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GRAFFITI -- June 16 thru June 22, 2003 >> Link to the Current Week << 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..

WebCam

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
June 16, 2003 -    Updates at 0653 EST

Good morning. Here we are together, halfway through another month, and on a ever-so-lovely Monday, to boot. You know, I really must work harder on following through with what I say I am going to do. Case in point: Yesterday I said that I was going to be mostly sedentary. Well, that was several lies in one.

After lazing about for a couple of hours, I only intended to toddle off to Lowes and pick up the trim for edging Marcia's new cutting table. Once outside, I realized the fatal flaw in my plan: a flat tire. Sheesh. So a quick trip to the Yahoo Yellow Pages got me onto the people at NTB, down off of Mitchellville Road. After changing the flat bit for the wheel-barrow tires that pass for spares in most cars these days, I drove down there with some trepidation (not trusting the barrow wheel, y'know). Pleasant, polite and best of all working on a Sunday, NTB took care of finding and repairing a dinky leak while I walked down to Lowes, picked up what I needed and walked back up.

Upon arriving home, I finished banding the top of Marcia's cutting table, and vacuumed the room. That done, I decided to go ahead and move most of the rest of her stuff down from the upper floor. So I dismantled the big table and brought it down in pieces. The only real hassle was the top, which is first and foremost quite heavy, and secondly, large and awkward. But with a bit of careful planning, I slid that down the stairs, partway out the front door, swung the back end around, brought the front back in and across into the new sewing room. Then I brought down the top frame and leg assemblies, then put it all back together again. One cabinet and a whole bunch of stuff like sewing machines, boxes of fabric and so on completed the makeover. Whew, that was a lot of stair work. You can see the final setup in the room in the snapshots linked above.

Today, I'm going to be moving all of the clients that are going to access the new mail server over to LookOut Express from their previous preferred MUA, Eudora. Whoo. Oh, hey, before I forget, Tom put up an addendum to his sabbatical post - follow this link and page down. Threat, heh. This should be a full day. I'd better get to it. Take care.

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
June 17, 2003 -    Updates at 0658

Good morning. It's time for some fun at Microsoft's expense:

From: mikem might be found at mikem dot net
Subject: From the web...

Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking, I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows on my PC. I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows CD. To my astonishment and distress, he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned it on. I was upset because the CD had become precious to me, but he said, "Do not worry, it is unharmed."

After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me, and said, "Take a close look at it."

To my surprise the CD was quite cold and it seemed to have become thicker and heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, in lines finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:

4F6E65204F5320746F2072756C65207468656D20
616C6C2C204F6E65204F5320746F2066696E6420
7468656D2C0D0A4F6E65204F5320746F20627269
6E67207468656D20616C6C20616E6420696E2074
6865206461726B6E6573732062696E64207468656D

"I cannot read the fiery letters," I said.

"No," he said, "but I can. The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:

One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them...."

Coffee nearly made the rearward advance through my sinuses over that one, when I got it from Mike Mills the other day. Then, in the process of following up on some email about Fetchmail, I ran across this bit of prose in the Fetchmail FAQ, this about MS Exchange:

Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias". Grant Edwards writes:

This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing stupid to figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox name from your username.

In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another inept, lame, almost criminally negligent design decision from our friends in Redmond.

You've got several options:

• Get your administrator to configure the server so that usernames and mailbox names are the same.
• Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username explicitly to your mailbox name.

But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Solaris CD.

I'll provide the CD.

Speaking of Eric Raymond, he's got up a new post entitled Hacking and Refactoring over on his Armed and Dangerous blog. [ed: If I've done that right, then it's a permalink, too!] Anyway, it's about the convergence of the precepts of "Agile Programming" and UNIX hackerdom as it's evolving in the light of the Open Source movement. I'm not smart enough to comment on what he writes... let me rephrase that. I don't know enough to comment cogently, but he's got a number of interesting points (as is usual with ESR), and his usual acerbic style:

This is stone-obvious stuff to any hacker, and exactly the sort of subversive thinking that most panics managers attached to big plans, big budgets, big up-front design, and big rigid command-and-control structures. Which may, in fact, be a key part of its appeal to hackers and agile developers - because at least one thing that points agile-movement and open-source people in the same direction is a drive to take control of our art back from the suits and get out from under big dumb management.

What I find most amusing is that Sonicwall's firewall content filtering scheme blocks "armedndangerous.blogspot.com" blindly, in the category of ... lessee here: "Militant/Extremist (graphics or text)". Now if that isn't entirely ridiculous... sure, Eric exercises his right to bear arms, and if free speech means the right to mock large monopolistic corporations, so be it. Note to self - Write an email to Sonicwall about removing Eric's blog from their list. Better stil, let them publish their lists, too. I only know about this because I can't follow my ESR link from certain customer sites.

And thus endeth the day's sermon. I'll be on the road to Rockville now, to work on some Sun UltraSparc and other fun things. Have a lovely day.

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
June 18, 2003 -    Updates at 0722

Good morning. I've been burning my time reading email and doing light browsing instead of writing this. Bad Brian! Last night, briefly, I stopped by Best Buy to actually touch a few laptops and see if any seemed suitable (and cheap enough) to get Marcia one for her downstairs time later this summer. But we've determined that if we get her a laptop, it's going to replace her desktop, and that's not in the cards - we're reserving cash against what the insurance doesn't cover. So last night I had the former Gryphon, the Acer 600TER in pieces, trying to puzzle out what was causing the problems, like spontaneous reboots. It was all in pieces, I found nothing of import and put it all back together again, unfortunately without any extra parts left over when I was done. It booted and ran just fine. But the battery won't hold a charge anymore. Hmmm. I'll cycle it back on again, and see how long it stays up. This might be good enough for light downstairs work.

Dan Bowman wrote asking about my Zaurus. He noted that I don't write much about it in these pages. Well, that's the truth, but ... well, here's the meat of my response to Dan:

That's 'cause the Zaurus just keeps running. I have contacts in it, and use it for that when I need it. I put some appointments in it, but not many because I'm not in the habit of turning it on every day yet (still!!) I'm told it sync's to LookOut, as well as of course synching to it's own Qtopia desktop. It doesn't work with the palm tools on Linux desktops, sigh.

On the OS side, I keep switching between the Sharp ROM set (new one out a few weeks ago) and OpenZaurus. Right now I'm on OZ, browsing with Konqueror, and using that also as an ebook reader (Baen Free Library). DLink Air (model DCF-660W) works fine, SD card (64M), CF card (256M). Didn't get the camera (I have one, the olympus D450Z just keeps working).

Fun little guy - I don't use him enough for what I spent, but that's my fault, not his. Certainly much more of a PDA than the Agenda ever was.

Sideline: USB cradle came with the 5500.

Have fun!

Today I'm working in the office, at least part of the day. We're revisiting that Cobalt that isn't behaving well, thinking about migrating a mail server for Nerds use, and we've got a tentative conference call scheduled for security/services configuration final checkout before taking a public server live for a customer. That should be a full-enough day... I should be going - have a good 'un.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
June 19, 2003 -    Updates at 0730

Good morning. I was at it until 2330 last night, building and configuring a Debian test installation of Cyrus and Postfix, backed by a MySQL database. It's not working now, there's an authentication error someplace, but I'm close. This is one of those setups that a body has to do a few times, making mistakes and fixing them, in order to understand how all the pieces fit together. They're almost there now - close enough that I'll start replicating the setup on a production Debian box we're building at work. That'll start this afternoon.

This morning, I'm off to Wheaton to install all the appropriate software on a Dell workstation for a customer there. It starts with Office XP, then a whole passel of apps, from ACT and InTime to Acrobat and other assorted stuff. I'm not in a grand rush as a result, because no one gets there before 0830.

The other accomplishment last night was getting the lawn mowed. Everything's soggy, but if I don't keep up with it, it'll go wild on me, and be a real PITA to catch up to again. The bits of lawn in front and back where I did some test patching are starting to sprout nicely - another few weeks and some more hours of work and the place might start looking pretty nice. We'll see...

I'm not going to recount the news of recent days to you. I figure you can find out for yourself about Orin Hatch wanting to destroy your computer, SCO accusing Linus Torvalds of ... um, something, and countless vulnerabilities, bugs and virii that you need to stay on top of in order to compute safely. Don't worry, it's just life, it goes on for just about everyone. Well, everyone except those who don't have one anymore, like the people killed by police in Benton Harbor, or Gregory Peck ... the list goes on.

I guess I'll just stop here, and run the upload script. What I'd really like to do is climb back into bed and nap for a couple of hours, but not until weekend, methinks. Perhaps this caffeine will kick in one of these hours. Hell, I dunno. Take it easy, have a lovely day.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
June 20, 2003 -    Updates at 0653

Good morning. I'm running early, and I think I'll keep it that way by keeping this short and beating the traffic out onto the road (hopefully). A couple of items - we made some progress on the mail server yesterday afternoon, but when testing the source build of Cyrus-imapd, it would segfault. The build environments aren't guaranteed identical, though, and ldd returns different results for the "master" binary. I'll be looking at installed libraries that shouldn't be there, next.

Jon Hassell is back and posting. I moved him over onto the Active Writers column in the Daynotes.org site last night. His new site? JonathanHassell.com. Now, I'm going to keep that date with a pre-traffic jam. Today I'll be working with vlans on a linux router, if things work out properly and the planets are aligned. Take it easy!

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June 21, 2003 -    Updates at 1019

Good morning. My day starts with email, most days. It's mostly filled with assorted list mail, log file reports, occasional personal items from friends and family. Sometimes there's the strident demand for help, or the derisive and mocking message from someone who's managed to exchange orifices. But once in a while I'm blessed with a polite and (relatively) simple query. Sometimes I even know the answer...

i810_audio             27624   0  (unused)
ac97_codec             14600   0  [i810_audio]
soundcore               6404   2  [i810_audio]

Okay! Happy Saturday. In the week just finished, Saturday through Friday, we've taken just 4 inches of rain here in Bowie. There's more scheduled in for today (they're calling it a flood watch, as has been the case over the last several days), then the clouds are supposed to break tomorrow sometime and give us a couple of days of sun ... during the week, of course. By Thursday we're supposed to be back to the rain, thunder and lightning. How... special.

Today, Marcia and I are headed out shortly to get the shopping done for the week. Then I'm sure there are plenty of chores and other fun things to fill my day. If nothing else, I can get in some reading on the latest batch of Discworld novels I got last week. That and I'll probably spend some time on figuring out this email server problem before going in to work on it tomorrow.

See you around, later today or certainly tomorrow. Fly right!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
June 22, 2003 -    Updates at 1022

Good morning. I've been up and at it for a while now, but it's time for a little break, so that I can say Hi to all three of you who aren't currently reading the new Rowling book. No, we're not either, yet. It's on pre-order from Barnes & Nobel, but not here yet. Greg and Molly bought two copies yesterday, so that there wouldn't be any strife over who gets to read it first.

We did our shopping, and I picked up a few more electronic widges to get downstairs setup properly for Marcia to use it later this summer. I still need to do a rolling table that sticks out over the bed for laptop, keyboard and mouse. More when I know more about that one. But I cleared the boxes back out of the guest bedroom, putting some away at the back of a closet, and the others stacked neatly in the corner of Marcia's upstairs office, where the sewing table was before, only using a small fraction of that floorspace.

Then I worked on home email storage last night. I've been using Evolution from Ximian pretty constantly over the last couple of years. When I switch systems, I would rsync my folder over to the laptop, then rsync it back at night. But that's sort of a pain in the ass. So finally I setup an IMAP server over on Garcia. There was some hassle in that some of my messages wouldn't transfer into a Cyrus imap folder - some complaint about invalid headers. Yet, the only common factor appears to be that the problem messages are old, as in sometime in 2001 or older. Very strange.

Now I can access my current mail on Rocket via IMAP from everyplace, and my local store via IMAP directly to Garcia. When I'm on the road with Gryphon in hand, I'll execute the following line as root:

ssh -C -g -L 143:192.168.1.7:143 [email protected]

The reason for root is that superuser permissions are required to tunnel privileged ports (those below 1024). And on Gryphon, the "local" store is then really local - I access it by pointing to localhost:143 as my IMAP server. Afterall, I had to do SOMETHING interesting after Dan Bowman dropped my name in the process of doing a weird and wonderful network test setup.

Marcia and I are both working today. She's at the Viking store for a few hours, and I'll be working on helping Larry set up a new NERDS mailserver. Oh, about the weather? It's cloudy this morning, with possible rain. Yesterday late afternoon into evening, we took about another half inch here. But going forward, it's supposed to start clearing, heating up, and the humidity is theoretically going to track the thermometer pretty well. Oh, lovely.

There's no guest head today yet, because I'm just not in the mood. So it's up to you to find one and send it in. Whether you do or not, have a lovely day.

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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.