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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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April 08, 2001 - Updates at 0730
Good morning... Yes, thanks, I am feeling better, I think. While I feel cold-ier, the flu symptoms appear to have receded. I believe that's a trade in my favor. However, I got jack-all-diddly done yesterday. Heck, I even forgot to check my email at all, until late yesterday evening. That's totally unlike me. I did make it outside during the 12 minutes of sunshine, long enough to snap this week's garden pictures. At left you can see the beans are approaching the string trellis I setup last week. And four of the eight tomato plants already have flowers blooming on them. We'll have first fruit in June, as a result.
Marcia has taken today and tomorrow as vacation days. We didn't plan on me being sick, utterly useless and unwilling to do anything interesting, however. We've a little shopping to do today, and I want to try and catch another nap today, to feel better soon. Marcia thinks that this illness is a way that the stress of the last several months is choosing to leave my body... I say: So, go already.
We'll see how this goes today, I definitely do feel better, which makes it likely that I'll accomplish something (anything, please) of note, other than just taking up air and space. Thanks for your patience, and your kind emails.
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April 09, 2002 - Updates at 0900
Good morning, folks. Yah, thanks, I think I am continuing to improve. It's sneezy, head-in-a-fishbowl, rough lungs day today, but I slept through the night, and seem to have a fair bit more energy and alertness. Yesterday I used a Borders gift card to pick up a copy of PHP4 Developer's Guide. I've dabbled in PHP before, but really should start making an effort, since the stuff is so bloody useful.
Handily, in Gentoo Linux, I merely had to type emerge dev-lang/php, and the system installed, from sources, Apache, mod_ssl, and PHP4, all integrated and ready to run. I'll be working away at that some today, as well as errands and other fun stuff. I've decided that in the interests of my sanity, I'm taking the rest of this week to continue to depressurize from the last gig. I'll pick up Job Hunting as my primary occupation next Monday, as my weekday 8 to 5 routine.
Now to get ready for the much-delayed Costco run. See you around.
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April 10, 2002 - Updates at 0820
Good morning, I suppose. As I write these first words, it's a shade before 0400 PDT. I've been awake since 0230, and finally gave up tossing and turning. I'm not sure why my body's decided that slightly less than 4 hours of sleep is enough. While I am not back in top health yet, I am surely on the mend, and I'd expect to be sleeping better, not worse...
John Dominik wrote to me the other day expressing his best wishes for both my health and the job hunt that begins in full swing next week. A number of other people have extended tentative feelers about my state of mind, etc. To clear the air, being out of a job right now is much easier than what I've been doing. Additionally, I'm not particularly worried about finding a new gig - I have a lot of skills, and we have the resources for me to be a little picky. Yeah, it's weird, and I sure do appreciate all the wonderful people who are a part of the community here. I've got plans, see...
Along with my job hunting, Greg Lincoln and I are working on a new venture with a variety of services and such. You can expect to see a lot more about that in the coming weeks - we'll be going live very, very soon (but not this week). I've got content to generate for that, and it will be a continuing operation.
Additionally, I'm going to seriously dive into sprucing up my coding skills. I really do have the knack for holding a good mental map for software design, I'm just a bit rusty, and best practices have evolved since I was really active, so I've got some learning to do. That is a good thing.
Now it's four hours later, and I've managed perhaps another half hour's sleep in that time. I'll be napping today, I think. Hmmm. There's rumblings in the world of authoring about Amazon's practice of selling used books cheek by jowl with the new stuff. IMHO, this is going to end up accelerating the trend away from the middleman/distribution chain of legacy publishing. Right now, except for top authors, the pay for book writing ... um ... sucks. So who's going to do it? Do you want competence in your books (or entertainment, or information or whatever)? Or do you want it written quickly. You see, to make a minimal living at today's advance rates, I'd have to write 5 or 6 books a year. That assumes that there's not much royalty stream, since most computer and software books obsolete on the same cycle as the actual stuff. But that doesn't leave much room for doing a good, thorough job, does it. I could write in those quantities, but I actually have to DO stuff to write about, and that takes 1 to 3 times the amount of time. It isn't there.
I like books. I like books a lot. But the economics are changing, and we who are customers, as well as authors and publishers and whatnot, need to have a bit of a think about where we want this industry to go. The world is changing under our feet. Old ways are dying, and the buggy whip manufacturer's are thrashing around, killing new technologies in their throes. This applies to books as well as music and movies.
Now I'm going to have another cup of coffee and get a little jittery, if you don't mind (heh, just kidding). See you in a bit.
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April 11, 2002 - Updates at 0825
Good morning. I definitely think I'm through the worst of this nasty virus. I appear to be able to breathe fairly well, though there's still a little pressure behind my ears. I'll take another couple of easy days, and should be well out of it. And, joy of joys, I slept through the night. That's much appreciated.
I spent a fair amount of time yesterday developing material for the new project that Greg and I are working on, so... I can't tell you about it yet. That makes this a bit ... boring, doesn't it? OK, here's a juicy bit... I'm building Koffice from CVS right now. The diagramming tool called Kivio isn't compileing right now(thanks to Greg for deciding to remove kivio from the action to see if the build completes), so we remove that from the tree. Here's the commands I'm using ($ is the Bash command prompt, you can leave the comments out):
$ cd ; mkdir src ; cd src # makes a src subdir in your home
$ export CVSROOT=:pserver:[email protected]:/home/kde
$ cvs login
$ cvs co koffice # the first time, cvs up koffice thereafter
$ cd koffice
$ rm -rf kivio # get rid of the non-compiling part of the tree
$ make -f Makefile.cvs # run the automake/autoconf steps
$ ./configure # plus any options you may desire
$ make
$ su
$ make install
That should do it. I'll now in a while whether or not the programs run. Greg assures me that the compile completes, so I'll assume for the moment that the applications run as well. More on that in a while (yes, really, later today, I promise). For now, I'd best shower and start my day properly. See you later.
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April 12, 2002 - Updates at 0930
Good morning. Greg laughed at me. LAUGHED. AT. ME. He said to me, "You always promise to come back later. That's only true, like, 0.024% of the time." I replied that wasn't true, and besides, the compile will be done in under an hour, and it'll be easy to pop up another post. Well, Greg is still laughing, since I did forget to post my success or failure with KOffice yesterday, but it was all his fault. I spent most of the day and evening doing graphics development for the new site we're about to launch, and plumb forgot as a result. I just told Greg of his responsibility in the matter, and he's changed his IRC nick...
--- greg is now known as evilgreg
So, the upshot is that the compile of KOffice, sans Kivio, completed nicely. All of the apps appear properly in the KDE3 menus, and all of the applications start. I've tested just a couple of things so far. Loading a Word document in KWord works just fine. There is a lot of debugging code in the program right now, related to filter operation. That slows the display of large, complex documents considerably. By large and complex, I mean that I opened the appendix from Tom and Brian's Linux book that has a single table over 70 pages long. Now that's a nightmare for an application that used to not do tables well at all. It was taking several minutes to render out the table, but given the output in the console, that's clearly a function of the debugging code. Good work there.
I also did some brief testing in KSpread. Loading a medium-ish Excel spreadsheet (several hundred rows, about 20 columns, nothing very complex) killed the application. I don't yet know why, and when I figure it out and make it repeatable, I'll file a bug for them. Working in the native format is simple and intuitive. Much of the interface is similar enough to other spreadsheet tools that any user can pick it up and start working away.
I'll spend some time reviewing the rest of the apps today, and comment on them soon. But right now, the CVS version of KOffice is a bit too ragged to be using for real work. Keep your eyes open though, that development team is making great strides, and I expect KOffice to compete head to head with OpenOffice.
I think that Marcia's UPS is going down the tubes, so I need to wander over to the APC website and see what sort of recycling/trade-in policy they have in place. Disposing of these in landfills is not only not legal here, it's just plain bad for the environment, even though I'm sure people get away with it all the time.
Also, I've revised my resume to reflect the current situation, and edited the text for readability, etc. I'd be pleased to hear any comments you might have, positive or negative. Thanks!
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April 13, 2002 - Updates at 0920
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Good morning. I was a busy beaver yesterday. My office space here was beginning to grate on my nerves, and everything was a bit jammed together, I was using wooden folding TV tables in several locations for a variety of purposes, and setting up the card table to work on the balsa model airplane was a straw that was creating hairline fractures all up and down that camel's spine - time for a reorganization. I took down the laptop folding table, the model table, and took out the chairs, then took the before shots that you see above - It's only a ten-by-ten room (no, NOT meters @$%#@$).
Sally, bright little dog that she is and with hard work to be done, decided it was time to be let out and get in some serious sunning time. So I put her out from underfoot, and emptied the bookshelves, accumulated boxes from the tops of cabinets, and then the contents of first one cabinet, then the other. Then I started dusting, modifying, vacuuming and moving stuff about. 
When the flurry of activity was done, I'd moved the two tall cabinets to flank the desk. I put the workstation tower, UPS and printer in the right-hand cabinet, and neatened up all the cordage. Since the tower is deeper than the cabinet (and so is the UPS), there are cutouts in the back, through which the equipment protrudes. It doesn't cut the fan noise very much, but it's much nicer looking. The left hand cabinet got the pantry overflow, assorted cooking stuffs, stationery supplies, etc. Then I sorted through the accumulated boxes of hardware that isn't currently part of a running computer, and put the keeper stuff back on top.
Finally, the shelves and remaining books came back in. I dumped stacks of magazines that I will NEVER catch up with reading. My next steps involved more dusting, and knick-knack placement, and finding a new home for Gryphon the Acer Travelmate: on the bookcase in front of the window, no more unstable TV table in front of the closet doors.
I put the art back up on the walls, and I'm really quite happy with the modified space. It *seems* a lot more open, since all the massive pieces are on one wall, instead of looming from both sides. Then I put the modelling table back in, to see how I could fit it in. It's excellent! I can move about, turn my chair, etc., all without crashing into something as I was before. With this done, all I needed was massive quantities of painkiller, a long hot shower, and several weeks to recuperate...
Thanks to Clark Myers and Don Armstrong for the feedback on my resume. I am reminded of Bob Thompson's advice last year to be brutally honest and a little funny in the objective. I might approach that one again this weekend. And yeah, the resume is generic and boring. I'm not sure how to do that. On paper, I'm underqualified. I have a broad range of experience, but not necessarily in those things that are hottest today. I can pick most things up in a trice, and hit the ground running, but that's hard to put on a resume. And I'm not willing to puff up the resume or lie. That would bite me in the ass at some later date.
Now I need to read my email, grab a bit of breakfast, and get busy on the projects that Greg and I are working on. See you around.
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April 14, 2002 - Updates at 0823
Good morning. Yesterday we struggled away with bad documentation and worse documentation and no documentation in our quest to setup an IMAP server. Then literally five minutes after we finished, I stumbled through my browsing, hit Dave Farquhar's site and found the link to Nick Petreley's IMAP five-part series (that's the fifth part, and links the previous four). AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH.Life is like this some days. So we certainly have nothing better to offer up on the topic at this time. So, welcome to grab bag Sunday, where I clear out interesting bits of my mailbox for your eddification and my archives.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, David Yerka wrote to me about replacing my piddlely little X10 Firecracker setup with something more robust like the IBM Home controller, available from SmartHome, land of X10 popup and popunder ads. Actually, it appears to have been called the Home Director, and it's been discontinued, but there's lots of replacements. Larry Wall (of Perl fame) spoke briefly about the large amount of X10 automation he's got going in his house. What he wants is something cheap, fast and reliable. X10 satisfies only the first, and wins for the time being on that count, for him.
Back around Valentine's Day, I lamented the lack of support for anything but GIF animations in most browsers. I wondered out loud what happened to the MNG standard, since I was to lazy at the time to even google the question on my own, apparently. The top link there today leads to the very page that Dan Seto sent to me back then. It appears that Konqueror, Mozilla and Netscape 6.x all support MNG. Looks like it's time for some experimentation...
One of the many mailing lists I hang out on is UUASC, a Southern California based association of *NIX users. One of the members thereon, Phil Dibowitz, has written a tool called IPTState, a "top" for IP Tables. It corresponds to the StateTop tool for IP Filter in Solaris. If this interests you, check it out.
Here's a link I've been meaning to put up for a long, long time. Valley Of The Geeks, a humor site put up by Zack Urlocker. It's sort of a cross between User Friendly and The Onion. Loads of fun. However, when I first came across the place, it had been linked by Doc Searls, and the site overran their bandwidth limits. So I simply put the link aside for a rainy day, where it lay fallow and gathered dust, until I came back across it today. Now it's yours, too.
Something I want to look into one day is the ability to do unattended Debian installs similar to those RedHat setups enabled by KickStart. One possibility is apparently a tool called FAI for Debian GNU/Linux.
Finally for now, I'll send you back to the EFF, to this page where they're putting out the call to keep the pressure on our legislators NOW, about "ALERT: Congress Calls For Public Participation on Digital Media Technology Mandates" Go. Follow the directions. And donate to the EFF while you're at it. I just recently threw another hundred dollars in the kitty there in repayment for a favor from a friend. Yes, there are many important causes in the world, and this is just one of them. But at least, go and read about what their doing, and keeping an eye on, on our behalf. Do what you can.
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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.