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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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June 17, 2001 - Updates at 0730
Good morning. Happy Monday. Lovely stuff in the news today, don't you think? Forest service personnel accidentally, yet stupidly starting forest fires ... Yasser Arafat calling the Israelis "fascist" for putting up a fence to keep suicide bombers out ... Only one bright spot - Son of Shrub authorized removal of Saddam "Nutcase" Hussein by any means necessary. And we have the Washington Post to thank for letting the bad guys know what's coming. That's good, and that's bad.
It's the line we tread, as a nominally free society in a dangerous world. I think it's great that the pest control people are being instructed to to their job and take Saddam down. And I'm glad that, given we live in a nation where freedom of the press exists, a story like this one wasn't quashed by the government for "national security" purposes. But I'm a little stunned that the Washington Post seems to think that they're required to publish news that serves only one purpose at this point in time: aiding and abetting the enemy. Why not hold the story? Oh, right, profits before prudence.
Originally, I wrote there, "profits before patriotism." But I don't want to impunge their motives, nor their desire to do what they think is right, at that paper. I just think they made the wrong decision. Yes, it's news that Dubya signed an executive order sending the CIA to finish the job his daddy should have done when he had the chance. But it is also a dangerous gig, not made any easier by having the target more on alert.
I'm just going to bypass this Forest Service cock-up. It is just too stupid. So back to the Middle East I go, this time to take Yasser Arafat to task for being a Big Fat Idiot. Here's a choice bit from the CNN version of the story:
"This is a fascist, apartheid measure being done, and we do not accept it," the Jerusalem daily Ha'aretz quoted Arafat as saying. "We will continue rejecting it by all means."
Let's see, Yasser. You claim to represent the Palestinians in their relations with the other societies and cultures of the world. Yet you clearly have neither a mandate from or the confidence of your people, as they continue to take matters into their own hands by bombing the shit out of non-combatant Israelis. You know what, you would be funny if you weren't so bleeding pathetic. So far as I can see, to protect its people, Israel has two choices. Keep Palestinians out by building a big fence or by killing all of you. I take it from your remarks that you prefer the latter. Yep, you're a Big Fat Idiot!
Yep, I love Mondays. They're the best. Really. On the assorted computing fronts, I continue to be extremely impressed by my new box, Goldfinger. With dual Athlons and 1 gig of RAM, I can put together scenarios that I couldn't have before. Using VMware, I was able to run Windows as the source of a VNC session, and also run Linux as the destination of that same VNC session, piped through a compressed, encrypted SSH connection. Woo. The results of that and other experiments are up in the second article about OpenSSH, over on LinuxMuse. Check it out.
After spending some time mucking about with Slackware and RedHat over the weekend on Gryphon, I'm putting Gentoo back on that laptop. I just want a stable travel box, and I really should go with what I know rather than experiment. I've got the GUI stuff going on now, then I'll bring up the dial-up networking bits (ltmodem, ppp), photo processing stuff (like the Gimp, ImageMagick, and netpbm).
Now to get on with this lovely day. See you around!
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June 18, 2002 - Updates at 0700
On the gripping hand, I'm just a village idiot... but first a bit of email about my Arafat comments yesterday:
Subject: fat idiot
From: Don Armstrong
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 01:02:16 +1000 (EST)Oh, I say, hardly fair, cobber. We big fat idiots resent being classed with the PLO. I mean, his stature is hardly imposing - he is in fact a little fat idiot.
Did you hear how he got his name. Many decades ago, they were recruiting for Palestinian terrorist groups. He'd had education in Britain, so when they came along asking each potential member "how do you feel about having to send your own people as human bombs to blow up children and pregnant women? Could you do it? Would you like it?" he stepped forward, threw a snappy salute, and said "Yassir, have-a-fat".
Regards, Don
Heh. Then there was this. I haven't time to respond to this one yet, but I shall:
Subject: Yasser Hussein and Saddam Arafat
From: Jan Swijsen
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 13:12:00 +0200
...But it is also a dangerous gig, not made any easier by having the target more on alert.Our dear friend Sadam knows he is a prime target. He doesn't need to read US papers for that. If I am not wrong Bill 'sigar' Clinton had signed a similar order which the press only revealed after he moved out of the white house. And I wouldn't be surprised that George Bush release-1, did about the same after he missed the opportunity during the Gulf War.
What I find strange is that the history of Sadam's rise to power and the way he and his Bath party control the country hasn't appeared in the papers. Well, maybe they don't publish it because they get sick while gathering the facts. I would.
...I go, this time to take Yasser Arafat to task for being a Big Fat Idiot. ...Our dear friend Yasser is not a Big Fat Idiot. No Idiot, however big and/of fat would have survived the power struggle and scheming that he has over the past 30 years (or more). He has got lucky several times but luck alone is not 3what has kept him coming out on top after each crisis. He is like a gambler in a casino, playing his hand well, betting high stakes and ripping off the casino, sure he loses big at times but in the end his balance sheet is positive and the casino loses out.
In a sense I admire his tenacity. He makes me think of a male spider playing his game in the web of a female. most males get eaten even before mating a lucky few get to mate before ending up as dinner and then you have the one cunning, devious spider that get to mate and gets away with it.
He uses everything and anything as weapons and the Israelis know it and yet they cannot stop him. When he says something you shouldn't take that as an opinion or a fact, he doesn't have opinions and he doesn't care about facts. Everything he says in public must be seen as a bullet aimed at his opponents. He shoots a lot, most of it wide off, but every so often a bullet hits a soft target.
Don't get me wrong, I don't approve his manners, aims or methods. I only acknowledge his cunning. He should be shot in the foot. Till he dies.
The whole 'show' reminds me a bit of comic books where the good guys are always honest and brave and succeed trough their quality and strength. The bad guys are always dis-honest cowards that go by scheming and treason and bribery or use brute force and hostages. When the good one meets a stronger opposition, stalks around and takes him by surprise he uses good tactics and cunning. When a bad guy creeps up behind the good one and strikes from behind he uses treason and cowardice. The action was exactly the same, though only a non-involved third party would see it that way.
Good morning. Happy Monday. .......... Yep, I love Mondays. They're the best. Really.Hmm, I suspect your Marcia has been adding strange things to your coffee. You'ld better check that out. Or maybe Sally did so. Or dual Athlons are affecting your brain.
--
Regards,
Svenson.
Now let's head into the Brian the Village Idiot zone. In the latest iteration of Gentoo on Gryphon, I went ahead and used the 1.3a builds, which are based on building the system with GCC3.1. It makes faster binaries, and the laptop can always use every bit of faster that I throw at it. One small problem... or more. First, Gryphon has a Lucent winmodem, no big surprise. I popped out and fetched down the latest copy of the ltmodem software. Yes, it's source code hooks to a closed source binary driver, it "taints" the kernel, and it's the only way I can get the "modem" working under Linux. So be it. But after over 24 hourse of building the system from the ground up, I compiled the ltmodem drivers, and they complained that they were likely to neither compile nor work under GCC 3.x. Sigh. I compile anyway. WIth warnings, the compile succeeded. OK. So I'll try it.
Now we get to the the Village Idiot part. I finally deciphered the error codes I was getting from Kppp (a KDE-based dialup tool). I didn't have PPP support compiled into the kernel. What's worse is that all the stuff I've been trying and failing with at assorted distros, including the original Gentoo install that *should* have worked, can be put down to the same thing: I left support for dialup out of the OS, then batter myself silly trying to get it to work without. Sigh.
So I popped in the Gentoo 1.2 ISO last evening, and started rebuilding again. 1.2 uses GCC 2.95.3, and that should work with ltmodem. We'll see. Meantime, this morning, I have to head over to $PRIOR_EMPLOYER to try and help them recover from an accidental hard powercycle of both the servers: an NT PDC/DB box, and a Linux Samba fileserver. I was told the boxes weren't coming back up at all. Sigh. More if there's anything interesting to report, but I'd best be getting ready. Time to join the commute again, temporarily. See ya!
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June 19, 2002 - Updates at 0800
Good morning. Overall, yesterday was a successful day. I managed to bring two power-cycled servers back to life over at the $FORMER_EMPLOYER site. The Linux running Samba file server was suffering from a stuck ENTER key, and the video card on the NT server was DOA. I'll be going back on Friday of this week to move their network over to the new smaller space they're renting, bring up the network and DSL, etc. Then, I was finally able to get Gryphon the Acer Travelmate TER600 laptop to do dialup networking again. It's been so long...
I responded to Svenson's email later yesterday:
Re: Yasser Hussein and Saddam Arafat
To: Jan Swijsen
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 13:38:42 -0700On Tuesday 18 June 2002 04:12, you wrote:
> Our dear friend Yasser is not a Big Fat Idiot. No Idiot, however big and/of
> fat would have survived the power struggle and scheming that he has over
> the past 30 years (or more).There's much more to anyone than any three word pigeon hole.
And equally clearly, there are things I don't understand about that culture. If the Palestinian suicide bombers weren't being guided to attack civilians and create terror, I'd be much more inclined to view them as "freedom fighters" than I am today. Making war on an enemy that threatens your independence is something Americans understand.
One of my "problems" with issue at hand here is that Israel is coming from the same stance. I think a tall fence, armed guards, and a palestinian state on the far side of the fence would be the good thing. Let them alone.
Oh, right. Everyone wants Jerusalem. The peculiar blend of extreme religion and political fervor means that perhaps the only Jerusalem that survives this era is one that people remember, not just a glowing glassy hole in the desert.
Their conflict threatens the world. The problem is that putting it down requires more will than we have, and no coalition can achieve consensus. It's a political minefield.
Re: Iraq. I'm not sure that taking Saddufus out will have anything like the anticipated effect. It's more like pest control. You *know* that killing this batch of termites really doesn't change the world very much. More termites are going to move in, as soon as you turn your back. And it doesn't change that your house is damaged.
But it sure feels good to eliminate the immediate pest.
.b
Re: Yasser Hussein and Saddam Arafat
From: Jan Swijsen
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 14:52:44 +0200Brian Bilbrey wrote:
> There's much more to anyone than any three word pigeon hole.Man is bad.
The Bible states 'God created man to his likeness. I think that you can better reversed that, 'every man imagines a god to his likeness' (and then acts on gods commands) and then you have a good explanation of what is happening. Not just in the Middle East but also on the Pakistan-Indian border and quite some other places.> Re: Iraq. I'm not sure that taking Saddufus out will have anything like the
> anticipated effect. It's more like pest control. You *know* that killing this
> batch of termites really doesn't change the world very much. More termites
> are going to move in, as soon as you turn your back. And it doesn't change
> that your house is damaged.
>
> But it sure feels good to eliminate the immediate pest.The one advantage of taking out Sad-an is that things will start buzzing. It would probably be like taking out the queen in a beehive, soon new queens emerge and fight among themselves splitting the hive in fractions. With some luck and careful management the infighting can be kept going for along time till only one queen with a much reduced hive remains. Of course if you manage that you must count on being stung from time to time. And if you manage it badly you end up with multiple hives.
--
Svenson.
In closing for the moment, I'll note that Slackware 8.1 is released. Thanks to Slashdot for the notice, I haven't done my distro rounds yet this week. Now to get on with my day, see y'all around.
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June 20, 2002 - Updates at 0830
Good morning. It's time for some snaps. First up, we have for your pleasure and eddification The Dog Who Would Be Cat. Sally has been observed to spend many long minutes licking her paws and then cleaning her face. I've only ever seen this before in cats. I wonder that she wasn't raised around cats? Right now she's sacked out on the floor right behind me. She only seems to like sleeping in the footwell of my desk, head against the sub-woofer, when I've got something on with a decent back beat. For the last couple of days, when I've actually been at the computer, I've been listening to classical music instead, and it doesn't attract the dog nearly as much.
Next up, bounty from our garden. I am going to miss this part of living here. I finally get a patch of real dirt to grow stuff in, start getting successful crops in, and it is time to move again. Why am I not surprised. Here we have a batch of carrots, a couple of baby zucchini, and oodles of stringless pole beans. I am taking out that many carrots each week, the zucchini in the ground are just starting to produce, and the beans are giving me that much every two or three days right now. The herbs are mostly OK, although we gave our basil to my folks, and the cilantro has bolted following the recent heatwave. But wait, it gets better...
The tomatoes are finally starting to ripen! Woooo Hooooo!!! There are just three that are going orange-y/red like this, and I'll leave them on past when I might think they're ready, as ripening fruit gives of ethylene, which starts the other fruit down the same path. Our plants this year are just brimming with tomatoes. I am so looking forward to chowing down on fresh tomatoes!
Finally, I want to share with you this lovely Hydrangea. We got it as a housewarming gift from my folks back last fall. It bloomed marvelously, then appeared to mostly die. However there were a few buds on the stems, so I just trimmed it back a bit while it was dormant last year. It's come in beautifully again. To keep the plant moist enough, I ended up having to put two drip outlets over the pot. I don't know if we'll be able to get this plant to make the trip with us...
I am still racked from yesterday... but first the good news. I found a great place for Benz parts: thebenzbin.com. Good prices, and I had the glow plugs I ordered for the 190D in about 24 hours. ... via UPS Ground ... from Trenton, New Jersey! They must have put the pedal through the floorboards (or more likely, a miniature package like that, UPS just threw it on a plane anyway). The issue here is that I was told that glow plugs were easy to replace, and not that expensive, perhaps $50 each. Mmmmmm. OK. When I bought the parts at about $10 each, I called and asked my resource. Ah, we must have been thinking about fuel injectors. OK. That I can live with. The problem is the "easy to replace" bit. I think that we were thinking about fuel injectors there, too. Those are right up top, easy to get to.
The glow plugs, on the other hand, are ... well, a nightmare. If you don't know what you're doing (I don't), and you don't have the right tools (I didn't), and you don't have small hands (I haven't), then getting the wire connection nuts off, then getting the glow plugs out of the block is rather a pain. Why? Because they're underneath the intake manifold with access blocked by accelerator linkages. It took me the better part of 4 hours to replace three out of the four glow plugs. One of the three was the bad plug, so I stopped at that point (as I don't know HOW I'd be able to get the last one out).
I might have been able to make this much easier if I'd demounted the fuel injector feeds and the intake manifold, but I didn't have a gasket set, nor any of those tools at all. Between my socket set, and the neighbor's wrenches, I worked through and around the manifold to get the three done, at the cost of three knuckles and one sunburn. I'm sure that people that do this for a living either do that, or have special tools to reach into those places without nearly the agony that I went through. Still, it's done, right?
Today, I have some more items on the Honey-Do list, and I'm also considering my choices for the next article to write for LinuxMuse. Additionally, it would appear that Greg and I are getting another tenant for our server up at RackShack. It's not done yet, but he'll draw more traffic for the server than any load we've put on it yet. Very cool. More details as the plan comes together. Now for a spot of breakfast... see you later!
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June 21, 2002 - Updates at 1700
0645 - Good morning. Happy Friday to you. Our happy dog is happy because she's going to work with Marcia today. No having to just lay about the house napping and watching me work on yards, cars and computers. Oh, no. She gets attention, petting, toys, walks, treats. Work with Marcia is like little doggie heaven. Heh.
Me? I'm off for a couple hours to help $FORMER_EMPLOYER move their machines to the new building they've rented, and bring the network up there. I'll probably also be working with the phone guy a bit. We'll see how the day goes. Oops. Gotta run.
1700 - Yep, and so fast I ran that I got out without running my update script to push the web changes onto backups, mirrors, and the live server. Wooo. Sorry, folks. It was indeed a busy day. I got all of their machines moved, brought up the firewall, servers, and three workstations. Not a bad day's haul. I'll do two more half days next week to make the rest of the stuff work, as they get the furnishings in place and ready to take hardware.
Now to catch up on a day's unread mail, and see what other sort of trouble I can get into in the 15 minutes or so before I collapse. See you tomorrow!
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June 22, 2002 - Updates at 1545
Wow, I've been a slacker two days in a row. No morning posts? Sigh. Really, I had good intentions, but I used them to pave a road instead of putting up a post. I have been busy, however. With a new tenant moving into our box, Greg and I have been working our way through a variety of configuration stuff, sprucing up the place and generally playing Baldrick. A mighty fine job we've done, too. Greg spotted some new options in the Perlfect search tool that all of us use. So now indexes run much faster, searches have context, all sorts of good things abound. Check out the search function (use the box at the top of this page). Nice, eh?
Ah, yes, Bob outed the information yesterday - We've got Jerry Pournelle moving his site(s) to our server. We're pleased and honored to have the trust of Thompson and Pournelle in our setup and choices.
Now to do a bit more admin work, prep the house for dinner guests, and maybe game just a bit... who knows? See you around!
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June 23, 2002 - Updates at 0800
Good morning. That's right, morning. You didn't think I'd keep forgetting, forever, did you? Lovely supper last night with Pat and Nathan, here. Grilled steaks, beans out of the garden, potatoes sliced and baked in an onion mix, then cherry pie and ice cream for dessert. Yummerlischious! Oh, and I received Bob's response to yesterday's post:
Subject: trust
From: "Robert Bruce Thompson"
To: "Brian Bilbrey"
Cc: "Jerry E Pournelle", "Greg Lincoln"
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 22:08:19 -0400> We're pleased and honored to have the trust of Thompson and Pournelle in our setup and choices.
It's not so much that we trust you as it is that we know where you live...
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
Well, you'll know where I used to live. Even I don't know where I'm going to live. It's a new security measure I'm testing out for Tom Ridge. The only tricky bit is, when you don't know where you're living, or where you're working, the commute can be... um... confusing. We'll probably end up living in the UK where they have lots of roundabouts, perfect for people who are driving directionlessly.
.b
Well, there is that.
I once spent my summer vacation trapped in a traffic circle in New Jersey.
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
Mmmmm. Now, with my first cup of coffee beside me, let's see what's in the news. Leaving aside terrorism and the Middle East today, is there any doubt that bad laws fostered by the entertainment industry in combination with clueless bureaucrats have killed Internet radio? If you want to stay abreast of this topic, then keep an eye on Doc Searls' blog, he's got a good grip and great linkage.
And then there's the NPR idiocy. "Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited." Yep. I've just violated their ... what? Is it a request? A suggestion? Certainly there's neither law nor norm that permits that sort of "brutal stupidity" (in the words of Cory Doctorow) I've got an idea. Earth to NPR: The web is about links and idea. If you can live without links, then we can live without your content. Get the hell off my web!
Gosh, there's so much going on in the world to be outraged about. Let's be careful out there, okay people?
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<-- * -->
Next Week
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.
