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GRAFFITI -- May 31, 2004 thru June 06, 2004>> 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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May 31, 2004
1500 - Good afternoon...
Three strangers strike up a conversation in the airport passenger lounge in Bozeman, Montana, awaiting their flights.
One is an American Indian passing through from Lame Deer. Another is a cowboy on his way to Billings for a livestock show. The third passenger is a fundamentalist Arab student, newly arrived at Montana State University from the Middle East.
Their discussion drifts to their diverse cultures. Soon, the two Westerners learn that the Arab is a devout, radical Muslim and the conversation falls into an uneasy lull.
The cowboy leans back in his chair, crosses his boots on a magazine table and tips his big sweat-stained hat forward over his face.
The wind outside is blowing tumbleweeds around, and the old windsock is flapping; but still no plane comes.
Finally, the American Indian clears his throat and softly he speaks, "At one time here, my people were many, but sadly, now we are few."
The Muslim student raises an eyebrow and leans forward, "once my people were few," he sneers, "and now we are many. Why do you suppose that is?"
The Montana cowboy shifts his toothpick to one side of his mouth and from the darkness beneath his Stetson says in a drawl, "That's 'cause we ain't played Cowboys and Muslims yet, but I do believe it's a-comin'."
Thanks to friend Brian for sending that one my way.
It is Memorial Day. Good men have given their lives in defense of American freedom in many places and many wars. Today young men and women stand the line in Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea and other places, keeping the peace, or fighting and sometimes dying to preserve what our forefathers built here. I honor them, their efforts, actions, and fortitude. And remember not to give away those freedoms in the cause of security, for without the freedom, security is merely a jackboot on our throat. Pay heed, George Bush, John Ashcroft, and Tom Ridge: Don't sell our freedom south. Do not make worthless the sacrifice of our fine soldiers.
A lazy day today otherwise. Marcia's napping, I'm watching Colonial House. We'll have some friends over tonight for holiday supper, and grill food in this nasty unseasonable weather. Yeah, it's been raining all day, but I'll count my blessings instead.
Have a great day! See ya...
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June 1, 2004
0702 - Good morning. Today is dawning the day yesterday should have been: Sunny and mild. Yesterday was drizzle and rain with the occasional tornado watch. The extra-good news is that no matter how hard we watched ... no tornado. Dinner and guests were all pleasant, more on this topic later, I need to get going. I'm at a brand-new customer site this morning, and need to be prompt to make a good impression. That means early, to compensate for possible traffic problems.
Have a great day!
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June 2, 2004
0921 - Good morning. Busy day, and I slept in a little bit to start it off. *AND* I was in bed asleep before 10 last night, plain tuckered out. I don't know why. I've a few pictures from the weekend to share, and more coming from Bob's cameras soon... but I've no time to post them today. Look for some tomorrow morning. Now I need to get cracking! Have a great day!
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June 3, 2004
0711 - Good morning. First, a couple of snaps...
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Lucy works hard all day, as you can tell from the picture above left, when she was caught in the act, about a week and a half ago. Or perhaps it's something about our living room, as after a hard day running around back on Memorial Day, Elizabeth was all tuckered out and slept for a good two hours, first alone while we stayed outside, then in the center of the room, with adults chattering and dogs bounding about. I also got a couple of good pictures of the quilt and two pillows that Marcia made for Barbara Thompson. I think that Barbara picked out the primary fabric, then Marcia took the lead from that. But when quilt pictures are being taken, Lucy can't help but get in on the action. She stolled in and perched herself in precisely the same spot as when Marcia and Karen held Karen's quilt, a few months back. That's a happy little dog, neh?
I did get the set of pictures from Bob's cameras yesterday, but haven't had time to get the processing done yet (that is, preview, crop, shrink, thumbnail, etc.). I'll do that tonight and put more up tomorrow. Barbara's got a batch up now, most will likely overlap.
Eric Raymond has an opinion (huge surprise, NOT!) about the recent spate of "Hardware wants to be free" announcements from Sun and Microsoft. A key section lies in the first paragraph: "IT customers tempted to sign on should take a lesson from the recent box-office bomb Troy and beware of suits bearing gifts. Because it's very clear that this version of free hardware will actually be controlled hardware -- controlled, specifically, to effectively seize control of the customer's operation." Go read the article, it's lucid and makes the point exceedingly clear - this isn't for our benefit, neh?
Today, I'm headed up to Gaithersburg for a short stint at a client site, getting an offsite machine ready for the email thing from a remote location, and applying regular updates, etc. Then I'll be back at the NERDS office doing a variety of tasks. I hope to take tomorrow off from the day gig to take care of some personal biz, as well as do some stuff for ETS, both webs and mailing lists. Oh, and Marcia get's home from Delaware tonight ... yay from both Lucy and me!!!
Gotta go. Have a great day!
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June 4, 2004
0807 - Good morning. So Marcia's wandering around the bedroom this morning, wondering where her glasses are. They're not on her nightstand, they're not on the dresser, they're not ...
"Are they on the desk in your office?", I ask?
"No, I remember moving your glasses to put mine down."
Urgh! "Check over here," I groan. No wonder I was having trouble focusing last night, reading in bed. I thought I was just extraordinarily tired - I only read about 30 pages before calling it quits. Eeeeesh! A few minutes later I wandered downstairs, and said, "I can't find my car keys. I moved yours to put them down... you're unhindered by logic!" ...stealing a line from Rob Becker. I said, "Next time, if you have to put your glasses down where mine are, at least leave them both there, don't hide mine in the process.
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Yep, here's some of the other pictures. Malcolm believes in his heart that he's just a cuddly little lapdog, and how are you going to argue with that? Either happy and licking my nose or fanging in the direction of Duncan in case I need protection, who am I to disagree. Later in the evening, one of the Kitterman's dogs, Knuckles, flopped down beside me on the floor and asked for a belly scratch.
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In Bob's only photographic semi-appearance, part of him is in play with Malcolm, while Duncan tries other kinds of play with Lucy. Lucy's having none of that, however, and we were unable to get any pictures of her backing Duncan all the way across the yard. No cameras handy any time that happened. After all that play, Lucy was seriously whacked, and Duncan's just a native napper, like Sally was.
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It really isn't all about the dogs... (or is it?) But the Kitterman's were there (with their two dogs), Mike came along (and didn't bring either of his dogs), while Barbara looked on to be sure that Malcolm didn't eat anyone. Of course, as it turns out, the one casualty of the evening was Sylvia's lip, nipped by none other than our little Lucy. Sylvia? Lucy is really, really sorry, okay? She said you can come staple her ears to the ceiling if it'll help...
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Of course, the preferred spot for a dog is where she'll got lots of attention, so Lucy positioned herself where she could get lots of petting, by Marcia along with the two elder Kitterman daughters, Victoria and Sylvia. (Yes, that's right, Lucy -- Staplegun Sylvia -- now you behave or I'll call her over!) That's the end of my picture selection, we hope you enjoyed it!
I just had to send this email off...
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: VIRUS IN YOUR MAILTo whom it may concern,
Ahem. Then your virus checker should be smart enough to know that Netsky is one that spoofs the return address, LIKE MOST OTHER VIRUSES. Please add functionality to your virus checker to not send out reverse notifications for viruses that are known spoofers. This traffic is unnecessary and useless for people like me, unnecessary and frightening for people that don't know better.
Oh, and the likelyhood that I'd have any virus on my system is virtually nil, since I don't run Windows.
regards,
.brian
I'm working from home today. I've got some personal business to attend to, and a variety of tasks to accomplish for ETS. I figured better to burn a Vacation day than try to get all of this stuff done and still put in a full day's work for NERDS. I'd best be about it. Have a great day!
0848 - I'm back, and very angry.
To: Dana Blankenhorn <[email protected]>
Subject: About this week's clue...Sir,
I have read most of what you have written over the last few years, and one of the highlights of each week has been your email newsletter. You write from the heart, and from your best understanding of the matter.
It is with regret and no little amount of anger that I have cancelled my subscription to your mailings, and I intend to urge that action on all of my friends, correspondents and readers. You say:
"Now all nations have evil-doers among them. We call them our military."
Were you one of those people who would have thrown feces at returning Vietnam vets, given the chance? Do you despise the men and women who serve our country so much that you'll castigate them as a faceless group, in public, for the decisions of their leaders, and the actions of a few?
What worries me is that I'm reasonably sure that you believe whole-heartedly in what you write. But I find what you write to be wrong-headed and evil in it's own right. But not the evil of a misdeed or bad intent. No, yours is the evil of believing that Bad Men can be fought without wars, without taking the battle to where the enemy is and doing things that would rather not be done.
You excuse Hitler, Stalin and bin Laden, then tar Washington, Lincoln, Lee, Wilson, Eisenhower by their proximity. And the Greatest Generation *does* know what they did - they did right, fighting for our freedom, fighting against those who by official policy caused the Holocaust. Yes, some of those brave men did things of which they were not proud. But they served our country, and did right, by my lights.
For you, sir, I can banish your email from my inbox, and if you're feeling particularly energetic, get the hell out of my country. I have read what you wrote, considered it, and rejected it. You have the freedom of speech in part because we have had soldiers who died to protect that right. I have the freedom to not listen to you anymore.
Brian Bilbrey
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Brian Bilbrey: [email protected] and http://www.orbdesigns.com/
The record companies pretend they're protecting the rights of
the musicians, but you have to be deeply dumb to believe that.
- Orson Scott Card via ornery.org
Now Blankenhorn's email comes out on Friday. I don't think that he posts it online until Monday, so I can't link to what he wrote right now. And I won't violate his copyright by posting it here. If you need to see a copy of what so irked me, send me email and I'll forward you a copy. But I've just now unsubscribed myself from his list. If I now get more A-Clue newsletters, I'll report him upstream as spam. I may not agree with Shrub's policies, and I definitely don't like some of the stupid shit our soldiers pulled in Abu Ghraib. However, as a group, I'm proud of our fighting forces. Thank you for being out there at the sharp end of the stick, doing what needs to be done!
1016 - Blankenhorn posted my letter, calling it hate mail. I replied a final time...
Hate mail, eh? I can *DO* hate mail, but you aren't worth the effort. That was simple disagree mail.
Welcome to my kill file (that is, as in EMAIL kill file, in case you don't get it). All further communication automatically round filed.
.b
And so it goes. I've been entertained by his quaint ideas about the coming interconnectedness of all things through a wireless mesh, without regard for the potential for privacy violation and the near-inevitable coming of a "Big Brother" society that would result. I've tolerated his mild pacifism, since he speaks from his heart. But now it's clear to me that his heart lives in a utopia unrelated to the real world, and that any soldier reading his message knows that Blankenhorn thinks all soldiers are evildoers. He said so. The new rule is in my mail filters, and he is shunned. I am happy to talk all day about the merits of any particular military plan or policy, but Blankenhorn crossed a line. I'm done with him.
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June 5, 2004
0916 - Good morning. Yesterday was a long, productive day with a couple of additional posts. Meantime I did a little bit of NERDS work here and there over the phone, and a bunch of stuff for the new ETS website. Most of that was integrating the text of the site with the brand new datasheets that I finally got hold of yesterday morning. And through all of that, Lucy spent the day napping in a variety of incredibly uncomfortable looking postures, as at right.
In the Other Items of Interest category, I just did a quick check, and it's clear that I didn't say anything about Xandros Linux either over the weekend or during this past week. I should have. Bob and I did some testing of MandrakeLinux PowerPack 10.0 and Xandros Desktop version 2. We both agreed - Xandros kicks Mandrake's ass all the way up the street, and back down again. Now, that's not to say that I couldn't personally get the mostly the same results from Mandrake that we did from Xandros... but the point is that after installation, Xandros just worked. The wireless stuff worked, the CD tools they've added into the GUI just worked, the Windows® networking stuff just worked (both for discovery, mounting, and sharing).
How impressed am I with Xandros? As much as I'm enjoying living on the edge with Gentoo, and the ease with which updates and dependencies are resolved, the fit and finish of Xandros, combined with the Debian distribution and tools upon which it is built makes it a very tempting target. However, changing distro's for work and for home are two very different projects. Additionally, I'll want to be able to revert if the need arises... More thinking and planning is needed.
And yes, the Mailbox project isn't done, either. I'm waiting for an answer on a question I asked via email. That answer will guide the balance of the project. Mark, are you there? Heh. Now I should get to work on some of those inside chores, as the outside here is quite damp, and still raining. Have a great day!
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June 6, 2004
0937 - Good morning. I only did two things yesterday. Both were ultimately successful, but the second was a real bear. After leaving off here yesterday morning, I headed downstairs to do pick up where I left off down in the woodshop. It was a good day for such things, as we were in our second day of continuous drizzle broken up only by periods of heavier rain. I sanded out the first round of mud, then did all of the joints, using fibre tape and about a quart of fresh spackle. Later today I'll lay on the final coat. During the week I'll sand it out, then paint. Then I can hang the door! Progress is...
Updating our test server was my second project of the day. When Greg and I were running Rocket, we maintained my old Gateway box with an identical installation of the OS - in that case: Red Hat Linux 7.1. Because 7.1 was End-Of-Life quite a while ago, we'd been not only doing regular maintenance for the packages that RH didn't supply, but also building security-updated versions of vulnerable RPM packages.
One good side effect of the forced death march to Zidane (this, our new hosting box) is we're back on a supported distribution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 ES. That's all well and good, but we're simply not going to pay $350 to buy a second license to put on the test/backup server. So after talking about it and talking about it some more, we decided to put White Box Enterprise Linux on that old Gateway box... yeah, that's right, my original: P2-233, 128M. Just keeps humming along.
I opened up Tserve, re-jumpered the original boot drive to be primary slave, put in a spare 80G drive I had laying about as primary master, put it back in place and booted with the first WBEL install disk (of three). One and two went fine, albeit terribly slow (that processor, you know). A longish while after putting in the third disc, I thought things seemed awfully quiet ... it had run into a problem reading the disk. My ONLY option was to retry, no cancel, no quit, no eject. I could terminate the installation entirely, burning two real hours forever, and not know if the problem would happen when I got there again. So I pokec and prodded and explored for a while. I switched to console 2 (by pressing [CTRL]+[ALT]+[F2]), and tried to eject the disc. Didn't work, but I wasn't terribly surprised about that, an installation environment doesn't look like a normal Linux in operation and the eject command wasn't finding a file it expected. So I used mount to see what was what, and tried to unmount the drive so that I could press the button and eject it manually. Nope, not mounted, but the faceplate button wasn't responding, just as if it were mounted still.
After a not-inconsiderable time spent with Google and spelunking the results, I came across a link to an old edition of LinuxGazette, where TAG was helping someone eject a recalcitrent disc. It turns out that cdrecord is my friend, AND it was already installed in the target partition. Here's what worked: cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 -eject. Out came the disc, finally. I looked, it seemed fine. I mounted it in Gryphon, and I could read the file that installation was having trouble with just fine too. Oh, well. After one last attempt with that disc, I downloaded a fresh ISO of disc 3, checked the md5sum, burnt it, popped it into Tserve's cupholder and held my breath. Poof, it worked. Whew. I was out of the woods...
Erm ... not! On first boot, the boot process hung up at the point of initializing the Ethernet card. Now there are a lot of possibilities for things to go wonky at this point, since Tserve gets a long lease DHCP address from Comcast. There are a couple of different DHCP clients, some work better with specific ISPs, some work better with others. All I knew was this: I was using the same card that was working before. So I blew about 1.5 hours before just swapping out the card, reconfiguring to load the right module and on with the show. The card was somehow dead. I can't explain it -- maybe I looked at it wrong while I had the box open and installing the hard drive.
My troubles were over. I then spent an hour locking down the box, turning off services, adjusting the IPTables/Netfilter firewall, and so on. Then it was time to update the box. Now White Box, although completely derived from sanitized RHEL source RPMS, cannot use the Red Hat update servers for it's updater (cunningly called "up2date"). So I did the config file modes as shown in the FAQ on the White Box site and started up2date. It takes a LONG time to run, because of low memory and a slow processor. But finally I'd picked all of the updates available, watched it download them, then start the process of installing the updates... it never finished. In some ways, it seemed that it never started. I must have hit the wrong key or something. So an hour later I killed the process, rebooted the box (just to make sure I had a clean slate), and restarted up2date. More long waiting, but at least the downloaded RPMS were cached. Then to the point of installation, where it chunked away and chunked away without ever showing any progress. I checked the output of top, and urk, up2date was defunct. Sigh. So I went down to the command-line tool of choice for WBEL: yum. I moved the up2date-cached RPMS over to the local yum repository point, ran yum update, and all was well. It was still installing RPMS when I went to bed at 1 AM, but it had finished nicely by the time I got up this morning. Perfect, finally. Hey, Greg? Don't use up2date on tserve. Just yum update, okay?
Now it's time for the shopping. Marcia's not feeling very chipper, so I'll head out on my own - I have a list! See you later, or tomorrow.
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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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