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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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September 30, 2002 - Updates at 0952 EDT
Good morning. I had a busy day yesterday. And that doesn't count all the pictures I posted to catch up to the present, from desserts to cars. But speaking of cars, Marcia and I decided that one of them should go in the garage. Look to the left to see what my starting point was.
So I started shifting bits and boxes around, sweeping up and setting up shelving that we brought with us from California. About three or four hours later, I was as done as I was going to be. This you see to the right. We have considerably less space here. Out in Sunnyvale, we had a two car garage. We had stuff along both walls, and in the rafters there, as well as the washer, dryer and laundry sink on the back wall. Here, the latter are inside, in the mud room. Everything else has to fit here. We've two less shelving units, since we disposed of a couple of ratty old Erector Set style ones upon departure in July. Once done, there's room enough for the Elantra. I could probably have made the Santa Fe fit, but not both, so we'll just garage the smaller car.
In the late afternoon and well on into the evening I did network testing of a firewall appliance for work. It's one of those things that's easier to setup here in my home network, since my configuration is more lab-like than the production setup we have in the office. The vendor would like to compete with Sonicwall, but I'm afraid they haven't got a chance. They're doing an embedded-Linux bit of hardware, in a pretty aluminum case. And they meet all of their marketing claims. But the capabilities are pretty well in line with what I could get from a LinkSys IPSec enabled DSL/Cable router plus a ten megabit hub (to handle the DMZ side of things). That is, they're way over priced for their capabilities. If you want a firewall appliance that's got the features worth the money, stick with Sonicwall for the time being.
Now I'd best be on the road myself. Y'all have a lovely day.
Top / Email Brian
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Octogre 01, 2002 - Updates at 0710
Good morning...
Subject: Octogre?
From: Alan Stevens
Date: 09/30/02 23:38
Hi Brian,
I noticed that your page for the current week says, "September 30 thru
Octogre 06, 2002." I'm sure you were just testing to see if you still
had readers. :-)
Congrats on the new job, house, cars... man, you must be tired.
Alan--
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Indeed, and not a test, but rather a "two birds, one stone" sort of thing. I often get a general sort of malaise at this time of the year. We're headed into the holidays, which means that I get to put on my Grinch suit soon. Summer's clearly over, we're headed full-tilt-boogie towards winter, and that's far truer here than when we were on the Left Coast. I like sunshine and wearing shorts all the time. So that makes me ogre-ish, too.
Finally, it's a tip of the hat towards one of my favorite authors, Piers Anthony (http://www.hipiers.com/). This month is called OctOgre in the Xanth calendar.
Thanks for being the first to notice *and* write about it, though. Nah, I'm not too tired. Just riding in the high revs for a while yet.
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I pulled down the last of the three Red Hat 8.0 binary CDs (discs one, two and three) by about 9 yesterday evening. I had Garcia sitting and waiting for disc three by the time it came out of the burner a few minutes later. Then I burned a couple more sets of disks for work and for my Friday client site. Do any of you have any idea how much space a "Install Everything" with Red Hat 8.0 takes? Do you? I was stunned: 4,680 MiB. Wow!!! Now, I don't expect a whole lot to be different between this and the beta that I tested for LinuxMuse a little while back. But I'm going to be using this version as my primary workstation distribution at the office, so I'll start reporting on impressions and such as the next few days pass. I'll tell you one thing: I really, really like the installer. While I don't need a hand-holding installation, this one asked all the right questions, in all the right orders. And package selection was both intuitive, and simple. I'd expect that the mirrors are going to be hosed for another few days, I had to work HARD to find decent download sites, and swap back and forth, doing partial downloads, then resuming from another site, before I got everything. Fun, though.
Subject: 1) Grey and 2)grains
From: Don Armstrong
Date: 09/29/02 11:46
Well, I'd suggest that you may have a new woman in your
life - name of Ellie. Drab, grey (or gray, as the case may
be), possibly not terribly exciting, but a good safe
choice. Of course, we don't need to remind Marcia about
Ellie Mae - she'll probably remember that all bah hearsalf.
Oh, as for the grains you've got coming up in front of your
window, I'd suggest you look at the fact that there are
other grains there too. I'd suspect that someone dumped the
bottom of their bird-cage, complete with discarded grains,
out the window. Don't forget that you can do Chinese-style
baby corn as well. If the season is moving on too fast,
just pick, husk, chop and stir-fry. You may be able to do
something analogous with those other grains as well - looks
like some form of Milo or grain sorghum - you may be able
to cut those, rub the green grains out of the hull etween
your palms, and add them to the stir-fry. If it doesn't get
big enough, then I'm probably wrong and it's probably some
form of millet.
Regards,
Don Armstrong
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I was leaning towards Gay (Deceiver), or possibly Jonathan (Hoag). But there's
no rush. And it seems likely you're right about the yard.
Thanks!
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Have a great day. See you around!
Top / Email Brian
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Octogre 02, 2002 - Updates at 0845
Howdy! I know, I'm slipping, aren't I? I've been doing a bit of sleuthing around the web, looking up some items for a spot of research I have in mind. There's two topics, inspired by recent items that crossed into my inbox. The first is a post from the CBP list that Studio B runs, yet another link to a Microsoft is less vulnerable than Linux article, this one here at vnunet. I don't mind these articles terribly on the face of it - it is probably even true that over this span of time or that, that there are more Linux vulnerabilities than Microsoft. But my issue with most of these types of things is that either they don't specify their sources, or they use the VulnStats page at BugTraq. That page states that "The numbers presented below should not be considered a metric by which an accurate comparison of the vulnerability of one operating system versus another can be made.", in bold text. So of course it's used to do just that all the time.
What's worst about many of these articles is that they take the MS vulnerabilities from that page (aggregated from two line items: Windows 3.1x/95/98 and Windows NT/2000) and all of the Linux vulnerabilities (where eight distinct distributions are listed), and equate them. Let's say that a Microsoft flaw is discovered, and both 9X and NT are vulnerable to it. That one vulnerability counts as two against MS. Well, that's not fair, is it? Just one flaw, after all...
But a similar single flaw in core Linux should generate a security bulletin from all eight tracked Linux vendors. Whack. EIGHT vulnerabilities against "Linux". Does MS need any more encouragement for the FUD factory to start working overtime?
How do we get good data to make these evaluations? Do we trust the raw data of the various BugTraq mailing lists? I think so. However, it's the grouping of data that makes for skew. What I fret about is how can we know about the items that get suppressed. And let's be clear, here. NOBODY, but nobody, closed or open source, likes having their dirty laundry aired before they have a chance to address the issue. What's different is that, in general, the OS developers in question drop what they're doing and pump out a fix, often within hours or days. Microsoft is noted for it's ability to spin and whine, shoot the messenger, then put out a service pack 3 months later that MIGHT fix the problem, and includes an onerous EULA change. Admittedly, all I hear are good things about Microsoft engineers and they have done some marvelous useful software over the years. They're very bright indeed: the best that stock options can buy. But I am reminded of how we used to say that as individuals, the Soviets were generally nice people, just like you and I, only standing in line for food for a much larger percentage of their day. That didn't change the fact that we were at undeclared war with their country for 60 years or so.
We need good data, and a way to make rational decisions based on that data. I'll think on how to do something that helps me to automate the task of generating realistic conclusions from the data we do get. Any ideas are appreciated, of course.
Next up, linked in from my Debian Weekly News dose, an article on DebianPlanet entitled: Is Debian Losing Mindshare? (Note that you might have difficulty getting to that article, I'm getting timeouts right now. Are they Slashdotted? Keep trying, you'll get through as I did) The thrust of the article is that Debian isn't getting attention from the online Linux press community in the same way that other recent distro releases have. The writer ("TheGoodDoctor") speculates that it's due to the one-two whammy of a slow release cycle and an older software base. I think the latter is more important: Debian stable stays stable by not including any cosmetic or feature updates to the current release. It's ... well, stable. But this is perceived as a drawback by a large part of the desktop Linux community, where KDE 3.0.3 and Gnome 2.X are king at the moment. GCC 3.2 and the latest glibc also are hot adoptees among the most recent releases. And you can't get that from Debian, either at all, or unless you pull packages from the so-called Unstable tree.
Generally, I've had remarkable success with running Debian stable as a server. As a matter of fact, I've recently brought Grendel, the Gateway box, back online using Debian stable. It makes a GREAT server, safe, secure and easy to update. Fine qualities. But Debian on the desktop is lagging the bleeding edge by a long ways right now. Does that matter for what I do, day in and day out? Yes and no. For the tasks that I do, Debian would work fine. But for what I write about, here and other places, Debian won't do at all. Nobody wants to read about KDE 2.2.X. So I don't run Debian on the desktop anymore. I'm running Gentoo, I'm toying with Red Hat. And life goes on. But Debian does deserve mindshare, it does deserve to have a userbase for testing, upgrades and improvements. Maybe I'll take a box up to Debian testing and spend an allotment of time checking out packages and generating bug reports. That's how things improve, and get's Debian on track for a faster, better release cycle.
This is a late post, but meatier than usual, since I have the time to devote to it this morning. I'm not working today, which means that I've got the Honey-Do list, as well as chores for myself. I'd best get started now, or I never will. Take it easy.
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Octogre 03, 2002 - Updates at 0659
Howdy. On the subject of Debian, Roland sez, "Debian's biggest problem is the 'unstable' name - it should be changed to '-current' or somesuch." Indeed, well, that and the installer is a bit off-putting for those who aren't heavy into hardware. I mean, consider the fun of trying to decide which PCI NIC card driver to modprobe on your own, if you've only ever installed windows before. Autoprobing isn't hard, folks, and would make the new user's life much easier. Why this wasn't addressed in Debian 3.0 is beyond me.
I made no new explorations of Red Hat yesterday. Instead I did chores, a few errands (including a long-overdue haircut), and spoke to Laura Lewin at Studio B about some upcoming book projects. There may be interesting things coming along - Stay tuned. Oh, and I'm moving my desktop over from KDE to Fluxbox for my workstation. I need to be able to WORK here, and there's too much eye-candy for my taste. Now maybe I could clean it up some more... but KDE is really heavy. There's a perceptible loading time and display time difference between the two environments, too. KDE *is* heavy.
Now to work with me. More as time and events warrent.
Top / Email Brian
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Octogre 04, 2002 - Updates at 0710
Good morning. There's been more fun with Roland on the subject of Debian, and the bright young man appears to have ... issues with Gentoo.
From: Roland Dobbins
Subject: Debian isn't intended
Date: 03 Oct 2002 17:14:37 -0700
for those who've only installed Windows before.
Those people should be running Mandrake or Red Hat; if/when they want
less of a straightjacket and have learned more, they can move to
Slackware or Debian (or, if they enjoy crashing and rebuilding their
machines constantly like Windows lusers, Gentoo, heh).
But don't try and get the Debian people to emulate Red Hat, etc. People
who essentially want a 'Windows replacement without Microsoft' can run
Red Hat or Mandrake and be perfectly content; people who want to run
-UNIX- can run Slackware or Debian.
And people who don't need to use their computers to do any actual
-work-, but instead enjoy seeing how many times they can recompile
XFree86 in a week, can run Gentoo.
;>
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On Thu, 2002-10-03 at 20:14, Roland Dobbins wrote:
> for those who've only installed Windows before.
I know that, nor did I say that it was. But when the question is, Is
Debian Losing Mindshare, that's one of the things that springs to mind.
My mind (or what passes for one, on a dark rainy night, on the wrong
coast).
Actually, if I would just leave my Gentoo box ALONE, instead of working
hard to update to the latest KDE CVS or Beta, then it would be stable
for me too. All my gentoo boxes ran steady and true while we moved and
settled in. The fun began when I started upgrading again, after
broadband arrived.
Well, people who want to run UNIX can run Red Hat or Mandrake, too. They
just have to live with the different stuff that those distro's do, and
pay attention to the "edit above this line and the auto-configuration
tools don't work anymore" lines in various and sundry config files.
Besides, who am I to influence Debian?
Have you got "issues" with Gentoo? Besides, it's NOT XFree that changes
every week, it's glibc. Get it straight! Besides, I learn LOTS
of things when stuff breaks, and I like learning things. Generally not
all of my boxes are broken at once...
And my server here runs . . . Debian.
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And now that I think about it, if I felt strongly enough about it, why NOT try to influence Debian. Oh, right, getting the installer to be easier to use so that more people can readily adopt Debian is being addressed in the current development cycle. How can that make Debian like Red Hat? All the distributions are theoretically asymptotically approaching the moving target of the LSB anyway, right? So when all is said and done, underneath the installer and the skins, it's all just Linux.
Ah, and when things finally start working right, like the SMB and kio_Fish (SSH) connectivity in Konqueror, you get results like this:
In the side menu, note that underneath Gryphon (and the other Linux boxen as well, though they're not expanded), there's a FISH item. Then, beneath Pavillion (Marcia's box), there's an SMB. These are connections to the boxes in question: Fish is the SSH connector part, and SMB is embedded Samba client connectivity. And it just works. I'll have a pass through the very few configuration bits required to make this work right, and let you know what I find, over the weekend. Now I'd best be off to work.
...which I am fully capable of doing without actually remembering to run the command that publishes this page. Sigh. Done at 0923.
Top / Email Brian
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Octogre 05, 2002 - Updates at 0855
Good morning. First up, pre-caffeine, I've been following up on a notification that Brian Lane posted over in the message boards on LinuxMuse. There's a couple of recent bugs/vulnerabilities in the Apache webserver code, versions 1.3.26 and before that can be exploited under certain conditions. While our sites and server aren't directly vulnerable to these, we'll likely upgrade shortly. Have we made the transition to 2.0 yet? Nope, not yet. There's lots different in the 2.0 codebase and configuration, and we've yet to puzzle it all through, being busy and all. One day, one day... Tip-o-the-hat to Mr. Lane.
September was a good month. From my webstats, numbers were up, back to the levels of last May, and rising. I wonder if that's something to do with some of you being back a school? Average daily page reads were back up over a thousand, and 8200 unique sites hit me over the course of the month. In the search strings, there were several of the usual subjects, like bestiality ftp, one that started I don't know how, but now I keep the mentions up just to draw people here, instead of to their intended goal. Sick, ain't I? That old Chevy Cavalier that we sold a couple of years ago keeps getting hits to this site, as well. Here are some of the more interesting clean searches, however:
"puddy ssh" - Actually, that's PuTTY, A Free Win32 Telnet/SSH Client. Great tool, fits on a floppy and doesn't leave a trail in the registry or anything. Very useful for running SSH on Aunt Minnie's Windows 95 box.
"linux book download" - Yes. Tom and I wrote a Linux Book. You can read it online, or download a tarball of the HTML and images for local use. It's a little dated now from the Window Manager/User Interface side of the ledger. But most of the setup and command line stuff remains useful and written in an accessible way (we like to think, anyway). Enjoy!
"vmware screenshots" - Also true. This site is strewn with them. There are a few less in recent weeks, since the latest product from Mandrake won't install completely in VMware Workstation 3.2, and the Red Hat Graphical installer won't run, although the install completes nicely in text mode. I'm sure that VMware will address those issues soon. I wonder if they'll ever get around to fixing the bug that Moshe found years ago, the one that prevents OpenMosix from running properly. We can always hope.
"pictures of ashland oregon" - Many of those, mostly the Green Show performances from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, documented here and some over here. Not what you were looking for if you wanted a photo essay on the town and environs, however.
There's lots of search strings related to grafitti, but that's just the name of this site, not what I do. There's a few about my cousin, the Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady. Then there was this little string, "baby scrape book designs" Wow, that wasn't just once. Is there some new fad about saving the scrapings from babies, something that I've missed over the years? Let me reiterate this: there are some things I just don't want to know.
Okay. I've got to go get ready for my day - it's going to be busy. See you around.
Top / Email Brian
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Octogre 06, 2002 - Updates at 1040
http://www.rennfest.com/mrf/
Good morning, sorry for the delay. I was doing some administrative work for Dr. Pournelle, then chatting with Moshe on IRC, and having my first cuppa, so you'll excuse me, if you please. The good news is that there's mostly good news. Jerry's got a nailed-up connection to the Internet, and while it's just pokey iDSL, it's still far better and more reliable than either dialup or satellite (although those both have their place, and are far better than no connectivity at all). Moshe and Avivit sound happy and healthy and that's wonderful, too. Sally's doing well, too. We've got her thyroid problems mostly under control, and the Rimidyl (or however it's spelled) is really helping her mobility and quality of life, so far as we can tell. I mean, it really hasn't changed that she sleeps 8 hours out of every 10, but at least she can now make the stairs on her own easily, and has more choices about where to sleep.
Here's a few pictures from the Maryland Renaissance Festival, which we finally managed to attend yesterday. It was a glorious day, a tad humid but pretty and not too hot.
Above, good Queen Anne entreats her subjects and assorted passers-by to attend her coronation, at two o'clock in the Globe Theater. We've got a bit of an anachronism going on, but who's counting. Apparently the Archbishop is wandering around selling indulgences, too, including one for his personal eighth deadly sin, a combination of Lust and Gluttonly that he calls Sluttonly. Apparently, this Archbishop is also prepared at the drop of the trousers to entertain a demonstration of any sin that he hasn't heard of or tried before. Ever so unfortunately, we managed to miss this fine specimen of priesthood entirely. There aren't other pictures from the rest of the event except the joust, since we were having so much fun looking a gee-gaws and people watching that I left the camera put away. So above and below, here's some joust for you.
We're having a lazy day, and I think I'll enjoy it (other than working on a book proposal or two). Have a lovely Sunday, see you next week.
Top / Email Brian
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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.
