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GRAFFITI -- February 24 thru March 02, 2003 >> Latest: Sunday, 0830 EST << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.   About 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   
February 24, 2003 -    Updates at 0725 EST

Good morning. About the redesign. One person yesterday thanked my for pointing him at Richard Feynman sites (see also the button for Sunday). This morning, my inbox carried the message that the brighter Yin-Yang in the logo makes him want to drink Pepsi. Ah, but that's projection, kind sir. Please drink all the lightly caffeinated beverages that you desire, however. If your friends, loved ones and associates determine that you're a bit jumpy, then consult a doctor before stepping up to Jolt or the Mountain Dew products.

I have one more reading to go through on the contract for the new book. There are a couple of hitches in the document, but nothing that can't be worked out, I'm sure. I'll be submitting that back to Studio B for review, incorporation of comments, and then it's back to the publisher to see if what's needed can be done. We should know in a few days.

I told Greg to remind me of this, but then I remembered it on my own. One of the downsides of using encryption for files is the general lack of integration with editing tools. If I have to decrypt a file, edit it, re-encrypt it, then delete the plaintext version, well that's just stupid. I'm prone to forgetting the last step - A safely secured bit of information is useless if there's an easily readable copy around.

Now I can incorporate GnuPG capacities into VIM. Note this isn't anything that I came up with on my own. I've tried a number of recipes in my ~/.vimrc, and none have worked before. Here's what does work:

" Transparent editing of gpg encrypted files.
" By Wouter Hanegraaff <wouter [at] blub [dot] net>
augroup encrypted
    au!

    " First make sure nothing is written to ~/.viminfo while editing
    " an encrypted file.
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg set viminfo=
    " We don't want a swap file, as it writes unencrypted data to disk
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg set noswapfile
    " Switch to binary mode to read the encrypted file
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg set bin
    autocmd BufReadPre,FileReadPre      *.gpg let ch_save = &ch|set ch=2
    autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg '[,']!gpg --decrypt 2> /dev/null
    " Switch to normal mode for editing
    autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg set nobin
    autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg let &ch = ch_save|unlet ch_save
    autocmd BufReadPost,FileReadPost    *.gpg execute ":doautocmd BufReadPost " . expand("%:r")

    " Convert all text to encrypted text before writing
    autocmd BufWritePre,FileWritePre    *.gpg   '[,']!gpg --default-recipient-self -ae 2>/dev/null
    " Undo the encryption so we are back in the normal text, directly
    " after the file has been written.
    autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost    *.gpg   u
augroup END

Just cut that block of code above, paste it into the .vimrc file in your home directory (or create that file if it doesn't exist, neh?), and save it. If you've previously configured GnuPG, you're good to go. On opening an encrypted file, it prompts for the passphrase, then opens the file. When you save the file, it is re-encrypted.. If you create a new file, and save it with a .gpg extension, then it is encrypted transparently.

OK, that's done, now I need to get to work. See you around!

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
February 25, 2003 -    Updates at 0700

Good morning. Dave Wootten writes in again...

From: Dave Wootten
Subject: Re: (no subject)
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 20:48:35 -0600

Really. It does...

"Brian P. Bilbrey" wrote:
> Heh.
>
> .b
>
> On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 00:31, Dave Wootten wrote:
> > Your new heading makes me want to go get a Pepsi....

And he provided artwork as proof:

I will note that the word Pepsi, and something that closely resembles the ovoid shape immediately above with those colors and that pattern (but rotated) are trademarks of PepsiCo, Inc. They are used by Dave Wootten, a neighbor of the Pirhana brothers, to build a parody of my new Logo design. If I were to complain too strenuously, then Dave would probably borrow Dinsdale's pnuematic nailer, and nail my head to the floor. No disrespect for the fine caffeinated products of PepsiCo, Inc. is intended. If this reads like sucking up, well, by gum, it is. Maybe they'll send me a few cases of sugar/stimulant drink for my craven yet pusillanimous attitude.

And Roland Dobbins asks about Movable Type (MT):

From: Roland Dobbins <email elided>
Subject: MT?
Date: 24 Feb 2003 05:47:26 -0800

So, what do you think?

--
---------------------------------------------------------
Roland Dobbins

Well, I'm not unhappy about the interface. The product seems stable, and once I got through the annoyingly *almost right* installation documentation, and made things work with suExec, then it went pretty smoothly. . . . I would want to spend more time with the assorted customizing interfaces, just so that I could give end users on Rocket a hand, if required. Would I want to use this? No, I think not. There's very little that I'm not comfortable doing in my current format. Comments are nice, but then, I'm not a fan of push-down blogs. I really do prefer the week at a time, chronologically ordered pages.

And finally for the correspondence portion of today's programming, Svenson noted that the thing last week about Ross Perot and taking the French to War was found on http://www.jokeaday.com/, and that it would be nice if I gave them the credit. Consider it done! He also comments on the new design:

<quote Sunday>
...Dan Bowman implied that I was trying to give him a stroke - ....
</quote>

But you didn't succeed ....

I like it. With the previous one there was sort of a discontinuity between the header and the rest. especially the blue on the left started to go downward but then stopped as if reconsiddering. This one look much more harmoneous and finished.

Good job.

Thanks! Now to work with me. I got the book contract comments back to Studio B late last night, and did some remote server updates for a NERDS client (easiest done outside of business hours, eh?). Overall, things are going well, if only my right ear wouldn't keep flaring back up on me. It can't have done things much good, to spend as much time out in the cold shovelling as I did last week. But who had a choice in the matter? Ah, well, funny thing life is, ya know? Take it easy!

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
February 26, 2003 -    Updates at 0715

Hullo. I see from the re-arranging that I've had to do that while I put up the Tuesday post, I didn't update the link at the top of the page. Normally I do that at the start of my editing run, and make a guess about when I'm going to finish writing. But yesterday for some reason, I decided to do the clerical work at the end. I became distracted, and simply published without those fiddley bits correct. So sorry.

The snow has started up again, with about half an inch on the ground already. This wasn't supposed to start until midday, or this evening. The expert forecasters are now casting the chicken entrails and coming up with 4 to 8 inches over the next 36 hours. That ain't chopped liver, and may kybosh our plans to drive out to Sterling today for an installation.

And the sound of the bells that I just heard was the phone, cancelling that run for this week. With snow today and tomorrow, and another client scheduled for Friday, we're now into Monday or Thursday of next week. Wheeeeee! Coming into this batch, we're already 20 inches over seasonal average for snow. Maybe I should go out and buy that snow blower right now?

Well, I have a couple of days here, let's see what trouble I can get into... Have a fun day, OK?

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
February 27, 2003 -    Updates at 0830

Good morning. The snow was both less and more of a pain in the ass yesterday than expected. It was less in that is was, well, less. Less snow fell than prognosticated. More in that the temperatures kept conditions pretty icy, and a skim coat of light snow over an ice base is not the recipe for a good driving surface, as evidenced by some of the terrible accidents on the roads yesterday. Now today, there's supposed to be snow all day, slowly getting heavier, and dropping 6 to 8 inches by tomorrow morning, then slowly tapering off by tomorrow afternoon. Then this storm will bail out to make room for Saturday's expected minor flurries and rain. "You're going to like living in a place with four whole seasons, Brian, really you are. It's so pretty in the Spring and especially the Fall." Mmmm, heh.

I took advantage of being house-bound yesterday to really clean the house. There's still a few bits to do, a shower stall to scour, and the kitchen counters and appliances need a good going over, but the rest of the house really sparkles now. The downside is that I over-did it by just a little bit, and my ears are a bit whacked. As I described to someone yesterday, it's like have one sinus infection in each ear, instead of behind the eyes. It's not really an infection, as such, but the pressure is pretty intense. The doc has me on Emtex, a strong 12 hour decongestant/expectorant combination. Eventually that should help everything drain. I thought that staying busy and shaking things up a bit would be a help, but apparently not.

Marcia's ventured off to work in the Santa Fe (an SUV). I'd perhaps go to Rockville today, but the doppler radars in the area show a bunch of snow falling all around, and I really don't feel like getting trapped up there 40 miles from home in the little, light car. So I'll do a little light systems work here, and have a look at email clients.

Bob Thompson's experience with Evolution has been less than stellar. Mine, on the other hand, has been really quite good. There were some hinks along the way - for a while the 1.2.[0,1] versions were dying on some types of attachment. But I kept the older version on the laptop for just such occasions. Now I'm up to 1.2.2, and it's really quite solid. I was only half joking with Greg last night that now it's stable - I need to change to a new mail client. I'll tell you what the REAL downside of Evolution is for me. I can't globally search all the messages, so far as I can tell. I can search within each message folder, but not across the whole message store. That sucks, especially when I put something in the wrong folder and can't remember what I was thinking at the time that made me put it away.

Additionally, I have ... issues with how I am currently using Evolution. I can't really run Evo nicely over a remote link (that is, ssh into this box, then run Evolution from here, with the display exported to the remote box). So instead I keep synchronized copies of my email folders on both Goldfinger (workstation) and Gryphon (laptop). That has an upside - the low probability of losing very much data. The downside is that it isn't automated - I have to type something to sync out in the morning, and sync in, in the evening. I may need to figure out a new system if I stick with a GUI mail client like Evolution. There are other choices, of course.

I certainly could use a text-based email client (also referred to as a Mail User Agent, or MUA) such as Mutt. That's light and easy to run over a remote link. Mutt rocks, and you can spec your own favorite editor to use for messages - from vi to nano to... well, Emacs, I suppose. I've used Mutt off and on for several years now. The reason that I don't often use it much anymore is that I'm rather wedded to the three-pane view of most GUI mail clients. That in itself is another reason to make the move - break that GUI addiction.

There are other options, of course. I could use fetchmail to pull down everything from other servers, and run an IMAP store here. Then the data would be secured, and I could access it via ssh tunnel with whatever client I chose, when working remotely. Mmmmmm. That, in combination with an OpenLDAP store that I could use for cross-client, cross-platform address book data, might be pretty interesting. We'll see.

Now on with my day. I hope your's goes well, too.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
February 28, 2003 -    Updates at 0745

Good morning. Well, I stayed home, in and quiet for the day yesterday. These stinking ears hurt like the devil most of the day, lots of crackling and popping and odd pressures - I figured I was either going to get better or go deaf. Fortunately, it seems to be the former. I can currently hear more clearly in both ears than yesterday, and the pressure and pain are considerably reduced. I guess the stuff I'm taking that's supposed to be helping them drain is finally working. Wooo Hooo!!!

On tap for today, well, it's still snowing, but we've got an important client meeting up in Rockville. Since Marcia's working from home, I've shoveled out the 3-4 inches in the driveway (and on the sidewalks, for any kids wandering about), and I'll take the Santa Fe out on the roads, slowly, slowly.

Our weekly local LUG meeting was cancelled last night due to snow, so I quickly setup an IRC server and announced a virtual meeting. It was frightfully well attended, with three of us plus an infobot called gbot. Among many other things, we talked about a program called partimage (http://www.partimage.org) This is a tool for, duh, making image files directly from partitions. You can run it against a running filesystem (although I'd imagine it best to do it against an unmounted partition), compress and split the images (into CDR size chunks, for example), and even run the images out across the network via an ssl-encrypted tunnel to a partimaged daemon running on a backup server someplace. I ran it against the root partition of Goldfinger here while we were talking about it. That's a 10 gig partition, about 6 gig used. It took 20 minutes to make the image, gzipped down to just over 3 gig. At a greater expense in time, it will use bzip2, as well. Yes, you might say this is ghost for Linux or anything else, as you can backup everything from the partition table, extended partition table, and all partitions. It handles many filesystem - check it out.

OK, I've mostly stopped sweating, so let me jump in the shower and venture out onto the roads. Wish me luck.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
March 01, 2003 -    Updates at 0900

Hullo. Yesterday's drive was fine. I spent a fair amount of time tapping on my brakes to back off the tailgaters, but other than that, the roads were remarkably empty and fast-moving - no icing to speak of. As I drove north, the falling snow got heavier and heavier. At one point we slowed to a crawl when visibility dropped to just a couple hundred yards, but that flurry passed and the pace picked up again. The meeting was good, and I helped out with a couple of little problems onsite, to do with a machine that dies enough to be worriesome, but with an utter lack of regularity and no external precursors (I've got a tcpdump logging box riding on a mirrored port on the switch to see if there are any interesting events leading up to the death - there haven't been).

My ears are finally improving. I slept through most of the night for the first time in ... well, too long a time. We're going to do our major shopping today, as Marcia's going to work at the sewing place tomorrow - she's picked up this new gig so that she can have the opportunity to start teaching quilting classes.

I have to spend some time reading through the publisher's return comments on my various reactions to the offered contract. He made a good point - for this to work, we have to trust each other. But if I think it's a bad contract, then that's not going to happen. Then, sure it might be a good deal, or it might not - but if I'm going to assume what I consider to be an inordinate amount of risk, then the deal's not going to happen. Stay tuned.

OK, I've got nothing else of interest in this still-just-waking-up little mind, so I'll let you off to enjoy your weekend. Oh, I almost forgot! I sent Mat Lemmings a ping the other day, just because I hadn't heard from him in such a long time, and he's not posted since January 2. He's busy, busy, busy, but doing well by all reports. There's birthday's in the offing, and continued broken bits on their assorted vehicles (what a shocker!), and money to spend for Pathfinders, if only they can decide what to do. There, that ends this edition of the Lemmings report. Now you're dismissed. Have a lovely day.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY   
March 02, 2003 -    Updates at 0830

Good morning. A few days back, I was at Sam's. Sam is a NERDS Group client, a nice guy with more techno-toys than you can shake a stick at. As I started working on his system, I picked up this oddly shaped wireless mouse that he had laying on his desk. I noted that it was slickly designed, but rather small to the hand. He said yeah, let me show you...

And so he showed me. This is not just a wireless mouse. It's a freesytle wireless mouse. On a desk surface, it detects that it's there with a small led/photodetector on the front of the beastie, and runs like a standard (if slighly undersized) optical mouse. Great sensitivity, though. But when you pick it up, and click the button underneath, the motion detection circuits allow it to continue to mouse about the screen. You can see the motion-latching button just peeking from under my index finger in this shot to the left. Click and hold to move, release to stop movement, or I can double click to latch it, and freeform motion without having to depress the button is possible.

This is the Gyration Ultra (http://www.gyration.com) and it took a few days to sink in just what I had held in my hand, then I had to have one. It took a bit of hunting, because at the time, I hadn't paid attention to the manufacturer - after all, I was working and on the clock - at that point, it was just another of Sam's cool toys. A look round at Best Buy found me nothing. So I started searching online, looking for wireless mice that looked like the wee beastie that did what I wanted. I found them online, then found they were in stock at the Staples down the road.

From the perspective of the computer, it looks just like any other USB mouse, although I had to plug the wireless base unit into a port directly on the computer. It didn't seem to work hanging off a hub. So the Gyration works fine in Linux without any hinks at all, as I already had the system configured to recognize USB mice. . Win2K had to go through a few driver loads and MS certificate signings, and it wanted to reboot to use the mouse, but that OS got there too. It's more sensitive, motion-wise, than the MS Optical that I've been using. I'm still tweaking the mouse motion and acceleration settings properly.

Through a website called FranceStinks.com, I ran across a reference to an article by Alistair Cooke for the BBC News.The article is entitled "Appeasing Hitler and Saddam", where he reminisces about the English and French appeasement of Hitler in the 1930's. As he notes in the article...

...The rest of it, within months, Hitler walked in and conquered. "Oh dear," said Mr. Chamberlain, thunderstruck. "He has betrayed my trust."

During the last fortnight a simple but startling thought occurred to me -- every single official, diplomat, president, prime minister involved in the Iraq debate was in 1938 a toddler, most of them unborn. So the dreadful scene I've just drawn will not have been remembered by most listeners....

I am certain that war is an dangerous and frightening thing to wage, uncertain in it's outcome, yet generally acknowleged to be harmful. Hell, there's probably even a Surgeon General's Warning against the whole practice. But I agree with several commentators, that we ARE at war already - it has been declared against us, against America, by persons, parties, and nations. It was declared first at the bombing of the World Trade Center. It was made frightfully clear when they took commercial jets and flew them into our cities as weapons, killing thousands. We call them terrorists because they fly no flag. Yet the vast majority of their support comes from nations that we can clearly identify.

I think that we don't yet have the spine necessary to go after some of the most heinous terrorists. Saudi's were the majority of individuals who executed the attack on September 11, 2001. Al Queda is run by a Saud who may be dead, one Osama bin Laden. The money trail leads back to Saudi Arabia though, where we've been able to identify it. Make no mistake - these are not nice people, these are not good people. They prevent school girls from escaping a burning building because they are not properly dressed, resulting in many needless deaths. They are not our friends - none of OPEC is. They work to dance our economy on strings through the idiocy of our dependency on foreign oil.

I don't fear war nearly so much as I fear what we are likely to do. Slap these bastards on the wrist again, and tell them that they really should stop. We'll probably spend 50-70 billion dollars executing a military action in Iraq. This cost will largely be borne by the US, because most of our prior allies are spineless weasels. Then, instead of doing the right thing - taking over the oil fields of Iraq and using them to pay for the action that was necessary, we'll instead spend another hundred billion of OUR MONEY rebuilding the place into the sort of land that the Left and the Green think it should be - a vomitous place that will breed even more young terrorists.

And to do all this, we're going to what? Oh, right, give up even more of our civil and constitutional rights??? Read this. Read about the Patriot Act v.2. Decide where the priorities of our government really are. Then start thinking about looking around the world and trying to determine if there's ANY safe, sane place left.

Oh, and happy Sunday.

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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 © 1999-2003 Brian P. Bilbrey.