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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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March 11, 2001 - Updates at 0730
Good morning. Although these were done pretty much before I built the sewing table for her, the ever-crafty Marcia made quilted runners for the dresser and highboy in our bedroom, matching the quilt over the headboard as well as the rest of the scheme in the room. They also set off some really cool candles we received as gifts at Christmas from neighbors William and Angela. We'd held off on putting the candles out since we didn't want them on bare wood. This room looks really nice.
Also, Marcia really likes the new sewing table. This is good for a couple of reasons. First, she's got several projects in the works,and she'll be able to lay them out much more easily on the new large surface. Second, it gives us the ability to store lots of here project stuff underneath, which really helps in keeping the place neat, while allowing easy access to the materials. 
Yesterday, I added an aluminum edging to the front and right corners, to protect the fabrics and Marcia from nicks, snags and runs. As added protection from splinters from the supporting frame, we covered the front 2x4 with fabric front and under, using the staple gun. Then we bought a nice padded stool with a back for her to work from. Then we found that to work the sewing machine, her foot really needs to be on the pedal. So I build a pedal-stal, just the height of the foot rail on the stool. Now all is good, we think.
No, I didn't get much done on the Emacs tutorial this weekend, other than Friday. I did spend time laying in some bones for the remaining panels, and reordering them this way and that for decent readability and material flow. I'll be making significant progress on this during the upcoming week, as I'll put it out for review this weekend, and then fix it up in the following week - it's due by month's end.
I'd best organize myself for work, so I'll see you back here soon. Hope you had a nice, productive weekend too - see you soon.
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March 12, 2002 - Updates at
Howdy...
Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spaaam! Wonderful Spaaam! Lovely Spaaam! Wonderful Spam.
And so on (props to the fine fellas from Monty Python). I was in receipt this morning of an email from a recruiter for engineering positions in New York. Now that in and of itself is not a bad thing, although I'm not too sure about relocating to upstate NY. My issue with this email was forged headers, explicitly the from field, to get past my spam filters. That, and it was the first email I saw this morning - top of my email box (which may mean they munged the date too, I forgot about that). I've already sent back my reply to Gregory Peda at The Josef Group, politely chastising him about email header forgery, and threatening complaints to the state AG's office if I *ever* see another email from him or his company. Unfortunately, I've already deleted his original email - I should have archived it for the purpose, and perhaps even posted it in it's entirety, including his cell number... Hmmm.
There's a story on /. about new tariffs for recordable media to be imposed in Canada in 2003. I feel a rant brewing, but I want to do some research, rather than just spout off and look like a lunatic. I want to be a lunatic with authority! Heh. Nothing but stuff to get me riled up this morning, sheesh. I'd better go fume for a bit, then get ready for work. See y'all later.
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March 13, 2002 - Updates at 0700
That rant? It's still with me, but I haven't the gumption to write it yet - I'm suffering from the dreaded ick. That's my version of the flu. This is a mild one, as I mostly have my appetite, but all the other symptoms are present. As a result, my concentration is equivalent to that of a small household appliance on vacation in Lodi. That's right, Lodi. Scary, isn't it.
Random rant-ish thoughts from others though, include this piece by Doc Searls in LJ about how the Library of Congress and the Copyright office are planning to price webcasting out of reach of everyone except ... oh, Clear Channel and one or two others. Go read that article.
On the Canadian front, the proposed fees for recordable media include a stunning CN$21 for each gig of storage on portable MP3 players. What if I play MP3s on my laptop? Additionally, they're putting the tariff not just on CDR Audio, but on all recordable optical media. That means that to back up my systems (should I live in Canada) with CDR, I get to pay their equivalent of the RIAA and MPAA CN$0.59 per disc. Amazing. And they're going to remain purposely blind to it (from the PDF Statement of Proposed Levies Item 4 on page 6, my emphasis):
The levy is payable on all media that qualify, without regard to end use. No purpose is served by asking that the tariff include a mechanism that would allow those who can prove that they use qualifying media for purposes other than reproducing musical works to be exempted from payment or to receive a refund.
I guess moving to Canada to get away from the grasping claws of Old Media isn't going to work, either. Looks like Sweden or Bora Bora for us... I can't really comment officially to that "governing" body, but if you're Canadian, you sure should, right?
That faint whistling noise you hear is the last of the air escaping the balloon - I warned you I didn't have the energy for this, and then I got going anyway, at least a little. Now I've run down. Sorry, folks. Instead, I'll just close by letting you know that Greg's got a new post up, and with this letter from Svenson about Skin-A-Cat:
From: Jan Swijsen
Subject: Skin-a-cat (or two)
Date: 11 Mar 2002 13:23:54 +0100<quote>
.... I'd have to go with Don's idea on points - Air compressors are a heck of a lot more common than 25K RPM large capacity centrifuges, thus there's a usability issue here. ....
</quote>I think there are some technical problems with the centrifugal method. The principle is sound but in practice things go wrong. You see hair is the lightest (component specific weight) of the cat so that is ok. Second lightest is the lungs, next comes brains etc. last are teeth.. The skin itself is relatively heavy.
So after spinning the centrifuge for a couple of hours you still find parts of the cat between the two components of the fur. So you don't achieve a skinned cat, just a cat with relative repositioned organs
Also, I wouldn't trust Moshe with a centrifuge.
<quote>
...you will typically find the body squashed against the side walls of the centrifuge, followed milliseconds later by the skin ...
</quote>The "milliseconds later" gives him away. You could expect that if the cat was released in the center of the centrifuge while it was spinning. That is not the regular way to operate a centrifuge. (So if you ever meet him and he proposes to show you his centrifuges I urge you to be cautionous.)
His calculations would be valid I guess (probably with some minor adaptations) for a cat that gets accelerated, either linear or in a cyclotron. I guess we could contact CERN for an experiment.
A cyclotron would be a good tool to skin a cat actually.
Cyclotrons accelerate charged particles. So you pick up the (neighbor's) cat, vigorously pet it by stroking, making sure you use rubber, insulating gloves. This will charge the fur of the cat. Now you place the cat in the accelerator. The fur will accelerate faster then the less charged remainder of our volunteer test cat. Et-voil? we have skinned the cat.
A possible by product could be a hole range of new elementary particles.
--
Svenson.
See you next time. Be well.
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March 14, 2002 - Updates at 06:45
Good morning. Konqueror rocks. Let's get that out of the way now. It's a solid, attractive browser that shares enough UI in common with the browsers of more pedestrian nature and name, like Explorer and Communicator. That's all so California touchy-feely, isn't it. But now you can use Konqueror, a browser for manly-men, with a manly-man name like Konqueror. Galeon is fast, yeah. But it's named for a dinky ship that takes you places in the Mediterranean. Is that where you want to go today? Do you want to use a browser that's not quite named after a guy in a rubber suit stomping around Tokoyo? Mozilla? Fuggeddaboutit! Konqueror lets you go out and make the web yours! Mmmm.
Too much coffee, this morning? Nah, but I'm having fun, while chatting up the real reason that I keep coming back to KDE for my Linux desktop. It's the browser called Konqueror. Well, Konqueror is also a file manager of at least two faces, and a file viewer to boot. But today, let's look at browsing. One of the Daynotes gang recently published some pertinent bits from his webstats (you can see mine anytime). Now I noted that the assorted known Unix variants made up over 5% of his stated OS visitors this time. Of that, about 85% were Linux. Allegedly, Windows hosts made up 87% of his visitors. Now this makes sense - there are one heck of a lot of Windows boxes out there. But are all of those Windows hosts really running Windows?
Thanks for letting me divert you for a minute. Now back to Konqueror. <sarcasm>One of the true joys of web browsing in this golden age of the Internet is the people who so carefully protect me from a harmful user experience by not allowing me to see their website unless I run an approved browser on an approved operating system.</sarcasm> What happens is I hit their site, and the webserver logs a variety of information about the visit. This commonly includes information about the browser and OS. Ooooh. Thanks. So what a site sees is something like the following log excerpt:
123.111.222.123 - - [13/Mar/2002:20:44:18 -0800] "GET /bpages/dnmStyle.css HTTP/1.1" 200 360 "http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/start.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/2.2.2; Linux)"
That can lead to a reasonably common occurance: "We have detected an unsupported browser". This is shown, for example, in the webshot pictured at left. Also in that screenshot, you can see what I can do in Konqueror to fix that little problem up, toot-sweet! Use a pull-down menu to select a new face to present to the web, for this site, this time. Very cool, problem solved (as shown at right). Once that's done, the reporting string to the webserver looks like whatever I've chosen (slightly different for the example below, but representative), something that resembles Linux not at all, from the web's perspective.
123.111.222.123 - - [13/Mar/2002:20:45:34 -0800] "GET /bpages/start.html HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.5; Windows NT 5.0)"
Of course, in the case of Zinio, I can't actually use their software at all because it's Mac/Win only, but at least I can see what they're offering, and decide whether it's worth running windows for (I don't see it). Now, configuring the User Agent in the Settings dialog is a way to more permanently setup your reported identifying characteristics. As shown at right, I can configure what face I present in general, or to specific websites. For example, some financial sites don't let you connect unless you appear to be using IE. It doesn't matter that Konqueror has solid SSL support, nor that it is more standards compliant than IE, nor that it just plain works fine, thank you very much. So I tell the site I'm running IE and voila. Me and Flint, are, like, in!
Now a fair number of people don't even bother with all this folderol. It's just easier to pretend that you're always running IE, and not have to deal with the occasional random browser-mugging. I wonder, of that 87% Windows hosts, how many are really Linux running behind an fake string?
Also, I'd be interested in how those numbers reported for Linux are shaping up over time for Bob and Jerry. 5% ain't nuthin' to sneeze at, although I'd be the first to admit, their communities, like this one, are a fairly technical bunch, and thus far more likely to be running the OS that's not called upstart nearly as often as it was a year ago. Harumph! Hey, Bob? Can we put together some historical data on trends for admitted (out of the closet) Linux users hitting your site and Jerry's? I vaguely remember a year or 18 months ago that Linux was just more than the noise on Bob's site, returning less than 1%. If so, then there's been a stunning uptake of late, neh?
Thanks go out to Dan Bowman, for pointing out that I spelled Wednesday badly yesterday, and to Dwight Wallbridge for the following feedback on the Canadian recordable media tariff tiff:
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 16:13:58 -0600 From: Geek Subject: Canadian piracy levy X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4807.1700 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I am not surprised by this, and I might add that there is already a levy of something like 21 cents per CD. This only extends that levy, and increases the revenue for 'the copyright holder'. This is why I rarely buy CD R's or any sort of burnable media. Also, this does not legalize ownership of MP3's, as the police still can, have and do arrest people who they feel pirate music, or rip their CD's for distribution, inlcuding a local person who was arrested after the PC repair shop went looking around while they had his PC in the shop. It also likely didn't help that he had a couple of cracked programs(he didn't get charged for those), but he got charged once for each song he had an MP3 of, and simply pled guilty and paid a hefty fine. The Canadian government has long been one of the most unfair and business friendly, but thankfully we have no Fritz Hollings that is willing to introduce an SSSCA like legislation here, though we will still be affected if the SSCA gets passed, simply because 90% of our hardware and software comes from the US or passes through there first. Dwight Wallbridge, Webmaster, Geek, Blogger.
I'll leave you with that, so have a lovely day. See ya!
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March 15, 2002 - Updates at 0800
Good morning. I've been fighting with a couple of things over the last couple of days, aside from the mild flu bug from Hell. I certainly haven't had the powers of concentration necessary to do the Emacs tutorial, so you'd certainly think that I wasn't going to have much luck with anything else, right? Well, I'd say I've been about 66% successful.
I'd been working to get Festival (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/) running. I monitor a couple of IRC channels these days, and Festival is a text-to-speech program that I can pipe IRC channel chat into using a Perl script, so that I can keep an ear on goings on, without having to take my eyes off my other work. Very handy. The tricky bit is that there isn't a Gentoo ebuild definition for Festival, and it's really a rather tricky setup and install. It turns out to be non-trivial to get Festival working via the ebuild format - finally I gave up on that angle, and simply build the package and installed it. Then when I run the fest.pl script, it segfaults the XChat IRC client. So overall, mostly failure...
OTOH, after just a couple of false starts, I've got OpenMosix (http://www.openmosix.org/) running properly on my two node Mosix cluster, trading Seti@Home data and processes back and forth like there was no tomorrow. First I decided to install the kernel from the OpenMosix CVS tree, since I can't seem to find the advertised 2.4.17pre1 patch. Then I pulled down, built and installed the new GPL'd OpenMosix Userland tools from the Sourceforge repository, and built those. Poof. Mosix up and running. I fired up mosmon, the monitoring tool, and I could see processes running on the local node, and on Gryphon the portable OpenMosix node. However, I couldn't get processes to migrate. Mmmm.
So I went over to Gryphon (well, I turned the chair, OK?), and figured since I was running a pre-release of Moshe's first mods to 1.5.2 there, I'd best upgrade to the latest there, too. Then it turned out that the DFSA option has to be set the same on all the kernels in all the nodes. The issue there was that from the workstation side, I was getting network unavailable messages. I had to swap back to the virtual console on Gryphon incidentally before I found that DFSA message. Then it was a matter of minutes before I rebuilt, reinstalled, and booted with a revised kernel having the correct options. Poof. Done. Waaaaahooooo.
The test for me comes today as I update more of the packages that were made vulnerable by the zlib thing. But anyway, that's my 66% success story of the last few days. Now, working at home today on the Emacs tutorial, I'd best get to it. See you around, maybe later today.
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March 16, 2002 - Updates at 0800
A slow start to the day. Good morning. After supper out and dessert here last night with Pat and Nathan and Myrna and Roger, I got out into the yard and bagged the freshly planted garden against the impending freeze, which appears not to have happened after all. That's about all I have right now. I worked on the Emacs tutorial most of the day yesterday, and I'm about 2/3 of the way through. I'd like to finish the first pass by tonight. I'd better get cracking... TTFN
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March 17, 2002 - Updates at 0900
Good morning, at least by most definitions of good. I made a lot of progress on the Emacs tutorial yesterday, and I'll probably be ready to send it to Troy and Greg for review by late tonight, if all goes well. I spent some time producing small illustrations that depict character motion nicely - I did so solely because I find such things useful when I'm learning a new character map.
Also I had a bear of a time trying to locate any information whatsoever on what the Autosave interval is for Emacs, or where such a thing might be set. I found nothing online in about a half hour of searching. Lots of references tell me how to disable it (why?) or how to set the output name in ~/.emacs. But that isn't what I was looking for. Wait, let me try one more obvious spot... Wooo-hooo. Got it. Thanks for your help. It's often the case for me that in describing a problem to someone else (or many someone elses, in this instance) I manage to find the blind spot that was preventing me from seeing the answer. In this case it was found in /usr/share/emacs/21.1/etc/DOC-21.1.1, which told me what the variable names were, and then a quick web search reminded me how to view the variable value. Excellent!
That's really about it - I didn't do anything very exciting yesterday beyond sitting right here and bashing away on the keyboard, trying things and consise ways of describing them. Oh, OK, here's a couple of recent snaps of life from around this crazy joint. Sally really likes the deep cave formed by the new big sewing table and Marcia's fabric storage boxes. Then, to the right, you can see yet another quilt in progress. Marcia is really finding the quilting to be an interesting and fun pastime - and these are going to make great Christmas gifts for some little people we know...
With that, I'd best be getting ready for the Costco run. There isn't much on the list today, but early is still better than late. Y'all have a lovely day.
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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.