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GRAFFITI -- April 10, 2006 thru April 16, 2006 >> 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   
April 10, 2006

0502 - Good morning. Well, not so good if you're AT&T or the NSA... EFF Files Evidence in Motion to Stop AT&T's Dragnet Surveillance. Interesting, eh? Here's more, from the Daily Kos: All About NSA's and AT&T's Big Brother Machine, the Narus 6400. Aren't they special! Grrr. But is such stuff needed? I don't know. I do know that this piece by Dan Simmons (Note that's a mutable link to the April 2006 Message, you may need to go hunting for it in Dan's Archives.) made me pretty thoughtful about our short-term future. Thanks to ESR for sending me that direction.

Setting KDE's desktop icon text color has always, always made me insane. It's not in the same place with all the other color settings, oh, no! To set most item colors in a KDE setup, you use the Control Center, select Appearance & Themes, then Colors. A simple easy-to-navigate interface for setting almost every foreground, background and select color under KDE. But if you want to set Desktop text color ... well, that's not listed. I always end up poking and prodding for a considerable while. I found it again, today, and wanted to put it here for me and others to find. So, to set the KDE (3.4, 3.5, at least) desktop icon text, from the Control Center select Appearance & Themes. Choose Background from the sub-menu. Yeah, Background. Who knew? Then, click on the Advanced Options button. There are three sub-panes in the resulting dialog. The first, Background Program is usually all I see before bailing out of that dialog. But keep looking. Further down, there's Background Icon Text. Not Desktop, oh, no. And that's not to be found in the general color settings tab, for heaven's sake, no! Now I understand the reasoning behind where it is. But since for all the rest of the world, that's the Desktop, why not call it that, or make it easy to find using the Desktop term. And, praise Baal, why not let people change that text color in the standard tool as well as in the special secret place!

Here's Jack's obituary...

Jack Andresen

July 30, 1931 - March 31, 2006

He left as he lived, on March 31, 2006. The last Jack story - He crashed into a CHP cruiser,
closing the 101 Exit ramp for more than 3 hours in the middle of rush hour! He would 
have liked this story, after 26 years in that traffic. Jack always lived his life asking 
questions and challenging assumptions.
 
Born in Montreal, Canada, the Bay area with its California hills was his home. A graduate 
from UC Berkeley with an EE, MBA, and PHD, Jack was one of the innovators and leaders 
in Local Area Network technology. He was a member of many IEEE committees, as well as
participating in several Standards Committees, the Professional Activities and Intellectual 
Properties Committee. Jack was also instrumental in getting Erissa through Congress in 
the late 70's.

In 1980, Jack took over his fathers' business, ETS, and grew it from 2 to 100 employees. His
extended work family is now 11 folks large. ETS, of Fremont, CA, manufactures network 
equipment (baluns, network panels, connectors, etc.)

Left sitting in traffic are his wife Trudy, brother Terry Andresen (Darla), sister Gail Kirkpatrick, 
sons Mark Andresen (Anne) and Rob Lawson (Jennifer), daughters Vicki Grey (Peter), Nancy 
Lawson Beech (Roland), Lynne Angeloro (Kathy), Maggie Lawson (Debora), 12 grandchildren: 
Jane, Ketty, Rian, Gretchen, Alec, Isaac, Payson, Colman, Emerson, Ashley, Jeff, and Deija, 
and many nieces and nephews.

Memorial services will be held Saturday, April 8 at 1:30 p.m. at the First Congregational 
Church in Palo Alto. Please bring your Jack stories, written or oral, for a lighthearted 
gathering following the services. In lieu of flowers, please contribute in Jack's name to the 
Palo Alto Fire Department Paramedics (Palo Alto, CA) or the California Highway Patrol 
(Convention Way, Redwood City, CA). Arrangements by Roller Hapgood & Tinney.

Published in the San Jose Mercury News on 4/7/2006. 

Sigh.

Okay, on with the day. I've got to have Marcia at BWI by quarter to six. Argh!

2029 - Hi. Just dropped in to fix the run-on line in Jack's obit, above. Be well.

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 11, 2006

0917 - Good morning. I reinstalled Crossover Office Pro last night, to run Quicken, to pay the bills. Works like a champ, as usual. That, plus backups and trash, ate the evening. Then, as a capper, it appears that the nForce3 based motherboard doesn't agree with the SATA drives that I have in Vroomfondel. I'm going to have to rebuild that system and I'm going down the reliable route: Intel through and through. Vroomfondel was a low-end experimental workstation repurposed as the home server. But now I've had two drives "die" in the SATA "b" channel. The error messages into Google indicate some interaction between the drivers and the nForce3 chipset. I'm not going to play any games. Time to move on. So a bit of shopping is in my future today. But now I've got a user to help with AV updates. See ya!

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 12, 2006

0934 - Good morning. In rebuilding Vroomfondel last night around an Intel D915GAV board, Celeron processor and 512M of RAM, I learned one most interesting thing. It's safe to edit the partition table and change a partition type from Linux Raid Autodetect to Linux, and have the filesystem still accessible. That made my rebuild of the box much easier, because I was able to recover all of the prior configurations and scripts. Starting with the hardware work at about 1830, I was effectively done and fully back online by 2100. A couple of misplaced cron scripts showed up in the logs today: I've already moved those into their proper homes. Overall, not too bad, and the drive that was pitching fits on the nForce3 board has been calm and happy. Now back to work with me.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
April 13, 2006

0819 - Good morning. Is it Friday yet? No, hmmm. Well, yesterday I left work a little early, and went by the home store to pick up a couple more pieces of lumber for the current furniture project, and my (slightly early) birthday present: A DeWalt plate joiner. In the evening I spent time mucking about with mounting and making effective use of an NFTS partition under Linux. Annoyingly, I can't do anything with it except as the root user. Grrr. But I'll get the data saved off of it, then reformat to ReiserFS and all will be right with the world. When Marcia travels, the dogs and I aren't happy. Sleep is restless and full of weird dreams. Everyone will be better tonight, when she comes home. But for now, to work with me.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
April 14, 2006

1106 - Good morning. Sometimes I'm a spaz, too, Tiger. It's really okay for you to call yourself a funny name, implying that you were clumsy or inept. Just because some other spaz-alicious people get upset that you used the word spaz doesn't mean that you have to bend down and lick their feet clean. I guess that it's okay that you chose to apologize anyway, but only if you did it to protect your revenue stream. If you actually think that you were being offensive when you called yourself a spaz, then it's time for you to go. And for the SCOPE folks in Britan, get over it. The whole world doesn't revolve around you. Nor does the word mean for us what it does for you. Now go cry in the corner for a while.

Elsewhere in the news ... "The United States is leading an "unholy alliance" to undermine democratic elections that put Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian Authority, partly by denying millions of dollars in aid to the government, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Friday." Right. So let's recast that argument in more familiar terms, Haniyeh. Let's say that I give a considerable sum each year to my favorite charity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Further, let's now envision an EFF that's been legitimately taken over by a bunch of thugs whose stated mission is to kill all the people in a competing charity. Now, I disagree with the mission of the new leadership, even though their takeover of the EFF was fully above-board and legal. Am I required to continue to give them the money that I was contributing back when I supported the mission of the organization? No, I'm not. That is just crazy talk. Now, back to reality-land here. The US is not required to give you money. That we gave your country money before so that you could teach your children how to suicide bomb the Israelis was insane enough. But now that your government is run by genocidal nutjobs, even the wusses at State have figured out that continuing to fund your hate is beyond the pale. Now go cry in the corner for a while.

Marcia's home again, and the dogs and I were all very, very happy to see her. Since they don't drive, I got first dibbs, but they monopolized her evening once we got back home from the airport, shortly before 8 yesterday evening.

Now I've got more systems work to do today, so I'll bid you farewell for now. Happy Friday.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
April 15, 2006

0906 - Good morning. Remote editing without going to look after publishing == $BAD. Thanks to Don Armstrong for pointing out my broken linkage from Friday, now fixed. We slept in a bit, but there's plenty to do today. Shopping today since tomorrow's Easter Sunday and the stores are closed. Laundry since Marcia didn't get around to it yesterday (too busy). Mowing, front and back, since it's sunny out, and may not be tomorrow. A bit more cleanup work in the basement suite, wall patching and the like. Work in the woodshop, if there's any time and energy left after all the rest. Maybe we ought to start paying that tax on hope, on the off-off-off chance that we did win the lottery. That would give me back 60 hours a week.

The last ten songs in my playlist:

• The Police - Hole In My Life
• Daniel Ben Pienaar - Prelude And Fugue No.18 In G Sharp Minor BWV 863 Fuga
• Reba McEntire - Can't Even Get the Blues
• Giuseppe Verdi - La Traviata: Di Madride noi siam mattadori
• Francois Couperin - Track 02
• Morphine - Murder For The Money
• The John Butler Trio - Zebra
• Loreena McKennitt - Tango to Evora
• ZZ Top - I Got the Message
• Eric Clapton - One Chance

Have a great Saturday, if you can. I just read this post from Dave Korn on the Full Disclosure list and my blood is boiling again: [Full-disclosure] Microsoft DNS resolver: deliberately sabotaged hosts-file lookup.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
April 16, 2006

1016 - Good morning. Happy Easter, if you celebrate such things. We finished shopping, yardwork and laundry yesterday. That was enough of a workout that I didn't do anything downstairs. I'd better ramp that up a bit more soon, as we've got guests coming in ... June? Somewhere in there. Today we're having brunch with Linda Rose and family. That'll be nice. I'd like to take this opportunity to make sure that our men and women in service here and around the globe know that this little part of the world is thinking of them, too. Don't fret about Rumsfeld and the Generals. That'll all work itself out. You're doing a great job out there and I'm proud of all of you! I also offer my condolences for your losses, for our fallen soldiers...

• Sgt. 1st Class Gregory S. Rogers, 42, of Cincinnati, Ohio, died in Ar Ramadi, Iraq on April 9, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during convoy operations.
• Pvt. Jody W. Missildine, 19, of Plant City, Fla., died in Tal Afar, Iraq, on April 8, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during convoy operations.
• Pfc. Joseph I. Love, 22, of North Pole, Alaska, died in Balad, Iraq, on April 9, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during convoy operations.
• Lance Cpl. Juana NavarroArellano, 24, of Ceres, Calif., died April 8 from wounds received while supporting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. Bryan N. Taylor, 20, of Milford, Ohio, died April 6 after being shot by an Iraqi Army soldier on a coalition base near Al Qaim, Iraq.
• Cpl. Richard P. Waller, 22, of Fort Worth, Texas, died April 7 from wounds received while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Spc. James W. Gardner, 22, of Glasgow, Ky., died in Tal Afar, Iraq, on April 10, from a non-combat related cause.
• Sgt. 1st Class Randall L. Lamberson, 36, of Springfield, Mo., died in Balad, Iraq on April 10th, of injuries sustained in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on April 9, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Sgt. David S. Collins, 24, of Jasper Ga., died in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on April 9th, of injuries sustained in Ar Ramadi, Iraq, on April 9, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Spc. Shawn R. Creighton, 21, of Windsor, N.C., died in Rawah, Iraq on April 8, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Stryker vehicle during patrol operations.
• Cpl. Kenneth D. Hess, 26, of Asheville, N.C., died in Rawah, Iraq on April 11, as the result of a suicide bomber attack while Hess was conducting a dismounted patrol.
• Cpl. Joseph A. Blanco, 25, of Bloomington, Calif., died of injuries sustained in Taji, Iraq on April 11, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle and he subsequently came under small arms fire during combat operations.
• Pfc. James F. Costello III, 27, of St. Louis, Mo., died of injuries sustained in Taji, Iraq on April 11, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle and he subsequently came under small arms fire during combat operations.
• Pfc. George R. Roehl Jr., 21, of Manchester, N.H., died of injuries sustained in Taji, Iraq on April 11, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle and he subsequently came under small arms fire during combat operations.
• Spc. Scott M. Bandhold, 37, of North Merrick, N.Y., died of injuries sustained in Misiab, Iraq on April 12, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Pfc. Roland E. Calderon-Ascencio, 21, of Miami, Fla., died of injuries sustained in Misiab, Iraq on April 12, when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Lance Cpl. Marcus S. Glimpse, 22, of Huntington Beach, Calif., died April 12 as the result of an improvised explosive device while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.
• Lance Cpl. Philip J. Martini, 24, of Lansing, Ill., died April 8, of a gunshot wound while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar Province, Iraq.
• Spc. Andrew K. Waits, 23, of Waterford, Mich., died April 13, in Baghdad, Iraq, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV during combat operations.
• Cpl. Salem Bachar, 20, of Chula Vista, Calif., was killed due to enemy action in Al Anbar Province, Iraq on April 13.
• Lance Cpl. Stephen J. Perez, 22, of San Antonio, Texas, was killed due to enemy action in Al Anbar Province, Iraq on April 13.

Much to do, and little time, as usual. See you 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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