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GRAFFITI -- April 14 thru April 20, 2003>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week 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.. |
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April 14, 2003 - Updates at 0730 EST
Good morning. That was a productive weekend, with plants in the ground, the lawns mowed, a bit of house cleaning done, and other chores to boot. The mowing of the laws is a bitter-sweet thing. It's rather like a man with a balding spot doing a comb-over. It's not how the end result looks, it's that he made an effort. I feel the same way about these yards. They're not ours, so I'm not spending real money on them, but the lawns are as much weed as grass. But mown looks much nicer than not. So I mow.
The taxes are done and going into the post box today. For the first time since we got married, we have a gross gain, rather than a loss. That's not a net gain, as it was eaten by the preparation fees, but it's far better than the mid-four figures we've owed the last several years due to ... um, bad planning on our parts. So we're getting better, eh?
There really is no other news to speak of, at least not news from here. We have rescued soldiers coming home, order starts to descend on Iraq, and the administration appears to be setting its sights on Syria. I'm not hugely surprised - after all, shortly after 911, the George said that those who harbor, aid or abet shall also be held guilty. Next to the Saudis, I would put Syria pretty high on that list. But I hope he knows what he's getting into...
I have a day in Annapolis today, then a light week ahead. That's good as I need to get both vehicles their 7500 mile checkups. More as events warrant. Have a great day and Go USA!!!
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April 15, 2003 - Updates at 0710
Tax Day for the USA. Oh joy, oh rapture. 'nuff said...
Good morning. There are a few changes going on around here. First off, I'm back to running in Fluxbox again. There are parts of KDE that I really, really am comfortable with. Those appear, on deeper inspection, to be features that I grew used to while using MS Windows. That in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when some parts of the interface work in a way that's expected, then all the other bits should too, neh? No, well, of course not. But the muscle memory works that way. I'll give you another good example of this in a moment.
Fluxbox is light, fluid, easily customizable, overall a really sweet window manager and the one I keep coming back to when I retreat from the feature-overload of the heavier desktop environments. At left is a grab of the desktop, the linked image file is reduced to 1024x768 to keep the download size from killing all you dialup folks out there (although it's still heavy at 155K). You can tell it's my desktop because it's all about me, heh. Yes, the webcam is working again, too. I never did get it running in the 2.5.66 kernel. I'm back to 2.4.20 for the time being, too. Other apps running in that desktop include gkrellm (a monitoring app) in the lower right, Xchat in the lower left, just after a massive netsplit in the #Gentoo channel on Freenode, and Jedit smack in the middle, editing the first parts of this post. The background image is culled from the Sandia Labs photo making the rounds - Fusion for fun and eventual profit. Thanks to Dan Seto for that link.
That's the other big change. For the first time in about three years, I'm not using Bluefish for my day-to-day html compositions. The latest versions, replete with GTK-2 crap, have made the program a real nightmare to work with. Stuff that worked before for me doesn't anymore. A few of the broken bits from the 0.7x series are fixed, but the cost in useability for me is just too high. So the other day, I gave Quanta another shot. That was an even worst mistake. It reformats my entire text file for me. BAH! I try to keep things pretty organized in this HTML, so that it's easy for me to orient myself, make updates quickly and easily without having to think too much about layout.
Jedit doesn't have some of the dedicated HTML features that I've gotten used to using, but just plain typing works quite well, thank you. In Jedit I have tag completion thanks to the XML plugin, and there's more to learn. But even as a Java application, it is simply miles faster than the new Bluefish, and it looks nicer too. I'll have more questions and reading to do, to customize it to meet my needs, but waiting is...
Hmmm. Carrier battle groups leaving the gulf... I guess that pretty well lays to rest the rumors floating about regarding the George's ambitions for the rest of the Middle East. No matter whether or not it would be advisable, the George hasn't got the stomach for all that. Besides, the rest of the world flatly would freak if they thought that the George would have control over a significant fraction of the world's oil. But seriously, you don't have carrier groups leaving the vicinity if you were planning on further action. Really. It'll be OK, Mister Shitrack. Oh, did I mis-pronounce that French prick's name again? Sigh, I'll never get it right. Yes, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld are "warning" Syria. Syria should pay attention.
Doc Searls pointed me at the site of one of my old DJ's, Rick Stuart. That link takes you down a bit into his site, wherein he describes one of the key differences between his current gig at KFOG and his prior station, KITS...
The saving grace of [KITS] (money and ratings) was Howard Stern on the morning show. The rest of the day was filled with music from about a 150 song library. I counted... But now I am at KFOG. I have no idea how many songs are in our library. Thousands. Maybe 5 or 10 thousand who knows.
Big Rick was Marcia's least favorite DJ at KFOG. Me, I figured that he had come up out of the pressure cooker and needed a few years to decompress before he'd mellow into a proper KFOG style. But I liked him alright, and really enjoyed his glee with the incredible selection of music available to jocks at the station. Now, of course, I don't get to listen to KFOG much, being on the wrong coast and all. KFOG does still webcast, unlike many stations, and their listener base is worldwide. But the webcasting is browser-embedded, and I can only make it work sometimes under Linux. I dunno what I do right (or wrong) there.
Today I have the oil to get changed in the Santa Fe. I got the Elantra done yesterday. Then I'm off to a customer site to migrate their offsite backup scheme from tape to external hard drive. Their data outgrew their tape solution, and needing to swap tapes to complete a single backup means that the ball gets dropped. This way either I or the owner can just carry a disk around, and when in the office, pop it onto a system and pull the latest full and differential images off of the Snap Server. So I'll be there for a couple of hours, then back home to do a few more chores, and I'll also try to figure out why network profiles come so close to being right on Red Hat 9, yet suck so very profoundly because they're horked. Maybe I should try to find more documentation on the feature, eh? You have a great day, and I'll do the same. Go USA!!!
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April 16, 2003 - Updates at 0723
Howdy. Welcome to hump day. Or post-tax-de-stress day, or whatever floats your particular dingy. As I noted in this recent post to Linuxmuse, my boat is currently floating with Opera 7.1 Beta for a browser. I find myself becoming somewhat enamored of mouse gestures. I only know one so far, but with gestures, tabbed windows finally start to make sense. Wow. I'm told that there are gestures interfaces available for other browsers, but they haven't been flaunted in my face the way Opera did.
It's funny really, but I did something, I don't know what, in Opera and up popped a dialog box. Shades of undying Clippy!!! But the question can be paraphrased as "You just used a mouse gesture for the first time, do you want to enable these or learn how to use them?" Sure, sez I. And I read, and I've forgotten most of what I read the first pass through. Yes, yes, I'll go back and finish re-reading shortly.
Yesterday, I managed to complete most of the tasks I set for myself. The Santa Fe got its oil changed, customer backups are working alright (although there's more work to do there), the rest of the house is cleaned and I did the laundry. A long day, really. I spent some time on the horn to California, doing remote training on PCB design, with the phone in my hand and VNC running a desktop in Fremont. When technology works right, it really is a joy, you know?
Another joy is Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, by JSB. There is no finer. I mean, I get carried away by Mozart, Beethoven, Clapton, Santana, B. B. King, and many others. But that organ music rocks my deep soul. In other very excellent good news, Dr. Moshe Bar, CTO of Qlusters, Project Leader for Open Mosix (and in my best smarmy Eric Idle lounge host voice) a close, personal friend, has bought a new motorbike and announced the event on his restored and freshly blogified website, http://www.moelabs.com/blog/html/. Way to go, Moshe!
From my open office window, I heard the voices of young men (although perhaps older male children would be a more apt description). "It's my shopping cart, I stole it so it's mine." This I had to see, if I could. Something stupid was about to happen, and I was going to get a ringside seat. I looked out the window. Up the hill and kitty-corner to our property, there were two boys, apparently just having finished a vigorous tug-of-war over possession of the shopping cart. The smaller boy, clear loser in the cart sweepstakes, bent down and picked up a orange construction cone, one of the extra large freeway-sized ones.
There may have been further direction given, but I heard none of it. A mostly silent movie with audio effects became my entertainment. The smaller one and his cone climbed into the card. The boy put the cone on his head, and shoulders - it was really quite a large cone. Then the larger boy started pushing the cart around in the back yard and whanging into things. This I could hear. Then he pushed the cart out around the side of the house... Oh, no... Oh, yes! I saw, between the houses, the cart with coned child rolling with increasing speed down the street. The child who provided the initial impetus was not to be seen. As the cart passed between the first two houses, I saw a flash of orange and silver, and heard a muffled HEY over the clattering wheels. Between the second and third houses, just a glimpse. Then nothing.
I have to assume (since I saw the same two later that evening) that nothing terrible happened this time. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Clearly, parents are working while the kids are home for Easter break. However, I didn't even consider passing the word along. Some genes just aren't meant to be given to future generations. So if they survive, these kids will probably grow up to make movies like Dumbest and Dumbester part 75. One can only hope for the tragic alternative.
Now it's time to get to work. I've got remote updates to do on a client box with Larry, at the office. Then I'm off to another site to do some training for a few new mailman lists that we've created to replace Majordomo running on a RaQ XLT. Fun stuff, eh? Take it easy, Go USA!!!
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April 17, 2003 - Updates at 0700
Short post today... good morning. Tom appears to be off the air at the moment - Storms or something, no doubt. For roving networking with Gryphon the Sony Laptop and profiles, well, Red Hat's profile scheme is vile, and doesn't work well. Either that or it's so poorly documented, and so easy to setup wrong, that it doesn't work well. Comes to the same thing, really. So I've got most of the way through to setting up my own profiling system, embedded into the boot process where theirs once was. Everything except DHCP works, so I'll have to see what's up with that soon. Now off to Rockville with me, right after I finish this coffee and get the recycling out to the curb. There's not enough trash today to bother with that. Have a fun day, and Go USA!!!
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April 18, 2003 - Updates at 0709
Good morning. Once again, I missed the weekly Laurel Linux LUG meeting. I don't even get home until minutes before the meeting starts at 7. Then by the time I've fed the dog and myself, it's been running for an hour, and I'm still a 20 minute drive away. I feel badly, because it's a small group with lots of potential, and I'm sure I could contribute. But I'm just plain busy. Even with Marcia dropping the after-hours sales gig, I'm still likely not to have the time and energy, 5 weeks out of 6, and that's a darned shame. But by Thursday night, I'm usually pretty whacked anyway - I put my heart into my work, you know...
Happy Friday, by the way. I'm glad, too - it's been a lo-oong week, but productive. We were supposed to be smack in the middle of a four day downpour by now, but it's been downgraded to drizzle today, and dismal the balance of the time. At that, it's still better than the late blizzard that Syroid and company have got themselves stuck in. My guess is that Tom and Leah are going to try to wrangle a way to move to... oh, say, Arizona, or potentially that Kalahari. Someplace known for dry warmth through most of the year. And I'm quite glad for the rain - what little there is, is knocking down our astronomical pollen counts. If I weren't already on a daily anti-histamine, I think my head would have exploded by now.
I'm continuing to tweak my home-brewed network profiles solution on Gryphon. I've not found a satisfactory answer to doing DHCP, but I can select from an assortment of static IP profiles at boot time, quickly and happily. And with networking actually configured properly, the system is much more responsive than when I was trying to make the RH supplied profile tools work right. Did you know that they have a tool that REQUIRES X to run properly, and the official documentation says NOT to edit the files in the /etc/sysconfig/... tree manually. Bah! So I blew right past all that and did my own. Once I'm happy with it, I'll post all my work on LinuxMuse.
At the customer site yesterday, I started installing Gentoo Linux, yes, the brand-new 1.4 rc4 release, on a Toshiba 790 CDT laptop, with a PII-233, 96 meg of RAM and a whopping 4 gig drive. The excellent news is that by booting with "800 dopcmcia" it not only used the display properly, but brought up the pcmcia card, recognized it and had it ready for network configuration. It's only a 10 megabit card, but that's still faster than the three bonded T1's that the customer uses to connect to the greater world. Because we started the box out with a Stage One build this evening before I left, it should be late next week before KDE is finally built and installed. Hell, Mozilla by itself might take a week.
Alright, I'd best hit the road. Have a great day - Go USA!!!
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April 19, 2003 - Updates at 1117
Good morning, yet. I know, I was awake enough at about 6:41 to get up. But I didn't. I've been running lower and lower on available resources over the last couple of weeks, and it makes sense to recharge the batteries every once in a while. So Marcia got up for a few minutes, then came back to bed, and we didn't get up until about 10:30 or so. Very nice, really.
I'm building a fresh Gentoo install on the front-end of Gryphon. The stage one and two builds ran overnight and right now I'm configuring a hot kernel for use with the laptop. More later. I'm considering leaving KDE out of the equation entirely. We'll see. I'd best get back to it, so I'll see you later. As you can see from the top right of this page, the WebCam is back up and operational. Wooo. Now to work with me... Go USA!!!
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April 20, 2003 - Updates at 1000
Good morning and a pleasant Easter celebration to you all. I was remiss in leaving Passover out, but then I was raised in a Catholic family. There's one set of religious holidays that I don't (usually) have much trouble remembering ... Samhain, Beltane... oh, wait. Wrong life. Heh. But anyway, enjoy this beautiful Sunday, where ever you are.
Maria Sklodowska-Curie is today's guest head. Follow this link to learn more about her. Early worker in radiation, discoverer of radioactive elements and the winner of the Nobel Prize ... twice. She was also the inventor of the little-heralded glow-in-the-dark chocolate Easter Bunny (just a pinch of radium dust, kids). Or was that... Oh, sorry, wrong universe, this time.
Okay, since I can't seem to be serious, here's some old Easter humor that arrived from our friend Nathan and got to me via my lovely Marcia:
Three blondes died and are at the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter tells them that they can enter the gates if they can answer one simple question.
St. Peter asks the first blonde, "What is Easter?"
The blonde replies, "Oh, that's easy! It's the holiday in November when everyone gets together, eats turkey, and are thankful..."
"Wrong!" replies St. Peter, and proceeds to ask the second blonde the same question, "What is Easter?"
The second blonde replies, "Easter is the holiday in December when we put up a nice tree, exchange presents, and celebrate the birth of Jesus."
St. Peter looks at the second blonde, shakes his head in disgust, tells her she's wrong, and then peers over his glasses at the third blonde and asks, "What is Easter?"
The third blonde smiles confidently and looks St. Peter in the eyes, "I know what Easter is."
"Oh?" says St. Peter, incredulously.
"Easter is the Christian holiday that coincides with the Jewish celebration of Passover. Jesus and his disciples were eating at the last supper and Jesus was later deceived and turned over to the Romans by one of his disciples. The Romans took him to be crucified and he was stabbed in the side, made to wear a crown of thorns, and was hung on a cross with nails through his hands. He was buried in a nearby cave which was sealed off by a large boulder."
St. Peter smiles broadly with delight.
The third blonde continues, "Every year the boulder is moved aside so that Jesus can come out... and, if he sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter."
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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.
