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GRAFFITI -- May 05 thru May 11, 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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May 05, 2003 - Updates at 0715 EST
Good morning. Today some of us celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a holiday to commemorate the defeat of an invading French army by a severely outnumbered Mexican force, back in 1862. Some claim that the defeat of the French in Mexico also sounded the end of major French support for the Confederate States, which made it possible for the Union armies ultimately to prevail, preserving the Union. That's almost a connection worthy of James Burke, as there was plenty of American coastline through which to provide military supplies to the Confederates. But perhaps Napoleon III just lost his taste for the New World after tasting defeat at the hands of the Mexicans. This isn't an official American holiday, but it is celebrated in many places. Of course, this year, it won't be at the White House, since the Mexican government saw fit not to support the US in the recent conflict, nor in the UN. Such is life, I'm sure that we can survive without George and Laura roasting a goat in an open pit in the South Lawn, or blindfolded and swinging at a piñata.
How was your weekend? Ours was productive. Yesterday I did the weekly comb-over lawn work and we got the shopping done. Saturday I posted that Red Hat 9 article on LinuxMuse. Marcia made a fair amount of progress on a new quilt. And Sally's doing pretty well following her stroke, so life is good, it appears. Oh, hey, you'll like this one...
At the client site on Friday, Mike brought this to our attention, one of the 2 cent Tips, linked here at the TLDP site. Here's the key bits from the bottom of the tip:
It looks almost certain at this point that Microsoft's "security updates" are changing NIC configuration eeproms. And, of course, Microsoft knows not to use the bad configuration and works fine with the change, but another OS like Linux that trusts that the configuration in the eeprom is what the manufacturer or user wants fails. I've found several other users that have been trying to figure out what happened, why their CD used to work fine but now fails on the same system. We all accepted Microsoft "security updates". We are now trying to get a test done with some networking tools that can watch the content of the eeprom and catch when it changes, so I expect to have evidence to support this soon.
I'm pretty sure it can - I know a dyed-in-the-wool linuxer who currently has to consider his happy little Orinoco family wireless pcmcia card a piece of junk because a "helpful" Microsoft update has put it into a state that Linux and BSD tools don't seem to be able to get it out of. Of course it works fone in the other OS. Grrr. -- Heather
Now, is this going to be borne out? I don't know, but I'm watching with interest for the people who have the ability to test these things to get to the bottom of it and report back. That's certainly not what I would call "playing fair" - MS breaking things so that other software wouldn't work has been done before, though. We'll see... Certainly I can recommend reading Linux Gazette regularly to anyone who uses or is interested in Linux. I know a number of the people in that gang, they're good, bright and helpful. When their main site www.linuxgazette.com is down, you can always use the LG mirror on TLDP
I'd best get the trash out to the curb and get myself on the road. I've got a half-day at each of two client sites planned, so I'd better be rolling. See you around.
A fortune for today...
"Ah, you know the type. They like to blame it all on the Jews or the Blacks, 'cause if they couldn't, they'd have to wake up to the fact that life's one big,scary, glorious, complex and ultimately unfathomable crapshoot -- and the only reason THEY can't seem to keep up is they're a bunch of misfits and losers."
-- an analysis of neo-Nazis and such, Badger comics
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May 06, 2003 - Updates at 0715
Hello. After my shower, I wandered in here to check email and put up this brief post. But the screen is unresponsive, and there's a bad noise coming from the box. A fan failing kind of noise. Now I'm running a dual Athlon box here. The wrong fan failing can let the magic blue smoke out of all the important bits at once. So I pulled the box down out of it's cubby and popped the lid. I hear the noise, it's not a case fan, it's not the PS fans... nope, it's not the graphics card fan. That leaves one of the CPU fans. Sigh. This isn't good.
So I brought down the box, and touched each fan while they were spinning down. Yep, the rear CPU fan was the culprit. The question is, is the CPU fried, or just the fan. When everything spun to a stop, I saw the problem. The sticky label in the center of the fan had slid off-center and was unbalancing things as well as blocking airflow. The corresponding label on the other CPU fan was plain off, sitting in the bottom of the box. So I extracted the label from the vane section, and fired the box up. Whew - I am a lucky boy.
Yesterday went well. Just about everything I attempted worked as advertised, so that's a good thing. Today we'll be looking into a Bugzilla implementation at a client site, along with a PHP installation on a Sun E450 / Solaris 8. Should be fun. I suppose I'd best be going. Have a lovely day. Oh, here's a note from Svenson on the joys of MS Windows altering hardware (reference yesterday's post, here)...
From: Jan Swijsen To: [email protected] Subject: Linux/2 Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 10:30:51 +0200 <quote> ...MS breaking things so that other software wouldn't work has been done before, though.... </quote> Sure has. In exactly the same way even. I remember, early eighties, I had OS/2 (first Warp version) dualbooting with DrDOS on my second ever computer. I had painstakingly set up OS/2 to network with my older DOS+OS/2 box (Win95 never wanted to intsall on that). Well, it was the first time I got two computers talking a nd sharing, big victory for me. Weeks after that success I installed Win95. And My network stoped working under OS/2. Turned out the Win95 installation had found the network card and changed it, putting it on an other IRQ (was fixed in the BIOS setup for OS/2), and changing it's address ranges. And probably changing it's eeproms too for all I know. Weeks later and after reinstalling OS/2 I got my network back But I have never been comfortable installing any Win version ever since. Regards, Svenson.
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May 07, 2003 - Updates at 1130 & 2130
Good morning and welcome to Hump Day. There's lots to do and little time. First off, I came home to eventually find that Goldfinger the dual-Athlon box was locked up again. It's the Nvidia drivers, the Nvidia card, and my SMP setup working against me again. So I've removed Nvidia from the equation. That board will run great in Marcia's box, and improve her video performance dramatically, since she's currently only using the Intel 810 video built onto her motherboard. For this box, I went and picked up a Radeon 9700. Yeah, one step down from the leading edge saved about 150 bucks.
It turns out that installing in Linux was a breeze. I ran an XFree86 --configure, then copied the "Device" section from the new file into my old one that has all my pointer devices configured in. Poof, done. The card comes up sharp and pretty in Linux...
Ch-ch-ch-anges... And smack in the middle of all that, the system started going wonky on me again. Pftui. That's what I have to say about that. So I installed, updated, and tweaked up Red Hat 9 on this box in the last couple of hours. Not exactly what I was planning on doing this morning, but then I've reached the point where I want to WORK on projects, not the tools to work on the projects. Not right now. Yes, there were many options, and I could have possibly blown the day figuring out why all of a sudden applications were loading like molasses, but I've done with that. RH9 has been plain stable for me on the road with Gryphon, so I see no reason not to emulate that success on the desktop.
The next little project is to puzzle my way through getting the accellerated X features of this new graphics card working under Red Hat. I was just about to start that under Gentoo when whatever it was went sour. More later, see you then
2130 - And it's later, by gum. I've been a busy beaver. After getting Red Hat up and situated in short order this morning, I spent a while bringing Windows 2000 back to life in such a manner as to recognize the new video card. Whereas that took a grand total of about 5 minutes under Gentoo last night, Windows just plain hated me. I followed the directions and when I was done, I couldn't load the driver, nor could I make the system believe that it was running the card with vga.sys, even though clearly it was (or I wouldn't have been seeing anything)... Bah! So the short form is that when all was said and done, I simply reinstalled Windows this morning. Well, I tried, but it wouldn't work. I finally had to blow away the old partition, and create a new one of different size to make everyone happy. No, there's no real data in that Windows setup. Just games.
Now I've got another test or two to do, then I'll be ready for bed. Oh, hey, I did not even mention the tornado warnings that we had this evening. More on that tomorrow. I'd best be about it. See ya tomorrow bright and early.
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May 08, 2003 - Updates at 0745
Good morning. My daystart is being eaten by home and remote admin duties, so I have no time for a post. Here's the short version. Lots of lightning and thunder last night. Tornado warnings all around us, too. Doppler radar showed the right patterns, but it appears there was no touchdown here. It's not over yet. Systems are mostly fine, but I may have lost an IP following powerdown during the lightning storm.
Now I must fly. Have a great day!
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May 09, 2003 - Updates at 0700
Good morning and Happy Friday! In my sometimes odd LIFO stack fashion, the last email this morning is from Svenson, who asks how I lost IPs in a powerdown. The answer is simple: DHCP. I don't have static IP address assignments from Comcast. They claim long lease, though. However, when I shut everything down and unplugged during the lightning storm, I stayed off the system for a couple of hours. When I brought everything back online, my systems got new IP addresses from Comcast. Now, flatly, Comcast won't do static. I've asked, begged, pleaded and threatened. No joy. My connection here is about 6 Mbit down, 384 Kbit up, for less than $100/month. The closest I could get to that would be a 1.5M/384K RADSL line from Speakeasy, for something around $129/month. So I'll take the occasional IP change as the price of doing biz.
Shortly after I posted yesterday, I saw that MS had a little hotmail problem. This little problem exposed user accounts to a password change by anyone at all - leading possibly (probably?) to a complete exposure of their Passport data. Hi, I'm your Microsoft Wallet...What? I'm not actually yours? Well, okay, come on in anyway, you gave me the correct password. Security by design, my ass. I have never had a MS Passport account, and don't plan on starting anytime soon. If you do, have you considered killing your account? I might...
I guess I'll get on the road. Last night was eaten by a sparsely attended, yet fun LaurelLinux LUG meeting. Today ... well, I'm not sure yet what I am working on today at the client site. We've a cusp a-flowering with possibilities. So I need to be there soonish. Have a lovely day!
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May 10, 2003 - Updates at 1330
Good day. Apparently I have all of the constancy of the weather around here. Goldfinger is well on his way back to a Gentoo box. I caught myself thinking yesterday... Why do I need TWO stable boxes? Okay, that's a bad question, as I actually have three stable boxes here: Gryphon, the Sony laptop, running Red Hat 9, quietly and happily. Tserve, the Red Hat 7.1 test server that we use for installation and stability testing before updating Rocket (yes, that's right, we have a dev server, and a production server). And not leastly, Garcia. Garcia is my old main workstation, a P3-933 box, now running Debian stable. Garcia is the backup server and local caching DNS server for the house. So I get one box that needs work and pain and sweat, don't I? Yes, yes I do!
So last night I backed up the latest changes to Garcia (just in case, mind you), and threw the Gentoo 1.4rc4 basic ISO into the cupholder. Now I've got the whole system on its way to rightness. KDE is building, but for now I'm working in Fluxbox, using Jedit. Once QT is built, in a few minutes or so here, I can install the Opera beta again, then browsing will be back. Over the course of the next four or 5 hours, the balance of the system should drop into line.
This also provides me with a grand opportunity to get in some quality time with the Amber collection that Mike so graciously loaned to me yesterday. By bedtime last night I'd gotten through about 1-3/4 of the 10 books. I've definitely lost some reading speed, but that's alright, I'm enjoying these books very much. I used to have the first six books in the series (by Roger Zelazny, BTW), but it's been years and years. Oh, and I suppose I should reallyy be getting some of the chores around here done, but my heart just isn't in it today.
Thanks for dropping by, I'll put anything new or exciting up later, as it happens. See ya!
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May 11, 2003 - Updates at 1010
Howdy. Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there. I talked to my mum on Friday night, a good thing as they're in Yosemite this weekend. I wonder though - wouldn't Yosemite be crowded as all get out on a gorgeous spring weekend? I just checked the webcam from the Virtual Yosemite site, it's just sunrise right now, and beautiful looking day. Still, it's a pretty place at the worst of times. We loved it when we were there in mid-winter a couple of years back - no crowding at all. Sure it was cold and all, but the lack of population made it sweet. You remember that trip? We put up a photo essay here: Yosemite in February, 2001
Leonardo da Vinci is today's guest head. His is the name that most often springs to mind when the words "Renaissance Man" are bandied about. An artist, scientist and inventor of the first water, Leonardo left voluminous notes on virtually all of his activities, many of which have survived to this day. His most enduring and well known public work, of course, is that picture of the lady with the enigmatic smile, the Mona Lisa. I wonder sometimes, running through the catalog of his achievements, what he might have accomplished in an era with a little stronger scientific basis. Yes, yes, he was in at the beginning, and foundations are important... but still? Anyway, here's a rather breathless short account on the Museum of Science (Boston) site. There's plenty more, too, via a quick Google search, so get to it.
Eric Raymond is back at it again. After a longish hiatus while he finished up the writing of The Art of Unix Programming, he's posting again on his Armed and Dangerous blog site. Heh, have I mentioned that Eric's blog is on the Sonicwall list of "militant and extremist" sites? That's right, you can block ESR's blog with a built-in rule that comes with a subscription to Sonicwall's content filtering tool. Hmmm. Anyway, his latest entry is a neat little essay on "The delusion of expertise", starring ESR, Terry Pratchett and the Penguicon conference. Well worth reading, so do, please.
Goldfinger is just about fully happy again. Gentoo's built and running like a top and the new ATI board is a screamer. I dunno what happened earlier this week, but using the ATI binary driver again, this time I'm getting approximately 6000 FPS from the standard glxgears window. Fullscreen 1600x1200x24bpp yields 385 FPS. Not too shabby... There's more software to install, and a few things yet to tweak, but things are good in computing land.
Now it's time for errands and chores, so I'll bid you adieu for the moment. Later, perhaps... if I don't get caught up in Amber again. I'm up near 800 pages read out of the 1250 or so in the book. I could finish it today easily, if that was all that I did. But that's unlikely, methinks. See ya!
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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.
