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GRAFFITI -- June 28, 2004 thru July 04, 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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June 28, 2004
0620 - Good morning. Here we are, about to wrap up another month, and I've gotten done or kept up with most of what I intended. That's not altogether a bad thing. I've a bunch of stuff to do today, not least of which is find a home for secondary DNS for a bunch of domains. When Tom's permaconnection to the network went away forever on Friday, it took ns.orbdesigns.com with it. I may do secondaries here, or host them on another box nearby - credit where credit is due, when the fog clears.
Yah, Tom's okay, he sounds really good, actually... but he's been out of work for long enough that non-essentials (like a nailed up internet connection) had to go. The good news is that he's interviewing for a new gig tomorrow, and it seems likely he'll get it. Syroidmanor and Daynotes.com should come to life again in two or three days, once I find someplace to park them and deal with those technical details.
The yardwork got done, the installation of Debian on Grendel is about complete, Xandros on Gryphon the Sony laptop seems happy. So lots got done, and now my reward: I get to go to the dentist. Time for a cleaning, that's all. But I set my appointments for 0700, so's not to blow out a working day. Thus the early rise and early start. Gotta go, see you later.
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June 29, 2004
0814 - Good morning. Run and hide, the copyright police are working hard to get more tools with which to control the world. The new one would have a serious and significant effect, if passed: The Induce Act, S.2560, introduced by Orrin Hatch. Here's a PDF of the draft text. The EFF says:
Senator Orrin Hatch's new Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act (S.2560, Induce Act) would make it a crime to aid, abet, or induce copyright infringement. He want us all to think that the Induce Act is no big deal and that it only targets "the bad guys" while leaving "the good guys" alone. He says that it doesn't change the law; it just clarifies it.
He's wrong.
Get in touch with your Senatorial types - this is REALLY BAD legislation, and needs to be stopped. After all, designing a new hammer is an inducement to murder, under an extension of the logic that this bill uses. It disposes of the concept of substantial non-infringing uses. Hell, the whole Internet is an inducement to infringment under this bill. Your call, ignore this threat at your expense!
I'm off today, making up for gained time on long days a week or so ago. I've got the nameservices issues worked out, and in another day or so the Internet should sort itself out around all of the changes I made last night, solo and with Greg's help. Thanks to Larry and NERDS for letting me host my secondaries there. Good folks, and not just because they let me work for them...
Now to figure out what to do with my day. I got so much done over the weekend that ... oh, well, I can finish up the LUG give-away box, do some prep work on the floor in the woodshop (readying it for paint), finish up deciding which data to move where in my laptop redesign - I guess I won't have a problem filling my day.
1449 - A brief update... I've been modifying my scripts that power this place to automate the header a bit more. That's a good thing. Now, when I post, the link will go to the day that I post in, I don't need to remember that. The only manual timestamp remains the one at the top of each posting section (e.g. 1449, just above). That'll closely correllate to actual posting time, but may not match perfectly. We'll see how it goes.
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June 30, 2004
0640 - Good morning. So, I washed the car, cleaned the sump pump pit out somewhat, took down the seedling germination setup (I should have done that a long time ago), and fed all of the plants - veg, herbs and flowers - with water-on fertilizer. That was enough for the heavy chores.
I spent much of the afternoon screwing around with computers. I updated the BIOS on Grendel, the old Gateway box, in hopes of getting a successful Mandrake install on it. The BIOS update was an adventure, as their directions were careful, explicit, and wrong. You simply cannot make a boot floppy by just using the DOS copy command. I finally got that going by making a bootable DOS disk with Marcia's XP laptop, then running the BIOS update from another floppy. All of that didn't help, Mandrake was just throwing up, ide-iops.c was throwing an error, then I would get a kernel panic. Game over. The bug is in their database, but no help to me, there's no fix other than upgrading the CDROM drive to something that'll work with the new distro. I'm not doing that for a give-away box.
So the backend distro for Grendel (now re-christened lugprize) is White Box Enterprise Linux. I got all of that updated, while I also mucked around with WordPress. Yeah, it's blogging software. It's dead simple to use and install, so I did. Orblog lives. I've tweaked things a bit, there's plenty more personalization yet to come ... but I see a use. I can snip off the interesting things as I see them much more easily than remembering them for posting here. And it shouldn't impinge too much on here, since I usually didn't remember.
Today's schedule went all wonky, and now I've got a long drive and a half day across to the other side of the commute world, then back to NERDS office to do most of what I wanted to do today anyway. So I'd best be about it. Have a great day!
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July 1, 2004
0706 - Good morning.There's still something I don't understand about my webstats. This effect disappears in the noise later in the month, but right now, on day one, I've gotten 67 visits from 74 sites. My best comprehension is that 74 sites show up in the logs as requesting a page or more. How can any of those not count as visits? The drill is, from the documentation, that one site, coming in and requesting two pages, then coming back more than 0.5 hours later to read some more... well, that counts as two visits. Okay, that's clear, but how can I have sites that count as no visit at all. Yeah, I have yet to google on this effectively.
Now for some more pictures:
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The squash are starting to produce pretty well, but at the same time, a couple of the plants are starting to look a bit sickly. That won't do... but the veg is wonderful. I also ate one of the first tomatoes last night - a picture of those went up on Orblog last night. Back to the pictures here, the front flower bed is doing spectacular work. The gladiolas have come into bloom - given the state of growth among the 40 or more bulbs we planted, they should be throwing up flowers for months. We also picked up a few plants to replace the pathetic and dying white petunias. I can't remember from this vantage what the replacement (shown right above) is called, I'd have to go look at the stake tag. But pretty and strong looking. We also got some small-leaved flowering ground-cover succulant, not pictured yet. We'll see how those go over time.
Today I'm to try and recover a Windows XP box that gasped and gave up on a customer at home the other day. They're already suffering through advanced withdrawl, and now they probably understand why I keep more than one computer around... <grin> I guess I'd best start organizing myself to get that done, I'll be heading into my office first, then over to the client site. Have a great day!
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July 2, 2004
0643 - Good morning. Yahoo! Friday! Three day weekend! Fourth of July! Hmmm. Well, the Fourth can't very well be a real holiday, can it? I mean, there's no candy associated with it. The meals are strangely manufactured (burnt abbatoir floor scrapings shoved into some intestines). We use rockets invented by some other country entirely to celebrate our independence. I suppose that item is a good thing, since we tend to become upset when our own rockets blow up. For the movie Independence Day, the director cast Bill Pullman as President. But the most telling blow against the Fourth of July is that there aren't any Hallmark cards for it (that I'm aware of, no TV commercials for such). I guess we'll have to figure out what's important about our independence and our country on our own, without the candy and card industries telling us how to feel about it.
Long day ahead, and plenty of time for writing and experiments and such over the weekend. Among items on my plate is having a look at the Novell Customer Communities evaluation discs that I signed up for a while back and got just yesterday. More on that soon. There's the mailbox series to finish up, the LUG prize box to tweak, a lawn or two to mow... A full weekend any way you look at it. Have a great day!
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July 3, 2004
1300 - Good afternoon. Not much to report, really. Day one of the Independence Day holiday weekend. I was up at the crack of eight in the morning, and out washing Marcia's truck by sometime between 9 and 10. She'd been through a storm of pin-point sized pine-sap sleet, apparently, as there are little black blobs at a density of about 15 per square foot over more than half the vehicle. Getting those off was slightly less than fun, and not entirely successful. I'll be picking up some of the right stuff for taking sap and bugs off tomorrow, so I'll have that next time I wash her truck, sometime in the Fall.
I'm on call for a customer site for about the next week. So the cell phone goes into the bedroom, and I can try to sleep lightly enough for the phone to wake me ... good luck! Now, while I've seventeen things I want to do, a nap sounds most appealing, so perhaps I'll wander towards the nearest couch and give that a try. Back later, here or over on Orblog. Have a great day/weekend!
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July 4, 2004
0914 - Good morning ...
Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!
Now hold that thought, keep it safe.
Time for weekly shopping, I'll be back later.
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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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