Orb Designs Graffiti, a Daily Blog - March 29, 2004 thru April 04, 2004

GRAFFITI -- March 29, 2004 thru April 04, 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
March 29, 2004

0721 - Good morning. It was a tiring and productive weekend. The house is sparkling clean, and I got some quality time in out on the lawn. There are a number of problem areas in back, not least of which was the area just below my new garden. That got chewed up by the rototiller as I made an assortment of u-turns. Then there was a little 2' x 4' patch of non-grass a few feet away from the remnants of the sand pit - that's about 10 feet in diameter. The sand pit's problem really was that it was non-level, and second that the grass was spotty. For the first two locations I lightly tilled the surface, and I turned the sandpit over deeply with what surface soil there was, down to the clay. Then I raked all three areas level and tamped them down. Finally, I seeded, fertilized and mulched with some of the grass trimmings from that pile I made (for just this purpose, among others) at the bottom of the yard. With luck I'll have new grass poking up through in the next couple of weeks, temperatures permitting.

I got to have some Python time late last night. I worked through another chapter's exercises in Learning Python. I want to keep up with that at least a little bit, so that I don't drop all of the knowledge I picked up at PyCon. There won't be much chance for using it this week, though. I've got a busy day at the office planned today, then client sites all the rest of the week. Then we'll have our house guests for a week, so expect the unexpected.

I suppose that it's time to strap on my shoes and get ready to face the traffic. Have a lovely day!

Top / Email Brian

Mon TUESDAY Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
March 30, 2004

1832 - Good evening. A delayed day. Last night was eaten by matters financial, paying bills and whatnot. Then this morning was a fast bailout to get up to Gaithersburg for a busily unstructured day, lots of small projects started, precious little finished, but progress and/or good planning made on most. Tonight I'll muck about a bit with Fedora Core Test 2 and let you know what I think. See you around...

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues WEDNESDAY Thu Fri Sat Sun
March 31, 2004

0819 - Good morning. A brief post from onsite. I did in fact install Fedora Core 2, Test 2 last night a couple of different ways. First, I installed it in a VMware setup. That requires setting "Legacy mode" on the virtual CDROM drive. The next interesting thing is that FC2T2 is now using X.org, instead of XFree86. That confuses VMware mightily, and so after a successful install that wouldn't do X, I stopped heading down that road. I instead did something I haven't done in a long time. I did a kitchen sink install, this time on the real hardware. It takes about an hour to get all 6.2G of stuff installed, but the system comes up like a champ. The other new feature of FC2T2 is SELinux extensions (that NSA project) is enabled by default. There's plenty to explore there and I will, time permitting, and report my results. Now I need to get to work. Have a great day!

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed THURSDAY Fri Sat Sun
April 1, 2004

0659 - Good morning. Svenson weighed in the other day about our upcoming fun with Brood X of the 17 year cicadas:

<quote>...the expected onslaught of Cicadas, ... </quote>

Simple solution.
Install SUSE. Those Geckos eat the Cicada for lunch (and dinner and breakfast).

--
Svenson.

But wait... Am I installing SuSE? Ximian? Novell? All of the above? What does it matter, as long as the gecko eats the cicadas, eh? My luck the gecko will lose his gig as mascot just before the brood emerges.

Yesterday was moderately successful. I continued on a couple of paths at the client site that will eventually lead to some good solutions for outstanding problems having to do with text-to-voice requirements, and I'm building them a new mail server, too. Then in the evening, I was batting .500. First up was an old 10G WD drive that I was blanking before transfer to a customer with an ailing system today. I popped it into a debian box I have laying about, and typed this (the drive designation depends on where in the chain you put it. I had this drive as secondary master, so it was found at /dev/hdc... you know what you're doing with this type of command or it will bite your ass - you have been warned):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=1M

I came back a few minutes later and I have a drive full of zeros. Perfect. The failure was with an old Linksys BEFSR11 gateway/router device. I have had this laying around for years, and wanted to refurb it with the latest firmware and put it into play for an experiment up in Gaithersburg. No such luck. Although all the blinky lights were on, it just never came to life as far as actual connectivity was concerned. I worked on that for a good three hours last night, googling this idea and trying that one. Oh, well, can't win them all, can I?

Time for me to roll. I've got a meeting, a conference call, then two client sites to visit today. You have a great day!

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu FRIDAY Sat Sun
April 2, 2004

0715 - Good morning. Damn. Instead of the post I intended to put up, I've been frantically paying the renewal fee (at a bloody exhorbitant rate)for daynotes.org. I asked for it to be transferred to me early last month, from the person who was holding it. Apparently that email never went through. Sigh. So instead, the site was deleted from his DNS a few days ago. This was brought to my attention last night by a number of people. I ran in circles, and decided I'd better register Daynotes.net (that link may not work yet for a couple of days), lest we lose the game altogether. Now I've gotten email from the concerned party, and links to pay for the renewal. $40 bucks at current exchange rates, instead of the $8 it would have cost me to transfer and get a year's renewal in the bargain from GoDaddy. Oh, well, Daynotes.org is up, and will be in the fold one of these days, soon. And if Tom can get Verisign to recognize that he's got a new email addy, then I can transfer Daynotes.com in, too. That'd be nice.

Okay, I must fly! See you around. Remember, we've got houseguests for the next week, from Marcia's side of the family, so expect light posts.

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri SATURDAY Sun
April 3, 2004

0801 - Good morning. Karen and Ron arrived safe and sound last night. They're cat people - I dunno how Lucy's going to handle that, perhaps she'll go into full-gonzo evangelical mode: "You KNOW you love dogs, right?", day and night until they relent. And of course, dogs are so danged useful when it comes to letting their people know that those heinous thugs are stealing the trash again. Why do we insist upon leaving it out near the street where it's so easy to grab and run???

A few sidelines from the week just past: First off, I ran out of space on my main root volume here on Goldfinger. Silly, really, I just forgot to monitor for that. Now you'd think with a 16 Gig /, there'd be plenty of room. But not when building everything from source (topping up /usr/portage/distfiles, 4.6G) and Linux kernel source trees (I had 21 of those unpacked into /usr/src, 3.2 G freed when I dumped the oldest 19 of those).

Nextly, there's Daynotes. Daynotes.ORG is back online (well, it was never off, but the DNS records were removed due to errors in communications). It points to the same tree as before, with accommodations for Daynotes.NET, the site I bought night before last when it seemed that the two other Daynotes sites might slip out of our grasp. Now we're in the process of getting administrative transfer of dotORG moved to me. Then I'll pull it down to GoDaddy with the rest of my sites. I'm not particularly vain about such things, but I'd hate to have any of you go to one of the sites known for our type of Daynotes, only to end up at a portal page for WebCamGrrrlz or something similar. I'll leave dotORG/dotNET as it is now, they can both land there. If Tom and I manage to effect the transfer of Daynotes.COM, then I'll put up a separate tree there, leaving that original structure up, including some of the original stories and backgrounder intros.

John Kopp wrote:
>> Hi, Brian,
> The Daynotes.org link has not worked for a few days and I have not seen 
> any reference to this in the few daynoters which I have separately 
> bookmarked.  Is this a DNS problem? Solution? Can you give me the 
> numeric value of the URL? The old daynotes.com still exists and works 
> despite Tom S.'s threats to take it down.
Yah. Many things going on at once. Here's the whole story. Tom had issues with events on the Daynotes backchannel, and to forstall a disappearing dotCOM, Bob Walder first got and held the dotORG site. Later he got tired of doing so, but wouldn't transfer the domain nor the DNS. I took on hosting dotORG, and waited. This year he asked for someone else to pick up the tab for hosting. I responded with a request to transfer, which garnered no reply (He says he never got it). Then when I got your note and several others saying dotORG was gone, I panicked ('tho that's probably an exaggeration). dotORG expiring in 10 days, DNS gone, I'm not admin for the domain... what to do?

I went out and bought the dotNET, setup DNS and apache configs and waited. By last night that had propogated nicely. And by then, of course, Walder put the DNS entries back in and sent information about how to renew the domain. It cost a bomb to do so, since I had to use his UK registrar - too close to exipiry to transfer. Now Bob and I are finagling the administrative handover. Then I'll transfer dotORG to my preferred registrar.

dotCOM will eventually transfer down here too, although I'll retain that as a static site for historical purposes. The ongoing and hopefully growing list will be the dotORG/dotNET combo site.
> P.S.: I've been reading your almost daily writings since long before you 
> made the move from the left coast. I'm curious about your impression of 
> the traffic situation around D.C. relative to the S.F.Bay area. I can't 
> imagine anything worse than rush hours on the Cap. Beltway.
<bows> Thanks! I appreciate your patronage. During the height of the dotBOOM (not bomb), traffic around the South Bay (SF Bay Area) made today's Beltway traffic pale in comparison. My most normal run, from Bowie to Gaithersburg, takes a little less than an hour except on the very worst days, when accidents and rain take their toll. Homebound generally averages about 15 minutes more. But the same distance over the same sort of artery in South Bay 5 years ago would take 2 to 2.5 hours during commute. You'd see thirty miles of backup moving at about half a mile an hour. I never really understood the dotCOMMERS buying all those fast cars... ALL cars can go under 10 mph quite handily.

Now, with employment levels some 40% down from where they were at the peak, I'm told that traffic is a breeze. So today, you're probably right.

Thanks for asking and writing.

Now to go have some coffee. Have a great day!

Top / Email Brian

Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat SUNDAY
April 4, 2004

0839 - Well, good morning. There's a spot of sunshine creeping through the window just now, and that hasn't happened in several days. It keeps getting interferred with by cloudus interruptus, but a welcome sight all the same.Our friend Pat wrote to me yesterday to confirm the relative current lightness of traffic in the South Bay Area, but noted at the same time that a jumper can ruin your day. The A's were scheduled to be across the Bay playing in SF, got stuck in the snarled traffic, and barely made it to the park on time.

Back in my own brain (after a short bout of surfing that led me through a bunch of Tiger Woods sites, don't ask why), we had a nice supper last night. Larry and Cheryl and Jim and Lee joined the four of us. I grilled steak and chicken, we had salads and all sorts of good stuff. Fun evening, good conversation. I'm still looking forward to building the dining room set so that dinner guests don't have to eat off of their knees (when there are more than four).

Today I think we're due for a driving tour someplace. I don't know yet, the others are out to church this morning and we'll finalize our plans when they get back. I guess I'll go hop in the shower now. 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 -- March 29, 2004 thru April 04, 2004

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