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GRAFFITI -- July 04, 2005 thru July 10, 2005 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : 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   
July 4, 2005

1024 - Good morning. Independence Day. No, we're not going down to the District to join in those festivities. At times of crowding and celebration, FedLand isn't a pleasant place to be. Another quiet day at home ... that sounds nice. Yesterday I staked the tallest flowers in front, ahead of any possible damage due to pop-up thunderstorms and the like. We may see some of those tomorrow afternoon if we're lucky, but so far it's been quite a dry late spring and early summer. I've got to clean up and organize my home office a bit, and that's about all I have planned for the day. Later on, I may restructure a couple of systems around here, but I have to consider that I only have one machine with USB2 on it - that's my avenue to offsite backups. So perhaps a quick run to one of the electronics stores is in order. We'll see. Have a great holiday if you celebrate it, and otherwise, just enjoy your Monday best as you can.

1043 - SUVs are a source of good. Why is it better to be driving a large gas-guzzling SUV? Well, there's this (culled from our local ABC affiliate)...

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July 5, 2005

0630 - Good morning ... for some definition of "good". Afterall, you woke up in a non-dead state this morning, right? Right? Grin. There's plenty going on this morning, and top of these charts is an XML-RPC vulnerability in a PHP library. That makes systems running a number of the most popular Blogging packages vulnerable to remote code exploits. Get the updated PHPXMLRPC library (or the Pear equivalent) and don't delay. ISC thinks this has the potential to be a major Internet security "event". So pass the word along to those you know. If you're hosted and blogging, make sure your system administrator knows about this and is already moving on it.

Next up, there's some free CAD coming down the pike. X-CAD is putting out a new parametric solid modeller, and if they get enough (where enough = 100,000) registrations, then those first 100,000 will get a free download of the software. Interesting way to generate some buzz. They're currently nearly up to 60K, and there's 27 days left to fulfill the challenge. So if you're interested in such things, but not enough to spend the thousands of dollars needed to get real tools, then here's your opportunity to get in the door. Yes, they're building a mailing list, and yes, there's bound to be interesting things that you'd need to spend real dollars on if you were to use the software on a production basis. But at least this gives you a zero-cost way to try the software out. Oh, and yeah, it's probably Windows based, and the smart money is that Alibre is behind it. Sign up and confirm (and pass the word) if you're interested.

As promised, I did some restructuring around here. I'd previously had the most recently purchased hardware, an AMD Sempron 3100+ on an ASUS K8N motherboard, operating as the home server, providing filestorage and backup spaces, music storage and service, local caching DNS via BIND9, and probably some other things in the future. But that was an awful small task set for a reasonably powerful processor. The running system is Debian, and is known as Vroomfondel, after one of the two scientists who interacted with Deep Thought in H2G. So I merely sidegraded Vroomfondel from a K7 kernel to an equivalent I686 kernel, swapped the disk over into one of the old P3-933 platfoms I have laying around here. Also into the new Vroomfondel went a dual-port PCI bus USB2 card. That's needed for the data transfers to mobile storage - remote backups are always a good thing. The Sempron box, currently known only as hdjones, and has one of my new-ish pcHDTV HD-3000 cards installed. Yeah, that's the HD card without any broadcast flag hardware in it. So the deadline got pushed back, but one must believe that the power of Hollywood Money will bring that back to the table sooner or later.

I'm basing the hdjones system on an NPTL (Native Posix Threads Library) installation of Gentoo Linux, following this HOWTO thread in the Gentoo Forums. When it comes to HD decoding and reencoding, bleeding-edge fast as the hardware can bear is probably almost good enough. I may also break down and locate one of the nVidia cards that's supposed to help out with hardware acceleration of parts of the process, but that's in the future. I'd expect that by the time I've got the system software built up from nothing two or three times in a row (the apparent right way to get proper NPTL installed), it'll be midweek at the earliest. I finished the second build of the toolchain, and rebuilt the rest of the Stage 3 packages last night. That's where it sits for the moment: I've still got the rest of the install to complete, then most of userland to blow in.

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July 6, 2005

1509 - Good afternoon. I'm reading about Small Business Server 2003, applying all 50 critical updates to my fresh install, and deciding where to go from here... In the meantime, it's hot, humid and looking like no more rain until Friday, after last night's torrential downpour and lightning display. I've got a big set of documents to review, so I'd better get back to it.

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July 7, 2005

0630 - Good morning. One of the weird (to me) things about living so close to the Right Coast's reality distortion generator (DC) is the number of commercials, especially on radio, that are lobbying messages, rather than product/service messages. One of the campaigns getting current big play is the assorted unions representing a big hunk of the DoD civilian workforce. DoD is proposing a bunch of changes, including something really radical: Merit-based pay raises. Hmmm, and the ability to reclassify jobs and pay scales to match work/skills. Mmmm. Unions have a purpose ... their purpose is to get more money and benefits for their members, while fewer hours are worked, so that those members can pay their union dues. I've never worked in a union shop, nor worked in an industry that was heavily unionized. So my take is that unions want ... what? I read this, this, and this. There's some rhetoric, but it's not too strenuous. But the radio ads call on the general public to call on Congress to halt these reforms, claiming that "true American patriots" are at risk under new HR rules, and that protections for whistle blowers are wiped away (I can't find anything about that in my reading). Here's the quote from those previous links that really got my goat:

That's a bright note in a survey of Federales??? Can we put a ballot measure up to fire ALL the bastards, elected and bureaucratic, then go back to what the founders actually WROTE DOWN in the Constitution? I'm in favor of these things:

• Strict Constitutional limitations on the size and scope of the Federal Government. Federal Government to be funded by the states, per capita.
• Mandatory minimum of 2 years public service following high school, military or something like the conservation core. The alternative to service is second-rate citizenship: no vote, no benefits.
• Local taxes support local services.
• Permit discipline in the classroom - it's good for kids. Some of the things that happened in my public high school would have a lawyer salivating today.
• Lawyers: Not allowed to serve in elected positions, except for criminal justice bench seatings, which are medium-term (3-6 years) elected only. No appointed judges at any level.
• All elected officials are required to budget their time in office as a part of the election documentation. How much of your tax dollars are they going to spend while in office. Then, when up for re-election, they're required to review that budget against reality, audited, and explain themselves. Then we don't need term limits - fiscally conservative policy will be self-enforcing.
• Lawyers: Representing frivoulous lawsuit is a crime, punishable by disbarring the lawyers in question, and prison time.
• Gun control means use both hands. All that gun control does is take weapons out of the hands of people who would protect themselves. Yes, there will be problems, angry people with guns, and mistakes. Guess what: Just like Gravity, Darwin works.
• Everyone votes. Voters are logged (not by how they voted, but THAT they voted). I'd love to see people identify themselves in public meetings, and have the quick database lookup to find out that they hadn't voted in 10 years - that should have bearing on how seriously their commentary is to be taken.
• No drivers licenses, welfare benefits or free emergency room hospital care for illegal immigrants. Find a way to make them legal or deport them. If they show up anywhere official asking for services, lock them up, document them, then throw them out. I'm thinking the 3 mile limit is a good place, although we might want to go out as far as the international fishery zone boundaries. Think about this slogan: Feed the Whales!
• Money is given to political parties for campaigning. ALL of it goes in one bucket at each level: Local, state, national. Each candidate at each level gets a ration. They can spend it how they like, for campaigning. Some might buy radio time, some might buy TV time. Town hall style debates required for state and national office, voters get to ask questions. Local office election rules set by local law.

That's eleven. That's enough for today, although I'm strongly tempted...

Happy Thursday! Let me check my email right quick, then hit the road. Have fun!

0755 - Back again. All the radio news is about London, and the explosions in the Underground and on the busses. Tony calls it barbaric, and an attack aimed at disrupting the G8 summit. Oh, he's probably right about the latter (and certainly the former is true), but my very first thought was that the French were more pissed off than we thought about losing that Olympic bid. Of course, had that actually been the case, then the news would merely have been about clouds of smoke in the channel where previously three French registry yachts had been seen... (thanks, Dodge!). Everyone around here is scurrying about and going on violet alert, with no warnings or credible threats at all here. Damned bad joss for the Londoners, though. My heart goes out to y'all.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
July 8, 2005

1340 - Good afternoon. I've been battling Windows server problems. No light at the end of the tunnel yet, but I've moved forward a few feet, so I guess a little progress is better than the tunnel collapsing. Ooops, gotta roll. More fun to be had. Ciao!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
July 9, 2005

1136 - Good morning, for some odd definition of good. By the time I got home last night, I had a sore throat, and a head cold weaving its way into my sinuses. It's neither better nor much worse this morning, but that is hard to quantify properly. I can most honestly say I feel icky. And I've had to shoo the watchtower people away from the house this morning, then give the good dogs cookies for barking at the watchtower people. More later if anything exciting happens.

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July 10, 2005

No post........

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