As Tom well knows, this is my favorite day of every week. Sigh. There I was, last week, reading on Jerry's pages about the passing of Marion Zimmer Bradley, flipping through the pages of memory, thinking on her books that I have read and enjoyed. My favorite is The Mists of Avalon, a book which I have owned many times, and lost through loaning each time. Time for another copy. She was also acclaimed for her Darkover novels, but they somehow never really caught me in the right mood - I hear you should read them though. The other night, as I had supper with my parents following a day helping out my dad, my mother asked if I had noted that Marion had died. Mom remembered how much I enjoyed her Avalon books, as well.

One of the few pictures that my parents caught of me (I was notoriously camera-shy in my younger days) is one of me reading (I am not sure what book), curled up in a niche of chimney, along the outside wall of the house. My mother laughingly shows this to everyone she knows, and many people she doesn't know, as evidence of my early bookishness. I was probably all of 7 or 8 when the picture was taken. I didn't really take off in reading until after a speed reading course in the fourth or fifth grade. I do remember having to struggle my way through Dune at the tender age of 10 or so - It was a couple more years before I was ready to enjoy that book.

RedHat is supposed to release 6.1 today. If you are really interested in this, then keep your eye on Linux.com and/or redhat.com. Methinks that the next version of Mandrake will be my next upgrade, and when I have another computer to load, Debian will be the second distribution. I hear wonderful things about the stability and consistency of Debian installations. I just haven't been successful at getting one running yet - and Lcow is not allowed to have any significant downtime. See you later.

Late update on RH6.1. Apparently it showed up on the RedHat ftp server sometime on Saturday, initially only in i386 format, with an ISO image as well. As advised, you might want to wait for a few days for the ftp feeding frenzy to die down. I personally would wait a couple of weeks for cheapbytes or lsl to come out with the CD's in dirt-cheap mode. If you do have a CD burner, and a fat pipe to do the download fairly quickly, then you will probably be successful sometime this week.

Eric Raymond was interviewed, slashdot-style, last week, and his answers to the questions posed are available at the top of this link. He also participates in the comment festival below the Q&A session, and there are a LOT of comments, so be prepared to stay a while. I enjoyed the interview, though. ESR is one of the OSS people I really enjoy. He evangelizes well and clearly, without becoming overly dogmatic, or stuck on a single view. What he writes, I read, because I usually learn something.


Orb Home / Top

Found an interesting link last night off the New Scientist site... here, called Daughter of the Bizarre. Lost some of the evening there, and the rest went to the Henry VIII book.

Just FYI - there is information (lots) out on the web for setting up a linux box to perform IP Forwarding and IP Masquerading for a network. The setup here at home is that I have the Linux box set up as a multi-homed host. That is, there are two ethernet cards in the system - eth0 point out at the internet, and eth1 points to the internal network. You know the external address - it's 216.102.91.55. The internal addresses are selected from one of the non-routable IP groups under 192.168.x.x. All of our boxes are setup in lmhosts, DNS is setup and running, and I have these excerpts of script running at each boot... infrequently, of course. The key is to change the name of the device pointing at the internet, whether it is eth0, as I have it, or ppp0 or whatever.


#!/bin/sh
# pfilter -- start/stop packet filter services
# Allow use of autoconfiguration (RH 5.2)
# chkconfig: 345 90 25
#

NAME=$0
case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting Packet Filter... "
# 2.1.x/2.2.x have IP forwarding disabled by default
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
# flush current settings:
/sbin/ipchains -F
# default policy is "deny"
/sbin/ipchains -P forward DENY
# block Windows housekeeping traffic from triggering autodial etc:
/sbin/ipchains -A forward -j DENY -p tcp -s 0.0.0.0/0 137:139
/sbin/ipchains -A forward -j DENY -p udp -s 0.0.0.0/0 137:139
# provide masquerade services for the local machines
# masquerade interface eth0 - rename/ add other interfaces as needed
/sbin/ipchains -A forward -j MASQ -i eth0
# don't know if you need these with IP chains - let me know
exit 0

This was extracted from the guidance provided to me by Mark Roberts, at his pages entitled Linux Network Server Guide (or LNSG). This document was crucial in getting me going in providing internet services to the home network. A simple set of this is, do that instructions that I could not have done without when I was getting started.

I appear to be having a spot of trouble with email service - if you don't hear from me, or expect that I should have posted something you wrote, be patient - clearly access to this box appears not to have been a problem. I see that the Atlanta Linux Showcase (3rd Annual, no less) is going on next week, and online registration ended yesterday. Ah, well, I haven't time or resources to attend anyway - but show reports happily accepted and published right here. Consider yourself drafted, if you are lucky enough to attend.


Orb Home / Top

Running (like the wabbit) terribly late this AM. Busy, busy day planned. I will try to update later.

Now this from William Anderson...

On your page http://216.102.91.55/bpages/metajour.html you are missing a link to the week ending 10/3.

I enjoy reading your daynotes.

Thanks. The link is as fixed as it is ever going to be. The explanation, which is rather longwinded, boils down to - Last week went into the bit bucket. Thanks for reading and checking up on me.

And indeed the link wasn't there, and neither is the file. My backup got eaten by the same script that didn't update the pages correctly... Maybe I had better roll back the clock a little bit and explain what happened... Email is now ok, since I am now home to receive it.

For those of you with good memories, I mentioned a couple weeks back that Marcia and I were going camping. Well, we have been. Just got back a couple hours ago. It was going to be longer, but the flies, bees and impending rain drove up the schedule a bit. Home and a quick check, yes, Wednesday morning's update happened just on schedule - so off we went to unpack, do a little grocery shopping... What - Oh, thanks, William, but why didn't the.... OH SCHEISS!!!

The payback for pre-writing a batch of daily updates, and setting up a cron job to post them for me, every morning and afternoon is this - the monday morning rotation script I wrote, I rushed. So instead of copying the old current to both backup and z19991003.html, overwrote current with the new Monday AM update I wrote on Saturday afternoon, then backed that up. No creation of a backup from 10/03. Gone...zip...bye-bye. Stop laughing so hard, Syroid. I can't hear myself type.

Also in the news, a new update from the webmeister Jakob Nielsen. His latest missive is on the positive side of the scale - Ten design elements that would increase the usability of virtually all websites if only they were employed more widely can be found here. I am going to have to look and see how many of these I can break at one time. <grin>

After reading all of the 344 emails generated during 75 hours away (excepting those filtered directly to the trash folder), I can determine a few things that strongly interest the local linux community. One of these is system security. The "standard" for system session connectivity, and it comes enabled on many distributions, is telnet / telnetd (the latter is the server daemon). The problem with this suite is that it does no session security and worse, sends usernames/passwords over the internet as cleartext. There are also problems with the various ftp clients and servers which are available for linux. The only ftp solution that works is anonymous ftp, where no user or password info is exchanged. This becomes problematic in the case of private accounts... do you use MS Frontpage to publish? Does it use FTP protocols to communicate with your account? Then your account / password info is flying cleartext on the internet. Do you have a pop3 account? Same thing. Do I know the way out. Nope! Sigh. There is so much to learn, and so little time.

With hardware you control, then you have some measure of security. Here on Lcow I have disabled all standard outward pointing services except httpd. I run sshd, and when I do midday updates from work, I do a SSH-Client login from work and thus do not expose my info to the world. More as the days fly by, but here is a SSH resource link.


Orb Home / Top

"Well, good morning." That in my best Norm Abram intonation. "Last night I completed sanding down all the .gif files in the public areas, and refinished them into Portable Network Graphics format (or .png)." As have been noted on the pages of Pournelle and Thompson (among others), Unisys has decided to operate its legal division as a profit center, focused upon the GIF format, which uses LZW compression, patented by Unisys. This activity includes "licensing" websites at $5k/site, for using GIF images, purportedly to cover the possibility that one or more images may have been created by unlicensed software (or some such twaddle of that nature). Needless to say, there have been a few responses to this action. Burn All Gifs Day is fast approaching, on November 5, spearheaded by Don Marti. You can see the site here. A resource you can use to eliminate the GIF images from your life is here, on Eric Raymond's pages. Eric also include a decent synopsis of the issue on that linked page.

Lots to do today. Got to change setups on the fishing rods from bass (caught, cleaned and enjoyed one on the camping trip) to trout. Since we're home early, Marcia and I might as well go barrel fishing (or its equivalent, fish a stocked lake). Meantime, have a nice day, all. I will catch up with you later.

A little shopping, washed and waxed the car, and did a lot of net research and reading, a little writing for a potential project upcoming. And thus a day is sucked up by aliens. A minor tempest in a teapot arose over the fact that bash2, (Bourne Again SHell, version 2.x) was not the default shell for RedHat 6.0. It turns out that due to a mistake in the POSIX definition for the shell, where POSIX did not follow the existing bourne implementation, which mistake was faithfully entombed by the bash2 authors. This causes an error in many common shell scripts. Write me for details and I will forward the message I received.

Tomorrow, on our last weekday of vacation, Marcia and I are getting up at OH-Dark:30 and going out to kill some trout. So there won't be an early update on Friday. Oh, did you see what that mean Tom Syroid wrote today? He said that I could botch up wjhwer nmbmnwwe 32ijhjned!

Following a request by the aforementioned Syroid, the mailing lists I subscribe to are linux-admin, which faq can be found here, and SVLUG main mailing list (the SVLUG homepage is here). Both of these are valuable resources for me, and I learn things I never might have anyplace else.


Orb Home / Top

Film at Eleven. One of my favorite phrases. Of course, it never gets me to stay up late and watch that particular newscast, but how are they to know that, eh? Oh, stick to the topic, Bilbrey. OK. We caught 3 trout between the two of us up at Lake Chabot today. We were up and out way early. Trout are now cleaned, headless (Fish heads, fish heads, rolly-polly fish heads. Fish heads fish heads, eat them up, YUM - outbreak of Barnes and Barnes... Film at Eleven!). Tom and I were bantering about newsgroups vs. mailing lists -

I thought I remember you saying something about a Linux kernel NNTP group you checked on occasion. Made me think that you might know others. I don't want to sign up for any more newsletters -- I get too many I can't read already. What I'd like to do is fire up my news reader and go check out the latest when I can. I used to think having a newsgroup delivered to my inbox was the cat's meow... My how times change...

Well, since I have these mailing lists presorted into subfolders of my inbox on receipt, I can check them out at leisure without having to deal with an overloaded main inbox (except for that stinking spam which seems to find new ways of evading my filters - aarrrggghhhh!).

The problem is to strike a balance between traffic and quality... Not enough traffic = not enough conversation to elicit the sense of community and involvement which improves the quality. Too much traffic and it becomes rather difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Just for kicks, I checked a couple of Linux newsgroups.

comp.os.linux.setup   15649 messages
comp.os.linux.help   2645 messages
comp.os.linux.misc   13233 messages
linux.dev.kernel   183 messages

ulp! The first groups messages span from about August 10 to today. That means about 260 messages per day! YIKES! On the small end of things, linux.dev.kernel has some very interesting questions, but very few answers. While some might say (oh, that mysterious some, closely related to "they") that knowing the question is more than half the battle, sometimes a bit of an answer helps me at least put the question in a kind of reasonable context - there are SO MANY bright, bright people out there working on this stuff - I am in awe.

Yup, living in California is tough. When we went shopping the other day, I had to pick up some winter shorts and a new pair of deck shoes, on the off chance that someone with a sailboat will invite me along . More in a little while - a few more things to accomplish around the homestead.

It must be later... from the Linux in the news department, this just in. VA Linux Systems made their SEC filing in advance of a US$70M IPO. This is another bump on the Linux rollercoaster folks, and it looks to be a good'un. People I know and trust say this is the one to watch - they are not a Linux distro vendor, but a value added reseller of Linux-clued hardware and services. They have some nice rackmount h/w and other bits that I drool over (just let me win the lotto once, folks). The release is documented here (dead link, sorry).

I have taken advantage of all the fishing time to finish reading The Autobiography of Henry VIII (With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers). Some books have a certain style to them, that can be indicated with the example of a single paragraph, as thus

     Suddenly I remembered something that gave me great pleasure: Francis had reputedly bought a substandard painting of Leonardo's just to placate him and entice him to France. Ha! Now he was out of his money, out of Leonardo's service's, and stuck with the dark painting of the half-smiling woman that everyone agreed was ugly.

Had the above excerpt appeared in a review of the book, I would have run to purchase it, rather than simply stumbling across the title as I did. Overall, the book is gorgeously written, with no gross anachronisms that I caught. Having had the good fortune to have been exposed to a lot of good history from an early age, this book has the ring of truth, so far as historical novels go. Margaret George did meticulous research, and annotates that at the back of the work. Two Thumbs Up!


Orb Home / Top

John Cleese (a member of the British comedy troupe Monty Python, for those gentle readers who have lived in caves without cable these past decades) is returning to the tube for a special on PBS this season, as I have noted previously. Well, it is airing on KQED tomorrow (Sunday night) and is called In the Wild: John Cleese with Lemurs. Alright, so you may have guessed that I am a bit of a fan. I don't mind. Those formative years spent watching Monty Python while all the other kids were playing baseball, reading science fiction as my peers folded the pages of Mad Magazine haven't aff afff affff >shut up< haven't affected me in the least.

BTW, I am told that in these diminished days it is considered proper usage to put the word "effect" and its derivatives in place of "affect", et al. Well, that wasn't what I was taught with a steel ruler. Anybody have an opinion on this one?

Another stink raised in the SJ Mercury News this morning - regarding PBS journalist Bill Moyers. Although the headline is slightly misleading (or it wouldn't be a headline, I guess), Moyers is being accused of non-disclosure regarding his paid involvement in campaign finance reform, independent of his journalistic forays into that arena. The story can be found here. IMHO, there is no problem here. Sure people can worry about it, but can I tell if Moyers is pushing things in the right direction, both personally and professionally? Yup. Campaign reform is called for. Should Moyers have disclosed that he is president of a foundation which is prominent in philanthropic activity as relates to campaign reform. Probably, but that he failed to do so changes his actions not one bit, and by his actions we know him. What I find annoying here is the requirement that every bit of life becomes grist for the public mill. As another example, look to Dr. Pournelle's recent experiences here, though you may need to read up a little, and down quite a ways to get my drift if you weren't following the pair.com truncation tempest at the time.

The upshot is that I have this image in my mind of an old Bugs Bunny toon, in which dat wascally wabbit was misdirecting a bunch of hounds, first in this direction, then that. The hounds were very, very earnest, and believed (I am quite sure) that they were doing right and good. But, as usual, they headed in the wrong direction, and merely ended up looking foolish. Now the good thing about sending out the hounds on absolutely every scent is that sometimes they will come up with something heinous, nasty, dark and ugly. And I don't even mind the occasional kitten in a tree story. But mostly the news overstates, creates itself and does a disservice to the public.

And now for something completely different. How to destroy a game of Trivial Pursuit. The question - "What was banned by the Miss America Pagent in 1948?" My warped little gray cells twisted a little tighter real quick-like, and out I popped with "Beastiality." Game destroyed with gouts of laughter, uncontrolled giggling and other useless snickers and whinnies that were just winding down, when it was revealed that the correct answer was "Animal acts"... I was still laughing to myself as I fell asleep last night.

A brief update from the WTF department... SBC has completed, after a 17 month process, their acquisition of Ameritech, forming the largest US local telephone company. The story I read is here (dead link, sorry). Now, why is this from the WTF department, you might ask? Well, says I, the new, largest US local telephone company now serves 2/3 of the US population, # 1 in local lines and # 3 in wireless services. For why did we break up the Bell System? Was it to watch the little fish first eat each other's waste, then each other, until we have just the one behemoth? Again? These Federal regulatory types crack me up... Oh, you mean then we can break them up again next decade, employing 5,000 new bureaucrats and 400 lawyers, and get a permanent budget increase out of the deal. SURE!!! {Disclaimer - my connectivity is provided by an SBC-owned corporation, so if I disappear of the face of the net...}

LDAP, or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, began life as a simple to use front end for industrial strength X.500 databases... now creeping into many aspects of common (connected) life. Tom noted this today, and I decided to play with it myself. I went to the OpenLDAP site, where upon I set to reading vast, nay, huuugge tracts of... of... of text. I then downloaded the latest release and building an OpenLDAP installation here. More details tomorrow, but for the moment, let us say, YES! I am the man! Chill. Chill. OK, I overreact, but it was fun, and in patches, less than intuitive. Expeditions tommorow include connecting it to the appropriate TCP port, finding a gui client for it, etc, etc. Right now the <edited> output from the following command looks something like...

[bilbrey@grendel bilbrey]# ldapsearch -L -b "o=Orb Designs, c=US" -W "(objectclass=*)"

dn: o=Orb Designs, c=US
o: Orb Designs
objectclass: organization

dn: ou=Colleagues, o=Orb Designs, c=US
ou: Colleagues
objectclass: organizationalunit

dn: ou=Misc, o=Orb Designs, c=US
ou: Misc
objectclass: organizationalunit

dn: cn=Brian Bilbrey, ou=Friends, o=Orb Designs, c=US
cn: Brian Bilbrey
sn: bpb
mail: [email protected]
mail: [email protected]
objectclass: person

dn: cn=Marcia Bilbrey, ou=Friends, o=Orb Designs, c=US
cn: Marcia Bilbrey
sn: mlb
mail: [email protected]
objectclass: person

dn: cn=Tom Syroid, ou=Colleagues, o=Orb Designs, c=US
cn: Tom Syroid
sn: tsr
mail: [email protected]
mail: [email protected]
objectclass: person

I know, clear as so much mud - but what's another challenge. At least I am having fun. Oh, Marcia has posted some updates and new features available off of the home page... and set me my next project. She (briefly) mentions that we finally picked her up a domain name, dutchgirl.net, no www needed, thank you very much. But now I have to figure out how to get the apache server to handle the virtual hosting bit properly. Anybody with suggestions (outside of hiring a professional, or something about "all corners!" please feel free to write to me here. Lastly, since we had decided that indian summer has come to an end, I pulled out the AC, and stuck it in the garage for the winter. As of this moment, 18:11, with the last light of the sun on the trees, it is over 90 F inside the apartment, with every window open, and all the fans running. Sigh.

In Jerry's mail for today, a gentleman going about by the name of Onge sent him (Dr. Pournelle) a message about a broken link, and I sent the good doctor the following...

Poor Mr. Onge...

Who actually did what he was told to do by the error message at the site, as shown here

*****
The URL http://faculty.physics.tamu.edu/jsmith/wet-perls/ does not exist.
Please notify the webmaster of the site at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/ that
the page at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/currentmail.html#Saturday has
a bad link. Be sure to mention the URL at this site also.

We moved the department website on May 1st, 1998. Check out
http://people.physics.tamu.edu/jsmith/wet-perls/ before giving up.
*****

It would appear that Dr/Mr/Ms Smith no longer lives at that particular physics department, as the page also indicates the names of the physics people there, and Smith is not among them. Now had it been W.Smith, or A.Sheffield or even L.Long then I might have been able to instantly figure out what was going on... <grin>. Certainly there is more effort in tracking down Smith than any of us want to go to - however he did give you info that you could use to disable the link, rather than... wait, wait, an idea, one moment please...

I decided to follow up a hunch or two. First, looking at the original context in Mail27, I determined that indeed this was regarding some Perl script or another, so off to http://www.perl.com/ I go, where there are... 0 search results. One last try, at http://freshmeat.net/ yielded this http://www.jamesmith.com/cgi-wet/ which is the new online home (we presume) for the information previously contained at that bad link. Bad tamu.edu, broke Jakob Nielsen's rules they did. Content to die without forwarding link they allowed. Weak in them the force is. Perhaps you could offer unredeemable, meaningless brownie points for people who not only identify bad links that you could remove, but also the new location of the data linked to... surely SOMEONE must have as much time to waste as I do <grin, again>.

Hope all is well with you and Mrs. Pournelle. Interesting times.


Orb Home / Top

As a follow-on to the above, I sent the new pointer to Smith's work on to Mr. Onge late yesterday. Hope that it assists him in his endeavours. And this morning in the box, a response from Dr. Keyboard, hoping to effect a change in the usage of "affect".

The apparent new interchangeability of these two words these days annoys the hell out of me too. I grind my teeth when hearing a newsreader talking about the affects of Hurricaine Floyd - you get the idea. I had to learn Latin at school, not so much to understand the writings of more dead white males (which were good enough all the same) but to teach me the basis of English grammar, which it did very well. A campaign is called for: The Effects of Affectation or similar. Onwards and upwards.

Regards
Chris Ward-Johnson
Dr Keyboard - Computing Answers You Can Understand
http://www.drkeyboard.co.uk

PS Actually the mis-use of the exclamation mark annoys me more than the effects of affectation, come to think about it! Like those people who can't say a sentence without turning their intonation up at the end to make it sound like a question? They are so annoying? Like?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHh

IMHO, the purist will also abhor the practice of excessive use of acronyms in our era of electronic communication, ignoring their overall positive effect on bandwith usage in transmitting such. Not to mention the overuse of the word "argh", often misspelled, and capitalized to boot. Have a lovely afternoon and evening.

> indian summer

Don't you mean "Native American Summer"?

Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

Oh, BTW, for the motorcycle fans among you, Indian Motorcycles has been resurrected, and the Indian Vee Twin Chief is in production and for sale. Nice looking bikes. You can see some pix and get some info here.

Fun reading found via Slashdot can be found here. Sir Arthur Clarke regales us with his "extrapolations" for the next one hundred years. Having read the whole thing, all I can say is I Hope SO!

David Huffman, UCSC Professor Emeritus of CS, developer of Huffman Codes, passed away at age 74 this last Thursday. A press release from UCSC is here. This strikes me as important on a reasonably personal level - while I hadn't seen Dr. Huffman for about 15 years, I took several courses from him while I was at UC Santa Cruz. Not an inspiring instuctor at the lectern, he was an interesting, animated and witty being in small groups, both personally, and in interaction with students. Got a lot of recognition recently, I note. Rest in Peace.

I have been having difficulty setting up virtual hosting to work, so as to redirect the dutchgirl.net requests into a homepage for Marcia within her own directory... sigh. Lots of online resources, and for once they seem to be mostly in agreement - just that the darn thing doesn't do what is indicated. I have temporarily backed up from that project - time for a little PBS, maybe a nap. Don't forget, if you are in the Bay Area and like animals or John Cleese, check channel 9, KQED tonight for In the Wild, John Cleese with Lemurs.

And a final chuckle or two to end the week properly - The Onion brings us Earthquake Safety Tips. Enjoy! Oh, BTW, these !! are!!!!! for the good !!! Dr. Keyboarrrrrrrrrd !!!!!!!!!!!! hehehe! G'night.


Orb Home / Top