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GRAFFITI -- May 19 thru May 25, 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 19, 2003 - Updates at 0734 EST
Good morning. After yesterday's excitement, I'm looking forward to a quiet, peaceful day at work. Yesterday evening I finished sprucing up Debian on Gryphon the Sony notebook. KDE is running fine. I've got some network mobility issues yet to work out on it, but since those are work-related, I'll do those in the appropriate location - at work. I'll also setup and see how printing works out from Gryphon.
Last night, instead of picking up the first Terry Pratchett book, I decided to dive back into Niven for a bit. I have the Three Books of Known Space collection. That includes World of Ptavvs, A Gift From Earth, and Tales of Known Space, as well as a number of short stories, including some of the earliest. I got through World of Ptavvs last night, which I probably haven't read since high school. Fun stuff.
Alright. Time's up, so I'd best be going. Have a lovely day. If I only do a little more than half a day today, then I'll drop back in here later. We'll see.
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May 20, 2003 - Updates at 0704
Good morning. Well, having slogged through the 67 legitimate email messages, I find myself already out of time this morning. How boring, so sorry. Yesterday afternoon, I got home by about three, in time to spend quality time with the trimmer and lawn mower. Late in the evening, I picked up the first of the Terry Pratchett books that I have, The Light Fantastic??? I think so. I just barely got into it and thought to myself, "Ooops. I'd better put this down now, or I'll be up until 0230, and that I can't afford." So I put it down. He reads like a great combination of Doug Adams and Piers Anthony. Woo, I'll be enjoying these.
Since I'm so short on time, I'll point you in two different directions for extra-credit reading assignments. First is over on LinuxMuse, where you'll find Brian Lane's account of the slashdotting of a P75. Then over on the LinuxWorld site, Nick Petreley writes up his new love affair with Gentoo Linux. Now I must leave you - have a great day.
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May 21, 2003 - Updates at 0701
Howdy. Welcome to the middle of the week, and the first day of a six day run of rain, according to the weather gods. Whatever drought was going on here before our arrival from California is so far gone in everyone's minds that it must always have been like this. I swear that sometimes I'm thinking we moved to Seattle (Washington STATE, rather than DC), and everyone else around here is just playing a cruel joke on us. No, I jest not. Of the last seven weekends, it's rained on six of them. And we're scheduled for rain straight through to next Tuesday. Lovely, just lovely. I guess that the Memorial Day barbeque will be done on the Foreman sink-side grilling thing.
In the meantime my lovely Marcia has been putting in a whole lot of work, both in her vocation and her avocation. In case you missed any earlier reports, Marcia's Makings is open for business, and she's having a blast. She's redone the site completely in the last few days, and would be pleased to have you drop by and see what's up.
The Goodyear Blimp, well, one of them anyway, has been roaming about our area for the last few days. It's made several passes right over our neighborhood, and we've seen it tethered and taking off from the small airport just west of Bowie along Highway 50. I wonder if they aren't training a new pilot or two. Still, an odd place to practice such things - I'd have chosen a more deserted and less paranoid place to fly any sort of aircraft around in, just for practice, at least.
Red Hat Linux 8.0 made yet another appearance in the data center of our number one client. We built a box last week to do a small bit of intranet work, running PHP, Apache, other CGI stuff, and connecting via UnixODBC to an Informix database running on the E450.... Everything was running perfectly except for that last bit. We'd installed RH9, and our suspicion right now is that the libraries and tools were too far out of sync with the Informix drivers and UnixODBC code. So we've downgraded a notch, and I'll be reconfiguring things today for another valiant attempt. I would have done so yesterday, but the updates for a kitchen sink install (the only kind that virtually guarantees that we won't have any missing bits) is up to 710 MB for RH8.0, now. Whew!
Sally is also doing alright. The dramatic improvement we saw in the first couple of weeks following her stroke has tapered off quite a bit. She's certainly functional, and generally doing alright. But she was a bit... um, thick to begin with. Having lost some brain function, I wonder if she'll compete head to head with cauliflower now. No, I suppose not... cauliflower probably has more convolutions and a higher grade of corpus callosium. Heck, I'm certain that cauliflower might beat ME out on a bad thalamic day. But I digress - For where she's been, Sally's doing great!
Hey, I've got a virus! Well, perhaps I've phrased that improperly. Three of those Palyh virii have landed in my Spam folder, presorted there by SpamAssassin for me. On the premise that the box that sent it to my machine can't be faked (by IP, anyway), one came from a bank in China, one from New Zealand, and the other one, embarrassingly, apparently from the offices of SysAdmin magazine. Heh... Here's a bit of interesting stuff from one:
bilbrey@goldfinger bilbrey $ ls -al screen_temp.pif
-rw-r--r-- 1 bilbrey users 51269 May 20 22:13 palyh_test
bilbrey@goldfinger bilbrey $ strings screen_temp.pif
. . .
!js .r
88dp
KERNEL32.DLL
ADVAPI32.dll
MPR.dll
ole32.dll
OLEAUT32.dll
urlmon.dll
USER32.dll
WSOCK32.dll
LoadLibraryA
GetProcAddress
ExitProcess
RegCloseKey
WNetCloseEnum
OleRun
URLDownloadToCacheFileA
wsprintfA
My, that looks like something to avoid if you're running Windows! I'd suggest taking two Linux, and call me in the morning. Meantime, I suppose I'd best be organizing myself to get into the office. I've got an hour or two there, then I'm off to Rockville to continue the quest for a working UnixODBC to Informix connection. See ya!
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May 22, 2003 - Updates at 0645
Good morning. This link to The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher dropped into my brain courtesy of the ever-thought provoking Doc Searls. The article, by John Talyor Gatto, bugs the heck out of me - and I'm not a parent. That's part one, but here's the less popular part two: Why are parents spending what little leisure time they might have doing school projects for their children?
Did your folks do your homework for you? I don't remember mine doing so... it's possible, I suppose, that my memory is just shitty, but I doubt it. But in website after website where I read the stories of the parents of school age children, I read about the parents doing this for an assignment and that for a special project - and these get turned in to school as the child's work??? WTF is up with that? Okay, so perhaps some teachers have expectations that are out of line with reality. Then let the child do what they can with their own resources. Sure, HELP him, but don't do the work. If it doesn't get a good enough grade, then you, YOU, the parent, know what went into it, and what it really means.
If unrealistic expectations are the order of the day (and I do mean unrealistic, rather than just high), then it's time to get involved with the school/district in curriculum planning. But doing work for a child and letting him turn it in as his own is a disservice, I think. Then, when it comes time to start doing real work on their own hook, they'll have what experience to use: Someone else to make the work, the project better than they could have done on their own, and they get to take the credit. Is that a good lesson? No, no it's not.
Bob Thompson got an entirely predictable response or two to his "I consider Linux to be inherently somewhat less stable than Windows NT/2K/XP" statement. I noted immediately that his bracketting and qualification of the opinion made it entirely valid for his circumstances, and didn't even bother to send him a note of reassurance that I was alive and paying attention. I figured he'd get enough grief on his own. It seems I was right.
Linux is more sensitive to hardware than Windows is, especially in the video arena. Expectations for Linux are higher - the rock-solid server capabilities are assumed to move nicely into the desktop arena. If you're careful, very careful, then they can. I'll tell you this: Right now, this Gentoo installation is dead rock steady for me. I don't anticpate any problems at all... until I do one of two things: Change a key piece of software, or play a computer game that pushes the video card driver beyond the tested edges of its capabilities. And then yes, it can take the box down hard - no more network, no console, time for a reset. Mmmmm, journalling file systems, yummy!
For servers, there's nothing better than a *NIX, in my opinion. The only downtime that old Grendel, the Gateway PII-233 has had in the last year has been for a cut off during a lightning storm and moving across country. Rocket, the box from which you're reading this, has been up for 184 days. That boot was for a kernel upgrade. All the other major software upgrades - web server, database and mail servers - were accomplished without requiring a powerdown.
Can I build a desktop that's just as stable? Sure I can. I can back off of the latest video hardware. I can build the system up to a stable configuration, then leave it there, without updating it. That's important. Service packs break Windows sometimes, updates break Linux occasionally. The best way to be stable is to have vanilla hardware that's been around long enough for developers and engineers to be running Linux on it every day. Then it'll be a stable platform for Linux. Stay away from the cutting edge of hardware. Period. Get last year's Intel mobo and processor. If the motherboard video doesn't meet your needs, then get an 18 month old video card that's from either NVidia or ATI. Get fast, reliable hard drives (I like Maxtor). Get the best memory, correctly specified for your motherboard (Kingston or Crucial). Get an exellent power supply that's over-specified for your system requirements. Install Debian stable. Or install Red Hat Linux, down one or two revs, then upgrade it once. Configure the system to meet your needs. Then leave it alone, except to do your work. It'll be as stable as any Linux server.
Linux as a gaming platform is, in a word, improving. That's as gracious as I can be. It's much better than it was, and there's a hell of a long way yet to go. As Linux achieves greater market penetration, then I expect that hardware vendors will start providing better and more timely support for their products. The cycle times will get shorter and the leading edge desktop systems will get more stable.
Now it's time for me to go. I've got another half day or so in Rockville this today, then I'm done for the week. A nice, long 4.5 day holiday weekend, full of freaking rain. Sigh. Hope your day goes well, and mine, too!
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May 23, 2003 - Updates at 1214
Good afternoon. A lazy day today, the first of a rainy four day holiday weekend. More later, perhaps if the mood strikes me. If not, them tomorrow. Have a good 'un.
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May 24, 2003 - Updates at 0835
Good morning. I find myself here for the first time since that abbreviated post yesterday noonish. I read Terry Pratchett, we grilled somw food in the rain and played Trivial Pursuit, I took a nap. Oh, and we watched Star Trek: Nemesis. Yep, a dog. Bummer for the franchise, really. SCO continues to ram their feet down their throats, and schools are closing without giving finals, out of money. Wooooo.... wait, is this going to hurt me in college? Yep, that too! Now I'm going to go get some coffee. See you later, maybe.
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May 25, 2003 - Updates at 1545
I know, I know - that's two afternoon posts in one week. But I'm allowed. I've gone all bookish and such-like. I've finished off three Terry Pratchett Discworld books, part of a Niven collection, and I'm breaking into a re-read of some Heinlein (Stranger). I've rebuilt both laptop and desktop up to current software releases, and grilled steaks. There's really not much going on at the moment, so I think I'll go back to my book. It's fitting somehow, what with all this rain... We're up over 10 inches or so in the last two weeks, if I read the local weather guy correctly. Who knows what's next, I don't! See you on a holiday Monday!
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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.