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Orb Designs Grafitti December 17 thru December 23, 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. Starting off my day on an absoluely tragic note, we find that our government is now requesting that specific information at public libraries be destroyed, that it might not be used for nefarious purposes. This article at the LA Times site has more details. I came across this via the freshly ressurected Kuro5hin, back from a failed disk array.

What frets me in all of this is the threat from terrorists being reflected and amplified in scatters and shards between the petty bureaucratic minds in their federal fiefdoms. These maroons will be making decisions (like the above) that will set a tone that lasts for decades, regardless of the outcome of current events. I can just see the competition in these tiny minds, "I can be more fervently patriotic over here in my department. They've ordered geodesic survey data that's in public libraries destroyed. We'd better get rid of all our data on 5 to 7 year olds that are allergic to peanut butter, just in case terrorists decide to serve them peanuts on domestic flights." Yes, a silly example, that article had several more serious ones, and this lovely bit of ... logic:

Officials acknowledge that there are very few examples of 
terrorists actually using public records to glean sensitive 
information, but they say that the terrorist attacks prove the 
need for extraordinary caution.

Um, what?

Bah, what a lovely way to start a Monday. Check out the rest of the gang - I'll be back later.

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Howdy. I've a lot of ground to cover today, and as usual not enough time to do all of the material justice. Let's start off with my reserve mailbox, where I stash items of interest (much like browser bookmarks). Speaking of mailboxes, I'm contented using Evolution for both my work email, and my backup POP3 addresses. I've only one gripe, and I'm not sure it is a bug: I've checked the Save Password box (I mean, why bother, POP3 passwords travel the wire in cleartext anyway), and occasionally, it asks for the password anyway. Maybe it's a random reverification thing. However, between the two boxen (home and work), the home machine asks for the password much more frequently. I need to read more of the Fine Manuals first, then I'll report back to you. Oh, and I don't know how to properly configure the default browser that's opened when URLs are selected. More reading... Without further ado, the interesting bits (to me, at least):

• For those that run their own mail servers, check out the Obtuse SMTPD, a rules-based spam-busting SMTP server. Apparently it's a bit of a bitch to configure, but perhaps worth it.


• Links for doing proper layout in web pages (that is, getting away from using tables to position elements: http://www.climbtothestars.org/coding/tableless/ (found a working link for that one) and http://alistapart.com/stories/tohell/, with an example (view the sources on this one) at http://www.netspace.net.au/. Thanks to J C Lawrence for those tidbits.


• Open Root Servers, anyone? DNS without butthead bureaucrats at the top of the food chain, neh? Pointer from Ian Kluft, c/o one of the sbay.org mailing lists.


• The Linux-Newbie mailing list FAQ, and subscribe to Linux-Newbie, too (you'll need to confirm that subscription by replying to the authorization message that the Majordomo mlm sends to you). I lurk on this list, helping out occasionally, and often learning whole bunches - there are some really good folks on that list - do at least refer to the FAQ before asking, though, and a Google search on your question might be in order as well.

Next up... KOffice 1.1.1 is now out. The announcement says that this "is principally a stability release." Why should you care? Because it's yet more competition for the office suite space on Linux, and choice is a good thing. As a suite by itself, Kword is pretty capable these days. For document interchange with MS Office users, I'm still tending towards OpenOffice/StarOffice, as it appears that the features and import abilities are a little more compatible over there. I'm talking about revisioning and so on. For MANY documents, KOffice is clearly good enough. I'll fire 1.1.1 up sometime soon, and see what I can find.

We took Sally to the vet last night - She's fundamentally OK, although the vet rather confirmed my niggling suspicion: Sally's a little older than 5 or 6. My guess is 8 or 9. That's OK too. She's sweet tempered and really calm. She does have infected ears, so we've got her on a treatment regimen for that. Since Sally's hearing clearly wasn't up to par, I'll be hopeful that this will help her a lot!

Time for me to go. Have a lovely day.

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Good morning. Today, Sally's going to come to work with me. She's already acquired a permanent open invitation for Marcia's workplace, I imagine she'll quickly do the same at my joint.

On the computing side of the world, I'm trying out Sorcerer GNU/Linux. I think I read about this first on Dave Farquhar's site.... yep, I was right, here's Dave's first post on the topic. Sorcerer is designed for an easy minimal install, and easily rebuilds itself through a complex series of scripts, for your (or my, in this case) hardware. That is, every package on the system, from the Linux kernel through all the libraries and all the applications, everything is recompiled and reinstalled, ensuring that the packages are optimized for the hardware, unlike most binary distributions. While this can be accomplished with relative degrees of ease on other distributions, I've yet to see something like this:

root@Sorcerer:~# yes n | sorcery rebuild

By itself, sorcery rebuild is interactive. There are options to configure packages and view compile and installation logs. If you don't want to DO any of that, but just let the thing roll (which can go on for hours and hours) then you need to automagically say NO to all of the questions that a rebuild asks. Thus, the yes command. Heh, I know, it seems counter intuitive, but here's what's going on. Natively, the program /usr/bin/yes, invoked by itself, simply outputs a stream of 'y' characters, each followed by a carriage return. Optionally, a string or character can be specified that will be continuously output instead. Thus, yes n sends a stream of 'n' to STDOUT. I've taken that output, and piped it to the sorcery rebuild process, so that I don't need to sit here typing 'n' all night.

And it would have been all night. I started it, oh, around 2130 last night, and it literally just finished rebuilding the installation packages just 2 minutes ago, as I typed this post in. Now, of course, I have no time for testing what I've wrought, so I'll let it be for the time being. More tonight perhaps. Now I'd best organize us to hit the road.

Oh, if you have any favorite online references for CSS, would you send me a link - I've got some things I want to try for the new work website.

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Good morning. Sally had a good day at work yesterday. Everyone likes her, so far as I can tell. She spent about half her time curled up napping in Trudy's office, so I guess that's a good thing. At the end of the day, Jack said that she was an excellent office dog, and could come back any time she wanted. I told him he'd have to arm-wrestle Joyce, a director at Marcia's place of work, for the privilege.

Doc Searls visited my brain yesterday with another viral meme, HCLs (Hotel California Lists). Outside of my friends in the Daynotes Gang, Doc is one of the few daily visits I make. He does it better of course, but I am pleased to find a blend of personal and professional material that rather matches my own tastes.

Sorcerer didn't get much more of my attention last night - I was really pretty shagged out by the time night fell. When we got home, Sally was blessed with getting her ears washed out, followed by a bath, flea treatment (Frontline, as recommended by the vet) and ear drops for the infection she has. She wasn't very pleased with me (extreme understatement - I think she's forgiven me by now, but not forgotten) when the process was done, and I was thoroughly washed out myself. So I picked up my copy of Dreamcatcher (one of the newer Stephen King books) and settled in until the DIY shows came on KTEH (PBS) later in the night.

Today, I am going to venture into Costco. A dangerous prospect, but we couldn't go over the weekend, due to our house guests. And going without coffee and soda isn't my idea of a good time for Christmas, so I'm bound. I'll be there when they open, though, which makes life a little easier. I'd best be on the road. Later!

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Good morning, and Happy Friday. I like Friday's better than regular holidays, since (a) they happen every week, and (b) when necessary you can make them happen early by unilateral declaration that Thursday is Friday, and Friday is off. Now that's fun. However, today is Friday, although only a half-day. We're having a holiday season luncheon for the staff at noon, then bailing out until January 2nd. Well, a few people will come in one day next week to put together the rest of an order and ship out on the 28th. And I'll probably go in and fire up an old, "new" box with Linux, and build a web/mail server - I'm bringing ETS' services in house, unless something unforeseen crops up. But that's for next week.

Here's an email I received from Karsten Self via the SVLUG mailing list last night. This is posted with permission...

From: 	Karsten M. Self 
To: 	Silicon Valley Users Group 
Subject: [svlug] Announcement: FSL-discuss list created
Date: 	20 Dec 2001 12:09:11 -0800	

As a followup to a free software law summit hosted by Bruce Perens
of HP September, 2001, a mailing list to address issues of free  
software legal issues has been created, [email protected].

This list satisfies an unmet need within the free software
community.  While there are discussions oriented toward specific
legal issues such as the OSI's license-discuss submissions review
list, Free-Sklyarov list and DVD-discuss, and there are general  
discussions for free software and free software business, there is
no discussion that focusses on general legal aspects of free
software.

So we've created fsl-discuss.

The list charter is:  Legal issues concerning free software.

This includes: licensing (in a general sense, specific issues of, say,
OSI certification should be directed to the OSI license-discuss
list), patent, trademark, legislation, standards, international
treaties, and other aspects of law.  The list is intended for  
general discussion.

For further information, to subscribe, or to view archives, see:
                                                               
    http://lists.alt.org/mailman/listinfo/fsl-discuss          

List moderator and hosts are Karsten M. Self and Drew Streib.

Karsten is a long-time active member of the free software and
GNU/Linux communities, who's been involved in numerous discussions,
panels, publications, and presentations of legal issues.           

Drew is a cofounder of SourceForge.net, a member of the Free
Standards Group (http://www.freestandards.org/), Linux
International, and other organizations and activities.

Thanks to Drew for providing hosting services for FSL-Discuss.

Thank you.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <[email protected]>       
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?   Home of the brave
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/          Land of the free
We freed Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! 
     http://www.freesklyarov.org
Geek for Hire           http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html

This looks like it'll be an interesting list to hang out on, if you're interested in the issues that Karsten raises. I'd venture that the signal-to-noise ratio is going to be excellent, as the list builds. If you subscribe, keep it low key for a bit - Karsten doesn't want this to hit the big sites for a couple of weeks yet, while they tune the box that's going to host the list, etc. See you there, contributing or lurking.

Then, over the last couple of days, a couple of stellar .sig lines have crossed my screen:

It is not how much you know, but how
much money you make pretending to know.

And this one:

Q: How does a UNIX Guru pick up a girl?
A: shell; exit; look; grep; which; eval; nice; uname; talk; date;
   !!; !!: !!; !!; !grep

To which someone (not me, more's the pity) replied, "ah!? No "mount", ?? No "umount"?? no "FUN???" Heh. Finally, for now, this virus cure HOAX (read that again, folks, this is a warning about a HOAX) that's making the rounds once again, sad to say. That is, if you receive this hoax in the mail - do NOT do as it recommends, as you'll damage your Windows installation for no reason at all... The heads up comes courtesy of Dr. Keyboard.

Chaps

I've had several e-mails from readers in the past couple of days
about sulfnbk.exe - sulfnbk.exe is, of course, the bit of Windows
which deals with long file names but some users are receiving the
warnings, finding the file on their system and going nuts assuming
they have been infected with a virus.
I know some of you look after, er, less than attentive end-users
(hey, my hand's in the air for that one already) so you may want to
pre-empt them all telling you they're infected with a virus.
http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/ and This Symantec site have the full 
skinny in case someone doesn't believe you.

Chris Ward-Johnson
Dr Keyboard - Computing Answers You Can Understand
http://www.drkeyboard.net
Chateau Keyboard - Computing at the Eating Edge
http://www.chateaukeyboard.com
Magic Mouse - Computer Books for Children Even Grown-ups Can
Understand
http://www.magic-mouse.com

No attachments were sent with this e-mail - if you find one, delete
it and let me know.

And with that, I'd best hit the road. TTFN.

15:54:19 Good afternoon. Fun day. Got some work done, updated virus sigs here, there and everywhere. Took care of some customer hand-holding, and a few other bits of biz. Our holiday lunch was Chinese take-out, and delicious. I bailed at about 13:20. Right after I got in, I got the call - come pick up the dog. Marcia's day has turned frantic, and having Sally at the office was one thing too many to keep track of. So she and I are mucking about with email and such (actually, she's snoring, asleep on my feet under the desk. So I'll share with you this notice I just posted a little while ago to my Talkabout mailing list (free subscription, double opt-in), and on the backchannel to the gang - Your credit card data might be at risk...

Hey, folks. This popped up onto my radar screen courtesy of the [email protected] mailing list, a couple of days ago. I was waiting for some confirming data outside of the community of the Ultra-Paranoid... Here it is: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23493.html Fundamentally, CCBill had terrible security on the systems accessed by their member merchants. CGI access to things that no one outside of a local admin should be able to touch, apparently. This is a Bad Thing. Oh, and Merry Christmas, happy holiday ONLINE shopping... <grin/> -- Brian Bilbrey "The ships hung in the sky in [email protected] much the same way that bricks don't." www.orbdesigns.com Doug Adams, H2G

You may wonder what I've been doing with Sorcerer and YaST2 and other things I've been promising to return to shortly. You might even remember that I've still got some Linux server-oriented installations to do, as well as the *BSD family. All in good time, all in good time. I've got between now and January 2 free, so aside from chores, dog walks, holiday parties, pre-scheduled social events, family open houses, time with Marcia, I'll have the 10 or 15 minutes free that I'll need to accomplish all that, and more. Just you wait and see. Oh, I'd best get to it, then, neh?

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Good morning... I guess. It is REALLY blustery here. The good news is that Sally continues to settle in properly. At left, Sally's tricked Marcia into a brief game of tug-of-war - that was earlier this week. Then, after most of a hard day at work with Marcia yesterday, Sally sacked out in the footwell under my desk. That's right, sound out, with her head next to the subwoofer pumping out a fair amount of AC/DC. Amazing if you ask me.

Marcia's off for hair and nails this morning. I've got to get the layer of dust off of this desk, and zip a vacuum around the house, in preparation for guests this evening. We're going out to Casa Lupe (yeah, just like last week), this time with Jan and Scott, our neighbors from the apartment complex. It'll be an early evening, as none of us are really paint-the-town-red types anymore... Still, fun and good food to look forward to.

Now I've got Moshe up on IRC, and many things to do. I'll be back later...

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Good morning. Sorry about that. I opened Bluefish to start this post at around 09:00. Then Moshe showed up on IRC and we nattered away the better part of two hours. Now I have to set up to do my Christmas cooking. So I will (and I will) be back later this afternoon. Thanks!

16:46:21 - Howdy. Been busy, but productive as well, so that's all right, even for a Sunday. We got our shopping done, and I worked on one of my year end projects for a while. Then Marcia and I took Sally for a walk, to visit several nearby friends, none of whom were home. Since then, I've been wrapping Robbie's Christmas present, which is a tad oversize.

Let's see what the news has brought us. A nutcase with theoretically explosive shoes and some det cord. Hmmmm. Space the bastard at 6 miles up, that's a good answer. What I find to be a hoot is that they didn't contain all the passengers after landing. Any hypothetical accomplice got away clean. Maroons. The article I read is headlined "Authorities see no Shoe Bomb Accomplices." Not Looking seems a more truthful statement. On the good things side of the ledger, Rudy Giuliani is to be Time's Man of the Year. Excellent choice.

Heh. I love this! The FBI says don't just apply the Microsoft patch for the Universal Plug and Play bug, but disable the damn "feature" before your box is hosed. Woo Hoo. If Justice can't stomach the job, then MS and the FBI will do it properly. Hahahhahah.

OK. This is making Marcia crazy, so I'll cut loose now. The secret is a new web page... well, a pair of pages - The Orb Designs 2001 Year in Pictures. If it's good enough for Life, it's good enough for me. Here you go, have fun. Meantime, I'll catch 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.