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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 24, 2001 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. Welcome to Monday. No, thank you, really. Keep your rotted fruit and veggies, you might need it if you believe that the economy is fundamentally based on the stock market, rather than on real people making, buying and selling real things. Yeah, there are people out of work, including me. But this is a temporary condition, and there's lot's of measurably good activity going on. But I keep seeing people watch the Dow and the Nasdaq, where the good news isn't good enough, the bad news is terrible. Stocks dive because the Fed might make a decision, then when the Fed makes the decision, stocks dive because it wasn't what the herd wanted. Herd, you say? Of SHEEP, say I, driven toward the precipice by wolves in financial analysts clothing. A stock market is speculation, a vehicle for rich people to play real life monopoly. It is not about retirement savings, or financial prudence, nor employment incentive. It's a fine place to put money that you don't care if you never see it again. You might gain, but you probably lose. It's like going to courts, where lawyers are the winners. In this venue, it is the brokerage houses and investment bankers and venture capitalists that mostly win (when there are any winners). Day traders are the genetic forebears of a whole new generation of global village idiots, straw hanging out of the corner of their mouth, slack-jawed and swinging their legs on the stone wall leading out to the fields. Stay OUT, unless you have money to burn.
Yesterday, before I had breakfast, I was a busy lad. I decided that Sally needed a summer haircut. We have a pair of doggy clippers inherited from Princess, my parent's dead dog. So I moved the car out of the garage, and started shearing. Well, not shearing, as such. I used a 1/2" guide over all, and a 1/4" guide on her tummy and legs. In the picture on the left, you can get a sense of how much hair there was, and how little actual dog. Personally, I was stunned. While Sally clearly didn't hate this nearly as much as she does baths, she also thought that perhaps I'd stepped too far away from sanity, and in the picture at right you can see here plea for escape assistance. I must actually admit that she lay there nicely and submitted to this indignity with reasonably dignity. Little did she know the best was yet to come.
After the haircut was over, I sent her into the back yard with Marcia for a brushing, while I cleaned up the garage. Then I came out into the back yard and played with her for just a minute. When I ruffled her fur, an aerosolized cloud of furlets filled the air around us. "Oh, no!" said I. This dog is not going in the house next to my computers. This will clog fans like nobody's business. Marcia asked if I was going to give her a bath. Man, this dog hates baths, and I'm already pretty shagged out from the haircutting. I've got an idea... We have a shop vac! So I got out the extension cord and the canister vacuum. First Marcia tried, but that didn't work, she couldn't control the dog and the hose at the same time. So I vacuumed the dog. Sally was rolling her eyes and I could almost hear her little mental scream, "My people have gone MAD!" But when all was said and done, she doesn't look too bad, except for the bits that I over-trimmed on her feet. She looks a little vulture-like, there.
On Saturday, I showed Nathan bits of MS Office 2K running under Crossover Office, from Codeweavers. It didn't quite run as well as I remembered. But then, this was a single user installation that I did on Garcia, the Intel workstation, under the old version of Gentoo, not the new beta GCC 3.1 system. So last night I stripped the old setup out, and put in a shiny new fresh one from the reserved installation files. Word works, and Excel. Also IE 5.5, and to a slightly lesser degree of functionality, Outlook. There's some formatting bits that are ... problematic. I'll show you those, perhaps tomorrow morning. But for those of you who stick with Windows now only because of Outlook... you do have an option to run it on Linux, where the crashes don't take the OS with it. Sorry, Bob. FrontPage still won't start.
I'm going to spend a little more time helping out my $OLD_FIRM today, and Wednesday. Tomorrow I'm converting our friend Roger into a dual-boot Linux and Windows user. Woo Hooo! Now I'd best get my day started properly. See you later!
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June 25, 2002 - Updates at 0730
Good morning. As noted, I'm going to spend the morning bringing our friend Roger partway into the Light. He's got a Sun Qube, and now he wants to do some MySQL/PHP development for it. So it's time to set Roger up with a dual boot box. We've gotten him a new HD for the laptop, and it'll hold lots of Linux. I think I'll give him RedHat. He's really fairly technical. Otherwise we'd go with something like Lycoris, but that won't meet his needs here.
For those of you who find that my short Sally exploits just aren't enough, you may want to know that Marcia keeps an entire Sally PAGE up!
Important news: Theo posted a message to BugTraq yesterday, there's a remote root exploit in OpenSSH. Upgrading to version 3.3p1 doesn't fix the bug, but installed with UsePrivilegeSeparation enabled removes the root-ness from the remote exploit. There's more on this at the top of the news over at LinuxMuse, and many other places. UPDATE your systems NOW, not soon but now. Later today, I have a short Mailman/SuExec Howto to polish up for LinuxMuse, laundry to start, and more packing in the garage ... yep, I'm already starting to pack for our move. There's a LOT more to be done, when it's cross country instead of across town. I'd best get busy, see you later!
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June 26, 2002 - Updates at 0730
Good morning, more or less. More because I'm making progress on a number of fronts, less because I'm going to have to look at finding an HTML editor that has an autosave feature in it. Because I don't just stick to clean stable programs, and because I use NVidia drivers for my system (which are closed source binary kernel modules), I've been known to have my display lock up on me. Generally I can exit cleanly by logging in from another machine, and executing a proper restart. That doesn't help me for pages under active editing, like this one was today. This is nothing like what I wrote the first time, starting more than an hour ago. But some of that was done before my first cup of coffee, and I can't get it the same way yet. I have a rant to write about the weirdness that some people exhibit around OpenSource program vulnerabilities, and other things as well. However, my allotted time for this space is long past at the moment. So I'll simply try again later today, or tomorrow morning. But some of today is going to be spend evaluating new HTML editing tools, so there will be a report on that here, or probably over on LinuxMuse. Now I really must get going. See you later!
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June 27, 2002 - Updates at 0720 PDT
Good morning. I've a fair amount of ground to cover with you this morning, so I'd best just dive right in. First, the failures. I haven't found a new HTML editor tool to work with yet, mostly because I haven't looked. My system locked again last night, and while I didn't lose any work, I'm not yet sure why. I've got a system monitor running, and I've got this system loaded down pretty hard. Harder than I think it should be, so I've got to look at why running Linux, X, Gnome and just a few apps is using nearly a gig of RAM. Very weird. However, my lockups were while running KDE, one before and one after system updates. Of course I'm a ways out on the bleeding edge with an optimized Gentoo-compiled GCC 3.1 system and some of the very latest builds. I'm clearly not in stability mode, so I guess that I can't be too unhappy. At least this monster of a Dual Athon that I'm calling Goldfinger boots very quickly indeed. And I've got the journalling filesystem ReiserFS in use on my main partitions, so no data loss due to anything but apps currently running.
My stats were up a bit yesterday, mostly due to Jerry Pournelle linking to this site. I need to send him the actual site URL for this place and Greg's. As long as he's going to be mentioning the sites of his hosts here on Rocket, he might as well do so by name rather than IP address, neh?
Ah, yes, time to get back on track. Item two is Gnome. Gnome 2 was released yesterday. Here's a brief review for those of you who don't track the technology or history of these things. Running on top of the Linux OS is the X window system. X provides an interface between graphical programs and the underlying hardware, like 3D accelerated graphics cards, mice, tablets and more. X doesn't do anything, though. For that, you need a Window Manager (WM). There are many, many WMs, some light with minimalist interfaces (like TWM), others somewhat heavier, with more features to configure and make use of, like panels, menus and docks (say, WindowMaker). Fundamentally, the window manager is there to simply manage the appearance of multiple applications on the screen and virtual desktops, configuring mouse and window interaction.
Then there's the next level, provided by what's called a Desktop Environment. This provides additional glue, function and enhancement over that offered by Window Managers. Programs are written to a common interface, an object linking and embedding interface is present, on and on. Fundamentally, the goal is to drive ease of GUI use to the point where Joe MS-WindowsUser can conceivably feel pretty comfortable sitting down at a Linux GUI desktop system and get to work without too many hitches. (This leaves aside the problems with application data compatibility.)
KDE was the first desktop environment to hit the scene, founded back in October of 1996. KDE is based upon the QT graphical library from TrollTech of Norway for it's look. Back then, there was one small problem with that. QT wasn't free software. That made it problematic for the purposes distribution. If you built and used it non-commercially, no problem. But in the world of the FSF, Linux and Open Source, this wasn't good enough. So the GNU project started up Gnome, a competing desktop environment development environment, based on the free GTK+ library.
Over time, this competition drove a fair bit of rhetoric and change. The rhetoric is now mostly water under the bridge, and the change was all to the good: QT is now under an accepted free software license, so there's no major non-technical competition between KDE and Gnome. There are ongoing efforts to ensure that applications written explicitly for one environment or the other run well in either - that'll be important in the long view. But over the last couple of years, KDE has clearly been ascendent. It has been more sophisticated and faster. Faster is especially important since these desktop environments are not light-weight entities. They're... bulky, memory and cycle hungry beasts. But they're pretty, and they provide a fairly unified interface to the programs that are written to them, read that as ease of use. So Gnome has been lagging... until today.
Yesterday, after a long hard development cycle, Gnome 2 was released (Note - their server is so busy that I am currently getting time-outs, I got in under the wire, you may need to wait for a bit). Gentoo Linux was the first distribution out with Gnome 2 support, so it's a good thing I was hanging out in the #gentoo-dev channel on irc.openprojects.net, and saw it coming down the pike. Two commands and I was done!
emerge --clean rsync # to get the latest set of ebuilds.
emerge gnome # fetches and compiles all of gnome and dependencies.
It is FAST! About time, too! After spending most of the last three years in KDE, with brief forays into the wild Window Manager arena, I'm now running Gnome. I'll admit I've got my brain pretty well wrapped around KDE and its operational methodologies. But as long as it stays stable for me, I'll spend some serious time in Gnome 2 and see what I can see. I can definitely tell you that Gnome now feels faster and lighter than it did. I'm running with Sawfish as the WM, and Nautilus as a desktop manager. That used to be pretty unpleasant, and now it is very much nicer - integrated well with the bulk of Gnome and also fast.
If you've stayed away from Gnome because it's old and slow, then it's time to give this other desktop environment a spin for yourself, because it is new, shiny and fast. And yes, you can still run your KDE apps, the performance penalty is in having to load the libs that would already be memory resident. But this is worth a look.
In early preparations for our cross-country move, I've already packed, labeled and manifested the contents of the garage. That's so that as I start packing the house proper, I have places for boxes, dismantled furniture and more. Next up is my office, but not today!
Here's what's on tap for this day: I've got an OpEd piece on development and vulnerabilities in Open Source to write for LinuxMuse, as well as (still, sorry) the Mailman/SuExec integration writeup to format. That is written, I just need to take the time to wrap it in the appropriate XML tags, and get it posted. It'll definitely be dry, though. Heh. Also today, I'm headed back over to $PRIOR_FIRM one more time, to setup the last couple of workstations, clean up some of the document templates for their Manufacturing/Accounting software, and generally tune things up a bit.
I suppose I'd best be going. See you around.
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June 28, 2002 - Updates at 0845 and
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Good morning. Sorry for the delay. I slept in, after seeing Marcia off to work before 0500 this morning. We really need to get to the same timezone as the guys she's supporting! I wrote one article, and Greg pounded out another, both up on LinuxMuse right now. I'll let that stand for me, for the moment. I'll be back later. Now it is breakfast time.
Life is interesting. People sending me a copy of Klez to run ... as if! And then there was this one:
Fakes...
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 17:08:41 -0700 (PDT)
From: Edmond Alfurese
To: adobe (at) orbdesigns.comThere is something extremely wrong with every single person in this world. They seem to be part of a pointless simulation.
"The Matrix" has portrayed this idea somewhat, yet we watch it and go back to our daily lives. Yet in this very life, underneath the seeming diversity in people's opinions, values, talents, and interests, there is something that makes everyone the same. It is as though this planet is populated only by mindless fakes, objects that provide the appearance of intellect on the surface but are based on only mechanical reflexes and primitive thought patterns.
I don't really care if anything I say has been said before, if it was portrayed in movies, in books, or in the lyrics of some useless song. With 6 billion people covering the globe at any given time, thousands and thousands of years of written literature, probability dictates almost any combination of words has occurred numerous times. Yet there is clear evidence there was no action, so those words, just like the people who spoke them, must have been just more fakes. I am forced to use this language (also created by the fakes) because there is no alternative, so everything I write here could be misunderstood to make me sound like one of them, but it will be the action that I take and the dedication that will separate me from them.
In my estimation the fakes that occupy this planet don't make up 99%, but more like 99.9999999% of the population. I know this because I've searched, and in my search have so far only found one true ally (I have found him via the internet as well). But even with those numbers we would not give up because there is no logic in giving up.
The people on this planet are all fakes because the societies have made them this way. Ideas that populate people's minds have no logic or purpose. Concepts such as religion, god, morality, individualism, freedom, identity, happiness, love and billions of others are all just memes. Like parasites they infect the minds and spread from one person to the next. They have no point or purpose; they exist without any logical basis or foundation. The fakes are completely controlled by them, and they will never see beyond them. To not be controlled by them one must do more then just realize that they exist. One must resist any ideas that have no point, endlessly question, and never accept imperfection or compromise in any answer.
We (myself and my ally) are different though. While we have had the limitation of existing only in these societies, something has made it possible for us to resist being indoctrinated into becoming one of those fakes. We have no arbitrary wants, needs, desires, or preferences.
If this world continues to exist the way it is then nothing in it will ever have a point. It will always be just a product of random evolution, one with no importance or relevance. The only logical goal is to dedicate our lives to increasing our numbers, those that aren't fakes, so that in thousands of years our numbers may be such that the fakes would no longer be a threat to progress.
Those that join us must see every other person occupying this planet as the enemy, and us as their only allies. Like us they must have dedication only to taking the most logical action, and to nothing else.
To tell you more about us, we've posted some personal information about ourselves on a website. You'll also find past responses to us on that webpage.
Obviously anyone reading this email is most likely just another fake. Do not simply reply to this email, if you do your message will almost certainly be ignored. If you do wish to communicate, first demonstrate your interest by taking the effort to find us online, one of the ways to do that is described below.
Use a major search engine to search for every combination of any two words from the list below. The order of the words shouldn't matter as long as you do not search for them in quotes. Also when you pick the right combination you shouldn't need to look at more then the first matches.
There is no trick to this and this isn't meant to be quick, it should, however, be fairly clear if/when you find the right site. The following search engines were verified by us, please use any of them as other search engines may simply not list us correctly: MSN, Lycos, InfoSeek, FastSearch, LookSmart, HotBot, InfoSpace, Ask.com, AllTheWeb, Teoma, WebCrawler, AltaVista.
If this can't be solved, or if you never reach us, there should be no reason for you to give up as we will never give up and thus there will always be some way to find us.
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Ryan and Jacob
Mmmm. I used to think like that sometimes. Of course I also used to use mind-breaking chemicals, once upon a time. I have done neither for a great many years now. This is just plain odd! I thought you'd be amused, before I just deleted it. Have a lovely HAPPY FRIDAY!!! See ya tomorrow.
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June 29, 2002 - Updates at 1947
I've been a busy boy... In getting ready to move, step one involves dismantling all the furniture that comes to pieces. All of my office furniture comes to pieces. What you see is what's left. Three little tables, and a pathetic remnant of only two running computers. What IS the world coming to? See you tomorrow, earlier than today, I'm sure.
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June 30, 2002 - Updates at 1043
That's the problem with being leader of the pack, you're the first to get cut down by the machine guns when it's time to rock and roll. I installed Gnome 2 on Goldfinger, my fast new workstation, a couple of days ago. It's a much nicer, lighter interface than Gnome 1.4 was, and Nautilus, the file manager (which is all that remains of Eazel) is now well embedded, and very fast. However, installing Gnome 2 broke a number of applications I've come to rely on. Just because I generally use KDE as my primary environment doesn't mean that I'm wedded to only using KDE apps. Galeon, Bluefish, Xchat, all started exhibiting really odd behaviour. So I'll step back away from that particular challenge, and just work with the latest Gentoo 1.3b test build instead. Clearly, two bleeding edges simultaneously is at least one too many.
The garden continues to do well. Last night we noshed on the tomatoes, and put fresh beans, carrots and zucchini into the stirfry, along with chicken. Yummerlischious. This is going to be one of the hard parts about moving. California growing seasons can spoil a body. I sure hope that whoever rents this place appreciates fresh veg. Today, along with continued packing, I'll be mowing the lawn, doing a bit of weeding, and whatnot. Garden work is good for the soul.
I suppose that I'd best go be of service. Marcia is packing up her office now, and we're getting to the heavy-stuff section, and that's my gig. See you around!
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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.