 |
|||
HomeGraffitiWebCamAboutSiteVisualDevGPG Key |
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.. |
MONDAY
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
September 23, 2002 - Updates at 0952 EDT
Good morning. Welcome to the start of yet another week. Did I mention recently that I want to win the lottery? A lottery, any lottery will probably do, as long as there are six or seven zeros between the lowest significant digit and the decimal point. The more the merrier, though. Ah, well it looks like work instead. So be it.
I did tail off rather abruptly at the end of yesterday's post, didn't I? I was off into the ccache writeup, and when I was done, I guess I was done. Now Svenson jumps into the fray with a pointed stick ... er, question. I meant "a question".
Subject: ccache
From: Jan Swijsen Date: 09/23/02 05:26<quote>
...You can see from the ccache statistics (which I zeroed out prior to that run) that I hit on 741 cache objects. Pretty neat....
</quote>Does it perform it's checks before downloading the sources?
I have stayed away from most of this stuff because using a PSTN modem is just too slow and expensive (I am paying per minute).
No, unfortunately the checks are done live during the compile process. But you can run emerge -p bleah, see what packages gentoo wants to pull, get those down at work, burn them to a cdr, come home, copy to your /usr/portage/distfiles directory, and roll with it.
Per minute, huh? Yeah. Probably still not the best distro for you. It also doesn't pull all the sources at the front end of the build process. It does them each serially. The good news is that often the actual source file doesn't change - they just apply a new patch set from the portage tree (which is currently about 10 meg or a little more). The good news there is that *that* is updated using rsync, so only changed bytes get pulled down the wire, not *necessarily* even whole files.
Whether you're a techie or not, and would like just once in a while to get worked up about something else besides Reichmarshall Ashchroft, check out the agenda at Digital Hollywood. That's where jumpin' Jack Valenti and his gang of merry lawyers talk about how they only want us to have tech that lets us pay by use for consuming the "products" covered by the copyrights that will never die. Anything else is piracy, or might be, which is the same thing, right? Wait... something's wrong in those assumptions. I'm sure I'll figure it out.
Now it's time for me to hit the road.
Mon
TUESDAY
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
September 24, 2002 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. There isn't much to report on this morning. I've now got Gentoo running on all four of the boxes in my charge here in the Hovel Bilbrey Server Room. Although it's not really a server room as such - Grendel remains the only dedicated server box in the building, since he's too slow to do much on the desktop these days. But Grendel still got a dose of Gentoo 1.4 last night. Slowly over the next few days I'll bring up a few services here and there, so that Greg and I can use him as a test platform for assorted projects.
This upcoming weekend, I'm going to bring Gryphon the Acer Travelmate up to speed with 1.4 as well. The optimizations available through the GCC 3.2 compiler are clearly much more effective than those of the 2.95 GCC. And I continue to be impressed with KDE 3.1 Beta, to boot.
Time's up, I've got to roll up to Gaithersburg this morning, so toodle-oo.
Mon
Tues
WEDNESDAY
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
September 25, 2002 - Updates at 0700
Good morning. Through assorted stupidities on my part, mostly asking too much of him, I'd made Gryphon the Acer Travelmate a wee bit unstable. While many of you constant readers may simply believe that it's only appropriate and suitable that my laptop should also be unstable, I beg to differ. In reality, these days, the laptop is my single most important box, from a work perspective. Not only does he carry the latest backup data from my workstation, but I use him for documentation and network testing at most of the customer sites I visit. So a dicey box with a borked GCC was definitely not happening.
The tricky bit is that it's mid-week, and I can't just rebuild a Gentoo box easily overnight. There's good news, though. Gentoo now has Stage 3 tarballs built with only moderate optimizations for the most common processors out there. So I was actually backed up, rebuilt up to a booting system and ready to start building GUI, in about 1-1/2 hours. I built Fluxbox, a very lightweight window manager. That drew in XFree86. So by around 0930, I had a working X installation. Then I installed the Blackdown Java SDK and OpenOffice.org. I use OOo extensively these days. Then going to bed, I started the emerge kde process. I've stopped that this morning, about 2/3 of the way through, for transit to work. Then I'll let it finish up today during the day. Oh, yeah, my data's already back on the box.
Speaking of news I haven't heard from anyone else yet... Maxtor has withdrawn their 160M drives from the market. According to our vendors, the reason that our order for two of them was summarily cancelled is because Maxtor was having problems with the drives. So instead of two 160 GiB drives, we've picked up four 120 GIB drives for only about an extra $100 over what we were paying originally. So we've got an extra 160 gig, and filling two extra slots in the 2RU backup staging server that I've got to build on Friday. Wooo!
Time for me to roll. See ya!
Mon
Tues
Wed
THURSDAY
Fri
Sat
Sun
September 26, 2002 - Updates at 0615 and 1933
Good morning. You know, I've suspected each of the last three mornings that it is really Thursday. Finally I am right in that assessment, and now it feels like Friday (only it isn't, sigh). We all owe this extraordinary early start to my need to get across the top of the beltway and down into Chevy Chase to put the new car in for an hour or two to replace its initially faulty ABS/TCS sensor at the left rear wheel. So I really don't have much to say around the relatively continuous yawning.
Fluxbox and OOo stood me in good stead throughout my day yesterday, and by bits and pieces I'm rebuilding KDE. I suspect that all will be right by tomorrow morning with little Gryphon. I realize now that I was remiss in describing Fluxbox just a little bit. Fluxbox is a KDE application-aware window manager based on the Blackbox codebase. It is a tabbed window manager, which means that any application can be tabbed, regardless of its underlying functionality. Here's the Fluxbox homepage for more information.
OK, I've got to put out the trash, put on my shoes, collect my gear and go. See you folks later.
Freedom of Speech. It's the law... Freedom of Speech. It's the law... Freedom of Speech. It's the law... or is it? Declan McCullagh writes, over at CNet News. A UCSD yahoo is trying to ban hyperlinking to a Columbian group that's on State's "Terrorist" list, based upon the USA Patriot Act. I've got an idea, Mr. Gary Ratcliff. How about you write Freedom of Speech. It's the law! about four bazillion times on a chalkboard someplace far away from the students you're supposed to be representing.
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
FRIDAY
Sat
Sun
September 27, 2002 - Updates at 0715
Freedom of Speech. It's the law...
Good morning. Dana Blankenhorn, in his weekly Clue via email, calls this time a tech depression, and here's a choice excerpt:
...When there's no money, there's no money. The sound that comes back is silence. Hit the "send and receive" button as much as you like all that's coming in is spam.
Spam booms in a recession, as does crime generally. It's cruel, but when you're desperate the other fellow's sorrows don't mean anything. ...
Mmmmm. Well, it's certainly not the best of times. Ah-hah! A message in from Holden Aust:
Brian,
PBS is going to be showing a fascinating new play this Sunday evening.
It is based on a true event, the meeting during WWII in occupied Denmark between the great Danish physicist, Nils Bohr, and his former student, the great German physicist, Werner Heisenberg.
I saw it live in San Francisco when it played here and thought it was intellectually challenging and very moving. I think you'd like it.
Theatre and physics - what a wonderful blend. I'm looking forward to it, Thanks!
And indeed, here's a link to that show. It's on one of our local stations, WETA, at 10 on Sunday night. MPT doesn't appear to have it in their schedule, though.
Okay. Time for me to roll. See you folks back here soon!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
SATURDAY
Sun
September 28, 2002 - Updates at 0800
Good morning. Sally came and woke us up this morning, apparently it was time to go out. We know she can hold out much longer than this, but are sure that this is a bad habit she's picked up from talking with Malcolm or Duncan. She had best be careful, or we'll start calling her Banquo, or simply Ghost.
Since I'm up earlier than I intended, I figure it's time to pass the joy along, so I'm sending email off to people asking if they're up yet. Some of them might have mail readers that make noise, like mine does...
On tap for today: time for Sally to have a bath. Then we'll go and make a valiant effort to trade Lemon (the Chevy Blazer) in on another new car. We're carrying two car payments now, so they might as well both be for reliable, warranted cars, don't you think?
The other day, Tom asked me if I knew how I had managed to make Gryphon, the Acer Travelmate, unstable. My major suspicion in this case is that I was slightly over-enthusiastic in upgrading some of the foundation bits - libraries, compilers and such. Now Gryphon had been a Gentoo 1.2 derived box. That is, based on GCC 2.96.xxx. The major development efforts in the last three months or so have been devoted to getting Gentoo up to speed on the 3.X series of compilers. The major symptom of instability on Gryphon prior to the rebuild was that after doing a system update, he wouldn't compile anything anymore. This is even though the compilers were there, and I could run them from the command line. One or more pieces of software that I installed in the moments previous to that event broke compatibility with the GCC 2.96 setup.
Now this may seem like a bad thing, but you'll note that I explicitly break the rules from time to time. In this case, I'd unmasked packages that weren't deemed "ready" yet, and gone ahead with their installation as a part of trying to bring KDE 3.1 Beta up on this older Gentoo setup. Clearly that didn't work. My bad.
Linux Vulnerability notice. I figure that it's only fair that I give attention to problems with the OS that I actually use, since I scoff so at the daily exploits of that Legacy OS. Bill Kendrick, bright guy that he is, passed along a bit of interesting Linux program vulnerability news to the SVLUG list (which I still hang out on, because it's a large, erudite list). GV, also known as GhostView, has a buffer overflow that could permit malicious code to be executed with the permissions of the user that runs GV. Here's a link to the article on PCWorld.com making the announcement. And by way of contrast, here's a link to the original iDefense notice to BugTraq.
I sent an email on to the writer of the alert:
Subject: Regarding gv vulnerability, were you mis-quoted?
From: Brian Bilbrey
To: [email protected]
Date: 09/28/02 07:49Hi, Mr. Endler.
That was a good, useful alert that went out to BugTraq, and I'm passing it along to my readers. But there are some interesting quotes that appeared in a related IDG article
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,105473,cp,reuters,00.asp
A choice bit:
"...Endler notes that it is not uncommon for users to open and read mail while logged on using the administrative root account -- a condition that would give an attacker unlimited access to the victim's machine."
Really? Or was that the IDG people puffing things up to get more traffic headed their way?
Thanks for the heads up, all the same.
So here's the drill. GV and its derived cousins, Kghostview and GGV, are vulnerable when the file open is called from the command line, not when their native GUI interface is used to open files. So if you run gv or friends from the command line, or have them linked to run automagically by file association setup, then you might be at risk. Don't run GV remotely until you have a security update. If you must use it, then save the PDF or PS file you wish to view, to disk. Then run GV, and open the file from inside the program. This is stated to be safe, according to the alert.
And just in case you do... STOP IT. Don't read email as root, don't use IRC or browse or ftp or anything Internet as root. For email, have your system configured to forward root's email to a normal user account. Your's, for example. Use root access for administrative purposes, test your changes, and get the hell out. This warning is up on LinuxMuse as well.
Have a lovely Saturday, see you later.
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
SUNDAY
September 29, 2002 - Updates at 0900
Good morning. We had a busy and ultimately successful day yesterday. Sally spent much of it guarding the door during our absences. Admittedly, she wasn't only handling the storm door while we were gone, the front door itself was closed and locked. However, that picture shows one of her favorite neighborhood watch program posts. She rarely breaks out into full throat, though. Only kids on skateboards and squirrels really get her riled up. 
And we have many little critters that use our back yard as a thoroughfare - that dog has been observed spending an hour tracking back and forth across the yard checking tracks, making sure nothing stayed behind. Sometimes she roots out the occasional itinerant chipmunk. Then Sally has lots of fun barking at and not catching the wee beastie.
A Retrospective Tribute to Chocolate Cake. At right you can see a slice, a somewhat generous slice, of the chocolate/rasberry cake that we had to accompany our dinner last weekend. I'd forgotten that I snapped that picture, but I thought, why not immortalize the thing? We got it at the Cakery on Race Track Road here in Bowie. Highly recommended.
Most of our success yesterday involved divesting ourselves of Lemon, the Chevy Blazer that Couldn't. In his place we've gotten a Hyundai Elantra. We'll save considerably on gas mileage, and we still have two car payments, just as we did before yesterday's transaction. 
This vehicle has a full warrantee, unlike Lemon, which was simply a full hole in our wallets. At left you can see the new car, still nameless. On the right side is a picture of Blue, the truck replacement. By the way, I've been getting between 24 and 26 miles to the gallon in Blue since we got him a couple of weeks back. That's nice. Once things settle down a bit, Blue will be Marcia's commute car, and our weekend car. I'll be using .... (I need a name for this one, yet. Suggestions?) ... the new car for my running around. It's only a four-banger, but it's got good suspension, along with ABS and a traction control system. These things are both good for a former California kid running around in these winter-icy climes.
Recommended: Chevy Chase Buick Hyundai. Talk to Lloyd Belcher. They'll make you a good deal, they're competent and extremely pleasant to deal with. And no, I get nothing out of this recommendation. But they're a small, family-owned dealership, and they do good work without getting in our faces.
One last picture to bore you with - we've got volunteer corn springing up in our front plantscape! Corn! And it's pretty late in the season, don't you think? There's a total of four stalks that have sprung up over the last 4 weeks, and there's at least one ear developing. It won't last out the fall frosts, of course, but how interesting. I wonder how that came to be in our front yard. It assuredly wasn't us!
We fought our way through the late Saturday rush at Costco yesterday, so that I can devote this morning to getting our garage in order. We may want to try to keep one of the cars under cover. The door's awfully narrow, but there's no use even trying unless or until I get the shelves up and the boxes arranged. I guess I'd best get to it, after a small spot of breakfast. When I run out of steam there, I've got some testing and documentation to do on a new firewall appliance that we're evaluating. See you around!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
Last Week
<-- * -->
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.
