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GRAFFITI -- January 26, 2004 thru February 01, 2004 >> 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.

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 26, 2004

0816 - Good morning. ... Snow day. It started late, much later than predicted, but there's 6 to 7 inches on the ground this morning. I've shoveled in back to clear a path for the dogs already. Yeah, I know, but if I don't give Lucy a defined route to the place where she can pee, then she'll go on the deck. Bleah. In a little while, after coffee and breakfast, I'll give the front a pass with the snow blower, to make it easier to keep up thereafter. It's supposed to ice and sleet, for another quarter inch or more over the next day and a half, so being out and about is really out of the question except for an emergency. I have a little work to do from home, and plenty of extra hours in this pay period to offset against the snow day so that I don't have to use vacation time to keep the paycheck up to snuff. Okay, food time. I'll be back in a bit...

1042 - Back again, same day for once! Here's some of last night's fun:

As we read and watched a spot of telly, the dogs rested and vied for attention from the scratching/petting hands. That lead to a dog jumble (above left), which was so cute it demanded a picture. Once the camera's out, now both dogs ham for the lense, especially Lucy.

The snow's here, as I noted earlier. Even now it's squittering down ice and snow in intermittent and light amounts. This is now supposed to continue for the next day and a half. That'll make driving fun - - not! Our dogs aren't really snow dogs. They'll get out and do their business when they must, but they don't enjoy themselves. By contrast, our occasional guest dog Ebony, the big black retriever (whose people are our friends Lee and Jim) is a definite snow hound - he loves to play in the stuff. Oh, and I'm definitely appreciating my snow blower. The work I did this morning would have taken a lot longer, and ruined me for the day had I been shoveling by hand, as I did last year. The end result is shown at right, and I did all the sidewalks, too, so that school kids can at least walk part of the way without having to walk in the street.

Now I have some work to do, so I'll get on with it. You have a great day!

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 27, 2004

0837 - Good morning. It's still bloody cold from my perspective. No new snow, but a nice fresh crust of ice on everything. I'll refrain from driving again today, but I do have work that I can do remotely, so I will. The extra-special news this morning was that the commute is light due to lack of cars ... oh, really? Just goes to show what happens when the news crew has been on duty all night, or sleeping under their desks. The oddest thing that happened yesterday was the email that said not being able to drive in ice and snow is just another reason to hate Californians. Excuse me? And here I am, thinking I'm prudent in not getting out on the road putting myself in the way of the other nutcases out there. No, there was no smiley face on that one, so I'm not sure how to take it. Oh, well, ice under the bridge...

Mmmm. Hint to world, don't use dd(1) to blank the first part of a partition without first backing up your partition table. The slightest typo can create havoc - trust me. I spent most of yesterday afternoon recovering from typing "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1" when of course I meant hdc1. Oh, well. I always keep recent full-image backups around, so what's missing is only stuff I'd already copied up here to Rocket, or sent via email to someone else - that is, all recoverable.

I just got a Green chain letter purporting to be a message from Robert Redford about the evils of a Senate energy bill that's due for a vote soon. I'm irked. Why are these people always afraid to give a link to the actual text of the bill that they're opposing? Ah, it appears that we're referring to HR 6, the 700-plus page omnibus energy policy package that hands out money to domestic energy producers without requiring much in return. The "awful" ANWR drilling provision passed by the House (supported by the Shrub and his handler, Cheney) is missing from the Senate version. Greens are up in arms over lack of environmental protections ("climate disaster" in green-speak) and the taxpayer organizations are freaking about handouts to corporations that don't need it. I can get behind the latter, but the shrill anti-scientific rhetoric of the Greenies really puts me off. Here's a link find the text for yourself if you're interested in this. Just type "HR 6" in the By Number search box. After reading chunks of it, I'm against this bill, and ready to tell my Senators so, but you should decide for yourself.

Time to get to work. Have a great day!

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 28, 2004

0931 - Good morning. The roads are variously icy, slushy or saltwater, but I made it in to the client site up in Gaithersburg today, in the car. I'm leaving the truck at home for Marcia to use getting to her surgical follow-up appointment this afternoon. Yesterday things got very slick indeed, to the point where Sally slid right off the deck, bumped down the three stairs and onto the ice and snow below. Poor puppy. Anyway, there's lots of work I need to tend to, so I had best get to it. In the meantime, if you're in Northern California, or going to be visiting there in mid-March, check out Contact 2004. This year's theme, of course, is going to be Mars. Check it out, and I'll see you around.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 29, 2004

2221 - Hi. I've stopped, now. I just finished dinner - got home from work about 1830, setup the printing environment for Quicken, paid bills, talked to family members, talked a Doom attachment clicker back from the edge, and done the dishes. Coffee is set for tomorrow morning, and I'm whacked. So have a lovely evening, I'll try to catch up one of these days.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
January 30, 2004

2145 - Well, counting commute ... it was 12 hours today. That's okay, I learned a few new things, helped dig out a hidden switch that we thought was a rogue machine, figured out that Windows boxen TCP stacks don't know WHAT they're seeing when spanning tree protocol packets swing on by, and more. Tonight I'm moving furniture from the living room to the library - we have a couple of new pieces of furniture coming in tomorrow. Meantime Sally is snoring behind me and that's really contagious. I'm almost caught up on rest and health, though, so I should start having some more time around here again, too. Thanks for bearing with me. See your tomorrow.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
January 31, 2004

0954 - Good morning. I dragged out shortly after 6, to put the dogs out. Then back to bed for all of us. After 8, I got up, put on my cold weather gear and set about the first steps of deicing parts of the front walk and driveway, so that there isn't much ice in the way of furniture delivery this morning. Then I did some of the same in the back. Finally, I tottered back into the house and started some coffee brewing.

A few minutes later, Marcia called frantically from downstairs. Coming in from outside, Sally wasn't bearing any weight on her right rear leg. Sigh. Marcia starts ringing the vet, while I get the leash down. This drives Lucy into a "is it a walk? isitawalk? it'saWALK!!!" frenzy. Lovely, just what I need right now. Meantime, Sally stands up and starts walking around, nearly normally. Double sigh. No vet. What a weird dog. Perhaps she slipped and sprained something a bit, and she was waiting to see how things felt. But really now...

Oh, good news... I've finally got the graphics subsystem working the way I want it to. Goldfinger has a Radeon 9700 in him. I've wanted to have things working right both for the OpenGL applications (aka gaming) and stuff that needs some extended XFree86 attributes, like DGA. VMware likes having DGA working - full screen ops are much faster that way. Anyway, I basically setup a blank-slate configuration and then retuned. I got it right. The OpenGL is working and there's no DGA complaints. Woo!

Now that the sun is further up, I can go scrape some more ice. Back with pictures later today. Have fun...

2030 - No, I wasn't really posting at around 0100 this morning. I'm just in the habit of typing, for example, 0954. The problem is that once the hour and the minute is parsed by PHP, I've typed 09 and 54 respectively, and it shows as 0054. I'll puzzle that one out one of these days. John Dominik wrote to me earlier to point out that it's possible that Sally picked up some ice between her pads and that was drawing her up lame-ish. I'll check that when and if... thanks, John!

Anyway, the Library has futon sofas now. Those were inherited from the living room - we've had futons for furniture since before we married. When we moved in here, the library had shelves, and that lovely large low table inherited from my dad's folks. So we had books, and light, and no place to sit and read. I moved all this stuff in there last night, then sat and read to near the end, from Stephenson's latest work, Quicksilver. We do like the large futon at the end of the room, but the smaller one is probably going downstairs someplace, or out to garage sale in the Spring. In its place we'll probably have a couple of armchairs....

Today the living room got part of a makeover. The furniture that we got last week was delivered shortly after noon. This shot at right shows what is nearly the final arrangement for now. I've already moved the loveseat back and more angled, to open up the room a bit more. We'll get another of those small ottomans for the loveseat, too. And soon I'll make a cocktail table and two or three end tables. We know what we want, and it isn't all the glass and exciting curvy crap we see on all the showroom floors. I'm looking at a Mission/Prairie type of design - more on that when I get there.

Now to get on with whatever it was I was going to do next. Have a good evening.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
February 1, 2004

1045 - Good morning. You can see last night that I did manage to post a couple of snaps of the re-done rooms. Then I came back up here to work on the computer for a while ...

... I decided to test a new Debian installer, one of the weekly images for installing Sarge, currently known as the Testing branch of Debian GNU/Linux. Debian's always been a bit spare about ease of use in installation, much like the offspring-rearing capacities of a particular bird in H2G2:

"Pages one and two [of Zaphod's presidential speech] had been salvaged by a Damogran Frond Crested Eagle and had already become incorporated into an extraordinary new form of nest which the eagle had invented. It was constructed largely of papier mache and it was virtually impossible for a newly hatched baby eagle to break out of it. The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no truck with it."

And so it has been with Debian installs, having heard of ease of use, but wanting no part of such frivolity. Not that I've needed the bells and whistles ... Debian is a breeze to install, provided you know your hardware. And since I generally build my own boxes, then yes, that's not a problem. Mostly it's about filling in the blanks, and getting a running system until I can build my own kernel. The problem is that there's been no hardware detection, and if you *don't* know what the hardware is, then you can flounder about in the lists of drivers available for installing into the running kernel for absolute ages. Until you know what you're doing, that's not a pleasant experience. And sitting down to unknown hardware can make it a nightmare.

I'm experimenting now with the "Sarge" Official NetInst Snapshot i386, January 3, 2004 edition. Look here for more about these:

http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/

Nothing too fancy in the new installer - it's still a basic ncurses(3X) interface - text mode only. But the system runs through a hardware detection process now, once the language has been selected. This, like most distribution's hardware detection, involves test probing any safe drivers - anything that fails to install means the hardware isn't there. That isn't always kosher - some drivers can hardlock the system if you try to install them when the appropriate hardware isn't there. Of course, there's always the output of lspci(8) to guide the installer, too. The output from that utility is easy to parse, and just requires some good lookup tables correlating output to appropriate driver. But caution still reigns.

After that, there's just partitioning, filesystem selection, hostname, networking information, and base system installation to do. It takes but a couple of minutes with only one problem from my perspective. I don't like a box that tries DHCP without asking. I don't generally use DHCP on my network, but have it on for Marcia's work laptop. But for machines I'm setting up, even for test, I use static IP addresses - it makes getting to the install remotely via SSH much easier. This new installer just goes and does the DHCP client tango without asking. But hmmm.... it failed and I was able to assign an IP to the new distro. Odd, that - the DHCP server on my Netgear router is working fine. Sigh, oh, well.

Then I rebooted into the new Sarge install. I chose the timezone, setup the root and bilbrey users, selected an installation mirror for Apt to use (I'm a big fan of Pair networks for this, they've got a great OSS projects mirror program going at http://mirrors.pair.com/). One little hitch here, too: To get out of the Apt sources selection routine, I had to select Cancel. Finally, I started up the tasksel(1) utility. I don't usually *install* anything using tasksel on the first pass, but just running it sets up a nice minimal install suite of packages and utilities. So from the tasksel screen, I tab to Finish, and then proceed to installing the selected packages.

With all the downloading done, a few dialog boxes asking for pre-configuration information for a few packages fly by. I can almost answer those in my sleep, I've been installing Debian for so long now. Three minutes late, the new Sarge system is ready for login. Now I'll fire up tasksel again, and ask for three things: DNS Server, C and C++, and Custom Kernel Compilation. The latter buys me a lot of the little bits that aren't dependent on each other, but are all needed to build a new Linux kernel.

34 new packages later I'm up and running. The first thing I'll do is have another look at the output of lsmod(8), and decide which modules I'll need to build into the new kernel I'm about to build. One important feature of a reasonably secure machine is not allowing loadable modules into the kernel. It's not the ONLY way that root exploits embed themselves, but everything that makes a crack harder is a good thing. So here's the lsmod output:

vsarge:~# lsmod
Module               Size  Used by    Not tainted
pcmcia_core         35360   0
usb-uhci            19696   0  (unused)
usbcore             52588   0  [usb-uhci]
pcnet32             12384   1
mii                  1984   0  [pcnet32]
crc32                2848   0  [pcnet32]
ide-scsi             8464   0
es1371              24044   0  (unused)
ac97_codec          11412   0  [es1371]
soundcore            3268   4  [es1371]
gameport             1388   0  [es1371]
agpgart             35416   0  (unused)
parport_pc          19400   1  (autoclean)
lp                   5952   0  (autoclean)
parport             21800   1  (autoclean) [parport_pc lp]
ide-detect           9008   0
ide-cd              27936   0
cdrom               25088   0  [ide-cd]
ide-core            84216   0  [ide-scsi ide-detect ide-cd]
rtc                  6120   0  (autoclean)
reiserfs           155504   1  (autoclean)
isofs               22932   0  (autoclean)
ext3                53220   0  (autoclean)
jbd                 34824   0  (autoclean) [ext3]
sd_mod              10860   6  (autoclean)
BusLogic            78460   3  (autoclean)
scsi_mod            85344   3  (autoclean) [ide-scsi sd_mod BusLogic]
unix                13260  10  (autoclean)

By gum, there's the sound card modules. Excellent. Of course, since I'm building a test server configuration, I'll ignore those (virtual) hardware items in my kernel configuration.

Stay tuned for the rest of this adventure, coming up soon...

1754 - I'm told there's to be a football game today. I actually knew that, since Tom Brady is a second cousin on the port moiety. Worse yet, though, Marcia's threatening to watch the darned thing. The fun bit comes in here: SWMBO is currently taking a nap, having been tuckered out just watching me tend to the honey-do list. I wonder just how much of the game I can get away with letting her sleep through?

Pat and Nathan, our friends from Saratoga, are off to share a super-party at my first cousin's house. Nathan knows Jim (cousin Mary's hubby) from a former gig, and the world just keeps getting smaller. I told Marcia to warn Pat to take earplugs - my relatives are noisily enthusiastic about young Tom's successes.

So the newly assembled end tables are in place, and one more small ottoman. Now we're done with changes in the living room for a long, long time... excepting the mission-style cocktail table that I'll build one of these days. I hooked up some tunes into the library, took care of a wound-up clog on the beater in the vacuum cleaner, and put 40 watt bulbs in the bedside lamps to give us more light there. Now it's time for me to relax, so I will. Enjoy your evening.

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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.

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