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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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February 04, 2001 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. Woo-hoo, Tom Brady and the Patriots. Well, I guess that if I was going to watch just one football game this season, that turned out to be one of the better ones, yeah? And for the halftime show, Sally wanted a belly scratch (click the thumbnail), since she cares about the game even less, except as it removes our attention from her. Still. Fun game, nicely wasted and relaxing afternoon, then I made beef stir fry for supper... Pretty nice Sunday - Marcia and Sally even got in some serious nap time.
Well, goodbye to a listmember. That's one oddity about running a mailing list like Talkabout, people come and go. It's like being at a crowded cocktail party, you can't always be sure who's there, who's coming, who's leaving and why (did I fail to be a good host?) although you generally have a sense of the size of the crowd.
Half day today, so I'll pop home, and get back to work on the YaST2 overview. I'd still like to finish that sometime this year... sigh. I'd best get into the commute. Have a great day!
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February 05, 2002 - Updates at 0710
Good morning. Another late start to the day, and the omens were so good, too. I was actually out of bed for a few moments at about 0550, but crawled back in to get warm again, for just a few more short minutes. That stretched out to about half an hour or so. It's terrible, but I'm just not a morning person. I could play one on TV, but it's not a role I relish.
Let's get the less good news out of the way. First, our hearts go out to friend Nancy, who just lost her baby. She was just out of the first trimester, and in a routine checkup yesterday... no fetal heartbeat. Sigh. Love and hugs to Nan and Roland. Next, of much less importance, sometime in the last 24 to 48 hours, I managed to pick up something that feels like a hamstring pull in my right leg. Very odd, because I've done absolutely nothing of import beyond washing the dog on Saturday last - and while that's work, it simply doesn't stress me. Hmmm.
Yesterday I had a good run at the YaST2 writeup, finishing several more modules up, and about a section and a half. One full day should see it finished, so perhaps this weekend? One note of warning, what you see there today will change a bit in it's final form. I'll probably restructure the thing into separate HTML pages, one per section, and put in a bunch of cross-refs. But the page linked to above will remain page one.
Did anyone else see the latest bits of oddity in the Linux world? First, some inexpert lies with statistics by Paul Thurrott's in his WinInfo Short Takes column. I caught this by way of Slashdot yesterday. His sources (the bugtraq lists at Security focus) clearly indicate that their lists are filled with apples, oranges and pomegranites, making the numbers therein entirely unsuitable for comparison. Why? Because many of the vulnerabilities of Linux packages are from entirely optional packages, or are only a danger in the hands of someone with a local shell account. Second, he's lumped vulnerabilities from several different distros together to creates a master count of vulnerabilities for Linux vs. Windows, with Linux the substantial loser. Unfortunately, Paul fails to take into account overlapping vulnerabilities, like a wuFTPd bug that shows up in Mandrake and RedHat and SuSE. Whoops! Same vulnerability - I'll just count that sucker three times, since it's in all the distributions. Feh. Welcome to this course of Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics 101 (aka Bonehead LDLS).
Next bit: The source gets a little more free open... yeah, whatever, Richard. In conjunction with the celebration of the fourth anniversary of the term "Open Source", Free Radio Linux is doing an on air, online broadcast of the entire source code tree of the Linux kernel. 4 million plus lines of code read by a speech bot. When the going gets tough, the tough get... weird.
Whoops. I'm late. See y'all later.
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February 06, 2002 - Updates at 0705
Howdy. Welcome to the middle of the week. Yesterday afternoon, I cranked out a few more sections in the YaST2 writeup, then plowed straight into the brick wall of their LVM GUI tool. LVM or Logical Volume Management, provides a number of distinct advantages, from bonding multiple partitions to allow them to appear as a single contiguous space to the OS, to (apparently) making a single large partition appear as one or more smaller partitions. The downside to all of this is that there aren't very many checks or guidance built into the YaST2 LVM module, and some things it just does plain WRONG.
Handy, doing this testing and writeup in VMware, though. I simply set up three extra 2 gig virtual SCSI drives, and started playing with LVM. The LVM module is so new that there's no documentation I could find in the SuSE books, and there's no help behind the help button in that module. I figured (never having used LVM before) that it must be a breeze. I did a variety of operations in what seemed like the obvious order, and ended up building... a non-booting system. Well, it booted, sorta, but the fstab was hosed, which makes everything not work right, and is a bit of a bear to fix. I'm not ready to write it up just yet, but I'll tell you I did succeed in creating an LVM bonded set of disks. If you decide to experiment with LVM in SuSE and use the GUI, then make a copy of the good /etc/fstab first, and check the revised one before rebooting. Your life will be MUCH easier.
Now, since time is short and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, here's some humor from our friend Pat...
Subject: Top Eight Idiots of 2001
Just when you think the world is getting a little smarter.........Idiot # 1
I am a medical student currently doing a rotation in toxicology at the poison control center. Today, this woman called in very upset because she caught her little daughter eating ants. I quickly reassured her that the ants are not harmful and there would be no need to bring her daughter into the hospital. She calmed down and at the end of the conversation happened to mention that she gave her daughter some ant poison to eat in order to kill the ants. I told her that she better bring her daughter into the emergency room right away.
Here's your sign, lady. Wear it with pride.
Idiot # 2
Seems that a year ago, some Boeing employees on the airfield decided to steal a life raft from one of the 747s. They were successful in getting it out of the plane and home. When they took it for a float on the river,a Coast Guard helicopter coming towards them surprised them. It turned out that the chopper was homing in on the emergency locator beacon that activated when the raft was inflated. They are no longer employed at Boeing. Here's your sign, guys. Don't get it wet; the paint might run.
Idiot # 3 - A true story out of San Francisco:
A man, wanting to rob a downtown Bank of America, walked into the branch and wrote "this iz a stikkup. Put all your muny in this bag." While standing in line, waiting to give his note to the teller, he began to worry that someone had seen him write the note and might call the police before he reached the teller's window. So he left the Bank of America and crossed the street to Wells Fargo. After waiting a few minutes in line, he handed his note to the Wells Fargo teller. She read it and, surmising from his spelling errors that he wasn't the brightest light in the harbor, told him that she could not accept his stickup note because it was written on a Bank of America deposit slip, and that he would either have to fill out a Wells Fargo deposit slip or go back to Bank of America. Looking somewhat defeated, the man said, "OK" and left. He was arrested a few minutes later, as he was waiting in back at Bank of America.
Don't bother with this guy's sign. He probably couldn't read it anyway.
Idiot # 4
A motorist was unknowingly caught in an automated speed trap that measured his speed using radar and photographed his car. He later received in the mail a ticket for $40 and a photo of his car. Instead of payment, he sent the police department a photograph of $40. Several days later, he received a letter from the police that contained another picture, this time of handcuffs. He immediately mailed in his $40.
Get another sign.......
Idiot # 5
Guy walked into a little corner store with a shotgun and demanded all of the cash from the cash drawer. After the cashier put the cash in a bag, the robber saw a bottle of Scotch that he wanted behind the counter on the shelf. He told the cashier to put it in the bag as well, but the cashier refused and said, "Because I don't believe you are over 21." The robber said he was, but the clerk still refused to give it to him because he didn't believe him.
At this point, the robber took his driver's license out of his wallet and gave it to the clerk. The clerk looked it over and agreed that the man was in fact over 21 and he put the Scotch in the bag. The robber then ran from the store with his loot. The cashier promptly called the police and gave the name and address of the robber that he got off the license. They arrested the robber two hours later. Remind me to have more signs printed up!!!!!!!!
Idiot # 6
A pair of Michigan robbers entered a record shop nervously waving revolvers.
The first one shouted, "Nobody move!" When his partner moved, the startled first bandit shot him. This guy doesn't need a sign; he probably figured it out himself.
Idiot # 7
Arkansas: Seems this guy wanted some beer pretty badly. He decided that the'd just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. Seems the liquor store window was made of Plexi-Glass. The whole event was caught on videotape. Oh, that smarts.
> > > >>> > >>>>>>>>>>>>> Give him his sign! >>>>>>>>>>>>>
Idiot # 8
Ann Arbor: The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti, Michigan at 12:50 A.M., flashed a gun demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn't open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren't available for breakfast. The man, frustrated, walked... away!!!!!!!!!!
Have a great day. I'm up in the air about tonight's SVLUG meeting. We'll see how the day goes.
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February 07, 2002 - Updates at 0705
Good morning. Indeed, I ended up attending the SVLUG meeting last night. The topic was MPEG4IP, an open implementation of the MPEG4 specification and associated tools to provide a server/client suite for streaming video and audio across an IP network, at bitrates ranging from high dialup to T1 and beyond. Of course, at LAN speeds, they're happily doing NTSC and/or PAL in near real time (that is, the frame rates are now in the low 20's. David Mackie, the speaker believes that continued optimization and tweaking will bring entertainment quality video completely up to snuff. The drill is that, especially on the encoding side, the software isn't happy running on less than a P4. The player runs on an IPAQ, among other platforms, so decoding and display isn't nearly as processor intensive.
Here are a few links from the evening: The main site for MPEG4IP is http://mpeg4ip.sourceforge.net/, that's where you can find all of the running source code. (another caveat, no SMP operation for this software yet, although if you have coding/debugging skills and an SMP box, then have to it - they'd love the help). There's http://www.isma.tv, a commercial consortium called the Internet Streaming Media Alliance. Lots more information than most people want about the MPEG4 standard can be found at http://www.m4if.org/. At the beginning of the meeting, unrelated to the topic of the evening, we were introduced to http://www.gnuhost.com/, an organization that does free server hosting for non-profit organizations. That is, the .org provides the server, and they host it on a fat pipe, at least according to Don Marti. That page is rather sparse, but at least there's an email link to ask if it's true, and how to go about signing up. Final link for now is http://www.codecon.org/. "CodeCon is the premier event in 2002 for the P2P, cypherpunk, and network/security application developer community. It is a workshop for developers of real-world applications that support individual liberties." Overall, a fun and informative night.
Now one joke for you...
~ The Baptist Preacher ~
There was a Preacher whose wife was expecting a baby. The Preacher went to the congregation and asked for a raise. After much consideration and discussion, they passed a rule that whenever the preacher's family expanded, so would his paycheck.
After five or six children, this started to get expensive and the congregation decided to hold another meeting to discuss the preacher's pay. There was much yelling and bickering about how much the preacher's additional children were costing the church.
Finally, the preacher got up and spoke to the crowd and said, "Having children is an act of God!"
In the back of the room, a little old man stood up and in his frail voice said, "Snow and rain are also acts of god, but when we get too much, we wear rubbers!!!"
Ghttp://www.gentoo.org/doc/build.htmlotta run. See you around.
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February 08, 2002 - Updates at 0710
Good morning. I worked steadily on the new website for the firm yesterday (but it's not up yet, about another week). Then I came home and worked on the YaST2 report, getting in the sections on LVM (bleah) and Runlevel Editor (yay). Unfortunately, that doesn't leave me much to write here. Oh, I know. I keep giving you links to that unfinished report, and you might be wondering why... Well, I've been working on it for what, a month or more now? By exposing my shame publicly each day, I goad myself to finish the darn thing.
Oh, and here's another joke. It fell on it's face in the backchannel, however, so I'll inflict it on y'all as well...
Little David came home from first grade and told his father that they learned about the history of Valentine's Day. "Since Valentine's day is for a Christian saint and we're Jewish," he asked, "will God get mad at me for giving someone a valentine?"
David's father thought a bit, then said, "No, I don't think God would get mad. Who do you want to give a valentine to?"
"Osama Bin Laden," David said.
"Why Osama Bin Laden," his father asked in shock.
"Well," David said, "I thought that if a little American Jewish boy could have enough love to give Osama a valentine, he might start to think that maybe we're not all bad, and maybe start loving people a little bit. And if other kids saw what I did and sent valentines to Osama, he'd love everyone a lot. And then he'd start going all over the place to tell everyone how much he loved them and how he didn't hate anyone anymore."
His father's heart swelled and he looked at his boy with newfound pride. "David, that's the most wonderful thing I've ever heard."
"I know," David said, "and once that gets him out in the open, the Marines could blow the shit out of him."
Heh, well, I liked it, anyway. Mmmm. There's quite a lot going in the world, but nothing I can get worked up over before my first cup of coffee, so I think I'll wrap this up and hit the road. We're having a pot luck at work today to celebrate the beginning of the New Year, as celebrated by the Lao community. Quite a few of the team at work are Laotian by descent. So I'd best get organized. Take care, have a good Friday.
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February 09, 2002 - Updates at
Howdy. Welcome to the weekend. We slept in a bit, and I've been lazily wandering through my assorted email and browsing sites. Nothing particularly gripping from this morning. However, I do have a couple of interesting links to share with you, after I review the upcoming day with you.
The story starts last night. Before, and occasionally during, the Olympic opening ceremonies, I was getting down to experiment a bit with Gentoo Linux, at the gentle prompting of Matt Beland. Needless to day, I'm not of a mood to throw a real machine at it first off, so I fire up VMware and create a new "machine" for my trial install. It dies badly, during the loading of the root image from the CDR for the Gentoo installation.
That's OK. I haven't made a coaster in a long, long time, but these discs are from the bottom of a 100 stack, so perhaps time and compression and slight movement have damaged them. I reburn, with a fresh disc, from a new batch. Check the image, reads fine.... Same damn problem. Hmmm. The behaviour is that I start getting read errors from the CDR drive. Now, it's possible that they've got a broken ISO image, but not likely as it's been up for a few weeks, and would have been fixed by now. It's possible that I've burned this badly, the same way, twice - but that's very unlikely. It's possible that I've got a hardware problem... Sigh.
So I shut everything down, halt the system, pop the lid and check all the connections, board seating, fans spinning, pop and reset the memory, yada yada yada. Fire the machine back up, and... VMware doesn't start, it claims that it hasn't been configured for the running kernel. WTF??? It was configured for the running kernel all the rest of this week, as I did writeups on bits of YaST2, right? Well, phooey. So I try to reconfigure VMware, and it fails, and the kernel starts spitting messages from the new patches that I'm experimenting with. BAH!!!
The problem I have with this all is that sure, I'm doing some slightly hinky, don't try this at home, stuff on my machine at the moment. I wouldn't at all be surprised that over the last few weeks I'd managed to kill the machine as I added experimental stuff to the kernel. But to have it all working properly, then die after a couple of weeks. This is just too weird. Then, when I restarted again, X failed. Well sure. I'm running the NVIDIA drivers. They're closed source, proprietary, and taint the kernel. That means that bug reports from a kernel that includes non-GPL'd bits are ignored and or jeered at. Rightly so, after all, how can one determine interactions and debug properly without all the source. I tried reinstalling the NVIDIA libs and kernel module. It appeared to work, but dies on startup. This is ... not good.
Does this indicate I've got a hard disk spindle going bad? Or that I've run into a highload stress error from ReiserFS? Mmmmmm. I'm a tad tweaked over this, to be honest. I think what I'll do is freshen up my backups, in case this last suspicion is true. Then I'll rip out the modified 2.4.17-modified that I'm running right now, and build a stock 2.4.17. I'll add back in the NVIDIA (it's a night and day difference in screen redraw times) drivers, and reinstall VMware. Then I'll start experimenting.
Sounds like a busy day to me, too. If only my back weren't whacked. Yesterday, I woke up with a bit of a twinge in my upper back, below the left scapula, and just left of the spine. Even taking Ibuprofen, it tighted and knotted on me in varying degrees throughout the day yesterday. It's not as bad yet today, but my level of dedication to this process is going to be a function of comfort and pain.
Now for those links I promised you. Well, I hope there's more than the one I remember right now - I was sure there was more to share... OK. First of, here's the Rosetta Stone for Unix. It's a large table that has columns of various OS's, from AIX and Darwin, through Linux, to Ultrix. 14 variants in all. The rows are setup for system functions, like Administrative GUI, managing users, and so on. Each cell contains the functions that accomplish the goal in the specified OS. Let's say you know that in AIX the command to check swap space is lsps -a, and you want to find an equivalent command for FreeBSD. Run your finger down the AIX column to the correct row, then over to Freebsd, to see that swapinfo is the correct equivalent. This is one handy tool, and if you're using IE5 or greater, apparently there's a custom table tool that's only available under that browser. Try it if you will, and tell me what happens. I don't know what they're talking about.
A-ha! Here's the other one. The most recommended Procmail site on the web. I couldn't get there, and didn't link it, when I was working on that a week or so ago. Here it is, Nancy McGough's Procmail Quick Start. Well written, and bound to be useful to me as I try and fix some of the things I did when I first set up the procmail filters that aren't doing exactly as I wish, yet.
Now I'd best get into my day. In a little while, I'll fire the webcam back up, once I've gotten rid of this bed-head. Then you can watch me tear my hair out as I try to muddle through these odd problems. Or you can watch the Olympics, or any other one of thousands of more fun things to do than watch me. Heh, see you later.
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February 10, 2002 - Updates at 0900
Yesterday went entirely NOT as planned, in some senses, and business as usual in others. I created a fresh, solid and tested backup set for Garcia the workstation, and decided just to wipe the system and start from scratch. I'll just have to do kernel patch testing on machines that aren't my primary workstation, because I want this box up for too many different reasons to have it break for just one.
I was about to start reloading Debian when I remembered Matt Beland's ode to Gentoo Linux. So I decided to install Gentoo directly on Garcia, instead of the failed attempts to run it inside VMware earlier this week.
Unlike my tests inside of VMware, the Gentoo CDR boots fine on real hardware. I can follow the directions given on http://www.gentoo.org/doc/build.html and everything just works... until I get to the point where I wanted to run the bootstrap.sh script. Starts, then dies, unable to get copies from either ibiblio or metalab, the two primary mirrors for the first thing that the Gentoo script wants to rebuild. Turns out I picked an EXCELLENT (also not!) day to experiment with something that has their primary mirrors there - they were down for maintenance all day. It
extended from 10 to 6, EST. So I waited until 3, and ran it again. No
joy. Checked the page at ibiblio, and they'd added two hours to the
downtime.
So I went spelunking on the Debian site in search of anything I really ought to know before reinstalling. I got some new boot disks, and wrote them (using the gentoo boot system to do so, since Garcia is the only working linux box with a working floppy drive). Then I started to build Garcia back into a debian linux box. Why? Ibiblio had gone from putting up a front page that showed their maintenance excuse page to no connection whatsoever. Everything times out. And I want a working machine in front of me at the end of the day.
The other reason? There should be a place in the Gentoo configuration scripts where I can set up additional mirror sites so that I can make their scripts work. In the nascent system, there's a file, /etc/make.globals - That file contains a configuration item: GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://www.ibiblio.com/gentoo/". Well, that should be easy enough. I went spelunking through the various mirrors for ibiblio until I found a site that carried the gentoo sub-tree. I replaced the ibiblio information with the mirror site data, and ran bootstrap. It failed, after trying the normal, previous, primary mirrors. WTF? The data in make.globals was back to the original. Ooooh. OK, someplace, I read that /etc/make.conf overrides make.globals. So I put a modified GENTOO_MIRRORS line in there. It's ignored. FEH. I search the filesystem painstakingly, attempting to find the bit that's overwriting and/or telling the system to ignore/overwrite configuration, and just use the mirrors I know are broken. Two hours of that and I'm through, which is why I was ready for Debian.
So, just as I finished building partitions for a Debian install, a quick refresh showed me that ibiblio was back online. Woo Hoo, all is not lost. After all, I'm now VERY good at wending my way through the prompts of an initial Gentoo install, very quickly. Click, bang, boom, I get to the right place, start the bootstrap process and crunch. Nada. Leaning over to Gryphon the Acer Travelmate, I check for the existence of the Gentoo subtree. It's not there. Shit.
I'm typing this, this morning, on a fully functioning Debian Sid (unstable) installation, that started off installing from a brand new disk set from the testing tree. It installs for me the 2.4.17 kernel. Woo and double Hoo. It's working. I've still got more to build in, but it's getting there. I ran SetiAtHome for a little stress overnight, and I'll pop on VMware in a bit, and try to get a bit more done on that YaST2 thing. Gentoo Linux? I'm sure it's very competent, and that my problem is not with Gentoo, but with the timing of things, in a very Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul sort of way. Yeah, I'm a bit tweaked over that MIRRORS configuration item, and I'll write to Daniel about that in a little while. Oh, today, the Gentoo subtree is apparently back at ibiblio. It's just forbidden now, instead of not found.
See you around, a bit later!
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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.
