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Orb Designs Grafitti October 28 thru November 03, 2002 Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun Last Week  <--  *  -->   Next Week --> Link to the Current Week <-- Email Brian 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   
October 28, 2002 -    Updates at 0605 EDT

Good morning. This morning is my hopefully last dentist visit for a while. One more tooth that needs some attention, then nothing until my next cleaning in February. So once again I'm up some indeterminate time before the crack of dawn, and ready to be in the chair by 0700. Right now the coffee's starting to brew, and I'll be much more lively shortly.

I really did have projects that I might have worked on yesterday. However, instead we both did a whole lot of pleasant unproductive nothing-to-speak-of. I spent much of the day playing Neverwinter Nights with Greg and Molly joined in for a while, too. Fun AD&D-rules gaming. There are a great number of user-generated modules to play, as well, since NWN provides a nice creation toolset. I've only just dipped my toes in that pool, but it looks absorbing.

While doing a spot of surfing yesterday, I was on a blog belonging to a "Tony", I'm not sure I remember what it was or how I got there. But from there, I got linked to Googlism. Unfortunately, they're down right now ("we'll be back real soon!"), but the place is a hoot. You put in a word or phrase (say, your name), then select from a bullet list of options: who, where, what, etc. It comes back with a list of quotes about the subject at hand. Putting in a name is a real hoot, although not always flattering. I came back with a few quotes, Tom Syroid came back with a few. Robert Bruce Thompson had quite a number, and Jerry Pournelle had pages worth. Fun, but if they're not up and running, do go back later.

Along with work and dentistry, on my list for this week is a medium-length look at the United Linux beta for LinuxMuse. Oh, man, look at that clock... now I need to get going. See you around.

Oh, and after a week of fine tuning, the WebCam is back yet again, with timestamps working. That was a PITA. Ciao.

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
October 29, 2002 -    Updates at 0710

Good morning. There's a certain sort of question that shows up in the inbox when a body doesn't even bother to look or search for an answer on their own before asking someone else to work for them, gratis...

From: Kreculj Zeljko
To: Brian Bilbrey, Tom Syroid
Subject: please
Date: 28 Oct 2002 21:27:31 +0100

Ciao,..

Can you tell me, please how could i start my internal modem INTEL HAM V90 Ambient tech. In Linux RedHat 7.3 The whole procedure from the start.

Thanks...

Kreculj

http://www.intel.com/design/modems/products/536ep.htm http://www.intel.com/design/modems/support/drivers_linux.htm I'm sorry, but without actually having the hardware, it's impossible to do what you ask. However, the www.linmodems.org website lead me to the above two pages that might help you on your path. How to use the drivers? Read the documentation on the www.linmodems.org website. Have fun.

So I sent that, because I know the place to go, LinModems.org. But then I thought, what if I didn't know? So I googled this string: "INTEL HAM V90 Linux" (sans quotes). The third link was this page on the Israeli Group of Linux Users site. A quick howto on using that driver, as well as another pointer to the Intel site. That one was broken, but Intel's search function works fine to turn up the correct page. So I sent that link along as well.

You know, I really do like helping people out. But it's also nice to know how they've tried to help themselves. So I always like to hear what you've tried, whether you couldn't find a resource online (but where you looked and what didn't work, so that I don't have to duplicate your failures), did you find a tool, did it work? Or did it fail, in which case what were the error messages. Verbatim, not paraphrased. I love to help, but I'm not getting paid to do someone else's work for them entirely... Of course, I'll do the whole kit and caboodle for cold, hard cash on the barrel.

After Tom's glowing praise the other week, I picked up my own copy of Æleen Frisch's Essential System Administration, from O'Reilly. I guess I've got a bunch of reading to do, and I keep falling farther behind. This happens mainly because something I read raises an interesting side avenue, or something new to try. So I wander down that-a-way, or try that new tool. I leads places where I learn new things, or get otherwise distracted. Next thing you know, it is three months later, and I still haven't finished what I set out to do. This doesn't happen with work much. But with my time? All the time! I've really got to buckle down a bit.

I made it all the way through the intro last night. I also knocked down more than half of my technical magazine stack. Then for dessert, I got all the installation screenshots and a few article notes down for United Linux Beta 3. And still I had time to watch a couple of shows and relax a bit with my love. I wonder why I have a headache this morning? Heh! Perhaps it's because my jaw still aches from the repairs to my lower left wisdom tooth that the dentist did yesterday.

Today, I've got two customer sites to visit, so I'd best start off smartly. Have a lovely day, folks!

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October 30, 2002 -    Updates at 0730

How odd. I never before knew that it was possible to feel rested and tired in one fell swoop. The good news is that I've got a slow starting morning this Ack Emma, since I'm going to totter off to the nearest local SSA office and prove to them who I am again, so that they can give me a replacement card. I do have a Social Security card... someplace. That folder either got lost in the move, or something. I had thought it was in the firesafe, but apparently not. So I've been getting by without it. The interesting bit is that I needed more forms of ID to get my Drivers Licence here in Maryland than I do to get my Social Security card replaced. Yet there's so many more important pieces of information tied to the SSA number than there is to a Drivers License.

I made progress on the United Linux writeup last night, I'm more than a quarter of the way through. I'd be doing better, but I was tired, and stopped working by about eight yesterday evening. In other news, Sally's current "hard" cast comes off tomorrow. It's sure to be one of those good news/bad news sorts of things, since I'm pretty sure she'll be more mobile and less stumpy in the new "soft" cast. That's offset by her having to go back under light anesthesia to get the work done. Not to mention no late food or water for our little girl tonight. Heh. Say, did you see that Jerry got a new dog? (that link's good through this week, then I'll change it if I can remember) Huzzah!

I'd write more, but I'm sure you can surf about and find your own interesting stories... like this one, contributed by Chris Ward Johnson, about the black hole at the center of the Galaxy. And one drawback to being Kevin Bacon is revealed at The Onion: Now he's been linked to Al Qaeda. And I can get lost in the back issues of The Onion faster than you can say "onomatopoeia"

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October 31, 2002 -    Updates at 0715

I'm tired, I have a headache, and a problem at a customer site that won't go away. They're a small .org, they've never been more than 10 people, and are now around 4 or 5, and they've got a local Exchange server. That's right, Exchange. Some previous vendor really sold them a bill of goods. That machine is also the file server and PDC (it's NT4-SP6A), and it used to be their internet gateway as well, running a version of WinGate. I know, wow! The excitement is that this box is as fragile an installation as I've ever seen, and now Exchange has broken. Some of the services won't start, they can't get their email, and we can't find their original CDROMs. Hmmmm. There are answers to many of the problems, except one. All of their current email data is bound up in that exchange server. It seems that a broken Exchange must be fixed, if only to get the data out, and once that expense has been gone to, then why not keep what's working, right? Geez, what a racket! I'm open to any ideas (and bear in mind that I'm not an Exchange expert).

I'm irked that after linking to Googlism the other day, they were down for a while. Worse yet, when they came back online, it was with a full-page popup add that hits at the same time as the index page opens. How irksome. Had the site been doing that previously, I might not have linked to it. The googlism output is still fun, though.

Email from Bo Leuf commends to our attention the Digital Technology Users' Declaration of Rights:

In response to the relentless encroachments we are suffering to our right to privacy, and right to freely generate, use and share information, this Declaration of Rights has been written.

Bo further offers that David McNab, author of the document, is welcoming comments in order to make the declaration better. There's an email address at the bottom, although I note no such "invitation" in the document to which I link. I'm sure there's an announcement of this someplace on a site that McNab runs, but I can't find it.

I'd best get rolling, I'm going to be coming home midday to pick up the dog from her first post-surgical visit. She'll be getting the old cast removed, stitches out, and a new cast put on. All of this under anaesthesia, so she'll be groggy and confused much of the day. But I've got work to do between now and then, so I'll see you around.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
November 01, 2002 -    Updates at

Another month gone by, and not much to show for it but less of a tan, and a little more settled into our new digs. Good morning. I had a busy day yesterday, starting off with Sally. Marcia dropped her off in the morning, and according to all reports, Sally wasn't too happy at the prospect. They put her under around mid-morning, cut off the old cast and bandages, took out her stitches, and re-bandaged her. The new dressings allow for some motion, something she's not been used to now for a while. She started waking up around noon, and they let me pick her up before two. Man, I'll tell you, she was ready to go home. She was practially running out the door of the veterinary hospital. For a dog with a freshly bandaged back leg, that's pretty impressive. However, it seems she was in a little pain, from the unaccustomed bending bits, and considerably confused coming up out of even the light anaesthesia. So she was pretty needy yesterday afternoon. I was going to get some real work done, making official use of the wireless card setup. But that didn't work out. Sally's doing much better this morning.

For those living in caves (Okay, caves with connectivity), yesterday was the modern celebration of All Hallow's Even, the night of vigil that preceeds All Saint's Day, this day. Of course, in this incarnation, yesterday is a training camp teaching the young and young of mind about the joys of extortion: Give us candy or we'll trash your yard (aka Trick or Treat). Of course it really wasn't all that bad. We made the acquaintance of perhaps thirty or forty little ghouls, goblins, ghosts and vampires. There was one very insistent little four year old, "I AM Spiderman!", and handed out the larger part of a few pounds of assorted, concentrated, sugar coma. Sally lay at the glass storm door, watching for us, greeting the little ones, and gaining a strong sympathy vote. The action picked up at around 1845, and we closed down before nine.

Wow. Great response yesterday to my plea for help with a borked Exchange server. Thanks go out to Scott Kitterman, Jon Hassell, Gary Berg, Shawn Wallbridge, John Goglick, Robert Bruce Thompson and Mike Garvey (in order of arrival) for all your kind assistance. I'll provide more updates on Tuesday, probably, as I'm off to that site again Monday morning. Our goal is to extract the data from the Exchange install, and get them the hell away from it.

So I decided to try Phoenix. It's a lightweight Moz-based browser that's been getting a lot of buzz in places like Slashdot and Syroidmanor, among other luminary sites. It is fast, but it has a drawback or two for me. First, if I try to start a second instance of the program externally, it doesn't allow that. I can do new windows to my heart's content, but if I type phoenix a second time on the command line, it just fires up the profile manager, and won't permit a second running instance under the same profile. I don't give a rat's ass about profiles, I start a browser, I want another browser window. Make it so.

My second bitch with the program is that when I execute the program with an argument (that is, for instance, phoenix http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/current.html), it should just start up with the specified URL displayed, rather than the default, or home page. Bzzzzzzzzzzzt. Nope, not the way it ships. But this one I was able to squidge. First I traced the execution of the program. When I type phoenix on the command line, /usr/bin/phoenix is what runs. That's just a little executable script that sets an environment variable, then calls /usr/lib/phoenix/phoenix.

That one, too, is a script. One that handles assorted debugging chores that might be passed to it on the command line, then goes forward to execute the actual program, phoenix-bin, in a line that looks like this:

exec "$dist_bin/run-mozilla.sh" $script_args "$dist_bin/$MOZILLA_BIN" "$@"

Where $dist_bin/$MOZILLA_BIN expands to /usr/lib/phoenix/phoenix-bin. Note at the end there that "$@", which should be passing the arguments on to the program. But they never get there. I don't need all the debugging stuff. It either works or it doesn't, in this case. So I wrote this little script, and put it in my ~/.bin directory:

#!/bin/bash
#
#  /home/bilbrey/bin/bphoenix

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/usr/lib/phoenix"

/usr/lib/phoenix/run-mozilla.sh /usr/lib/phoenix/phoenix-bin $@

Now I can use that script to run Phoenix so that I can use it as a preview browser for editing my sites in Bluefish. Yay! ... Ooooops. I'm running late and need to get up to Rockville, which is a longish drive. See you around.

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November 02, 2002 -    Updates at 0945

Good morning. You'll excuse me for a minute while I finish up my timecard for yesterday... there, done! I had fun, learned a few new things, and didn't get out of there until about 1800. It was more than an hour's drive home, too, so I didn't even turn on a computer screen last night. That might account for both the dearth of things to write about here, as well as a rather excessive email inbox for a Saturday morning. All we did last night was watch AFV, followed by a few episodes of Blackadder from tape. Wonderful stuff.

A relative of mine forwarded a link to this article at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/opinion/bookman/2002/092902.html

This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were.

An interesting read. And Donald Kagan replies, "Comparing America to ancient empires is 'ludicrous' " in this article:

http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/opinion/1002/06kagan.html

Earlier this week, Jerry noted that one's opinions must be colored by the position of those one holds in esteem:

And we move inexorably toward war. I must confess that when I see who is against the war it moves me to be for it, just to avoid that kind of company: if people I mostly respect tell me that they find it necessary, and people whose judgment I have little use for on all other issues say we must not do this, I have to rethink my situation.

Those who would hate us for who we are will do so regardless of our reaction. Will an aggressive stance on our part deter them? That I can't foretell. That the President has the authorization of Congress to take what action he deems necessary says to me that what is done is legal by our laws, and therefore deserving of my support. By that I mean that the troops that execute this policy are to be held high for their courage, their willingness to do battle for our ends. This shall not be a situation where the men at the sharp end of the stick are reviled for obeying their orders. In this, we should not repeat the experience of Vietnam, regardless of the success of our formal policies.

I certainly don't mean that I implicitly approve of either war in general or this coming war in particular. I believe war is evil. I also believe that the people who would cause us harm simply for being Americans are also evil, as a group. When one must choose between evils, it becomes necessary to weigh alternatives and take a stand. What I really do find interesting is the assumptions that are made, like this one:

The following is an interesting analysis of why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are so geared up to attack Iraq even though Saddam is weaker now than at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

That was the lead sentence of the email that introduced me to that article from the AJC. Now it takes as fact that "Saddam is weaker now than at the end of the Gulf War". What is the source of that statement? It is used to color all the commentary that follows, and yet it stands without support, stated as fact, not opinion. That irks me greatly.

What worries me most in all of this is that all of the people that know what needs to be known in order to make good decisions are probably lying to us. Those for war slant what they know to encourage their position, and those opposed do the same thing. How the hell am I supposed to find out what's true, so that I can take a stand that my conscience can live with? So I do the best I can with the information I get, and try to whittle a bit of truth here and there out of the loads of crap they dump on us through the Media. Let it be known. I am more for war, than I am for nutcases supported and sheltered by foreign states who would fly airplanes into civilian targets. That much I know.

Happy Saturday. This topic generally hoses my day, I hope yours is better. Later...

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November 03, 2002 -    Updates at 0945

Just another lazy Sunday around the old homestead. Good morning. As you can see at left, Sally is seriously into remaining prone for as long a time as possible. I mean, sure, it's easy to have sympathy for the little doggy that has a bum leg. By this time next year, she'll probably be telling other dogs in the neighborhood that the limp came from her days working on the bomb squad, in between stints as a guide dog for the mildly confused. But don't let that fool you, friends. She was chasing another imaginary rodent in the back yard, and ran... badly. The funny thing in this picture is that she looks like she's seriously far too big for this dog bed. But here she's actually awake, stretched out, and looking for belly-scratch type attention. Usually asleep in her bed she's curled up and looks positively tiny in that bed. Quite amusing, really.

We have another new addition to the computational household around here. It's my early Christmas present: A Sharp Zaurus SL-5500. Here are the standard specs. I've added a D-Link WLAN CF card. It took all of 3 minutes to get the Zaurus online wirelessly with this. Sharp's software includes good setup tools. In the picture at left, you can see that I'm logged into an IRC session with an Opie-IRC client that I downloaded and installed. I also picked up a 64M SD card. There's just one thing missing for the moment: I need a CF memory card - it 's the only way to reflash the ROM, and there's better software out there than comes with the Zaurus by default (at least in the opinion of some): OpenZaurus.

At right, the Zaurus is showing its Applications screen. The stock apps include several items from the Hancom suite, including Word, Sheet and Presenter (all prefixed with "Hancom", of course). There's a PDA version of Opera for browsing, and several PIM apps that I haven't yet explored in much detail. This is a much more capable and accessible device from my perspective than the Agenda was. And the fact that the Zaurus is rechargeable rather than requiring battery changes really rocks! There's boodles of third-party software available - one of the major sites is at www.killefiz.de/zaurus/. Fun is going to be had.

And we've got grocery shopping to do today as well, so I'd best start getting ready. My hair looks slightly... frightening this morning. Clearly it's a bad hair day. Those of you not watching on the webcam were blessed when you missed it.

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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.