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GRAFFITI -- November 17 thru November 23, 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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November 17, 2003 - Updates at 0715
Good morning. Another work week begins, and I can relax a bit. Actually, we're getting a fair bit closer to feeling moved in. The boxes in the family room are all unpacked now. Yesterday, after shopping, I got up on the roof with some caulk, and took care of the items that the home inspector dude noticed. Then I moved everything out of the garage, doing initial triage as I went. Then I moved the benches to their semi-final locations.
It was then that I learned something new: stacking a garage full of boxes out in the driveway draws in rain clouds faster even than washing a car. Wow - we went from a few light high clouds to threatening within about an hour and a half. So I quickly restaged everything back under cover (note, i've now touched every box twice, by this time). Then I repaired the pull-down stairs to the garage attic, and fetched Marcia. The largest part of the boxes by now were her crafts stuff for the ornament factory, etc. I had her do the secondary triage on that set of boxes, then pass up to me all those that store in the garage attic. Then I moved the balance of the boxes down to the area where she might do crafts, one day. (Note to self, that's three times per box. Sheesh!)
I am broken, this morning. However, I've got a busy day ahead, and a couple of house-related appointments tonight, including the annual homeowners meeting for our community. So I'll bid you adieu...
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November 18, 2003 - Updates at 0700
Google is good. I am glad to have Google backing me up. I was sure I heard the Emperor's voice and the phrase "fully operational Death Star", but clearly I had a confused mish-mash of Admiral Tarkin from Episode 4 and the Emperor from Episode 6. A bit of googling brought me to the section of script in question (I had the voice right - it was the Emperor):
EMPEROR
As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station.
(into comlink)Fire at will, Commander.
And thanks to George Lucas, for implanting that whole universe deeply into my brain. There's probably going to come a time in my life when I'll need to remember something really important, and I'll be over-quota, memory-wise, full up with Star Wars and Star Trek trivia, among much else that is useless. Speaking of trivia, I saw in BJ's the other day Trivial Pursuit: Lord of the Rings Edition. Wooooo - oh, wait, Marcia won't play that one with me. Says that me reading the hobbit and the trilogy every other year forever gives me an unfair advantage over her. Ha!
Reading the fine print on the TP:LotR page found the following: "The Lord of the Rings" and the names of the characters, items, events and places therein are trademarks of the Saul Zaentz Comapnay d/b/a Tolkien Enterprises. How on earth did someone who earned himself immortality to the tune of Zanz Can't Dance...? Okay, the song is now Vanz Can't Dance, but that's just because the judge said so. I think we really know why John Fogarty wrote that song. Anyway, how did old Saul get his mitts on the Middle Earth, anyway? A bit more searching brought me to this page, excerpted here:
J.R.R. Tolkien sold the film and merchandising rights for The Hobbit to United Artists in 1966. At some point afterward, United Artists in turn sold the rights and Saul Zaentz eventually acquired them. Zaentz set up Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, in 1977 to administer the rights for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. All film, radio, stage, and television adaptations since that time appear to have been licensed from Tolkien Enterprises.
And there I draw the line, or I'll never get out of here this morning. But really, the web is a very, very interesting information space. There are lots of paths through the wilderness, and things to learn along the way. However, there's always the incredible time-sink temptations that must only rarely be let off the leash.
Last night we got the security system online and then we attended the Homeowners Association meeting. I was oh-so-hopeful, huzzah, no boxes ... but then I remembered, piles of crap to get out to the curb for pickup tomorrow, sorted into trash and recycling. Oh, well, waiting is. One day soon I will find myself having passed more than 24 hours without a single box lift. Oh, happy day.
No real Linux news yesterday for me, just a brief note to myself - when doing ANYTHING that impinges upon a web service, restart Apache early and often. I was fighting like hell with getting the MySQL functionality running in a PHP install on a Red Hat 8 box. After reviewing everything I'd tried to make it work with Craig, a cow-orker, he said, "Have you restarted Apache?" Bleah. Sigh. Shit. Problem solved... Thanks, Craig.
Now I must fly. Have a great day!
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November 19, 2003 - Updates at 0645
Good morning. Well, I didn't get up at the first buzz of the alarm, and I wanted an early start... so while I'm not late, I'm still rushed, and this post will suffer as a result. Last night, though, Sally was a bit mope-y and didn't have much of an appetite. At that we weren't surprised. She's past due for one of her episodes. But eventually she ate all her dinner, which is unusual if she's not feeling well. Later in the evening, I found out why - she somehow knew that Kerry had gone to doggy Valhalla, with many shield maidens to accompany him (each leading a flock for him to herd about). See ya on the flipside, you bear-faced relative of a wolf, you... Now I must go. Have a good day.
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November 20, 2003 - Updates at 0715
Good morning. Today I am running late - I have a new client's Linux box to run a security audit on, three back-to-back meetings to attend at another client's place, then back to the NERDS office for a write-up of the day's beginning activities. Yesterday was productive in that I turned a GX260 into a Debian box in preparation for designing a new web service for a customer, and spent a not insignificant amount of time talking about how to implement that in a webserver-middleware box-database backend way. In the evening, I did a bit of exploration of PHP, and implemented a snippet of code that automatically updates one of the pages that I have responsibility for. I'll know if it totally meets my needs tomorrow, when the data is supposed to change. More on that later, I must fly. Have a great day!
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November 21, 2003 - Updates at 0712
Howdy. There are days when I am sure that I'll never get caught up on my sleep from all the fun we've had with this move. This is one of those mornings. I didn't do much last night - went the the LaurelLinux meeting, and had meetings all day during the day. Well, yeah, that's more tiring than regular work in and of itself. But it *was* a productive day all the same. I'm hoping for good productivity today, building middleware boxes and applications from scratch. You have a great Friday, where ever you are.
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November 22, 2003 - Updates at 0809
Good morning. As a result of meetings over the last two days, I'll be building at least two, and likely three, Debian boxes. These will be multi-service machines, all replacing Red Hat 8 installations. Many of you know that all but RH9 goes end of life at the end of December, and 9 follows suit four months later.
There's no official path going forward for Red Hat that isn't in their Enterprise line. The claim is that there will up updates for 9 and for 7.3 available via some channel out of the Fedora Project. After reading on the Red Hat site, though, I've come to the conclusion that if they (Red Hat engineers supporting the Fedora Project community) make a stable Fedora, then they hurt sales of RHEL subscriptions. Thus, while intentions might be marvelous, everyone involved whose rent and food depend upon Red Hat for income are likely to behave in a manner that encourages RHEL adoption.
So, let me examine Red Hat's EL plans. There's a five year lifespan with stable APIs and interfaces. This is for the benefit of ISV's who's third party packages just can't economically keep pace with the rate of Open Source change. That's all well and good. So, to compare with another distribution's configuration, I'd say that RHEL is designed to be comparable to Debian Stable, and the Fedora version lies someplace between Debian's Testing and Unstable branches.
In this light, I should state that when I implement Debian, I tend to use unstable for a personal desktop, tolerating the occasional breakage. I can do that because I'm a Linux weenie - clients won't hang with that. For servers, clients, etc., I go with either Stable or Testing (at this time). The core of Testing is generally very stable as Debian is approaching another release one of these months. When Stable is fairly fresh, I'll stick with that.
A note about the Debian compromise that came to light yesterday. Here's the full announcement from Martin Schultz:
