Orb Designs Graffiti, a Daily Blog - February 09, 2004 thru February 15, 2004

GRAFFITI -- February 09, 2004 thru February 15, 2004

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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
February 9, 2004

0723 - Good morning. Let me see if I can't clean up my to-do box here... Mike M. wrote last week in followup to my comments about the Debian installation to ask "...why dselect is a Bad Thing, and why it wants to uninstall several hundred packages when you use it..." Well, let me restate this: dselect(8) is like using the 120mm gun of a M1A2 Abrams main battle tank to combat termites. That is, it's overkill. The level of detail is extremely fine, and the UI is not particularly intuitive. My preference in tools these days is called aptitude, which is rather like dselect-lite. It works both from the command line, and via an X GUI if X is present. As to why it wants to delete several hundred packages... Well, were those all packages installed on your Win2K partition? Heh. I don't know, I'd have to see it in operation to get a sense of what was going on.

Wynn F. wrote yesterday to yank my chain about the Sun Java Desktop that I first installed last week. It is SuSE 8.1. It has a number of plugins pre-integrated, such as Flash and of course Java. The Gnome 2.2 DE interface is clean and just fine. StarOffice 7 is a nice package, and having a complete Templates package is very nice indeed. But they have the SuSE weakness - no system configuration for connecting to Windows shares. While I can browse to Workgroup, I could not access the share lists without first entering the hostnames and IP addesses in /etc/hosts. And for StarOffice to access those files, I would have to create fstab entries, and change permissions on some Samba binaries. That won't do for the intended audience, I think. Really, these people all need to have a long hard look at LinNeighborhood. In a business setting, I'd choose my own distribution, and use OpenOffice if my template needs were modest, or buy StarOffice7 if I needed lots of templates, just on the basis of how I value my time. I won't be using Sun's Java Desktop system except to check out some document compatibility issues in the future.

Okay. I need to get rolling. Have a great day!

Top / Email Brian

Mon TUESDAY Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
February 10, 2004

0643 - Good morning. Bob Thompson (among many others) wrote "Ah, I figured you'd typed "2/9/04" and the software had interpreted it in a European sort of way..."

/* Change this every week */
StDay=9;
StMonth=2;
StYear=2004;
That's the thing that I edited improperly, at the top of my page this morning (oh, and there are or should be dollar signs in front of those variable names, but you get the point). You'd think with the actual NAMES of the stinking variables, I'd have been able to get it right. More pointedly, I might have been able to see it when I previewed the results after uploading. However, my eyes processed what I EXPECTED to see, and clicked the monday link to read the post. I didn't test links because that's what the code does for me - automagical linking, as long as I input the data properly. GIGO still rules the day.

Until I got that bolus of message traffic shortly after I returned to the office yesterday afternoon, I had no idea I'd borked my pages. So sorry... It was a productive day, though. We rolled another client over from a RaQ system to a Linux box running Postfix, RBLs and SpamAssassin. The changeover was smooth and easy. How nice is that?

I think that a world without Saddam running a country is a good thing. I also think that Dubya did badly by two things. First, he lead us into war with the wrong ones - most of the terrorists who flew planes into buildings on 9/11 were Saudi, after all. Second, since we ransacked the on-the-ground intelligence services in favor of satellite data interpretation, there's been no good human intel from lots of places that are dangerous to us. That made what little data there was subject to much interpretation and there certainly wasn't enough data for the services to gainsay the George, or put the breaks on a runaway administration. Personally, I also think that making taxpayers pay for the attempt (and ultimate failure to, I'm quite sure) building of Iraq into a mock Western nation is bloody awful. We just "freed" a bunch of Iraqis from a horrid dictator. They're sitting on a lot of oil. Let them thank us by paying for their own darned rebuilding. Then they can let contracts to the French and the Germans if they want.... Oh, yeah, I do have a point here. Dubya (or people for whom his is responsible for) got out of line - I'll agree with that. And MoveOn, an organization for which I generally don't have much use, is running a petition campaign to get Congress to censure Bush. While I don't believe that's possible, given the current makeup of the House and Senate, it is possible that it'll tip things further away from the Shrub come November. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm only bummed that Dean's shot is ... shot. If you agree with this effort, then send a letter to your CongressCritters and let them know. Or send them an email - after the Ricin thing, they may not be opening any envelopes anytime soon. Here's what I have to say:

President Bush lied to Congress and to the Nation, to achieve his goal of war on Iraq. Regardless of the right or wrong of the matter, and of the results, the President should not be able to lie to us to gain support for his goals.

There were no WMD to be found. The "winning" of the war on Iraq continues to cost American lives, as well as the dilution of our pursuit of Al Qaeda through the distractions of our entanglement in Iraq. The "winning" of the war on Iraq will cost billions in American taxpayer dollars to "rebuild" an oil-rich country. I do not approve.

Don't let the President keep lying to you. What are you going to do now? I am watching, and I vote.

Doing an update of Gentoo on both Gryphon and Goldfinger last night, I ran across an interesting little problem. On Gryphon (running Gentoo "stable"), after the emerge -u system was complete, I was prompted to update a number of configuration files. I typed etc-update to do that very thing, and in return was presented with an error message intimating that libstdc++.so.5 was not to be found and nothing was working. It was a Python error message, so I figured the easy fix was to just re-emerge Python, eh? Heh, silly boy. Nope, emerge IS python code. Sheesh, just shoot me in the head. So I checked in the right places. libstdc++.so.5 was present in the appropriate lib directory. And that lib directory was present in /etc/ld.so.conf. So what could be the problem? ... Could it be? Nah, but what the hell. I typed ldconfig, then etc-update. Everything worked fine. After one of the emerges, which had rebuilt a number of core libraries, a post-install script was to have run ldconfig. It didn't. Problem solved.

I know why I don't like politics. And most religions. And many groups of three or more people. Everybody's against something. Sometimes lots of somethings. A few are for something or other. I like that. Of course, generally, I'm for staying out of the other guy's face, let people do what they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Come down like a barrel of bricks on people who do hurt someone else. Oh, and I'm definitely for less lawyers. I am *way* for that, eh? I need to find a representative who is for stuff that I approve of, and do something useful.

I am for a small standing army to defend our shores. I am for local militias, and an ethic which says that gun control means use both hands. I am for a woman's choice, be it abortion or contraception. I am for worshipping whatever gods you want, in whatever way you want, as long as you pays your taxes and don't hurt, brainwash or kidnap anyone. I am for chocolate. And chocolate is for me. Ah, but I digress. I am for local government over state government, and state government over federal government. Give Space to the corporations. We'll get someplace then. I am for reasonable amounts of profiling, if it involves letting grandmothers and war heros not get strip searched while we check everyone of obvious Middle Eastern descent. If you want to be treated right, folks, then make your friends and neighbors behave through social pressures. If you and your family think what was done to the US on 9/11 was a good thing, then get the hell out of my country. Or if you're elsewhere, then stay the hell out. I am for arming everyone getting onto airplanes with box cutters. Or something. All the TSA is capable of is disarming law abiding citizens that would defend us when it comes down to brass tacks time. I am for educating people up to their level of ability and tolerance, helping them get a job that suits their needs, and helping them through the economic rough times. But when it comes to welfare, I am for cutting the benefit, with each additional child added to a family. A welfare family should not grow - welfare can't pay enough to get you out of the hole to begin with, and extra rug rats only make it harder. They'll grow up learning one lesson - mooch off the taxpayers. I'm for less of that, too.

Okay, I'll go quietly now. But protect your freedoms, folks. It's important. Pay attention to what's happening. Some of it's the same old game, playing by new Homeland Security rules. Other problems are Patriot Act abuses ... those need to be questioned. More thoughts on how to do this forthwith. Have a good day!

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues WEDNESDAY Thu Fri Sat Sun
February 11, 2004

0727 - Good morning. After a decent day up in Gathersburg, I spent a couple hours in the evening doing remote updates of Windows servers at client sites, getting MS04-007 patched. I'm going to shoot into the office this morning and get a couple of boxes there patched. Then I'll be at client sites for the next two days doing their workstations and whatnot, although those are slightly lower priority because they have no ports that are accessible to the outside world.

Okay, instead of a skreed this morning, I'll just be going. Have a lovely day.

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed THURSDAY Fri Sat Sun
February 12, 2004

0717 - Good morning. I slept late, more's the pity. However, the more I read about the ASN1 vunlnerability from MS, the more wary I am about the potential problems when someone does write a worm, trojan or virus to take advantage of it. This lies at the heart of Windows, including the domain authentication bits, so you can't just shut it off, the way you could with the SQL ports. Here's the message, patch or be damned. Really. Corporate users and home users alike - patch your machine from the Windows Update site until there are no more critical updates left, then check one more time. Live with the long download times to get the patches, even by dialup. Live with the reboots required by installing all this stuff. Because one day soon a virus will come along that will try to own the MS world through this vulnerability.

I downloaded Firefox, compiled and installed it last night, Firefox is the latest and hopefully last rebranding of the separated browser component from Mozilla. It's light, fast and capable. There are still configuration items I need to work on, but this is halfway to being my default browser already, in just a few short hours.

Here's a couple of fun links to lighten your day. First, from Slashdot by way of my friend Russell, the Duracell CPU Monitor, a small but fun electronics project. Next, in case you'd missed this previously, here's my current favorite 404 page on the web. Finally for now, reader David T. promises hours of reading fun with the Debian developer weblogs at Planet Debian.

Now I must drive. Have a great day!

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu FRIDAY Sat Sun
February 13, 2004

1039 - Good morning. A thought for the day from my friend Scott:

Despite how you may have personally felt about the issue, there was a good logical reason for removing the Ten Commandments monument from the AlabamaSupreme Court building.

You cannot post things like "Thou Shalt Not Steal," "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery", and "Thou Shall Not Lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri SATURDAY Sun
February 14, 2004

0843 - Good morning. As of last night, I had about 5 days of uptime on Goldfinger. This is continuous runtime in KDE, basically browsing, email, music, this site, and gkrellm2 as a system monitor. I've also applied some system updates during that time. Here's what the top of top looks like:

top - 17:47:52 up 4 days, 21:19,  1 user,  load average: 0.41, 0.18, 0.07
Tasks:  98 total,   2 running,  95 sleeping,   1 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  20.4% user,   8.1% system,   0.0% nice,  71.5% idle
Mem:   1031356k total,  1016020k used,    15336k free,    79916k buffers
Swap:  2096440k total,     5964k used,  2090476k free,   156988k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 2430 root      18   0 62016  47m 4116 R 21.0  4.7  79:55.69 X
 8270 bilbrey   16   0 11120  10m 8120 S 14.8  1.1   0:06.82 bluefish
 3909 bilbrey   16   0 39184  15m 7092 S  4.9  1.5  34:47.67 xmms
 2531 bilbrey   16   0  157m  24m  15m S  3.6  2.4   8:41.02 kdeinit
 . . .

I've burnt through a gig of RAM without even breathing hard. Look at those numbers for kdeinit. Stunningly large. When I exited KDE, and killed off a couple of errant kget processes manually, I found that there was still 803M of system RAM in use. But the process list couldn't even account for a small fraction of that. Then I rebooted the system. Running all processes, including VMware modules, logged into the system, but not starting X Windows, I was humming along at about 57M in use. So how's about running with Fluxbox instead of KDE?

top - 18:01:23 up 5 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.10, 0.14, 0.06
Tasks:  62 total,   1 running,  61 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):   4.3% user,   2.7% system,   0.0% nice,  93.0% idle
Mem:   1031356k total,   173816k used,   857540k free,    13524k buffers
Swap:  2096440k total,        0k used,  2096440k free,    72180k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
 2543 root      16   0 43432  29m 3664 S  1.3  2.9   0:10.78 X                 
 2602 bilbrey   15   0 24116  23m  16m S  0.0  2.3   0:01.24 firefox-bin       
 . . .

I've got a memory leaker someplace. Fluxbox is humming along using less than 5M of resources on it's own. Firefox is, of course, the new Mozilla browser. Historically, XMMS has been the culprit in this sort of instance. I left Evolution and XMMS running overnight from that starting point above, and I'm up to about 283M actually in use. Mmmm. Additionally, I'm still running along in the 2.4 kernel for these tests. I want to get the VMware stuff running under 2.6 and then I can finish that cutover - everything else is working and I hear that both speed and process management are much better under 2.6.x. More on this when I know more.

I'm going to PyCon DC this year. It is time to start rebuilding my coding skills, and that means dedicating some time and mental resources to the process. Should be frightening, really. Are you going to be there? Or you? Let me know.

Today I've got a headlight bulb to replace, a few chores around here to do and a nap to help knock this cold down again - it's moved into my right ear. So I'm loading up on decongestants and ibuprofin to kick that in the ass before it gets as bad as it did last year. After all, all the doc did then was give me ... decongestants and anti-inflammatories. I can handle that. Tonight, we're going to a Cabaret to celebrate Valentine's Day. Have a happy day, yourself. See ya!

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat SUNDAY
February 15, 2004

1035 - More or less... oh, hi. Good morning. I was up at 0649, really I was. The dog were roaming about demanding to go out. After a short debate, I got out of bed, took them downstairs and put them out back. We all staggered back upstairs and collapsed back into our respective beds. Then I snuggled close to Marcia and said:

Happy Birthday, Baby!

Yep. My lovely Marcia's another year older today - she's twenty seven. This is after the last five birthdays where she didn't get any older, and stayed twenty six each year. I convinced her that it was time to advance a year. Yesterday, as a part of her present, we went antiquing for a bit. We didn't buy anything, but saw and had lots of good ideas and a fun time. Then we went out to supper at our favorite Mexican restaurant. We haven't been able to do that since the gall bladder came out. But Marcia worked her system up to toleration of those foods she most enjoys, and it was time. Then to cap the evening, we went out to a Cabaret series production called Love is in the Air, at the Round House Theatre in downtown Silver Spring. The 'specially fun part of that is that our friend Linda Rose Payne is in that production - she's great!

Today, now that I'm up and about, we'll go do a few shopping errands, and Marcia's going to sew up a storm. I guess I'd best be getting ready to roll. Have a great day.

Top / Email Brian

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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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GRAFFITI -- February 09, 2004 thru February 15, 2004

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Happy Birthday, Baby!