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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 11, 2001 - Updates at 0700 and
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Good morning... First off, have a look at that dog in the sun. She spent more time there than I did this weekend, including the time I spent doing yardwork. Pathetic, really, isn't it? The funny thing is that she was billed to us as a dedicated indoor dog. I think it's more true that her former owners were dedicated indoor people, and the dog adjusted. She's really pretty happy protecting the backyard from all manner of birds and squirrels and such, and lying in the sun could probably be regarded as her new priority, right after having the last bit of ice cream from my bowl each night.
Yesterday, aside from finishing the rebuilding process on Garcia's Debian installation, I managed to (as noted) get some yardwork done. Of course that involved taking care of Sally's gifts to fertilization. I actually take on that task every second or third night, but definitely on lawn-mowing days. So I did the lawn, pruned out a tree, at least down low, took care of the feeding and such for some of the potted plants, and checked out the front for encroaching weeds. That's not in too bad a shape, at the moment. Once that was done, I spruced up my office, which was about 4 weeks past due for some organizing, and a serious dusting. Here are the results:
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Clearly, it's too clean, and I need more stuff. Well, strictly, that's not true. Right now just about everything fits on the shelving in the office, or in a collection of boxes above the cupboards behind me. But there's precious little space left free. And I really like being able to find stuff when I look for it. My chore soon involves turning that stack of accumulated magazines and journals that made it through the initial receipt triage into something manageably readable. You can see that Tux took a liking to the stray duster feather, and headed back to spend some time with Tim Leary and some Deadheads. Mmmmm. I need more of that in my collection. All of my Dead CD's got ripped off when the house I was living in before I met Marcia was burgled, some 4 or more years back.
Lucky me. A slog through the mail inbox this morning yields up four new entrants to the dummy list in my IPTables configuration file. Hosts on charter-stl.com, betanetclub.com and wcom.net have graduated from being logged by my firewall to just being dropped. Repeated connection attempts to known crackage ports, or to my FTP/SSH ports merits immediate suspension. Dudes, just because the ports scan as open doesn't mean they're open for you!!!
Mmmmm. And time's up, so I guess I'd best wrap this up and hit the road. Have a good day, even if it is Monday. See you on the flip side.
As far as Mondays go, that didn't suck too badly. And just for a follow on bit of good news on the Gentoo Linux front, here's the first bit of good news: I was finally able to successfully boot the Gentoo installation CD image in VMware. It turns out that more patience than I was able to muster was all that was required there. For whatever reason, there's a heaping whack of problem stuff, leaving junk hanging off the end of the rescue.gz image that gets loaded. Once the loader gets past all the IO errors, the boot continues normally. The second bit of good news is that the Gentoo mirror at http://www.ibiblio.org/ is up and available. So now I'm attempting an installation in VMware. Matt Beland mentioned on the Talkabout mailing list that he'd never had a successful Gentoo install in VMware, but you know me, I've got to try it for myself. Well, maybe not that no-parachute skydiving trick, but in general... you know what I mean.
More on this topic tomorrow, depending on my successes and/or failures. G'night.
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February 12, 2002 - Updates at
First off, bad move, Moshe! Announce what you like! But keep the cat in the bag. Best place for a cat, being in a bag, that is. Perhaps a burlap sack, wrapped with chain and dropped in the middle of Lake Superior. Overkill? You've never seen the way that cat looked at me! Oh, hey... I got distracted, didn't I? Really, it's good news that my friend, the author, kernel developer, new home owner and soon-to-be-married guy Moshe Bar has just put up his newest development project - OpenMosix. This project, following in the footsteps of the original Mosix project, provides perfectly transparent process migration across between boxes that are configured to work together in a Mosix cluster. Works for me running two SetiAtHome instance on a single box. One always migrates to the Gryphon the laptop, which has also been running OpenMosix.
Yeah, these are the kernel patches that I've been experimenting with for a while, and yes, there's a reasonable probablility that Moshe and I found (or rather, Moshe found, based on my description) the possible interaction between a running VMware machine, and a Mosix-enabled Linux kernel in the host OS. That may have caused my hard-to-replicate but painful and bad behaviour with Garcia, my main workstation, late last week. I know, I know - I keep telling you that Linux is stable, unlike that Other OS. Well, the answer there is not to play out at the bleeding edge. I can have stability, or I can have interesting. In my case I have both, since I track Debian testing for Grendel, and I'm only doing security updates now, there. Garcia is stable enough to be my workstation, and since I have the laptop as a backup, I can take on things that might put me down for a day or two of remodel.
Last night's Gentoo installation into a VMware virtual machine is proceeding well. The initial bootstrap process is completed, and all of the base utilities are loaded, recompiled and installed. I've got more steps yet before it's a bootable system, but then, I'm taking my time. So far, so good, though.
Along with everything else that 's going on, I keep coming back to Doc Searl's blog. Although he occasionally has the same fascination with the word fuck that turned me off of Richard Pryor and Chris Rock in turn, Doc thinks a lot about the nature of the 'Net, and where things are really happening. I'm not sure that he's right all the time, but he makes me think a lot.
Today, I'm thinking about the blog's eye view. That is, if you blog, then what's important is about blogging. What you link to is other peoples blogs. And blogging is at the center of the net. OK. Well, blogging as "conversations" in the sense of "Markets are Conversations" as from the Cluetrain Manifesto. What I really found interesting was in yesterday's post:
Meanwhile take another look at the Connectivity Infrastructure piece, which so far has only two comments (I've written far less worthy things that have attacted far more). It's itended as bait for fresh wisdom from Craig Burton and others. I've had some great emails about it, but nothing linkable. Yet.
Now maybe it's just the voices I hear that make me believe that what Doc said there was that non-public conversations don't matter. Whatever. If that's the proposition, I don't think I buy it, but let me flow about it here for a while. There's lots of information flowing about that's only important to two people. The results of the conversation may have greater significance, but there's too much noise swamping the signal now. Can you keep up with all the things you'd like to know about? If so, bottle some and sell it to me - I need that!
Here's the 64 thousand dollar question: Do I care how my sources of news, information and amusement reached their conclusions? If Doc and Craig Burton "converse" by writing in the public eye, and responding in alternation, then either come to consensus, or agree to differ, have they contributed something of value to the public arena? How is this different than a publicly archived (web accessible, of course) mailing list?
Now, in a related theme, Doc pounds on the point that news that isn't freely archived doesn't have any value to it's owners. That is, for example, you need to be a subscriber to the Santa Barbara Herald Tribune (or whatever they're called there) in order to see their content. The web has the potential to be a publicly valuable morgue for each news source. The availability of the history in each source's archive is part of what determines the value or "authority" of the source. Otherwise, how is a searcher to learn which is best.
Opposing that, let's look at a different scenario. When I want to demonstrate my mastery (or authority) in a particular field of endeavour to someone, say a potential employer, do I give them all my course notes from the pertinent classes I took? Do I send them here to this site and say, "Read that lot, then you'll know whether or not I know my stuff."
Well, no. There I have to bow to the needs of the recipient of the information. They need an executive summary. Markets may indeed be conversations, but business as usual still runs on the 15 second sound bite. Time has value. Your time has value. That's why I don't generally publish my long, boring installation reports here in the Grafitti section of my site. I link it, and you can delve into the history a bit if you're interested in my conclusions.
I read a lot of interesting mail each day. All the time, I'm involved in interactions, online and in real life. Some of those get summarized here. Important ones get linkage to additional resources. (There's a hidden motivation or two there - once written, I remember things better, and this is a searchable archive, so that this place becomes my virtual memory subsystem.) I think that a tiered approach is best. There's a lot of private biz that never gets significant enough for you or me to care, unless we're one of the directly involved parties. That's email. Then there's the special interest group, whether it be people who like lipstick on sheep (nod to the Onion) or the Linux Kernel Mailing List. These can be publicly archived if it's important (as the latter is), or not, as the group determines. Blogs, Daynotes, Journals and such can be either as personal as diaries, or as significant as channels and sorters for lots of below the surface activity. Often, as with this place, they can be a blend of the two.
It is important that once made available to the public, that information remain available, somehow. The Google caching tool is one way to ensure that gone information isn't gone forever. Then there's the very cool Alltheweb.com. Both good resources for finding things that used to be, and aren't. Some mundanea doesn't matter, except in a forensic sense - who needs to know what schedule the BART trains were running on the day after Thanksgiving in 1998? Not me, at least not by web search. But what WAS I working on a year ago? Here's the answer. And let's see if I can do that with Google... Yep, top link right here
Cool, my virtual memory isn't just mirrored up at Tom's place, it's also several other places around the web, and around the world. Now all I have to do is remember to write down all the important stuff... heh.
Let me tie this thing up and present a pretty package. The quote from Doc's blog yesterday still annoys me. I guess that it presents as a teaser (for us) and a goad (for Craig Burton and others). But what's the point? For me, I think it's important to provide enough detail and information for someone else to follow what I say/write. Linkage to references, debate, contradictions - all that is useful in creating an authoritative resource.
Blogging isn't the center, or at least it isn't yet. That's because blogging doesn't pay any bills. (Think Joel Gray and Liza Minelli) But show me a working micro-money system, and Doc might just be right. But for today, I just want Doc to lead a little stronger here. If there were interesting emails, what did he learn from them? What is he expecting from the mysterious OTHERS??? I guess we'll just have to wait for the new episode, airing next week. We can always hope that they finally kill off Jar-Jar Binks...
Oh, wait. That's a different conversation.
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February 13, 2002 - Updates at 0657
G'morning. After yesterday's ramblings, and last night's restless something that resembled sleep in the same way that a car wreck resembles a supernova, I really don't have much to say. The Gentoo Linux install proceeds apace. Last night I ran (and left running when I retired for the night) the installation of X and KDE. Why so long? I may not have mentioned here - everything installed in Gentoo is compiled on the local machine. Everything. When it's done, it's definitely optimized for the local hardware.
So anyway, That run was done overnight, and with a couple of configuration tweaks, I'll bring up X and KDE this late afternoon. It should be a breeze, and very quick to accomplish, but I don't want to get into that this morning, and then have it become a sinkhole. So I simply suspended the VM and I'll pick up where I left off.
Sometime today, a lost soul from the SVLUG mailing list is going to swing by at the office, and I'm going to help out getting their CD burner working, or find some other way to get their data off of their system. For a class, they need to upgrade to RH 7.2, and the burner isn't working for some reason. I said, swing by, I'll see if I can help. So we'll see.
I'd best hit the road. Y'all have an interesting day. I'm sure to.
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February 14, 2002 - Updates at 0700 and
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Howdy. I'm on the downslope of this week, and it still remains to be revealed whether this is a bunny slope or a double black diamond (or something in between). I'm starting to lean towards the middle thing, since it just became clear that the sewer main is backed up again, which means the owner didn't do as he promised and take care of it. I thought perhaps he had, since it's been about 2-1/2 months since last time - a long run. Sigh. Phone calls to make, work to be missed.
Yesterday evening I finished up the primary GUI installation of Gentoo Linux, along with some help from irc.openprojects.net#gentoo. I got X up and running, then installed the VMware tools, including the vmware server for X. Once that was done and I hand tuned /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 a bit to put my screen resolutions in their preferred order, I started up KDE. Waahooo!!! I did learn that under Gentoo's configuration, a user cannot login via ssh without a valid login shell specified in /etc/passwd (that can be specified by adding -s to the adduser command option string). Console logins still work, with the default shell, which made the whole problem just a bit confusing, "Of course I have a shell, I've logged in, haven't I???"
This upcoming weekend I'll reinstall SuSE 7.3, and make a concerted effort to finish out that YaST2 writeup. It would have been last weekend, except for the Garcia remodel. Now I'd best get to work, since I need to leave there early this afternoon to be here for the plumber. See ya!
1831 - Good evening. Just dropping by to point you at my e-Valentine to my love - Here it is! Yeah, that's in the hated GIF format, but WTH happened to MNG anyway? I'll look into that tomorrow, but I wanted this done today, for obvious reasons. Still it isn't as geeky as what Commander Taco (aka Rob Malda) did today on Slashdot. Heh. G'night, folks, have a lovely Valentine evening.
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February 15, 2002 - Updates at 0716
Good morning. Oh, and before I forget...
Yes, that's right, one day after St. Valentine's Day, it is my lovely Marcia's birthday. Do be sure to send her a message, especially one that asks about the mysterious glowing house...
Now, she's got the day off and is doing fabric shopping, I'm working a full day as the only member of the management team in the office today, and my entire morning's been eaten by the email. So I'll wrap this up short and see you around shortly. Take care!
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February 16, 2002 - Updates at 0845 and
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Good morning. For Marcia's birthday yesterday, I took here to Casa Lupe. That't our favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican food joint. Most excellent food: Steak burritos for me, chicken enchiladas for me, both with all the peripherals accessories ... no ... fixin's. Yeah, that's the ticket! Then we popped back home for a snuggly evening on the couch watching Pearl Harbor. That was a Christmas present that we'd never gotten around to, and SWMBO has been champing at the bit to see it. Voila! Oh, and thanks to those of you who clicked on the birthday wishes link above - Marcia had fun getting all those birthday messages through the day.
I got SuSE 7.3 installed again last night as well, and will attack the YaST2 writeup after my list of chores is knocked down some. Speaking of which, I'd better get to that. I'll be back later today. Meantime, you'll probably catch a glimpse or two on the Webcam.
1540 - Howdy. It's a little over 6 hours later, and I'm just now settling to some sit-down work, after enough of the chores have been accomplished that I can feel good about it. As a bonus, here are a few selected snaps from the early spring garden. Yes. Mid-February is early spring here. I've got to start prepping the ground for tomatoes soon (like tomorrow and/or Monday). So, on to the snaps. Right and left here, we have some flowering cacti, gifts from Angela next door. At left is String of Pearls cactus, with odd little purple shepard's crooks protruding from the white flower. Then at right, the Stone cactus is flowering. Yes, it looks like a flower among rocks - the greenish rocks are in fact the cactus. And the white center of that flower has the sticky look of something tropical that should really smell like rotting meat (but it has no discernable scent for me).
Respecting our current mode of frugal living, instead of buying Marcia something sparkling this Valentine/birthday combo, I got her a couple of plants. One flower for the Valentine, and a nice combo Rosemary/flower for her birthday. The latter is shown at left.
To the right, you can see the starter quilt that Marcia was working on while she waited for her quilting class to start. Then she went to her first class, and came home with a project that strongly resembled the sewing equivalent of fingerpainting. Not bad, just ... simple. I asked her if she was going to take in her side project in to the second class, along with the work she'd done on the class assignment. Yep. Like taking in the Mona Lisa to show off next to some crayon drawings. Isn't that just GREAT!?!?!? My sole contribution to this project was saying Ooooh and Ahhhh at the appropriate times, hanging the quilt on the wall, and taking the pictures. More on Marcia's site soon, I'm sure.
Today's list included changing the bedding, dishes in order to scrub stains from the kitchen sink (which was in need, though not dire, yet), and some yard work. Mostly the yard work involved getting some new plants into their pots, replacing winter spiders (which had died back badly during our frosts of the last month or so) and putting in herbs and some vegetables. At left are Thyme and Sweet Basil. I also replanted the Parsley, and put in a couple of pots worth of Cilantro. Then I pulled the spiders, and got the two big pots ready for zucchini. Unfortunately, I didn't read the tags properly, and picked up the wrong plants (another squash, of a type I'm not particularly fond). So Marcia hared off back to OSH and got Zucchini for me. Those are at right.
Now it's time for me to tear into YaST2 again, as Marcia and Sally settle in for their afternoon nap. See you later.
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February 17, 2002 - Updates at 0845 and
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Good morning. If you click here to last night's post, then you'll get to see pictures of some garden stuff, as well as Marcia's new quilt (the first one she made), in its place of honor. She's got more pictures on her site, and soon will have a permanent quilting page so that I can link to a non-rotating content page.
Let me take advantage of your attention to unload the mailbag of a couple (few??) items of potential interest. A while back, I ran into a problem where a Linux install running JFS blew up in my face following an inadvertent power event. Moshe Bar gave me the skinny, and I forgot to pass it on to you...
From: Moshe Bar
Subject: JFS and VMware
Date: 11 Jan 2002 09:19:32 +0100Hi Brian
I read about your problems with JFS and Vmware.
The most likely place for error is when we update the "sync point" in the journal. The sync point marks the most recent transaction that still has outstanding I/O.
If we move the sync point past transactions that we believe have been completely written to disk, but are still in the disk's cache, fsck will not eplay those transactions when the system is rebooted. Of course, I have no real data to back up how likely problems are to occur. This is just off the top of my head.
In short, JFS cannot guarantee the filesystem integrity when a disk's write cache is on, which is the equivalen of Vmware's write speed enhancments.
Hope that clarifies the issue.
Moshe
Next up,in a lighter vein, a lesson in Advertising vs. Marketing vs. ...
You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, "I'm fantastic in bed". That's Direct Marketing. You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says, "He's fantastic in bed". That's Advertising. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day you call and say, "Hi, I'm fantastic in bed". That's Telemarketing. You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink. You open the door for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her a ride, and then say, "By the way, I'm fantastic in bed". That's Public Relations. You're at a party and see a gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says, "I hear you're fantastic in bed". That's Brand Recognition.
Here's a link to one from the vaults: The Life and Times of the Multics OS. Now, for this crowd, I don't doubt that most people know that there is more to operating systems than Windows, MacOS, Linux, and the faintly remembered OS/2. This is a fun article on the "the most influential operating system ever built". Contrast that with the latest in technology gone awry: The LEGO DAT Tape Loader. If I had a DAT drive, I'd have to buy a Mindstorms set just to build this. Thanks to Dave Close on the UUASC mailing list for that gem.
At the beginning of last week, I ran across a link to a Hal Plotkin article on the SFGate website, entitled All Hail Creative Commons, Stanford professor and author Lawrence Lessig plans a legal insurrection. Larry Lessig is using that thoughtful brain of his again, to act instead of just talk and/or write about it. Here's an excerpt from the article:
In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new forms of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the unprotected public domain.
Yeah, it sounds interesting to me, too. I have NO idea how long that link will work, so you may want to hit it today. Finally, for now, follow this link to an archived message with the subject IP: Precautions Against SNMP Vulnerability. You've heard of this? Good. The message does a good job of summarizing the fast, effective things you can do to tighten the hatches on your network today. Speaking of which, I want to run another stealth scan against certain bits of my network. I'd best get to it...
And then, after my shower and the Costco run, I'll put the finishing touches on the YaST2 writeup. I got through several more modules last night. All that remains are 6 fairly easy-looking ones from the Miscellaneous section, and then I'll reconfigure the report into a palatable multi-page format. Look for it sometime this afternoon. Also the dog needs a bath, I have soil amendments to turn into the strip next to the wall in preparation for beans, tomatoes and other veg, and potentially other chores. A full life is a good thing, but tiring sometimes. TTFN
Howdy. How's your Sunday afternoon going? Good, good. Ours is fine, thanks. First off, let me direct your browser over to Marcia's brand new Quilting page (if you're interested in such things). I think it's cool.
Next up, here's the completed YaST2 review from my assorted SuSE Linux 7.3 installations. I've broken it into an introduction and seven sections to match the layout of YaST2. Hope you like it - only about 7 weeks in the making. Sorry about that, actually. Things keep coming up, and mostly this work doesn't pay. I did find one VERY cool thing about the SuSE 7.3 distribution - I'll replicate my note from the System section:
WAY Cool feature!!!
One of the things I am resigned to is occasionally mis-typing a directory name in a long string, and having to edit the path on the command line, or simply retype it (if it's short enough). This is because if you don't specify a correct file or path, Bash (the command interpreter) doesn't know where in the directory tree you mean. That's the cause of sequences like this:Virtually by accident, I mistyped something while looking for the rc_config file, and when I hit enter on
cd /etx, I didn't even notice that the cd command worked, even though I hadn't typed the correct path. A double take or two later, I noticed, and ran the following test:Wow. I mean, WOW!!! Now typing the right thing is good. But this is stellar! I don't know what the algorithm is, and I haven't found any documentation to support this feature. Dave Farquhar wrote about the joys of tab completion of paths recently, and that's a great tool. But this is great. Doesn't work on everything. You have to be pretty close. For instance,
cd /hom/bilbyfails, whilecd /hom/bilbryworks. Some distance algorithm at work, no doubt. Woo Hoo!
Now here's an entry from the total lack of humor department:
From: Tom Moorman <[email protected]>
Subject: burlap
Date: 17 Feb 2002 01:23:43 -0500
Yea, it would be interesting to see you chained up in a burlap sack,
sinking in Lake Superior.
Now that was brought on by my ill-humor about cats as I noticed that Moshe had finally opened the OpenMosix site, last Tuesday. But on second and third thought, I'm not particularly sorry that I offended. This is, after all, my place. I would expect that a rational person would just not come back to this site, for fear of being offended again. Any bets, anyone?
This makes me want to rub salt in the wound, so I hereby announce the First Annual Orb Designs Skin-A-Cat Competition. You all know the old adage, there's more than one way to skin a cat, neh? Sometime in the last year, I read about way number 39, which is to use a belt sander (I'll be happy to give credit for that one, if someone can direct me to the originator). So, for the next week, I'll accept submissions on the theme, then I'll post them all for your judging. The number one winner, by your votes, wins absolutely nothing except the respect and admiration of secret cat-haters the world over. Let the games begin!
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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.