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GRAFFITI -- December 15, 2008 thru December 21, 2008>> 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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December 15, 2008
2058 - Good evening. Sorry (just a bit) to throw you off track, posting on a Monday and all. Actually, posting for the second Monday in a row. It's a bit like someone throwing shoes at you. If your reflexes are good, you duck. If your reflexes are excellent, you catch the bloody thing(s). If you've got a sense of humor and history, you throw them back... You'd think, after Richard Reid, someone would notice someone else reaching down for their shoes when Heads of State are in the house, eh? Maybe it was the lack of a lighter that lulled the protectors.
I've updated Harmony to OS X 10.5.6, the latest security/bugfix update from Apple. It's a bit daring to do so on the first day of its release, but I figure a few people made it in under the wire before I did - if anything heinous were to have been wrong, they'd have pulled the patch, right? And when you're the guinea pig, you get the wire wheel to yourself for a while, until the rest of the crowd catches up. In another window, I'm using the Sun Download Manager, a Java app, to pull down the eight or so CD images that comprise the Solaris Sparc 10/08 release. I've got hardware downstairs (an Ultra 10 minitower and an Ultra 5 pizza box) that has been intended to be my Solaris lab for a great many months now. Getting the media here and burnt will be another step in the right direction. And at 1200KBps, it isn't going to take long to get those images down from Sun. I still need to pull the DVD so that I can install it on one of the Fujitsu Prime Power systems at work, in anticipation of the next major system build I've got in the works there.
The cookies were a hit (duh) at the office today. And, as the holidays ramp up, the in-house user-count should ramp down, and we'll have a little time to get caught up on tasks. That's my hope, anyway. Nothing else of particular interest going on at the moment. I'm reading pterry's Lords and Ladies. While I could swear that I had that book in the past, I've not been able to find it, and as we celebrated a bit early with Linda yesterday, Marcia gave me a UK trade paperback edition thereof. I'm about a third of the way through, and still it's not ringing bells. Maybe I only *thought* I had, and had read, it. Sigh. Ciao!
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December 16, 2008
1952 - It's raining, and the temps are dropping through freezing in the next couple of hours. That can't be a good thing, can it? According to the weather radar, the ice line is in Laurel and Rockville right now, you have to get well up into Pennsylvania to find the straight snow. Depending on how long this lasts, tomorrow morning's commute may well suck dead bunnies.
I've got the Disk Utility app running, burning all those Solaris ISO images I pulled down yesterday. A little while ago, we finished addressing the Christmas cards. Staying busy and productive appears to be one of my major goals, eh? I've been snacking on some Terra chips, but think it's probably time to get some supper rustled up, too. Ciao!
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December 17, 2008
2103 - Another Christmas present today - some dry ice from Linda Rose! Oh, yeah, and some Omaha Steaks to keep the dry ice cold. The dogs definitely don't like the CO2 fog from plunking the dry ice in water. I'll bet that Profit of Doom Al Gore doesn't like it either. However, I *do* like the steak, very much. Grilled one tonight, since it's above freezing ... Not much else to report, so I'll move along. Ciao!
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December 18, 2008
1905 - Progress, of a sort. I took today off, a "vacation" day that I needed to burn before the end of the calendar year. I got up at close to the normal weekday time, ground some recently roasted Guatamalan from Sweet Maria's, noshed for a bit, then got going with the day. I dropped off some more cards at the post office, then headed over to Lowes to pick up a couple of flush-mount ceiling fixtures for the upstairs hall. Back home, I got those installed in about half an hour. Then the fun started.
I took a stab at building the Solaris lab. Oooh, er, um ... okay. So the Ultra 10 doesn't boot from CD media. And hey, it turns out that my iPhone has a faster CPU, more RAM, and nearly more storage than the Ultra 5 pizza box. So, after taking 23 minutes to get to the point where the installer got rolling, I decided that neither system was going to be running here. So I started a download of the Solaris 10 u6 x86 DVD, and put assorted bits of hardware in place. Now I've got a booting-from-a-ZFS Solaris install running on the system that I built out of Marcia's old desktop. Two 500G drives in a ZFS mirror pool, updated and ready for me to use as a tool for learning stuff I don't know. That's the plan, anyway. I will probably still hunt down a Sparc-based workstation that runs (and is a bit more ... modern) for working with the Sun hardware and OpenBoot firmware, etc.
Over on the Linux side of the table, a recent update included a new "network manager" package and assorted hangers-on. The problem is, that with a perfectly good and working configuration, network manager now burps in the status bar and says that networking is broken. Only, it isn't broken, comms to the world run just fine. There was a bug filed on this ... closed as invalid, since network manager is working the way it's supposed to (barfing if it can't be in charge of the network interfaces). You can make it behave by removing the ethX network configs from /etc/network/interfaces, or by removing network manager from the system. I chose the latter, since my system was working just fine before they "updated" nm to break it. Sigh.
Lunch was a modified BLT sandwich. Modified? Yep. I substituted bacon for the lettuce, the tomato, and both slices of bread. So I guess it wasn't a BLT sandwich at all, just bacon. You gotta problem wit dat? Ciao!
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December 19, 2008
No Post......
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December 20, 2008
1554 - Yesterday's workday was about 15 hours. Not much time for "other". Today I cleaned up the woodshop a bit, and went over to help a neighbor get windows updated (dramatically updated). That's really all there is. I'm going to try to unwind a bit, maybe finish reading The Diamond Age (which got set to the side when I got Lords and Ladies). Ciao!
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December 21, 2008
1736 - More neighborly IT support today, after shopping and taking Linda to the airport. Then I ground my Warlock from 23 to 25 fighting assorted beasties in the wild (no quests at the moment, I need to get stronger first), which is more than enough playtime for today. On the school front, I got 94 out of a hundred in my final, I'm still waiting for the points I got on the final project - that's 20% of the grade remaining.
Hey! No combat-related casualties this week! That is good news! Private Colman J. Meadows III, 19, of Senoia, Georgia, died on December 16 at Forward Operating Base Ramrod, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident. Our condolences to his family and unit mates.
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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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