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GRAFFITI -- April 28, 2008 thru May 04, 2008 >> 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.

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April 28, 2008

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April 29, 2008

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April 30, 2008

1945 - Good evening. A light evening: I mowed the back yard, fed the dogs, then prepared and posted Jerry's final column segment for April. In the next couple of days I have some work to do reviewing my notes and quizzes in advance of my course final on Saturday morning.

Monday night was eaten by chores, as Monday nights usually are. Yesterday evening was a bit different. I decided to do something fundamentally stupid: I upgraded my main Ubuntu Linux workstation here from Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) to the latest release, Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS). The process took a little over two hours. The first quarter of that was spent pulling down two gigabytes of system and program update packages. Then, virtually every piece of software on the system was upgraded. Order matters in such things, so there was a bunch of time there, much more than would be found in a bare-metal install. But I have *lots* of configurations and services running on this box, from DNS to Web to IMAP, and I thought this would make an interesting exercise. I certainly could have just done a clean install if the upgrade failed - my home directory is in a separate RAID5 partition.

The good news is there was no need. Other than requiring a full powerdown reboot to get the latest driver to initialize the motherboard ethernet chipset, it's all been nearly hunky and dory. Bits of Crossover appear to be borked at the moment - I'll need to see what's going on there. It's possible that just a clean install that takes the latest libraries into account may do that trick. I only use it for Quicken, and I *could* run that on the MacBook Pro as well. But my preference is to keep that on this system. Oh, yeah. XMMS, my preferred music player, made the transition from deprecated to dead. Sigh. While I could compile and install it locally, I decided to give XMMS2 (a client-server reimplementation) a try. Blech! Right now I'm using Audacious, which is very nearly GUI command compatible. I hear about stability and playback problems, but have experienced neither, myself. So, back to my experiments. Ciao!

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May 1, 2008

2144 - Good evening. While I was installing seven DVD's worth of X-Plane and world scenery, I continued to explore the problem I'd spotted with Quicken under Crossover Linux. I logged in and pulled down the latest revision of Crossover and installed that. Joy == 0. So I navigated my way into the support forums and searched on the particular error message that pops up ("preloader: Warning: failed to reserve range 00000000-68000000") when trying to run some programs under Crossover's WINE implementation. Jeremy White, the bloke who runs Codeweavers, replied to one querent, and pointed them to this page on winehq. There's security implications to the workaround, so don't apply it on a machine which hosts untrusted users. Yeah, I don't trust myself, but I applied the "fix" anyway, and it worked. Huzzah!

Speaking of yummy, there's always FiOS... This speed test from Speakeasy is useful:

Download Speed: 15411 kbps (1926.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 4596 kbps (574.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

There's a new Don Easterbrook interview around. Jerry linked to it yesterday. If you missed it there, here it is. Read it. Be interested.

Nothing else new. Still no tomatoes.

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May 2, 2008

1935 - Good evening. The day is done, the front lawn is mowed, all the back yard stuff is watered and weeded. And this guy, [email protected], is a dirty spammer. If you do business with a place called Test Equipment Connection, I can assure you that they spammed me - the headers indicate so:

Received: 	from mail.testequipmentconnection.net 
(mail.testequipmentconnection.net [65.169.170.194]) by zidane.mazin.net 
(Postfix) with ESMTP id C4C1F294789 for ; Fri, 2 
May 2008 15:06:45 -0500 (CDT)
Received: 	from PhilTEC (unknown [65.161.131.154]) (Authenticated 
sender: [email protected]) by 
mail.testequipmentconnection.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5536599C104 for 
; Fri, 2 May 2008 15:46:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: 	Phil 
Subject: 	Stay Connected to Test Equipment Connection

I don't trust dirty spammers. What else might they do? I won't do business with them. Do you? Phil trusts in CAN-SPAM. I trust in publicly mocking Phil for spamming me. One negative comment online outweighs many positive. I hope that works for Phil.

Tomorrow, a final. Then on with the weekend. Ciao!

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May 3, 2008

1903 - Good evening. For some reason I neglected protective head gear today, so I'm burnt to a crisp. But I'm getting ahead of the story. Typical of the so-called "Associate Professor" who "taught" the class I took this last semester: In his run-up to the final, he told us there would be 55 questions. Like so many other things both procedural and technical - he got that wrong too. The final he wrote had only 50 questions on it. Anyway, I left the house at about 0815, and was seated in Cole Field House awaiting the start of the proctored exam by 0845. The three-hour exam session started at 0900. I stood up and turned in my exam at 0932. I read fast and multiple choice questions are easy.

The balance of the day was full: I took Marcia's Solara in for a oil change and tyre rotation. I picked up a few more drip heads at Lowe's. Then I washed both vehicles. The rest of the afternoon went to getting the backyard watering system set up. Too much sun, not enough covering for the head and ears. Oh, well.

Marcia's got pain, mostly due, I think, to the change in her meds leading up to next Friday's arthroscopic surgery on her knee. There's a torn meniscus there to be cleaned up. This'll be the third knee surgery in seven years, but the doc doesn't think she'll need a full knee replacement for a few more years. That's a spot of good news.

Now for some supper. Ciao!

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May 4, 2008

Current listening: McCartney & Wings - Live and Let Die.

1731 - Good afternoon. Another productive weekend about done. Today I laid down the summer fertilizer in the front yard, then edged and mowed the back yard before doing the same back there. For the last couple of hours, I've been re-reading Stephenson's Cryptonomicon while moving a sprinkler every 20 minutes or so - I want the stuff watered into the back lawn so that Molly doesn't consume it wholesale. Oh, and I got/installed some stakes for a few of the drip heads that didn't have them in the veggie beds.

Another fifteen of America's finest are lost to us. May our leaders understand the sacrifices our troops make on behalf of their policies and projections of force. Our condolences to the families and units of the fallen.

• Cpl. David P. McCormick, 26, of Fresno, Texas, died April 28 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when his forward operating base came under rocket attack.
• Senior Airman Jonathan A. V. Yelner, 24, of Lafayette, Calif., died April 29 near Bagram, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.
• Sgt. 1st Class David L. McDowell, 30, of Ramona, Calif., died April 29 in Bastion, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked using small arms fire.
• Pfc. William T. Dix, 32, of Culver City, Calif., died April 27 at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, of injuries suffered in a non-combat related incident.
• Pfc. Adam L. Marion, 26, of Mount Airy, N.C., died April 28 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his forward operating base with indirect fire.
• Sgt. Marcus C. Mathes, 26, of Zephyrhills, Fla., died April 28 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his forward operating base with indirect fire.
• Sgt. Mark A. Stone, 22, of Buchanan Dam, Texas, died April 28 in Baghdad, Iraq, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his forward operating base with indirect fire.
• Staff Sgt. Clay A. Craig, 22, of Mesquite, Texas, died April 29 in Baghdad, Iraq, from wounds suffered when he received small arms fire during combat operations.
• Sgt. Merlin German, 22 of Manhattan, N.Y., died April 11 at Brooke Army Medical Center, San Antonio, Texas, from wounds he suffered while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq, on Feb. 22, 2005.
• Cpt. Andrew. R. Pearson, 32, of Billings, Mont., died April 30 in Baghdad, Iraq, from wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.
• Spc. Ronald J. Tucker, 21, of Fountain, Colo., died April 30 in Baghdad, Iraq, from wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.
• Staff Sgt. Chad A. Caldwell, 24, of Spokane, Wash., died April 30 in Mosul, Iraq, of injuries sustained while conducting dismounted combat operations.
• Sgt. Jerry L. DeLoach, 45, of Jackson, Ga., died July 7, 2007, while assigned to Fort Knox, Ky. He had been medically evacuated from theater, and died of a non-combat related injury.
• Sgt. 1st Class Lawrence D. Ezell, 30, of Portland, Texas, died April 30 in Baghdad of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his unit during combat operations.
• Spc. Jeffrey F. Nichols, 21, of Granite Shoals, Texas, died May 1 in Baghdad from wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

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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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