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GRAFFITI -- June 28, 2010 thru July 04, 2010 >> 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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June 28, 2010

Wait for it ....

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June 29, 2010

2133 - Once again, welcome to virtual Monday, where I seem to be able to post for the first time each week. By the time chores and dogs are done, Monday evening is gone, and any useful thoughts or reflections have departed via luminiferous aether protocol. Today, I battled spam, or more precisely, a spam detection system with too many false positives. I can't tell you about it much, because I don't generally discuss specific vendors or gear that I use at work for fairly obvious reasons. I'll get to a resolution someday, but commercial anti-spam software is notoriously difficult to tune due to opacity, whereas FOSS spam detection is just notoriously difficult to tune. I do like open case messages from the vendor getting marked as spam by the vendor's software, though. That's priceless. Ciao!

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June 30, 2010

2217 - Huh. Where do you suppose that half-year went? I mean, in a real hours/days/weeks/months sense, I can account for it all, but damn, so quick! It's like Zeno's paradox in reverse, as one (at least this one) gets older. The one current blessing is that our high temperatures have deeply moderated in the last couple of days - It was 63° F out this morning as I departed from work, and it's supposed to be high 50's tomorrow at the same time. O frabjous day!

Meantime, I'm doing a clean install and update to build 134 of OpenSolaris in a VMWare Server 2.x environment, making some backups to optical media, listening to The Five Browns play beautifully, and trying to figure out how to modify the window title bar behaviour on focus/unfocus in Enlightenment 17.

In the first task, the downloading of the updated packages, nearly a gigabyte thereof, is taking a long time (hours). Almost done, though, then time to apply the changes - I figure it'll all be done long before I awake in the morning, but I won't know about success or failure until I get home tomorrow night. Although progress on the OpenSolaris development tree is proceeding apace, it's apparently doing so behind Oracle's doors. There's nothing public beyond the b134 packages dating from March (when OpenSolaris 2010.03 was to have been released). We're all still waiting. Hopefully the dev tree will open up again once (if) OpenSolaris releases again (a "promised" event, on the par with weather prediction at this moment).

The middle bits are proceeding fine, though the music has now progressed, courtesy of RAND(), to Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble. The last bit ... well, there are approximately 17 million distinct Enlightenment configuration dialogs, so I'm going to be a while at this task. I allot 10 more evening minutes to it, so see y'all tomorrow. Ciao!

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July 1, 2010

2138 - The OpenSolaris update to ~ build 134 completed in 286 minutes, according to the dialog that I found when I got home this evening. The upside: it's now working fine. The downside: it wasn't at first, because it wouldn't boot. The problem turned out to be this bug, more or less. There are a couple of startup failures in the graphical X startup after the boot proper, but I'll suss those shortly. Supper was pizza bagel things. Frankly, I'm not feeling all that well, but it's more a general malaise than any particular bug, in presentation. Sleep will help, one hopes. Ciao!

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July 2, 2010

2152 - Good evening. Marcia isn't feeling super either, now. Good thing, I guess, that we didn't have any big plans for this weekend. Big thumpa-thumpa music coming from the direction of the pool - the good news there is that the pool closes in just 10 weeks. Yay? Can you tell I'm not pool-people? On the desktop front, I'm continuing to use E17 (Enlightenment) in place of either KDE or Gnome - it's lighter, faster, and challenges me a little bit. All of those are good things. Finally, on the Solaris front, I flipped away from the broken upgrade to dev build 134, and popped on a copy of the Nexenta Core 3 beta, which is based on OpenSolaris build 134, but with a Debian tilt to package management, and an Ubuntu (okay, an old Ubuntu: 8:04 LTS) set of userspace packages. I'm mucking about with that as I write. Ciao!

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July 3, 2010

2148 - I wore my Technical Reviewer hat this morning, and my "I finally finished Half Life 2" hat this afternoon. For finishers, we watched Quantum of Solace tonight. And whatever low grade crud I've been enjoying continues to pain me. Sigh. TheraFlu and a full night's sleep will be nice, this one hopes. Ciao!

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July 4, 2010

2033 - Fourth of July, Happy Birthday, USA! I wish I felt more like celebrating. But between the crud and the bad week in the sandbox, I just can't muster as much enthusiasm as I'd like. Speaking of which: Crap. Crap, crap, crap. What a terrible freaking week for our men and women in the Armed Services! Our condolences to the families and units of the fallen.

• Staff Sgt. Edwardo Loredo, 34, of Houston, Texas, died June 24 at Jelewar, Afghanistan, when insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
• Sgt. Joseph D. Caskey, 24, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, died June 26 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
• Spc. Blair D. Thompson, 19, of Rome, New York, died June 25 at Konar, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit using rocket propelled grenades and small arms fire.
• Spc. Jared C. Plunk, 27, of Stillwater, Oklahoma, died June 25 at Konar, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit using rocket propelled grenades and small arms fire.
• Cpl. Daane A. Deboer, 24, of Ludington, Michigan, died June 25 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
• Lance Cpl. William T. Richards, 20, of Trenton, Georgia, died June 26 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
• Pfc. Robert K. L. Repkie, 20, of Knoxville, Tennessee, died June 24 at Forward Operating Base Farah, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident.
• Sgt. John M. Rogers, 26, of Scottsdale, Arizona, died June 27 at Forward Operating Base Blessing, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident.
• Pfc. Bryant J. Haynes, 21, of Epps, Louisiana, died June 26 in Al Diwaniyah, Iraq, of injuries sustained during a vehicle roll-over.
• Sgt. David A. Holmes, 34, of Tennille, Georgia, died June 26 at Sayed Abad, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit using an improvised explosive device.
• Staff Sgt. Eric B. Shaw, 31, of Exeter, Maine, died June 27 in Konar, Afghanistan of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with small arms fire.
• Sgt. David W. Thomas, 40, of St. Petersburg, Florida, died June 27 in Konar, Afghanistan of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked their unit with small arms fire.
• Staff Sgt. Brandon M. Silk, 25, of Orono, Maine, died June 21 of injuries sustained when the helicopter in which he was travelling made a hard landing.
• Spc. Matthew R. Hennigan, 20, of Las Vegas, Nevada, died June 30 at Forward Operating Base Shank, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered earlier in Tangi Valley, Afghanistan when enemy forces attacked his unit with machine gun fire.
• Cpl. Larry D. Harris Jr., 24, of Thornton, Colorado, died July 1 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
• Sgt. 1st Class Kristopher D. Chapleau, 33, of LaGrange, Kentucky, died June 30 at Forward Operating Base Blessing, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident.
• Spc. Morganne M. McBeth, 19, of Fredricksburg, Virginia, died July 2 in Al Asad, Iraq, of wounds sustained July 1 in a non-combat related incident in Khan Al Baghdadi, Iraq.
• Sgt. Johnny W. Lumpkin, 38, of Columbus, Georgia, died July 2 in Balad, Iraq, of wounds sustained July 1 in a non-combat related equipment incident in Taji, Iraq.
• Pfc. Ryan J. Grady, 25, of Bristow, Oklahoma, died July 1 at Bagram, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit using an improvised-explosive device.
• Capt David A. Wisniewski, 31, of Moville, Iowa, died July 2 of wounds sustained June 9 in a helicopter crash near Forward Operating Base Jackson, Afghanistan.

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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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