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GRAFFITI -- June 27, 2005 thru July 03, 2005>> 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 27, 2005
0640 - Good morning. I had a nice chat with Greg last night when I should have been going to sleep. I've been grilling him about his new job, since he's been too busy to post about it. From the sound of things, they really, really appreciate him in $NEW_FIRM. as rightly they should. Turns out that $PREVIOUS_GEEK plugged main RAID servers directly into wall mains, no UPS, no surge suppression. However, $PREVIOUS_GEEK didn't bother to plug in the robotic tape backup system that he bought, so there weren't backups for the aforementioned main dataserver. That's merely the most heinous thing that Greg's taking care of properly now. He seems happy in his new gig, and that's the most important thing.
Oh, and I was listening to Genesis all evening. That's always good. Marcia and Linda Rose watched Blake Edwards' S.O.B. (we finally got Marcia hooked up with Netflix so that she can watch all those one-time movies she wants without having to buy all of them).
Hopefully, fun with OpenVPN is on my plate today. Have as good a Monday as can be expected.
0816 - What if Newton was wrong? http://www.intelligentattraction.com/. Thanks to Jim for the link.
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June 28, 2005
1525 - Good afternoon. Thanks to Erik Fichtner for pointing me to this press release:
Press Release For Release Monday, June 27 to New Hampshire media For Release Tuesday, June 28 to all other media Weare, New Hampshire (PRWEB) Could a hotel be built on the land owned by Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter? A new ruling by the Supreme Court which was supported by Justice Souter himself itself might allow it. A private developer is seeking to use this very law to build a hotel on Souter's land. Justice Souter's vote in the "Kelo vs. City of New London" decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by the new owner. On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter's home. Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land. The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Caf�" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged." Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans. "This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development." Clements' plan is to raise investment capital from wealthy pro-liberty investors and draw up architectural plans. These plans would then be used to raise investment capital for the project. Clements hopes that regular customers of the hotel might include supporters of the Institute For Justice and participants in the Free State Project among others. # # # Logan Darrow Clements Freestar Media, LLC Phone 310-593-4843 [email protected] http://www.freestarmedia.com
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June 29, 2005
0831 - Good morning. Rick Hellewell points us at this UNL site with some of the most interesting and alien looking cloud formations I've ever seen. Yesterday, Bob Thompson pointed to the latest article that Barbara and he wrote for O'Reilly (in support of Astronomy Hacks, coming soon to a site or store near you), entitled Observing Deep Impact. Read that soon, before Independence day comes and goes. And my lovely Marcia is busy as all get out, as it's end of quarter. But she's still finding time to read some of her new (and old) favorite mystery authors.
Me? I fought and fought with a problem yesterday that I was convinced was due to an error on my part in firewall design. In the end, it turned out to be a netmask issue, so instead of just forwarding packets to the gateway for the subject subnet, instead it was sending out arp requests. Silly rabbi! Today I can get back on track, with any luck at all. Have a great day!
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June 30, 2005
0709 - Good morning. Someone in IRC said that it's not morning until 0600. Of course, that's a reasonable statement from someone who's working at 0039. Last night we had an hour or more of thunder, lightning and heavy rain, followed by at least a couple of hours of light rain. That's good, we were pretty dry (speaking of the lawn-ish we). The only upside of pretty dry is drastically reduced mowing requirements. But brown and ratty looking doesn't really have a place in my yard. Almost ripe first tomatoes of the season do, though. Grin.
It's Friday. Well, it's our Friday. Marcia's got tomorrow as a holiday, so I'm taking it as a vacation day ... simultaneous four day weekends, how lovely. Following this purposeful late start, I'll head to the oral surgeon's office for a followup, then into work. There I'll finish fettling a re-purposed laptop for our controller, get apps installed and data transferred. Backups need to be prepared for offsite transfer, and there's bound to be other fun to have. It will be a full day. Enjoy yours!
1132 - Hullo. Yay! It works. Running Windows update from behind a mandatory (there's no possible bypass) proxy server has been a hit-or-miss proposition, until today. We thought it was a problem related to the old Checkpoint firewall, but that is not the case. So I kept googling over the months, and finally found ONE page with the answer. As an administrative user, Start -> Run: cmd [Enter] , then in the command window, type this:
proxycfg
You'll see what the registry believes is true about proxy configurations, regardless of how you've configured IE, Firefox, or any other service on the box. To fix things up right, type this (substitute the correct IP address and port for your proxy server:
proxycfg -p "http://www.xxx.yyy.zzz:port"
Explicitly, here's an example for a Squid proxy running on a system at 192.168.23.14, at the default 3128 proxy port:
proxycfg -p "http://192.168.23.14:3128"
It's a registry setting, and thus is retained across subsequent reboots. Hope this helps anyone with issues...
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July 1, 2005
0907 - Good morning. Day one of a four day weekend. Marcia's out at appointments, and I'm going to get the oil changed in the Elantra. Exciting isn't it? Back later...
2016 - Good evening. The oil change was uneventful. Thereafter Marcia and I went out to look at a few items for making the library into the room we want - with a huge sale on at Marlo, we thought it'd be a good time to look. We found two comfy reading chairs and a medium-sized round table with four chairs, perfect for cards or spreading out paperwork or whatnot. That will be all delivered on Friday next. We had a late lunch at Ruby Tuesday's on the way home. Then Marcia went back out to get her nails done.
Meantime, I worked on pulling down FreeBSD 5.4 in order to test installing that variant on the little Sony R505 retired from active duty at work - with a working serial port and light weight, I'm looking to turn that into roving admin box. Yes, I could use Debian and be happy, but I still want more experience with the *BSD family, as I have several FreeBSD boxes of assorted vintages nominally under my purview. The previous bad news was that OpenBSD 3.7 happily installed on it, but thereafter would not recognize the CDROM nor most of the other connections on the docking base.
After using Bittorrent to grab the latest FreeBSD, I burned the disks (taking the time to install K3B from source, since the version available for Xandros 3.0.2 Business doesn't install) and flung them at the R505. So far it appears to have stuck. There's more testing to be done, but I'm not unhappy as a first approximation. One of the tricky bits is getting the X.org configuration file right. After a few tens of pages, I found the pointers I was looking for in an older reference to an XFree86 configuration file. For the record, here's my freshly minted xorg.conf file for the Sony PCG-R505JSK. On identical or closely related hardware, pop that in as /etc/X11/xorg.conf (back up any older version first, neh?). Should work for you.
Now we're up to date. Have a lovely weekend! I'll be around, will you?
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July 2, 2005
1741 - Good evening. We slept in, Marcia and I, to 1015 and 0830 respectively. Shortly after that bolting start, we made it out the door to pick up more flowers for the front and back. I've got them all in, and what remains of the lawn mowed, but no energy for anything more. I'll have pictures tomorrow. Happy Saturday!
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July 3, 2005
1123 - Good morning. In stark contrast to yesterday morning, we were up and about by 0800, and we were home from the weekly gathering run by just past 1000. That gives me time to put up a couple of pictures...
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In the front yard, we added four more hanging baskets, and two more pairs of plants so that symmetry isn't broken. More on that shortly. Down in the planting beds, the red flowers on the left are filling in and taking off nicely. On the right, the marigolds haven't really come into their own yet, but they haven't died, either. So the jury is still out, over there. However, the Gladiolas and the Tiger Lilies are large and healthy this year. I've got to stake them a bit, once I'm done here.
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The hanging baskets (I said I'd come back to them) have reds, pinks and purples. Once the new plants start filling in a bit, it should look really nice. Out in back, the snap dragons in large pots weren't doing so well, so I've replaced those with Delphiniums. The herb garden is also doing well, although the first batch of cilantro has already gone to seed. I'll let that dry out over the next week or two, harvest the coriander seed, and replant. The basil is doing very well indeed. I'll be making some diet-breaking pesto one of these days.
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Further into the back yard, The tomato plants (all the plants in the raised beds, actually) are doing really well with the new watering setup. We're just starting to get ripe tomatoes, we each had one last night. The corn is extremely slow starting this year, I had stalks four feet tall by this time last year, but we had much more rain in the spring and early summer last year. Plus the raised beds drain better, which is better for root health, but there's less water available for the plants. In the upper corner of the back yard, the hastas are starting to bloom, too.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers give up their lives to bring some form of freedom to the peoples there...
- Staff Sgt. Shamus O. Goare, 29, of Danville, Ohio.
- Chief Warrant Officer Corey J. Goodnature, 35, of Clarks Grove, Minn.
- Sgt. Kip A. Jacoby, 21, of Pompano Beach, Fla.
- Sgt. 1st Class Marcus V. Muralles, 33, of Shelbyville, Ind.
- Master Sgt. James W. Ponder III, 36, of Franklin, Tenn.
- Maj. Stephen C. Reich, 34, of Washington Depot, Conn.
- Sgt. 1st Class Michael L. Russell, 31, of Stafford, Va.
- Chief Warrant Officer Chris J. Scherkenbach, 40, of Jacksonville, Fla.
- Chief Petty Officer Jacques J. Fontan, 36, of New Orleans, La.
- Senior Chief Petty Officer Daniel R. Healy, 36, of Exeter, N.H.
- Lt. Cmdr. Erik S. Kristensen, 33, of San Diego, Calif.
- Petty Officer 1st Class Jeffery A. Lucas, 33, of Corbett, Ore.
- Lt. Michael M. McGreevy, Jr., 30, of Portville, N.Y.
- Petty Officer 2nd Class James Suh, 28, of Deerfield Beach, Fla.
- Petty Officer 2nd Class Eric S. Patton, 22, of Boulder City, Nev.
- Petty Officer 1st Class Jeffrey S. Taylor, 30, of Midway, W.Va.
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, when we celebrate our Independence Day. If you're an American, take a moment within the next week to write a letter or make a phone call to your elected representatives at all levels: local, state and federal. Let them know what you think about how our constitutional protections are being eroded by a government that plays on fear to gain power. Let them know that you support our soldiers, and that you want them home. Let them know that you're watching their activities, and let them know that you vote. And DO vote, when the opportunity arises. There were primary elections held for all parties in Virginia a couple of weeks back, with 5% of the electorate showing up at the polls. That's pathetic. PATHETIC!!! The message that sends to politicians is that they can do what they like, because nobody gives a shit. Make the elected yahoos understand that we do care, that we are watching, and that we will participate in the process.
I'm going back out to the yard for a bit. Have a great day!
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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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