to bring my mail and webservers in house. They're currently hosted at our connectivity provider, and while the connections are fine, the hosting restrictions, and mail server availability frankly suck. I have a block of IP addresses that I don't use but one of right now to NAT the rest of the network.

See ya later.

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Good morning. Sally's going to work today with Marcia, probably the whole day this time. Marcia's gotten a gate to block her cube entrance, so that Sally doesn't wander off unattended. Sure the dog could leap the gate, easily, but she really isn't minded to - this is a napping dog, not a leaping dog. Heh.

Now for some humor from the last couple of weeks:

An archaeologist was digging in the Negev Desert in Israel 
and came upon a  sarcophagus containing a mummy.

After examining it, he called the curator of a prestigious
natural-history museum.

"I've just discovered the 3,000 year-old mummy of a man 
who died of heart failure!" the excited scientist exclaimed.

The curator replied, "Bring him in. We'll check it out."

A week later, the amazed curator called the archaeologist. 
"You were right about the mummy's age and cause of death. 
How in the world did you know?"

"Easy. There was a piece of paper in his hand that said, 
'10,000 Shekels on Goliath' "

And then there was this one...

A drunk man who smelled like beer sat down on a subway seat 
next to a priest. The man's tie was stained, his face was plastered 
with red lipstick, and a half empty bottle of gin was sticking out of 
his torn coat pocket. He opened his newspaper and began 
reading. After a few minutes the man turned to the priest and 
asked," Say, Father, what causes arthritis?"

My Son, it's caused by loose living, being with cheap, wicked 
women, too much alcohol and a contempt for your fellow man, 
sleeping around with prostitutes and lack of bath."

"Well, I'll be damned," the drunk muttered, returning to his paper.

The priest, thinking about what he had said, nudged the man and
apologized. "I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to come on so strong. 
How long have you had arthritis?"

"I don't have it, Father. I was just reading here that the Pope does".

I know, but I was amused in the middle of my day with them, so why not inflict them on you, as well. Now, here's a couple of links for you. The first is a bit of a hoot - an O'Reilly cover generator that was pointed out by a correspondent on the SVLUG mailing list. Another email link to a web site landed in my lap yesterday. I lost a significant portion of my lifespan to giggling. I sent it to Greg, and he wrote back something along the lines of, "ROTFLMAO, hahahahah /me dies 5 times laughing." That should be enough of an endorsement for anyone. It's a post on Adequacy.org, entitled Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? Check out the coments, too - if you're looking for a Bowman-style time sink.

Last night, I was unsuccessful at getting a new backup tool running. I'll keep after it, and let you know. I also mucked about a bit with YaST2 from SuSE 7.3, and continue to be impressed. More later on that, as well. Today and tomorrow, I'm going to be living in Adobe Illustrator as I update the ETS catalog to reflect some new part numbers, and delete some that we haven't sold in months. I'd best get to it. TTFN

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Good morning. We had Roger, Myrna and Laddie over for coffee and play after supper last night. Well, the humans had coffee, the dogs played dominance games. Sally's barker got more of a workout than we've heard since we picked her up. Eventually she and Laddie settled down a bit - it was a nice couple of hours or so.

Then I went back to working with back-up systems to CD. Why CD? Well, the tape drive I have is a Colorado T-1000. That's right, Travan-1, 400M uncompressed. Sorry, the CDR is 650 uncompressed - that makes it an easy choice. Given my druthers, I might want a DLT or DDS drive, I'll have to do a little eBay research, some Google consumer research, then ask the busy Mr. Thompson about my findings, if I were to decide to go with tape. But functionally, we don't have more than about 4 Gig of data that needs backup. The MP3 collection can be replayed from CD if necessary. So 4 gig compresses down to about 5 CD's. The trick is finding a utility that works to break up the data collection into manageable chunks, and writes the CDs with only "Put in the disk" intervention required.

Over the last two nights, I first tried to work with a package called MultiCD. It's the only one I found that is also part of the Debian package distribution. To me, that spoke well. The packaged version matchs the current release on the program's home page. It has a configuration (/etc/multiCDrc) and usage pattern that is easy to understand. One little problem. It doesn't work for me. I don't know why, but it was locking up on me, to the point where it was locking up the system, hard. At one point I saw two simultaneous cdrecord sessions running, that may have been part of the problem. But a program that forces me to hard-reset the machine more than once doesn't last around here, so MultiCD is gone.

Then I headed over to Freshmeat and started hunting in the topic areas where I found MultiCD. After a bit of digging, I turned up cdbkup. There's no rc file, but the command line options are well documented, and have several examples in the man pages for the components that make up this program. It handles both backup and restore, theoreticaly over the network as well as on localhost. I successfully backed up the ALL the data I care about on both Garcia (my Debian-based workstation) and Marcia's Windows machine (still called Pavillion, although the HP is LONG gone). For Marcia's box, I just mounted her disk over the network using Samba, then created a backup directory. I populated the backup directory with symlinks to those parts of her filesystem that I wanted preserved. Then I pointed cdbkup at the backup directory root, and fired away. With those disks in hand, I can experiment some more with other solutions, knowing that I've got a backup. More as this topic develops.

Now it's work time, and a continuation of my Catalog updating work. Mostly it's the same, but there are several new parts, and many deletions. I've got a lot cut out for me, since the update was promised on Tuesday, for Friday, without consulting with me first. Argh!!! See you later.

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Good morning, and welcome to Friday. I was actually very ready for yesterday to be the last day of the week, but the calendar kept rudely disagreeing with me. Sigh. Hey, if Bob can design a new calendar, why can't I???

Speaking of the good Mr. Thompson, he wrote me a nice email yesterday laying out a few more potential options, as well as noting the number one idea, which is to replicate important data around the network, so that one machine's death loses us nothing but time. This is good for all normal circumstances, but I do want something offsite at least every once in a while. This provides coverage against fire, theft, and the like. What I've got now is good enough. If tape is appropriate later, then I'll do so. Here's Bob...

From: 	Robert Bruce Thompson <[email protected]>
Subject: 	tape
Date: 	13 Dec 2001 18:10:31 -0500	

Tape is expensive either way you look at it. Inexpensive 
drives tend to use $35 tapes, which means one tends not 
to have as many tapes as are really needed for an effective 
backup rotation. Expensive drives use cheap tapes, but few 
people want to pay $600 to $1,000 or more for a DDS tape 
drive for personal use. I have stacks of the things around the 
house (I wish I could give you one, but you know the rules...) 
but if I had to pay my own cash money, I probably wouldn't 
be using tape. Or, if I were, I'd probably be using Travan 
NS20 or Onstream. 
 
If you had only one computer, I might recommend a tape 
drive, if only because you can back up everything onto 
one portable tape. But you have enough machines, hard 
drives, etc. that I think you can safely get along without 
tape. What I'd suggest is that you buy one of the Plextor 
burners that supports 10X CD-RW writes, if you don't already 
have one. You can probably buy 10X certified RW discs 
for something like a buck or two each. Buy plenty of them, 
at least enough for four full backup sets, and more would 
be better. Also buy yourself some CD-R discs (Taiyo Yuden 
are my choice) that you can use for doing archive copies. 
You can treat the CD-RW discs exactly like CD-R discs, 
except they're reusable.
 
Then, take a look at your data. Do you really have 4 GB of 
data that needs backed up frequently, or do you have 
something like 1 GB of current working data and 3 GB of 
archived stuff? If the latter, you should reorganize your data 
directories so that you can pull one or two archive sets 
(CD-R would be fine for that) and then never have to back up 
that data again until you add to it. Even then, if you're 
comfortable with incremental or differential backups, you 
could mark all the files in your archive directories as backed 
up when you do the big one-time backup, and then later do 
incremental backups that include only the files written since 
the one-time backup. Then, once every three months or a 
year, pull a new archive set and start again.
 
Since you have a Home Area Network, it'd be foolish not to 
make use of batch files to replicate your data all over the 
place on command. I have such a batch file, which I run 
several times a day. Another option is backing up to another 
hard drive, although this really doesn't substitute for a 
tape/CD backup unless you can carry the target hard drive 
off site. Of course, yet another possibility is to set up a script 
that will backup your changed files to Syroid's server every 
night (or every hour, for that matter).
 
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com/rbt/thisweek.htm

Now to this morning's mail bag for one more, on a different topic:

From: 	XL Tajonera >[email protected]>
Subject: 	Thanks!
Date: 	14 Dec 2001 00:29:44 -0800	

Brian, 
thanks for your input on installing mandrake 7.2,
unfortunately i keep receiving these errors right
after i click install:
Installing package info-install
info-install-4.0-18mdk, chkconfig-1.2.12-1 mdk,
msec-0.15-14mdk,
ncurses-5.1, gpm-1.19-3mdk, grep-2.4.2-5mdl,
perl-base-5.600-17mdk
  I chose YES

Installing package gawk
gawk-3.0.6-1mdk, zlib-1.1.3-11 mdk, mktemp-1.5-8mdk,
vixie-cron-3.0.1-45 mfk,
ptovpd-2.0.7-6 mdk, modutils-2.3.17-3mdk
  I chose YES

any clue as to what the problem could be from my end?
here are my specs:
AMD 1GHZ Thunderbird, 524MB Ram, 20GB IDE, 32bit
NTVDIA graphic card, 52x CD-ROM.

Appreciate your help!

Xavier

Do you mean, right after you click install during the initial installation routine, or when installing extra packages from the Mandrake package manager after the system's running? I don't know "where you are" when you "click" install. What installation program is running? What have you selected for installation before clicking install? What I *think* I see is that you are using the package manager inside a running mandrake system. You select a package for install, and click install. It lists some other packages, and asks for permission to go ahead. If you "say" yes, then it does. Here, what you're seeing is not an error, but package dependency management. I say install package X, the package manager says "You need W, Y and Z, too. Can I go ahead?" That's my best guess at the moment.

Road time for me. Bill and Sue arrived last night, and now we're leaving them to their own devices while we work. Both Marcia and I are bailing out of work early this afternoon to have more time with them. So I'd best be going. See you later.

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Good morning. Today we spend the day playing tourist with Bill and Sue. We'll be in and out, but I am away from The Machines. Maybe later?

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Sorry for the delay. I've just sat down from a couple of days of continuous running. Bill and Sue Spoelhof (Sue is Marcia's sister) were in town until 1300 today. Bill and Sue do missionary work in Brazil. Marcia's had a website up for the Spoelhof's for a long while now. We had a lovely time - more description and pictures on that another time. Today we met my folks for brunch at Jack's Bistro, up in Jack London Square.

Good food and much fun was had by all. When we returned, we packed Bill, Sue, and their luggage into the rental car, and they headed for points south, visiting Aaron in San Diego. With that, Marcia headed into work for a bit to finish up a document for a customer, to be ready for first thing tomorrow morning. Meantime, I mowed the lawn, spruced up the back yard a bit, and took Sally on a nice long walk. When she and I staggered back in, Marcia was home, and it was time for the weekly shopping run at the supermarket. We're putting off Costco until later in the week.

While I collapse in a semi-coherent state of being, you might want to follow this link to an article about the B-52 Stratofortress: past, present and (longer than once expected) future. I found this on Slashdot, and found it a good read, informative and well written.

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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.