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Orb Designs Grafitti December 31, 2001 thru January 06, 2002 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.

There are a number of different ways of coping with a year-end rollover. The neatest, of course is when the New Year starts on a Monday. I mean, why not? They've moved all sorts of historic birthday's, all to the nearest Monday, neh? The calendar could simply say (New Year - celebrated), then we'll add or subtract days at the end to make the calendar match the solar system. Ah, but I digress... As my Daynotes week starts on Monday, and my file naming scheme is based on start date, this whole week is hereby officially part of 2001. I'll roll over to a new directory and 2002 naming scheme with next week's Monday post.

Good morning. Holden Aust wrote to me this morning. Aside from exhorting me to complete my work with a review of YaST2 from SuSE Linux 7.3, he was also inquiring about Linux consultants - would I be interested in providing a page of Linux consultants available for work, as a resource for you, my kind readers? I thought about that one several ways. First, it seems a bit too much like work, if you know what I mean. Other sites get paid for providing that kind of info.

Finally I spiralled into the real meat of the matter - If somone's on my site, and looking for Linux help, don't I want them to retain MY services??? Absolutely! I will keep the name of Holden's friend logged against my being unavailable or not having the requisite skill set. I'm generally not above saying, "I don't know how to do that - I can pick it up, and I won't charge full rate..." but if the potential customer is in a rush, then I'm happy to recommend someone else good for the gig. That still leaves the inquiring party with a good feeling about me - I was part of providing the right solution - they'll be back later.

Now to get on with my day - I think I'll work on that YaST2 review. See you later!

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Merry New Year 2002

Good morning. I'm just getting my morning coffee, while Marcia and Sally are about to take their first nap of the day. Sheesh. Of course, we were up past midnight, which is unusual for us. Watched the Peter Jennings thing, and the Dick Clark thing. Doesn't he just look wonderful? Just every bit as young as massive amounts of cold hard cash and good makeup technicians can buy. He is really 72. Not too shabby...

I've begun work on the YaST2 overview - you can find it here, in progress. It's not done, and likely will take a while to complete, if the first section is any indicator. There's lots to this configuration and setup tool.

Also, yesterday I went shopping for a bit. First stop was to return a desk organizer that didn't fit in Marcia's plan after all, and pick up some return address labels at Office Depot. Then I headed down to the AT&T store to pick up a new phone. My old phone, an Ericsson, perhaps dropped one too many times, was not charging any more. Not a problem with the battery or the transformer, but apparently with the charging circuitry in the actual phone. Repair and inconvenience costs more than buying a new phone. So I picked up a Nokia 3360. Nice little beastie, with good features, including an IR port. I've successfully beamed a bunch of contact information from my Agenda VR3d over to the phone (saving lots of annoying typing time). Also, I should be able to use the phone as a modem for both the laptop and the agenda. Woo hooo.

My final stop was to Central Computer where I picked up a new monitor for Marcia. She's been working with the bitty 15" tube that came with her HP Pavillion a couple of years ago. We upgraded the box a few months back, and I'd been after her to let me up her monitor size. This becomes more important as she begins to work from home more. I got her a NEC AccuSync 70 17" monitor. I figured I couldn't go wrong, since Bob Thompson bought a couple of them in the last few months, and he's an expert!

Now it's breakfast time, and on with my day. Have a good one!

LATE update - I've got a webcam up, sorta. I mucked about first with gphoto, and then with Beta3 of gPhoto2, and got the Olympus D-450Z set to take pictures, then scale them down and send them across the 'Net (local or Inter...) to the server. So, herewith, the Brian WebCAM page. I'll try to have it on at home sometimes, and at work, too. The photo bandwidth is about 16K every 20 seconds or so, I've got the CAM page set for a 20 second refresh. Clearly I'm ready to get back to work. Oh, tonight? I'll leave it showing the blinky lights on the assortment of switches, hubs, and such. Good night!

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Good morning. Heh. Is anyone out there awake yet? If so, smile, I'm on candid camera. That's right, late last night the first Brian WebCam went live. This was a fun little project. I'll get back to that in a moment. But it's important to note that I've had an entire night's worth of the new most boring picture on the Internet - a closeup on only the blinky lights of my switches, routers and hubs. That should have the Bobs well and truely knackered! Heh.

Bah. I just had to cold power cycle the server. What's up with that? I think it's possible that I've got problems with the hardware. It wasn't the DSL or the gateway or the switch this time, that much is sure. Sigh. Well, that ate all my time. Sorry. Check back in a bit and pop onto the webcam if you want to see me at work for some weird reason. I'll run through the setup and the script I'm using tonight. Later!

1815 - Nope. I lied. I'd forgotten that tonight is SVLUG meeting night. So I'm off again. TTFN

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Good morning. It was a very interesting SVLUG meeting last night. Steve Traugott spoke on Automating System Administration. Wow! Talk about cool ways to keep down TCO. Very, very neat stuff - Check out Infrastructures.org for all the info that Steve gave us last night, plus much much more! And the added bonus: Steve is a good speaker, and he's our new speaker coordinator for the next year or so.

On the topic of the Brian WebCAM: I wrote to Dan Bowman that it's "Just like Max Headroom, except no plot and it's not funny." Dan replies.

What????? It has a great plot line: "Where's Brian. ...and what is he
doing?"

...and funny? On man, I can hardly breath! Just looking at the back of
that chair again as it updates floors me!

...and as I see it: either time for my meds or time to go home (four
days off may have warped me).

Umm... Max didn't have a beard as I recall.

I am sooo looking forward to the light show late this evening (I confess
I missed it last night),

Dan

I believe I wrote back advising that he isn't well...

I've been working with gPhoto (http://www.gphoto.org) off and on for a couple of years, but never really been happy with the stability of the software in my circumstance. Since my Olympus D-450Z predates USB enabled cameras, I've simply got a fast serial connection to the camera. The problem is that serial communications are fraught with potential timing problems. In the case of the first iteration of gPhoto software (0.4.3 in it's latest stable version), it is both a command line utility and a GUI interface. My issue was that any time the CLI stuff hiccuped because the serial commo failed, it would fire off the GUI interface for some reason. This doesn't make for good scripting capabilities. Additionally, operations would fail quite frequently.

Now gPhoto 2.0 is almost out. I fetched down the Beta source distribution (it's at Beta 3), compiled and installed it. Poof. Wonderful. Just works. The CLI stuff is all this version is. The GUI(s) will used the CLI tools and camera libraries, but they're no longer joined at the hip. Additionally, they've managed to stabilize the serial link very nicely - I've only seen one dropped interaction in the last couple of days. Most excellent. Here's the script that drives the camera.

#!/bin/bash

while [ "0" = "0" ] ; do
  gphoto2 --camera "Olympus D-450Z" --port serial:/dev/ttyS0 \
        --folder "/DCIM/100OLYMP/" --delete-all-images

  gphoto2 --camera "Olympus D-450Z" --port serial:/dev/ttyS0 \
    --capture-image

  gphoto2 --camera "Olympus D-450Z" --port serial:/dev/ttyS0 \
    --folder "/DCIM/100OLYMP/" -p 1 --filename ~/tmp/tmp.jpg

  convert -geometry 320x240 ~/tmp/tmp.jpg ~/tmp/wc.jpg

  rm ~/tmp/tmp.jpg

  rsync -avzr -e ssh ~/tmp/wc.jpg orbdesigns.com:orb/bpages/.

  sleep 60

done

That's it. Dump any old pictures out of the camera. Take a new picture. Transfer the new picture down to the computer. Scale the image down, renaming it. Delete the original image (so there's no overwrite problem). Copy the scaled image to the right place in my webs. Sleep for a bit. Solid as a rock now.

Time for me to head into work - I've got to finish rebuilding a computer from a BAD virus infection. But that's a story for later. See ya!

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Short morning update - Happy Friday! "Why short?" is the question I hear from those of you watching me. Yeah, I've been sitting here for the last half hour, and haven't accomplished much at all, other than slogging through about 60 emails, including the flack that's flying about a change in maintainership for Debian KDE. Apparantly Ivan has resigned his post after getting flayed on the developers list for trying to cope with a set of broken libpng dependencies. I'll have to go have a look at the archives and see what went down.

I'll be back with an afternoon/evening report on something interesting, OK? See you later.

Good evening. Decent day at work. If you checked in on me via the webcam page you would have seen a fair amount of inactivity. Yep, I've been working on CSS again. The tricky bits are getting a set of CSS styles that work well for the presentation I want onscreen and print out nicely as well. That's likely to take some more practice of the learn by doing type. Ah, SallyCAM too! She came to work with me today, and I pointed the camera her way a few times. Evidently she spent some time noshing on one of the plants in the office, and lurped all over the carpet. That was just at the moment I wasn't paying her any mind because I was reviewing the alarm system with our new building cleaning personnel. How ... appropriate!

So, what now, you ask? Well, I'm recompiling the kernel on Gryphon (that's why no CAM page up as I type this - it'll be up by the time you're reading, however). I'm modifying the configuration in order to do some more IrDA testing, both with the Nokia phone and the Agenda VR3d. First, I'm taking advantage of the fact that the 2.4.17 kernel's been out for a bit, without any major screaming going on over it. So I've fetched that down, along with Bob Love's Preemptible Kernel patch for it. Then I'll configure from scratch, just to keep my hand in. I leave most of the extra stuff out, then compile the bits I do use in directly, rather than building lots of modules. However, for testing the IrDA stuff, I'll modularize it for ease of swappage. Here's the order in which I do things, following download:

cd /usr/src
rm linux
tar jxf linux-2.4.17.tar.bz2 
mv linux linux-2.4.17
ln -s linux-2.4.17 linux
cd linux
patch -p1 < ../preempt-kernel-rml-2.4.17-1.patch
make xconfig
make dep
make bzImage
make modules ; make modules_install
cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.4.17
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.17
vim /etc/lilo.conf 
lilo
reboot

Note A word from Moshe, who says that the make modules step should come before compiling the kernel image. I've never done that myself, and haven't found any documentation (including the kernel docs) that say so. However, apparently this is true with Mosix, and perhaps other complex patches - certain modules have to have been built correctly for the kernel to compile. So if you're doing something tricky with the kernel, and it doesn't compile properly using your regular routine, remember that Moshe says modules first. Heck, it can't hurt, neh?

Any questions? That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. It's a bit tightened up from the original version I did for Chapter 7 of Tom and Brian's Linux Book. This one's only 16 steps, although I left out the actual downloads and checking the GPG signatures on the software. Let's see, is this actually working correctly? We'll see in a moment.

In the meantime, let me remind you of something I've said before. When upgrading kernels, always keep around your last known good copy. For example, I've been successfully using 2.4.14 for quite some time now, so I'll migrate that to the OldLinux label, and make my default Linux label boot into the new 2.4.17 kernel. But I have the fallback position you see. That's why the copied files are named with their version numbering intact. The System.map file, which is used to debug and identify kernel symbols when the kernel crashes, well, the kernel is smart enough to look in the appropriate place (/etc/boot) for a System.map-version that matches itself. Here's a copy of the pertinent stanza's in my current lilo.conf file:

# Boot up Linux by default.
#
default=Linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.17
        label=Linux
        read-only
        append="hdc=scsi"

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.14
        label=OldLinux
        read-only
        append="hdc=scsi"

Now, most excellent, the kernel compiles without problems. Now for modules: Yup, no problems there. Copy the files, modify lilo.conf, run lilo (don't forget that, I've done it more than once myself), and reboot. Did it work? Yep! On my way there, I stopped in the BIOS setup screens, and checked that the IrDA FIR setting base address was correct at 0x2F8. OK, enough of this for now, more when there's success to report!

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Good morning. Let's start with a signature tag line that Dave forwarded via the UUASC mailing list:

I just found out that the brain is like a computer.
If that's true, then there really aren't any stupid people.
Just people running Windows.

Yeah, I like that. Next up, some lovely people just sent out the SirCam virus to Marcia. She quarantined it, and sent it my way, deleting the original. I confirmed it's nastiness, and sent an email to the originator. Marcia rocks, unlike someone else I know at work, who managed to not only change email clients to one unprotected by his AV software (which was up to date), but then, failing all my good instruction, opened an attachment from some unknown party. Aaaaeeeerrrrgggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! SirCam up the wazoo, and oozing out every orifice.

At least he figured out quickly after the fact that his machine was infarcted, and shut it down. When I came in to work on Wednesday, I unplugged his net connection, then fired up the machine. Yup. Through and through. Applications wouldn't run, looking for the viral code (which had been deleted by the AV software). The box was hosed. I did the safest thing I could.

I pulled the hard drive out of his box, took it over, and put it in my Linux box. I mounted the drive, and pulled all of his data (the My Documents folder, the Netscape users directory, outlook.pst, archive.pst, and assorted other bits and pieces). Then I unmounted and zero'd out the drive:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1024 count=19920000

That ran for quite a while, needless to say. Then I reinstalled his Windows 98 and assorted applications from scratch. The silver lining here is that the prior installation was that which was installed by the original vendor. Now I've got a tweaked, lightweight version that runs faster, and has the correct AV version setup for both system and email protection. Only took 1.5 working days to complete (although a significant amount of that time was spent elsewhere, as things ran on the box). Woo and hoo.

Now let's have a look at some of the accumulated links of the last few weeks. First up, there's an article from mid-December on InternetWeek entitled "Red Hat Adds To Linux's Credibility" - this is one of IW's Best of the Best series, and speaks well of RH Linux in the corporate context for both feaatures, performance, and available support packages. Good thing to point out the the PHB in your organization, neh?

Are you ready for a lawyer joke, forwarded to me by Trudy?

A local charity office realized that it had never received a donation
from the town's most successful lawyer. The person in charge of 
contributions called him to persuade him to contribute.

"Our research shows that out of a yearly income of at least $500,000,
you give not a penny to charity. Wouldn't you like to give back to the 
community in some way?"

The lawyer mulled this over for a moment and replied, "First, did your 
research also show that my mother is dying after a long illness, and has 
medical bills that are several times her annual income?"

Embarrassed, the rep mumbled, "Um...no."

"Or that my brother, a disabled veteran, is blind and confined to a 
wheelchair?"

The stricken rep began to stammer out an apology but was interrupted,
"Or that my sister's husband died in a traffic accident," the lawyer's 
voice rising in indignation, "leaving her penniless with three children?!"

The humiliated rep, completely beaten, said simply, "I had no idea..."

On a roll, the lawyer cut him off once again: "And if I don't give them
a penny, why should I give any to you?!?"

Next up, here's an article from the O'Reilly Network, called "Working Without Copyleft", on the topic of choosing licenses for Open Source software. Here's the intro: It's possible to be an ardent supporter of open source development and not be a fan of copyleft and the General Public License. In this article the authors -- software developers -- relate how they came to embrace copyleft, became disillusioned with its limitations, and consequently turned away from it. It's a good article, and worth reading, whether or not you agree with them.

From: 	Moshe Bar 
To: 	[email protected]
Subject: 	[blank]
Date: 	04 Jan 2002 08:00:27 +0100	

Brian, 

Instead of an endless with

While [ "0" = "0" ]

Just do a simple and elegant

While 1

1 is always TRUE

Just my own 2c. 

Be well

Moshe

--------------------------------------------
So this number is,
once again, the player key:
(trade secret haiku?)

"Eighty-one; and then
one hundred three -- two times; then
two hundred (less three);

two hundred twenty
four; and last (of course not least)
the humble zero."

(Enjoy your DVD now)

A good question, Moshe. I started off there with an actual comparison in there, mucking with dates, times and such to turn the thing on and off. Then I backed away from that, and just zero'd out the comparison. You're right, I could have simplified it. I didn't. Ah, well.

OK, and with that, I'll let y'all go for a nice Saturday. Here, it is sunny out now, although there is rain forecast for the day. Have a good'un, folks. See you later!

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Good afternoon. See, it's like this: we were up until about midnight. Pat and Nathan were over for a couple hours last evening, then after they departed we settled in, me with my book, Marcia doing her quilting project, Sally snoring on the couch, and HGTV droning in the background. You see, we had coffee, late. That's usually a no-no for me - I didn't sleep with extraordinary depth, as a result. This morning we were up at the crack of 0800, but really weren't moving too fast. I checked email, and mucked about with a few things, but nothing very exciting. Then I went on the Costco run, and wasn't yet awake enough to remember to grind the beans as I left the store.

I made a few changes to the BrianCAM yesterday - I added a USB camera to the mix, and a couple of pieces of software to make it all work anew. That's all detailed on the page. Here's the latest version of the webcam snap script:

#!/bin/bash

while [ 1 ] ; do
  vidcat -f jpeg -o ~/tmp/tmp.jpg
  stamp
  rsync -avzr -e ssh ~/tmp/wc.jpg orbdesigns.com:orb/bpages/.
  sleep 30
done

Without that sleep 30 in there, I'd be sending a new picture about every two seconds to the server. But I'm not going to do a page that updates every two seconds. Nope, not gonna happen. Then just a few too many active connections could saturate my uplink.

On tap for today, I've got to setup my directories and such for the new year's worth of weekly pages, images, and whatnot. Also I want to continue work on the YaST2 review that I've been dragging out for far too long. Unfortunately, both of those are in conflict with reading - We picked up the Harry Potter books finally about a week ago. I picked up the first book on Thursday evening. So far I've read the first and second books, I've got three and four calling me right now. Aaaargh.

Time to pop some Crash Test Dummies in the cup holder, and get some work done. See you later, p'raps.

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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 © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.