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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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January 14, 2001 - Updates at 0710
Howdy. Manic Monday. That's my theme for the day. I've always been ragged on Monday mornings, and this is no exception. It's exacerbated by spending a lot more time on chores than either relaxing or working on one of the boxen. I got many things done over the weekend, with the car, in the yard, and so on. Meanwhile Sally napped. Proof appears in yesterday's post. This morning I'm sore, tired and cranky. I should be a dream to work with today...
So I've slogged through the 70+ overnight emails, mostly interesting stuff, although this one list is currently featuring an interminable discussion on the merits of porting open source software to a closed source platform. Mostly people are ... bored/annoyed by the topic, but there are two or three who are intensely interested in the technical challenges of said ports, to the exclusion of the "political" problems involved in such a venture. Well, I like that part... doing something interesting is almost always better than being politically correct, no matter what your politics are.
I'll wrap this morning's post with this: a mail I sent out to the Orb Talkabout mailing list on ... mmm, last Friday. Yes, you're all invited, hit that link and join in the fun. It's free, in every sense of the word.
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January 15, 2002 - Updates at 0653
Good morning. I don't know how many of you folks use FormMail for web forms cgi on any websites. However, it's come up hot on the security mailing lists today, there's some new scanners and automated exploits that allow older FormMail installations (pre 1.9) to be abused as spam originators.
See http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/formmail.shtml for the upgrade data, and pay note to http://aris.securityfocus.com, which currently shows Matt Wright FormMail Attacks in the number 5 slot. While the vulnerability's been fixed for a while, there are a LOT of installations at commercial hosting sites that use this script. If you don't maintain your own site, check with your hosting vendor, and request that if FormMail is in use, that it be upgraded to Version 1.0 toot-sweet.
Now to the mailbag...
From: "Gary M. Berg" Subject: Polishing the car Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 15:45:03 -0500 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) Brian, If you are using a traditional paste wax to work on the car, you might want to check out the Zaino Brothers Polish - www.zainobros.com. I've used it, and it works pretty well. You will need to use clay to clean the finish of the car, and I'd confirm with Sal Zaino which products to use on the Benz. But the stuff is amazing, and once you've got the car cleaned with clay putting the polish on is incredibly easy and the finish is amazing.
Wow. Wow. Wow. This looks like FUN! I was reading Jerry's update for yesterday (this link good until at least Sunday...), and found a link which is rather sparse on the details - merely three words: Contact Conference Details. This is for CONTACT 2002, here's some more details.
Our keynote speaker will be Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart. The theme of Ames Day, organized by Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute and Michael Sims of NASA, will be "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life -- Is the Cosmos Rife with Life?." This year's conference is dedicated to CONTACT board member Poul Anderson, writer, friend, gentleman and starfarer.
There's a day at NASA Ames, and speaking at the Poul Anderson tribute are Marvin Minsky, Jerry Pournelle and Vernor Vinge. Can you say Woooo Hoooo ? Good, I knew you could. Oh, did I mention that I just registered? A three day conference bridging the weekend, in my own back yard? I'd be a fool ... wait ... Oh, OK. Heh. If any of you are there, find me for lunch or something one of the days.
Now to work with me, where I'll document a pair of new baluns, derived from already existing parts. These will let the customer use existing home run TV cable terminated with F connectors to distribute 10BaseT horizontally in an apartment complex. He's happy, and buying 50 of each as soon as we can get them built, which starts about 5 minutes after I document the suckers.
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January 16, 2002 - Updates at 0700
Currently listening to: Lynyrd Skynyrd - Double Trouble (outtake version)
Fun email signatures:
"Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you criticize him, you're a mile away and you have his shoes."
Good morning. Hey, did I mention that I finished out the Harry Potter books last week? Quite good, really. So often I've found that books explicitly written for juveniles are patronizing and just a tad condescending. These are neither. A few of the characters are a bit cardboardy - you'd figure after four books we'd know why Snape hates Potter. So many of the players seem defined by one major aspect. Perhaps that's a characteristic of wizards in general, fundamentally flawed. Ah, but they held me, and I read through all four books in a little over a week, so I guess that's OK then. As soon as Marcia finishes reading Sorcerer's Stone we'll go check the movie.
I've been tuning and playing with my desktop again. More on that topic as I refine things, but here are the basics. Gnome 1.4 for the desktop environment. Sawfish 1.0.1 is the window manager (fast and light). Applications include VMware 3.0 (for all the review and writing work), OpenSSH (secure machine to machine commo), Galeon (a speedy lightweight browser that uses the Mozilla rendering engine, Gecko), Evolution (email and contact manager), XChat (IRC client), Bluefish (this very HTML editor), XMMS for MP3 and OGG playback, and gDict (to look up the seventeen words I don't know how to spell properly, no matter how many times I try).
I've also got StarOffice 6.0 Beta loaded. The problem there is that this beta apparently times out at the end of March. Yet there won't be a shipping version of 6.0 until "sometime in the second quarter". That leaves me high and dry. So I'll reload OpenOffice, and go forward from there. Yeah, they're behind schedule by a bit, too. I wonder if Sun isn't holding them back just a bit. After all, if OpenOffice beats StarOffice to "market" by more than 3 months, a fair number of the buzz and early adoption will be done. Sure SO is going to have some whizzy proprietary features that aren't in OpenOffice due to the binary only nature of SO. But OpenOffice is going to be nearly as good, and the MS document filters are identical, so use OO and why switch? Mmmm.
Ooops. I'm in plus time now. Gotta run. See you later.
Currently listening to: Eric Clapton - I Shot The Sheriff
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January 17, 2002 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. Let's start off with a Galeon tidbit. Galeon is (as noted yesterday) a web browser that's light, fast, and standards compliant. Well, I'll hedge that statement a bit... Galeon requires Mozilla and Gnome (or at least largish hunks of the Gnome infrastructure) to run properly. Have a look at the Debian package page to see that list. Heh. But it is fast, and there's some neat fast features in the toolbar. The Galeon homepage is found at http://galeon.sourceforge.net/.
OK The tidbit is this: I went to the My Yahoo page, and failed to login. No email, no customized Yahoo interface showing me all the news I care about, and nothing else. Sigh. After a bit of searching, I read something in an archived mailing list that implied I needed the mozilla-psm package. Quickly I became root, and typed apt-get install mozilla-psm - 15 seconds later I was done, and My Yahoo was back to working properly. What I find odd is that this package is neither require, recommended or suggested for Galeon. Yet without it, encrypted web pages fall flat. Mmmmm. I need to see if there's a bug to be filed there.
Here's a snap of the Gnome desktop I'm using. Note that the thumbnail leads to a 50% reduced screenshot - it's only a 110K file. The full-on 1600x1200 image file is a whopping 400K, you have been warned. The desktop is empty of decoration aside from the wallpaper (which hails from our Yosemite trip of last February). That rule breaks when I fire up Nautilus, but that's beside the point. Looking at the bar, from left to right,
Looking at the panel (the light blue bar at the bottom), from left to right, I have an XMMS (MP3 player) applet, followed by stock Gnome icons for the menu, Help Browser, Gnome Control Center, Lockscreen, Package manager, Terminal, and FileManager. The next group of icons I put there, for my common applications: Bluefish, XChat, Evolution, Galeon, SSH link to Grendel, and VMware (that's not a stock icon - I constructed it from the VMware logo). Next to that is the task bar (showing open applications in the current desktop), then a gDict (word lookup) applet, system volume control, clock, and Desktop Guide.
This desktop is faster for me than KDE. It's also not quite as integrated, but there you go. The trade-off is in code size, execution time, and the interconnectedness of all things (as Dirk Gently would say). I might even be able to make it faster by using Blackbox or IceWM. We'll see, as responsive is a good thing. (Oh, and there's been some significant breakage of the KDE packages in Debian unstable lately, so that's yet another reason for experimentation at this time.) Now for a dive into the don't try this at home files, (and really, don't try this at home), here's a fun .signature I found in an email from Will Wesley on Debian-Security:
Great way to learn about mknod...
And of course, there's some mail on the Harry Potter topic...
From: Matt Beland
Subject: Re: {some irrelevent subject line}
Date: 16 Jan 2002 07:29:56 -0800
On Wednesday 16 January 2002 06:43 am, you wrote:
> OK?
Should be, I'll give it a try here in a few minutes.
Oh, and "why Snape hates Potter" was in the third book - his father saved
Snape's life by stopping a prank that would have had Snape trapped alone with
Lupin as a werewolf. Since Snape and Potter Senior didn't like each other for
various schoolboy reasons (remember what the Marauder Map said - Prongs.
Wormtail, Padfoot, and Loony all apparently disliked Snape for various
reasons) Snape hated the thought of owing anything to Herry's dad. So, he's
basically taking it out on Harry. Not rational, but very human.
On top of all that, Harry's done two things to piss Snape off - beat
Slytherin at both Quidditch and in winning Gryffindor the house cup, and he's
managed to defeat every attempt by Snape to get Harry in trouble.
Lots of things like that. For a juvenile book, she doesn't feel the need to
spell everything out - the kids are supposed to do some inferring and putting
things together. Kind of refreshing, really - I mean, God forbid we should
make kids *think*. For entertainment, no less...
- --
Matt Beland
matt [at] rearviewmirror.org
http://www.rearviewmirror.org
From: Roger Ritter Subject: Why Snape hates Harry Date: 16 Jan 2002 10:36:52 -0600 You mention in today's journal that after four books we should know why Snape hates Harry. We do know, I think. In the third book, it comes out that Harry's father did something stupid that almost killed Snape, then he rescued Snape from the danger. Snape never forgave him for that (neither the almost killing him, or the rescuing), and it's strongly implied that he's transferred that loathing to Harry. No, I'm not quite so much of a Harry Potter geek as to have remembered that tidbit for over two years. I've been listening to the unabridged books on tape while commuting over the last few weeks, so the third book is still fairly fresh in my memory. -- Roger Ritter
And with that, I'd best depart for work. Y'all have a lovely day!
Currently on XMMS - Hootie & the Blowfish, Crawl Away
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January 18, 2002 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. I decide to put up something a little more amusing than router/switch status LEDs on my WebCAM page, for the insomniacs in the crowd... So I perched the camera on the arm of my office chair, and pointed it at the workstation screen. A whole night of screensaverCAM for the terminally bored. Little was I to know that someone would rise to the bait in such a wonderful way. Thanks for the chuckle, Dan.
There's a bunch of behind the scenes stuff going on, and I'm continuing to not sleep well as a result. For that reason, I'm running late, and this is going to be short. I have an in the interest of fairness link for you - an article on LinuxWorld entitled The Kernel of Pain. It's on the topic of the instability and moving target that's been the 2.4.x Linux kernel. This appeared first in my email box, at about the same time as the article and all of LinuxWorld got slashdotted. So now that the link is stable and available, I offer it to you. Any thoughts on that?
Also, don't forget to keep up with Doc Searls' Weblog. You need to read down the page a bit to catch this if you don't follow Doc daily as I do, but he's inaugurated a new meme: Spam is a Denial of Civilization attack. That's right, it's a DoC. Heh.
Finally, though you may think I've forgotten, I am continuing to work, a little at a time, on that YaST2 review. I added three new sections yesterday, and might finish sometime before the next version comes out, at this rate. So, y'all have a great Friday, and I'll see you back here later or soon or something. Keep checking back.
Currently on the speakers: Bonnie Raitt, Nick of Time
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January 19, 2002 - Updates at 0908
Good morning. Oh, goody, it's Saturday morning, and I have 128 brand-spanking new emails to contend with. Then I'll bath the dog and hit her with some flea-control substance, then I'll bath myself. Following that, I'll re-caulk part of the tub, all this as quick as possible, to give all the curing time necessary so that we can take our morning showers tomorrow without worry. Then we're heading over to my grandmother's house to meet my mom, and claim some of the stuff that no one wants to send to Good Will. Yeah, the house has been sold, and now we've got to empty it out, one way or another.
I'll be back this afternoon to spend a bit of time on the YaST2 writeup - maybe enough between today and tomorrow to finish it out, who knows. I also finally broke down and subscribed to TransGaming's WineX development project. They've licensed some proprietary bits (like InstallShield and some copy protection schemes) that can't go in the open-source version of Wine, but that make games installation and play go much more smoothly. No, it's not as stable as Windows, when it comes to playing Windows games on Linux using the Wine API libraries. But they're getting better. I want to try a couple of other things besides games - most office software is MUCH less demanding than games are. We'll see. Oh, the cool thing about Transgaming? Subscribers vote on the direction of development. Code contributors and bug reporters get more votes, too.
Now I'd best get to that stack of email.
Lot's of fun stuff there, but only one that was really interesting: a link to a story in the Washington Post (as opposed to some less reputable rag) rumoring that AOL is talking with and about acquiring Red Hat. Wow, wouldn't that be a kick in the ass! Here's the story: http://www.washtech.com/news/media/14759-1.html
Now, time for me to get on with my day. See ya!
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January 20, 2002 - Updates at 0845
Good morning. Dan Bowman writes to tell me a Sunday morning webcam ought to be against the law (or something like that). This morning I've got no time at all, we're out to brunch with Myrna and Roger, so by the time you read this, there won't be any more Brian's bed-head for you to make a mockery of. I put a note up on the cam reading "Bah Humbug, Dan!!!" Dan had this comment:
On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 08:17:38AM -0800, Dan Bowman wrote: Cool! Hey, is that anything like 'Instant Messaging"? I can see the new trend now: people using their computers to write notes to each other!
See you folks back here later, we've got a brunch to attend to...
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Last 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 © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.