|
|
HomeGraffitiAboutSitemapVisualDevWork
Email BrianGPG Key |
GRAFFITI -- December 20, 2004 thru December 26, 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. |
 
|
MONDAY
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
December 20, 2004
0716 - Good morning. Not much new to report since last night. By evening's end, we'd taken all of half an inch of snow on easy accumulation surfaces. By the time temps dropped to where the roads were vulnerable, the snow had pretty much stopped, too. At around 2200 last night the temperature was -4° C and falling like a heavy thing. Overnight the temperature kept dropping and the wind came up pretty strong, talking to the house all night. The house talked back, creaking, clacking and groaning. That didn't make for a very good night's sleep, at all. This morning it's -10° C and crystal clear. We're looking for more snow on Friday, and perhaps Saturday, leading up to another white Christmas around here. But that's a ways out, yet, and unlikely true.
So besides the weather and reviewing the Thompson's lastest efforts and cleaning and shopping, bloody little got done this weekend. Never enough time, that's the problem. More later if there's more to report, wish me luck and safety on the roads.
Mon
TUESDAY
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
December 21, 2004
0642 - Good morning. Today's topics: No Fun Burning, VMware build environments, Jeri Ellsworth and her Commodore 64, Unisys weirdity revisited, and more. First up, making coasters. I had to burn a set of Red Hat 7.3 discs yesterday. I still don't have a complete set. Either it's the new burner ... oh, wait, it is not, because I made a coaster with the USB writer, too. Maybe it's the discs. Hmmm. It was a frustrating afternoon.
Earlier in the day, though, I came across the Slashdot link to the NYTimes story about Jeri Ellsworth (generally requires deposit of firstborn prior to reading). Jeri is a talented young woman who built the functionality of a Commodore 64 into a single chip, mounted it in a joystick, and made a great little retro gaming system. Then, this evening after I looked at a few pictures that Bill Ward snapped at the First Annual Linux Holiday Dinner, I clicked around his site for a moment and came across his pictures of the Vintage Computer Festival 7.0. There in the first snap, bright as life, is Jeri, demonstrating the C64 DTV thingy. Is that what they mean when they say Harmonic Convergence? Or is this more a Doug Adams sort-of-experience?
Now firmly out of order, the reason for burning RH7.3 discs. I have a system that is running RH7.3, providing some core services. For the time being, I want the box to keep running, so I disturb it as little as possible. However, I need to build, from source, a couple of tools to use on the machine. However, none of the dev tools are installed ... I can't build on the target box, against the target libraries. And I sure don't need to bring up RH7.3 on real hardware just to build a couple of small programs ... real hardware ...Ah-hah! Sounds like yet another job for VMware! And in fact it's the perfect application for this sort of thing, I can get the build environment up and running in moments, build what I need, then transfer the whole directory over to the target system and do the make install step. Once I get those stinking discs burnt... Next step, tomorrow, I check that the image file I'm burning from is actually good...
Does everyone remember Open Source's friend, Unisys? Yeah, the people who decided to start charging for GIF image tools and such in the last two years of the LZW patent, leading to such fun efforts as Burn All GIFs. Well, listening to the radio yesterday, I heard an advert for Unisys, promoting their "Open" enterprise Linux strategy in partnership with EMC. I don't know about the EMC part, I found this page: ES7000 Servers for Linux, and a link among others on the right hand side: Open Software in the Enterprise. Of course, to visit the eCommunity pages, you have to register. Heh heh heh HA HA HA HA!!! Right, you two-faced bastards, tied down on the deck of the Titanic, while the marketing yahoos try to grab hold of IBM's coat tails, and only end up rearranging deck chairs.
Okay, time to roll. It's cold now, but supposed to get much warmer than yesterday... we topped out in the mid 20's (F). Then 50's tomorrow, and back downslope to cold and colder, with an expected high on Christmas day of 30° F. Have a great day!
Mon
Tues
WEDNESDAY
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
December 22, 2004
0701 - Good morning. The first lesson of today is that computers suck. In the course of doing a bunch of other things yesterday, I continued to try to get a working RH7.3 disc 2 out of any combination of blank media and burners. I tried different images (downloading a fresh copy from a new source, even though our local ISO server has a good copy with a clean MD5SUM. I burnt copies in the internal burner (Samsung) of my desktop. I burnt copies in the external burner (Sony) attached to the desktop. I burnt copies using D'angua, the Xandros personality on my Sony laptop. Nope, never no joy. Finally I gave up. When I got home yesterday evening, I pulled down and tested 3 clean ISO images from the redhat mirror tree at mirrors.kernel.org. Then I started the install in VMware on D'angua. Same freaking problem ... fails in disc 2. Is it ... can it be??? I'll bet that even though I disabled it, the fucking automounter setup in Xandros is screwing with the drive enough when I swap discs that it confuses VMware.
Nope, that wasn't it. It's a lightly known problem of late-model VMware interacting with old-model Linux ... not many people installing older linuxen except for the RH series, to replicate things still in production, as I'm doing. But setting legacy emulation mode ON for the cdrom didn't help, as it did with the earlier 4.x versions of VMware. I did a lesser install, and got what I needed installed. But still, I've got to figure out how to turn some of that happy-crap from Xandros off. I don't need nor want automounting, I can handle that on my own, thank you very much. Well, the good news is that I really didn't make a huge batch of coasters. Instead, I made a huge batch of perfectly good RH7.3 disc 2 copies, then threw them away... um. Way! Sigh.
In other news, there was much wringing of hands yesterday as a month-old phpBB vulnerability was finally exploited in a big way by a worm that exploited the hole, installed itself, defaced the site, and used Google to find more places to deface and maybe own, depending on the permissions with which the board was running. There may well be 3 people running Apache as root, yet. And of course, phpBB runs fine (and is exploitable on) Windows platforms, too. It irks me that the broo-hah-dink was raised about "another Linux vulnerability" when the app is cross platform, and additionally, it isn't core Linux functionality. Would you count an Adobe Acrobat flaw that made Windows machines vulnerable as a Windows flaw or an Acrobat flaw? Yeah, Acrobat, me, too. But people in a rush think PHP --> Apache --> Linux and spout off about Linux vulnerabilities, when it ain't no such thing. But Microsoft sure makes hay off of stuff like that.
With that burr out from under my saddle... If you administer boxes that touch the internet in any way, then you should do your best to keep up with the patches and work arounds that are available for your active software. Join the mailing lists, or have a set rota of sites for them that you visit daily. It's a pain in the ass, but security and paranoia require it. Fortunately, Greg watches over the phpBB boards here on Zidane, and he was on the ball, patched the day after that announcement came out.
Another gripe I have is about tow trucks. The tow drivers in CA and several other areas use their yellow flasher/hazard bars when they're stopped in the roadway, hooking up a car or whatnot ... actually being a hazard. When they're just moving in the flow of traffic, the bloody distracting lights are off. Here tow drivers, school buses, most larger regional trucks (but not long haul rigs) have these hazard lights, and they use them as such: hazards. On all the time, flashing and warning us... about nothing, pretty much. At least that's what I used to think. I've been watching them drive over the last 2.5 years, and it turns out they're running those lights for a reason ... they ARE a hazard. Random lane changes back and forth, driving like a little sports car darting in and out of traffic to get three car-lengths ahead ... only driving a flatbed with a blazer lightly chained down on top, and a Camry dragging behind, swinging around like there's no tomorrow. And the schoolbus drivers, who drive empty up and down the beltway without kids in, but slower than other traffic, their Argon fusion lamp burning retinas over a 1/2 mile radius, then cutting across three lanes of traffic to make an exit. And when they're on the back streets loading kids, some of them put on the red lights and the flashers and the warning bars and such half a block before the stop, and roll up with all that stuff already going. That's not right either.
And another thing... How are we going to make a new generation of New York pedestrians if we coddle our children by not making them dart across the road to catch the bus in moving traffic, barely ahead of the grim reaper. Darwin thwarted for now, but we're raising children with no toughness, no heart and no education. No, not all of us. A number of fine people I know home school their kids, and I'm sure do a great job of it, because they can TEACH, instead of just making them sit and read the politically correct crap that passes for a public school education these days.
And don't even get me started about this bloody baseball stadium thing they've got going down in the district. Three years down the road, 800 million spent on a new stadium, the players walk out on strike for more freaking money and the right not to be tested for things that aren't yet illegal ... and the stadium financiers call the note, even though there's no income ... D.C. down the toilet again. Silly bastards, dancing to the tune Selig plays.
</ style="rant_mode=disabled> Whew!
Okay, I've gotta go... There's a mail server that needs another spindle installed as early as possible, and I've burnt up more than a few minutes poking all this out with only one eye working yet, and no coffee in me... Ciao!
Mon
Tues
Wed
THURSDAY
Fri
Sat
Sun
December 23, 2004
0656 - Good morning. I don't have nearly the rant in me that I did yesterday. For one thing, I'm still startled by the alarm going off shortly after 6 this morning for no good reason. For another thing, dogs are a remarkably centering and relaxing sort of being to hang out with, sort of a pet sedative, as it were. You can see the effect they have on things, or at least on each other -- they were sacked out cold side by tail on the floor in Marcia's office the other night. What? Were they all tuckered out from a hard day's nap? And normally they're not that close together: Lucy is still generally insanely jealous about any attention that Molly gets from either one of us. Having a dog that can be referred to as both "insanely jealous" and affectionately called Facebiter is a force to be reckoned with.
On the RH73/CD burning front... Well, it's a problem with VMware in conjunction with that ancient distro. In general, VMware is simply great, the best tool I can find to meet many needs. But some of my needs involve installing RH7.3. I can get all of disc 1 installed. I can get pieces of disc 2 installed, enough to meet my needs, but I must carefully pick packages around the problem areas. Oddly, using the "linux mediacheck" boot option to test the discs even gives different results in VMware and on live hardware. There were two proposed solutions that I found online to the problem. One said to make sure that the Legacy Emulation box is checked in the virtual machine CD-ROM setup. Done, but makes no difference. The other tip said to go without a disk the first time the RH7.3 installer asks for it, then put in the second disc when it prompts again. No joy in that route, either. I may explore building a single large install-rh73-from-dvd configuration instead, I understand that's not hard to do. Alternatively, I may setup a netboot tree for the purpose, but that's spinning fast access storage devoted to once or twice a year usage, at most. I'll decide one of these days...
PyCon is coming up again soon. Here's the email I got from Steve Holden today:
|
Now, free lunch today at work, nearly my favorite kind of food (free, that is). So I'd best go get in a good half-day's work. I've got some follow-up work to do on the major task from yesterday: bringing a new spindle online in an internal mailserver that was running out of space. Today I've got to check things over, and copy out some of those older home folders, get them archived in three places and off the live storage. Have a great day!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
FRIDAY
Sat
Sun
December 24, 2004
1238 - Hullo... It's Christmas Eve.
'Twas the day before night,of the night before Christmas and all through the net rustling: a SCO SOS. "Our books are done cooking, the profits aren't there." And Darl's woefully crying, "That's no IP to share!" The Judge was most mindful of her solemn oath, She looked at the cases, and threw them out, both! In hamlets and offices, from near and a-far, Users of Linux, they climbed in their car. They drove to the mountain through rain, sleet and snow, They gathered their gurus, and made their eyes glow. At the door they did gather, trembling in the light, But a Starbucks double latte soon put that shake right. Then deep in their throats, a rumbling mutter, A gathering cry they were ready to utter. "Linus! Oh, Torvalds!" They shouted, "Come out here and see!" "They've tripped on their dicks, landed face first in pee!" "The lies are through telling, the stories are done!" The streets filled with dancing, the geeks having fun. A snick of the lock, and a thud from the bar, then turning the deadbolt, he couldn't be far. A crack and a crash and the door was flung wide, Tove Torvalds was seen, she was fit to be tied. "Linus is sleeping, you lot." She quipped with a smile, "Has anyone told Eric and Richard, or sent out a file?" "It's in all the papers, it's on all the news. Dan Rather didn't fake it, we've now got free brews!" "Well, then, I'll just wake Him... be back in a flash" The door closed once more, and we lit up some hash. No really, I'm okay, it's medicinal, eh? RSI, or glaucoma, or ... I forget, today. Back in our story, the Torvalds stirred and awoke. He slipped out among us and asked, "Are they broke?" "Every little penny, down to the lone dime, Those SCO bastards have done us for the very last time." "So then I can tell you," Linus said in a trice. "Andrew and I made it all up, though it's not very nice." Then we fell back in shock, all agog and dismayed. "I'll tell you the truth, though it might get me flayed." "Prof. Andy and I, we cooked up a scheme, We'd fake a heavy argument, we'd dream up a dream." "An OS built, gave it my name? What a lark! It was really all IBM's shot in the dark." "The NDA's signed, the deal done in Armonk. A way to get even with that Bill Gates punk." "They fed me code piecemeal, a real slow-go. They used Alan Cox, and had Welsh-code commo." "And all through my "benevolent dictator" schtick, SCO didn't see what really makes things tick" "It's money and power, much more than they had. But they made up a roadblock, they made IBM mad." "So Linux the juggernaut now can't be stopped, Next Redmond's lunch will be eaten, then plopped." He stopped with a grin, as we all looked agast. "I'm joking," He said. "Think you to the past." "Each April Fool's Day, some idiots write An email "from Linus" that makes people fight." "Finally, my turn!" Linus shouted with glee. "Now have a good time, it's all right, you'll see." "SCOsource no more threatens, McBride's down the drain, Let's have some more free beer, we're feeling no pain." "So celebrate Christmas or whatever you cheer. And then we'll get busy, take MS next year." A thought from your writer, a dream free of fear, to find this screed true, the path finally clear. From my hearth to you, this holiday fancy flight, I give you best wishes and bid you good night. |
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
SATURDAY
Sun
December 25, 2004
MERRY CHRISTMAS
1253 - We even got Zidane a Christmas present: a fresh 512 MB of RAM. He's been randomly hinky over the last few months, and we couldn't pin the behaviour on anything specific until I got a bit of a log message yesterday that indicated RAM problems. Then, after yesterday's second involuntary reboot of the day, we decided not to wait until next week. By midnight local time, this box had a new memory. Fingers crossed.
Lucy and Molly have been gnawing away at their flavored Holiday treats, Marcia showed me all the fabrics that I bought her for Christmas, and then I unwrapped my dovetail template set and accompanying router bit. Fun! In a short bit we're off to spend some time over at Jim and Judy's, then back here for a quiet evening in -- we're both fighting a mild headcold of some kind or another, but nothing too serious.
Have a good holiday, if that's the way you lean, either way, have a great day!
Mon
Tues
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
SUNDAY
December 26, 2004
1001 - Good morning. Well, the good news is that we might not have to worry about that troublesome Unix end-of-epoch in 2038. Social Security may not run out of money first. And we have a solution to our Bruce Willis disposal problem. We can fire him at an asteroid after all. That's right, Houston, we may indeed have a problem. Three days ago I looked at the page for Asteroid 2004 MN4, following a link from Slashdot. At that time the odds of the 400 meter hunk of rock hitting Earth on April 13 in 2029 were 1 in 233, and expected to fall rapidly to zero as more observations were made. Instead, here we are, two short days later, and 2004 MN4 has moved from a 2 to a 4 on the Torino Scale, the first such object to go higher than 2. Oh, those odds are currently riding at 1 in 45, which starts to look more like a horse race than a lottery ticket. But the clincher for me is the date: April 13 does fall on a Friday that year. So, who does the rock fall on?
Now what does a 400 meter diameter rock do to us, traveling at a moderately low relative (to Earth) velocity of 5.85 km/s. That discounts acceleration of the rock in the endgame due to Earth's gravity, and atmospheric effects. A dead-on hit is much worse than a glancing blow, right? The Torino Scale refers to "regional devastation", meaning that 2004 MN4 can't ever reach 10 on the scale, that's reserved for dinosaur killer rocks. But still, the calculated impact energy is equivalent 1,570 Megatons of TNT. Uh-huh. About 100,000 times the 15 kiloton force with which Little Boy devastated Hiroshima. That's a big bang.
Of course, that asteroid may be preceded by another that we don't see until it hits us. Just four days ago, a rock passed by coming at us out of our solar "cosmic blind spot" and passed between us and the geosynchronous satellite altitude of 22,300 miles (about a tenth of the distance from here to Luna). This one was small, only 16 feet in diameter. Our blindspot will plague us until we have a space-based asteroid watch in place. This, in addition to the fact that we only know orbital data for a small fraction of the estimated 100,000+ NEO asteroids over 100 meters in diameter, means that the risk is not going to drop to zero if 2004 MN4's specific impact probablities do. But with 25 year's notice we could sure DO SOMETHING about 2004 MN4, as well as getting something up and away from us to keep an eye on things from a different angle. I'm thinking that asteroid survey Solar satellites in Earth's L2 and L5 points would be good. And how about investing some dough in Burt Rutan's firm. Riding out the storm in an orbital hotel, or on Luna sure sounds more appealing, eh? If we only count on NASA (without the impetus of outside competition), then we may well depend upon changing the rock's trajectory by firing Bruce Willis at it. While that might be a very satisfying activity, his likelihood of effecting trajectory change is vanishingly close to zero.
Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week
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.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2011 Brian P. Bilbrey.
Except where otherwise noted, this site is licensed under the
Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License.