Of course it is Happy Monday. And why wouldn't it be. After all, I haven't been to work since 10/01. I am simply overjoyed... Going to be an interesting day today. More in a little while. Hi. Last night and this morning's mail brought me a plethora of tips on the virtual hosting functions of Apache Web Server software. Apparently, I have a confusing situation, since I have no primary hosting domain (that is, you simply get here by typing the IP number, or by clicking on a link which does that for you). But before the virtual domains can be listed in the configuration file, the hosting domain must be - so this evening I will try these ideas. Thanks, Bo.

I read with amusement that Matt thought that he was done with the topic of nukes...

Yeah, riiiiiight. <g>

Do you remember Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" (I think that was the title early in the Expanded Universe collection book). Some debates don't end. But Clarke thinks that cold fusion will save the day, until quantum energy sources displace all else. Who knows - When my g'father was born, they didn't have cars yet... What are we going to see in the next 100 years?

Well, my chin's still above water, and it's already 11:30...

Yeah, I remember Blowups Happen. Fun story, wasn't it? Personally, I've always reserved judgement on the whole Cold Fusion thing. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense, but there's too many questions - like, why are so many prominent scientists starting to hedge their their bets on the whole thing?

And it wouldn't be the first time the entire scientific community condemned something as wrong, only to have the whole thing blow up in their face. As for the quantum energy thing, I think he's skipping over a few minor details in there, but what the hell - he could be right. Having read his initial predition from 1950-whatever, I'm certainly not willing to bet he's wrong.

Matt

Well, given that 100 years means that the tech will be over 50% magic according to some calculations (magic meaning technology which we cannot envision today), I would guess that any prognostication would be in error in lots of details, and generally conservative in the broad sweep of things.

What a wonderfully hectic day. To complete the last thought, the failure I had with the cron job was in not setting the executable bit for the script that was to do the Monday early rollover to a new week - so now I say that the week was eaten by wolverines. Don't let anyone tell you different, but do run {ls -l} on your script directory to check that the script you just created actually is executable. Sigh.

Now that I have confessed all on that issue, on to new things. I had an interesting meeting this afternoon, and should anything come of it I will let you know. Meantime, aside from doing some followup research after the meeting, I did try and apply the mods to the httpd.conf script, as sent to me by Bo. Still no joy. I have a serious worry that I have not got DNS set up right. The problem is that up to this, everything has functioned as requested. I may not have been asking the right questions, but I have been getting answers that worked. The system sees the internet. The system masquerades the other computer just fine. All connectivity to and from both machines to the outer world has been as it should be...

Except that this virtual hosting thingy isn't working right. And I am afeared that changes I make to correct that will in some way break the bits that do work. Well, I do know how to make backup copies of key files before editing changes. And the backup is now on a (don't laugh, Tom) working cron job, so if I break things, I can fix them. I will keep you updated, and let you know what worked, when and (hopefully) why.

Oh, and Tom has a copy on his site of the latest guffaw press snicker release from Microsoft (this one first circulated a year or two ago, I think, but I STILL like it.) You can get there from here, then down a ways. Enjoy that, and the following, which turned up from Chris " Dr. Keyboard" Ward-Johnson this morning, regarding my reference to Indian Summer...

I always thought that this was a reference to the Indian sub-continent and that it was an English phrase dating back to the late, great days of the Empire when the whole planet was coloured pink (well, all the nice bits anyway). However, upon investigation I discover that it's actually an American phrase which comes from the early settlers noting the phenomenon in the lands occupied by native Americans. Then I discovered that the phenomenon is also known in England as St Luke's summer or St Martin's summer, referring to their respective feast days on October 7 (pre-Gregorian, now Oct 18) and October 31 (now November 11). Blimey, you learn something every day. Which is a good aim in life.

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

PS My consulting company is called Most Excellent!, much to my exclamatory shame.

And lastly, to close out the day, I was noting today that Monty Python turned 30 (dead link removed) last Thursday, but I can be excused since I was on vacation (mentally). I was minded that my system sounds had flaked out on my KDE desktop, so I went into the Control Panel, and included them all over again. Now, when a new window opens, Gregorian Monks, chanting and bashing their foreheads with boards, greet me. This and many other .wav files are available at Monty Python Sounds. Many other such locations can be found by searching with Google (revised 10/2000). (The old site, Starbase21, was bought out by commercial interests...) Have fun and fly low and slow. G'night.


Orb Home / Top

Good Morning (or Happy tea-time to you, Dr. Keyboard :). So, the good, the bad and the ugly, eh? Well, the good is that Linux continues to generate more positive buzz than anyone thought possible just a year ago - and Jesse Berst thinks so too - another go-go article is here. The bad and ugly, combined - even dealing with exchanging rtf files, neither WordPerfect8 for Linux from Corel nor StarOffice5.1 from Sun make the grade.

Both tools appear to be sufficient for many purposes, and you can certainly import most any MS Word document, clean up the odds and ends, then go forward. But document interchange, where you need to send the same thing back and forth? Uh-uh. I held out hope that I could collaborate with someone just using the tools available for the Linux desktop. But when the driving requirement is a document in Word 2k format - sigh - I might have to get another computer, wouldn't that just be terrible <grin>.

Every generation has a mythology. Every millennium has a doomsday cult. Every legend gets the distortion knob wound up until the speaker melts.

Archeologists at the University of Helsinki today uncovered what could be the earliest known writings from the Cult of Tux, a fanatical religious sect that flourished during the early Silicon Age, just before the dawn of the third millennium AD...

The Gospel of Tux (v1.0)

In the beginning Turing created the Machine.

And the Machine was crufty and bodacious, existing in theory only. And von Neumann looked upon the Machine, and saw that it was crufty. He divided the Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet the two were one Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom.

And von Neumann spoke unto the Architecture, and blessed it, saying, "Go forth and replicate, freely exchanging data and code, and bring forth all manner of devices unto the earth." And it was so, and it was cool. The Architecture prospered and was implemented in hardware and software. And it brought forth many Systems unto the earth.

The first Systems were mighty giants; many great works of renown did they accomplish. Among them were Colossus, the codebreaker; ENIAC, the targeter; EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of froody creatures ending in AC, the experimenters; and SAGE, the defender of the sky and father of all networks. These were the mighty giants of old, the first children of Turing, and their works are written in the Books of the Ancients. This was the First Age, the age of Lore.

Now the sons of Marketing looked upon the children of Turing, and saw that they were swift of mind and terse of name and had many great and baleful attributes. And they said unto themselves, "Let us go now and make us Corporations, to bind the Systems to our own use that they may bring us great fortune." With sweet words did they lure their customers, and with many chains did they bind the Systems, to fashion them after their own image. And the sons of Marketing fashioned themselves Suits to wear, the better to lure their customers, and wrote grave and perilous Licenses, the better to bind the Systems. And the sons of Marketing thus became known as Suits, despising and being despised by the true Engineers, the children of von Neumann.

And the Systems and their Corporations replicated and grew numerous upon the earth. In those days there were IBM and Digital, Burroughs and Honeywell, Unisys and Rand, and many others. And they each kept to their own System, hardware and software, and did not interchange, for their Licences forbade it. This was the Second Age, the age of Mainframes.

Now it came to pass that the spirits of Turing and von Neumann looked upon the earth and were displeased. The Systems and their Corporations had grown large and bulky, and Suits ruled over true Engineers. And the Customers groaned and cried loudly unto heaven, saying, "Oh that there would be created a System mighty in power, yet small in size, able to reach into the very home!" And the Engineers groaned and cried likewise, saying, "Oh, that a deliverer would arise to grant us freedom from these oppressing Suits and their grave and perilous Licences, and send us a System of our own, that we may hack therein!" And the spirits of Turing and von Neumann heard the cries and were moved, and said unto each other, "Let us go down and fabricate a Breakthrough, that these cries may be stilled."

And that day the spirits of Turing and von Neumann spake unto Moore of Intel, granting him insight and wisdom to understand the future. And Moore was with chip, and he brought forth the chip and named it 4004. And Moore did bless the Chip, saying, "Thou art a Breakthrough; with my own Corporation have I fabricated thee. Thou thou art yet as small as a dust mote, yet shall thou grow and replicate unto the size of a mountain, and conquer all before thee. This blessing I give unto thee: every eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until the end of the age." This is Moore's Law, which endures unto this day.

And the birth of 4004 was the beginning of the Third Age, the age of Microchips. And as the Mainframes and their Systems and Corporations had flourished, so did the Microchips and their Systems and Corporations. And their lineage was on this wise:

Moore begat Intel. Intel begat Mostech, Zilog and Atari. Mostech begat 6502, and Zilog begat Z80. Intel also begat 8800, who begat Altair; and 8086, mother of all PCs. 6502 begat Commodore, who begat PET and 64; and Apple, who begat 2. (Apple is the great Mystery, the Fruit that was devoured, yet bloomed again.) Atari begat 800 and 1200, masters of the game, who were destroyed by Sega and Nintendo. Xerox begat PARC. Commodore and PARC begat Amiga, creator of fine arts; Apple and PARC begat Lisa, who begat Macintosh, who begat iMac. Atari and PARC begat ST, the music maker, who died and was no more. Z80 begat Sinclair the dwarf, TRS-80 and CP/M, who begat many machines, but soon passed from this world. Altair, Apple and Commodore together begat Microsoft, the Great Darkness which is called Abomination, Destroyer of the Earth, the Gates of Hell.

Now it came to pass in the Age of Microchips that IBM, the greatest of the Mainframe Corporations, looked upon the young Microchip Systems and was greatly vexed. And in their vexation and wrath they smote the earth and created the IBM PC. The PC was without sound and colour, crufty and bodacious in great measure, and its likeness was a tramp, yet the Customers were greatly moved and did purchase the PC in great numbers. And IBM sought about for an Operating System Provider, for in their haste they had not created one, nor had they forged a suitably grave and perilous License, saying, "First we will build the market, then we will create a new System, one in our own image, and bound by our Licence." But they reasoned thus out of pride and not wisdom, not foreseeing the wrath which was to come.

And IBM came unto Microsoft, who licensed unto them QDOS, the child of CP/M and 8086. (8086 was the daughter of Intel, the child of Moore). And QDOS grew, and was named MS-DOS. And MS-DOS and the PC together waxed mighty, and conquered all markets, replicating and taking possession thereof, in accordance with Moore's Law. And Intel grew terrible and devoured all her children, such that no chip could stand before her. And Microsoft grew proud and devoured IBM, and this was a great marvel in the land. All these things are written in the Books of the Deeds of Microsoft.

In the fullness of time MS-DOS begat Windows. And this is the lineage of Windows: CP/M begat QDOS. QDOS begat DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 begat DOS 2.0 by way of Unix. DOS 2.0 begat Windows 3.11 by way of PARC and Macintosh. IBM and Microsoft begat OS/2, who begat Windows NT and Warp, the lost OS of lore. Windows 3.11 begat Windows 95 after triumphing over Macintosh in a mighty Battle of Licences. Windows NT begat NT 4.0 by way of Windows 95. NT 4.0 begat NT 5.0, the OS also called Windows 2000, The Millennium Bug, Doomsday, Armageddon, The End Of All Things.

Now it came to pass that Microsoft had waxed great and mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mightier than any of the Mainframe Corporations before it had it waxed. And Gates' heart was hardened, and he swore unto his Customers and their Engineers the words of this curse:

"Children of von Neumann, hear me. IBM and the Mainframe Corporations bound thy forefathers with grave and perilous Licences, such that ye cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumann for deliverance. Now I say unto ye: I am greater than any Corporation before me. Will I loosen your Licences? Nay, I will bind thee with Licences twice as grave and ten times more perilous than my forefathers. I will engrave my Licence on thy heart and write my Serial Number upon thy frontal lobes. I will bind thee to the Windows Platform with cunning artifices and with devious schemes. I will bind thee to the Intel Chipset with crufty code and with gnarly APIs. I will capture and enslave thee as no generation has been enslaved before. And wherefore will ye cry then unto the spirits of Turing, and von Neumann, and Moore? They cannot hear ye. I am become a greater Power than they. Ye shall cry only unto me, and shall live by my mercy and my wrath. I am the Gates of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to the Blue Screen of Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly afraid; serve only me, and live."

And the people were cowed in terror and gave homage to Microsoft, and endured the many grave and perilous trials which the Windows platform and its greatly bodacious Licence forced upon them. And once again did they cry to Turing and von Neumann and Moore for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task until the birth of Linux.

These are the generations of Linux: SAGE begat ARPA, which begat TCP/IP, and Aloha, which begat Ethernet. Bell begat Multics, which begat C, which begat Unix. Unix and TCP/IP begat Internet, which begat the World Wide Web. Unix begat RMS, father of the great GNU, which begat the Libraries and Emacs, chief of the Utilities. In the days of the Web, Internet and Ethernet begat the Intranet LAN, which rose to renown among all Corporations and prepared the way for the Penguin. And Linus and the Web begat the Kernel through Unix. The Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities together are the Distribution, the one Penguin in many forms, forever and ever praised.

Now in those days there was in the land of Helsinki a young scholar named Linus the Torvald. Linus was a devout man, a disciple of RMS and mighty in the spirit of Turing, von Neumann and Moore. One day as he was meditating on the Architecture, Linus fell into a trance and was granted a vision. And in the vision he saw a great Penguin, serene and well-favoured, sitting upon an ice floe eating fish. And at the sight of the Penguin Linus was deeply afraid, and he cried unto the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore for an interpretation of the dream.

And in the dream the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore answered and spoke unto him, saying, "Fear not, Linus, most beloved hacker. You are exceedingly cool and froody. The great Penguin which you see is an Operating System which you shall create and deploy unto the earth. The ice-floe is the earth and all the systems thereof, upon which the Penguin shall rest and rejoice at the completion of its task. And the fish on which the Penguin feeds are the crufty Licensed codebases which swim beneath all the earth's systems. The Penguin shall hunt and devour all that is crufty, gnarly and bodacious; all code which wriggles like spaghetti, or is infested with blighting creatures, or is bound by grave and perilous Licences shall it capture. And in capturing shall it replicate, and in replicating shall it document, and in documentation shall it bring freedom, serenity and most cool froodiness to the earth and all who code therein."

Linus rose from meditation and created a tiny Operating System Kernel as the dream had foreshewn him; in the manner of RMS, he released the Kernel unto the World Wide Web for all to take and behold. And in the fullness of Internet Time the Kernel grew and replicated, becoming most cool and exceedingly froody, until at last it was recognized as indeed a great and mighty Penguin, whose name was Tux. And the followers of Linus took refuge in the Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities; they installed Distribution after Distribution, and made sacrifice unto the GNU and the Penguin, and gave thanks to the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore, for their deliverance from the hand of Microsoft. And this was the beginning of the Fourth Age, the age of Open Source.

Now there is much more to be said about the exceeding strange and wonderful events of those days; how some Suits of Microsoft plotted war upon the Penguin, but were discovered on a Halloween Eve; how Gates fell among lawyers and was betrayed and crucified by his former friends, the apostles of Media; how the mercenary Knights of the Red Hat brought the gospel of the Penguin into the halls of the Corporations; and even of the dispute between the brethren of Gnome and KDE over a trollish Licence. But all these things are recorded elsewhere, in the Books of the Deeds of the Penguin and the Chronicles of the Fourth Age, and I suppose if they were all narrated they would fill a stack of DVDs as deep and perilous as a Usenet Newsgroup.

Now may you code in the power of the Source; may the Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities be with you, throughout all Distributions, until the end of the Epoch. Amen.

The above came to me via mailing list from alt.humor.something. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

I return home to find justifiable outrage in my inbox...

Geesh. You move in, you take over the limelight, now you're getting credit
for -- what just 6 months ago -- was considered "boorish and uncouth"
language on my part.

This from Dr. Keyboard today:

One for, as Brian would say, the WTF? Department.

WTF indeed. Blimey.

/tom

And indeed you are right - if you want to be the sole possessor of uncouth and boorish behaviour, then by all means, I yield to the gentleman from the realm of eh? and Thanksgiving on entirely the wrong day - but you, yourself, are excused since you found yourself too busy to participate... But certainly - it's yours.

Then I find more mail from Bo regarding my continuing trials with apache and virtual hosting. We went back and forth a couple of times today - he is really trying to help me pull these particular irons from the fire. I tried checking things out running netconf - but only managed to break things. Since you are now reading this, clearly I got them going again, but only by putting all things back to the way they were. This was the latest from Bo...

> The incoming GET only has...

"We do these things only because others don't care to :)"

Shouldn't be a DNS issue, really. DNS just converts the domain name 
(dutchgirl.net at this point) to the IP# -- in Virtual Hosting, it is up to 
the server to identify from the 1.1 header which of many possible 
domains virutally hosted on the same IP# is being requested.

If this identification fails, then usually what happens is that the 
default (first) VirtualHost block's document root is used, or failing 
that the configuration's default document root.

So... the current behavior is that the site document root is being 
served, not mpages as might be expected from the domain. Hmmm.

I'll just think aloud obvious and perhaps non-obvious items and let 
you see if anything makes the proverbial lightbulb go poof...

. Server must be stopped and restarted to update changed httpd.conf 
(alternatively command to force conf relaod).

. Routing table should reflect current IP# and domain info. (netcfg?)

. (Items mentioned in last mail about ServerAlias directive.) Perhaps 
you need to specify your IP# as ServerAlias for the hosting 
"domain", i.e. first VirtualHost block.

. Accessing http://216.117.139.78/ (my public site) shows that its 
config does not specify this as a valid access, although it does serve 
the document root from leuf.net -- try this yourself to see.

. The NT solution: reboot :)

Ooops, it's past midnight here. Must leave this for now. Later.

/ Bo
-- 
"Bo Leuf" 
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/

Well, more salt mining will eventually solve that one. Of course, in the meantime, maybe an index.cgi will do the trick. More to learn, more to learn. I would buy the book, but usually, by the time something reaches print, the open source world has moved forward three steps, and sideways two - same functionality, but new commands, and deprecated old ones - the online docs track pretty well, but it is harder to find the most current sometimes. A little bird whispered in my ear that I ought to be learning Perl... but right now I have to find the spackle for Marcia - no, don't ask why - I certainly wouldn't.

So I keep experimenting for a while with the httpd.conf file, starting and restarting the apache server (sorry about access) and am having NO success making this work... when all of a sudden, I am looking at the window on which scrolls the accesses to this system.

29.san-francisco-46-47rs.ca.dial-access.att.net - - [12/Oct/1999:17:35:35 -0700] "GET /bpages/current.html HTTP/1.1" 404 225

As Tom would say (take note Dr. K - TOM's to blame for the following) WTF ??? There is certainly a current.html there, look it is there in the directory let me look at this for myself 404-Document Not Found aaarrrrgggghhh ! I enter http://216.102.91.55/ and get ... the fake index page I created to respond when I finally got Marcia's URL working. The problem is, that it is responding when I type in the main IP... not supposed to do that... There's more to this story, but dinner is on the table. Back in a bit.

To continue, the changes that I made to the httpd.conf file meant that EVERY access attempt pointed to /home/httpd/html/mpages/ as the document root directory, thus making it difficult to get to bpages/current.html... much tearing of hair. Much repeated reversion of httpd.conf, killall httpd, /usr/sbin/httpd (which "repaired" the httpd configuration file, stopped all the running httpd processes, and restarted the daemon, allowing a reload of the config file). To make a long story just a little shorter, I learned that unless I have cleared history and the caches from Netscape, the changes made to httpd.conf do not matter - it will appear to have failed to be properly functioning, even when it is. Fortunately, Marcia tried from her machine and reported that things had returned to normal.

This leads to the leap of wonder - while I was spelunking the httpd.conf file, trying to determine what things I could enable, and which were better left alone for a moment, in another window I was browsing the apache manual, which used this style of command...

<VirtualHost dutchgirl.net>

...as opposed to a VirtualHost call using the IP number. Well, I tried that, and reloaded the daemon and shazam, it FAILED. But it gave me a very useful error message. What follows is the virtual hosting section which has brought DutchGirl.net to life. Bo helps me make mistakes so that you don't have to. A couple more errors later and all is well - the below has been corrected since its first posting - be warned.

NameVirtualHost dutchgirl.net

<VirtualHost dutchgirl.net> 
	ServerName dutchgirl.net
	ServerAlias dutchgirl.net
	DocumentRoot /home/httpd/html/mpages
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 216.102.91.55>
	ServerName orbdesigns.com
	DocumentRoot /home/httpd/html
</VirtualHost>

After having been awake since about 03:45, some online, some trying to sleep - this I now post from Bo, regarding my current working apache virtual hosting setup...

I looked at your posted httpd.conf solution. Interesting idea, using the hosted domain as the server main one. But yes, even though an "inverted" configuration, that would work. The server doesn't really care since it goes strictly by specified document root paths.

Bottom line -- as long as it works. Right? (So when are you going to register orbdesign.com?)

BTW, I can interchangably mix and use
VirtualHost 123.456.789.01
or
VirtualHost mydomain.com

in the VH blocks. I tend towards using the domain name as it is easier to read the list then. In fact I clean up the public server config now and then whenever domains get added by the tech people who run the server farm. Both variants are however equivalent as long as the domain binding to the IP# is correct.

The browser caching --- ach... I should have thought of that having experienced it myself in various contexts, and as you noted it can make hash of your attempts to figure out what is working or not.

I still suggest modifying the dutchgirl alias to

ServerAlias dutchgirl.net www.dutchgirl.net

--
"Bo Leuf"
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/

orbdesign.com is registered - as of last night - may take a couple/few days to propogate - the dutchgirl took nearly a week before it appeared. This may be a result of NOT using NSI, but instead register.com. NSI still gets their pound of flesh, although they don't list dutchgirl.net in their whois database, they do recognize that dutchgirl.net is taken (as a domain)... but I think you pay a "time for recognition" penalty for not using NSI. We shall see.

Regarding the www.*, what I added to the zone file of orbdesigns that isn't part of dutchgirl.net (yet) is

www.orbdesigns.com. IN CNAME orbdesigns.com.

If this works, then we shall see if I can remember the administrator's username and password to update the zonefile for dutchgirl.net accordingly at Granite Canyon (free DNS hosting).

Again, thanks.

And in all the rush and bustle of vacations, URL's, fishing, websites and bees, I omitted that the Customer Service winner for the year (Hewlett Packard) dropped by the chateau yesterday early evening. As I related in this page (fortunately not eaten by wolverines), HP was going to do a little onsite, no charge service on the Pavillion box, which had been acting strangely - and was probably a heat problem - since we reported it, the cover has been off, and the behaviour didn't repeat. But yesterday the tech shows up, replaces the power supply, CPU and CPU heatsink/fan combo... the cover is back on and we shall see. No hassles, done inside of 15 minutes, didn't even have to sign something - they just come out and fix it. BRAVO, HP.

Surf City... The first paragraph pretty much says it all, and the headline is about a 2 out of 5. Surely they could do better at the Merc (10/13/1999, San Jose Mercury News) where this article appears...

Y2K causes car titles snafu

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -- State government got its first Y2K surprise
months early when owners of 2000 model cars and trucks received titles
identifying their new vehicles as ``horseless carriages.''

Also appearing this day are a review of the new Palm Pilot book out of O'Reilly - If you have a Palm, you may want to read the review to see if you want the book. While the commentary at Slashdot can be occasionally less than enlightening, the book reviews are generally excellent in quality. And here is another article, culled from Slashdot, generated by our rich buddies over at MSN, oddly entitled 10 Dumb Things Windows NT Users Do. They left off number 11, "not buying Linux."

OK, I am half joking - our NT server at ETS just keeps humming along, serving mail and a database application. Other than the company move, and the day the power supply joined Elvis, it has run happily with rarely a hiccup. I have got to take it up to SP 5 soon, but still, she runs. On the other hand, I have to reboot my NT workstation, which admittedly runs some hefty software, about every two days. MemTurbo didn't even touch the memory leaks. And having been at SP5 for a couple months now, I can firmly say that I can't tell the difference. On to a little speculative page development now. ttyl.

I have fuzz growing on the sand someone threw into my eyeballs. I think it is time for a little quake, then a little how-to night on PBS, then a serious session of lumber mill emulation. I have Quake II for Linux, and it comes with a couple of different, and large mission packs. Last year, I knocked off the entire Windows set in about 3 days, and started playing downloaded levels. This one I am still struggling through. However, we are not comparing apples here - running Linux is like a game itself - You are in a maze of small, twisty passages, all alike. :) Surely someone must remember that one. Anyway, enough for tonight here. Catch you tomorrow.


Orb Home / Top

Virus Alert - Matt forwarded a warning about a melissa variant virus which is getting about just now - I confirmed at SARC, and the virus, referred to as VBS.Freelink, is real and is nasty in its intrusiveness, although it appears not to have destructive properties in and of itself (just yet). My advice is, when you get a virus warning in the email, do the following - go to your anti-virus software vendor's site (you ARE running anti-virus software on your windows box, aren't you?), and confirm the existence of the beast, and determine that you are protected. If real, forward the warning, along with the confirming data to your IT people - they will distribute to the company as appropriate. DO NOT automatically forward warnings to all of your friends without confirming reality - there are too many hoaxes out there. When somebody sends me a warning, and it is real, I send them a thank you. When somebody sends me a hoax, I send them a stop it message. In both cases, I describe the process I went through to determine the veracity of the claim, so that they can learn how to determine the truth for themselves, without blindly forwarding mail which is, 90% of the time, junk.

Next, in my box this morning I find a link to this story, which discusses the recent Gartner Group report on Linux, which is apparently strongly negative. They say that Linux is no threat to MS. OK. Let MS believe that at their peril. At one time, IBM thought that microcomputers were no threat to Big Iron. The rules in these games keep changing.

A recent, private email exchange has lead me to consider why I do these pages. There are several reasons. The major ones are, because I can and enjoy doing so. I first stumbled across Dr. Jerry Pournelle's site, a while after he started it. I tracked into Bob Thompson's pages, and thence on to Tom Syroid, here. And on to worlds without end. I like reading these people, because they teach me things, they are bright, witty and current. Later, as I was spelunking in Jerry's site, I ran across a "How to get my job?" essay, which essentially said, write a million words. Well, I have been writing for a while, but there hasn't been any impetus to do continuous, steady work at it. This is it. Tom caught wind and drafted me into the group. I am flattered, because many of the fine people in the Daynotes Gang are professional authors - paid because they write well. I have been inducted into august company, and am treading water like crazy, trying to live up to my own expectations of "membership". It must be working, since I see a rising readership rate, and a lot of return visitors (Flattering again, thank you very much). I get some mail, and would always welcome more, since I am now writing for you, as well as myself. If you want to send me mail, there are email links at the top of most pages, or you can reach me here. Thanks for dropping by. Later.

Microsoft FUD roams among us, like Death on the make, ready to make a cut for the jugular if you waver for even an instant... Too much, you say :). OK, you're right, but I am having fun. A counterpoint to the previously referenced article about the Gartner Group report is here. Written by Travis Simon of the AAUG, it is almost poetic. A perfectly lucid description of what is right about GNU software and Linux. I do get it. A lot of other people get it. Vast hordes don't get it though - and the educative process is going to be long and hard.

Slightly later an email turned up stating (though I have no current way of verifying this information) :

#
#well, our recent fill of FUD comes from 'Gartner's' website... but
#notice the bottom disclaimer:
#
#Microsoft Web Letter is published by Microsoft. Additional editorial
#material supplied by Gartner Group, Inc. � 1999. Editorial supplied by
#Microsoft is independent of GartnerGroup
# analysis and in no way should this information be construed as a
#GartnerGroup endorsement of Microsoft's products and services. Entire
#

Can anyone confirm or deny the above? I wouldn't be surprised - the issue so far as I can see is that many of the things claimed to be wrong with Linux today are... well, true. No one denys that the lack of a journalling file system, strong SMP support, and vast, bug-ridden office productivity suites hold GNU/Linux back from overwhelming corporate acceptance.

One of the items in that list is untrue. Can you tell which one? That's right, Bobby. No one really wants vast, bug-ridden office productivity suites. OK, Viagra, it's true that office productivity suite is the archetypical oxymoron. No, children. We have to use it. In order for us to have all those computers in your lab, we were given copies of the current software from the company that bought us the computers.... [Sigh] Yes, Trojan - I am sure that all of the software upgrades that the school had to buy would have more than paid for all of the computers. No, Nike Rae, put that data chip back in your desktop - you can't take any of this software home, or the Company will know you have pirated software, throw your parents in jail and put the school district out of business, leaving all of you out on the streets, selling... What? No, I wouldn't know what they sell on those street corners, Sprite Watson - you'll be staying late today, reloading The Operating System 100 times, on the computer in the corner... That's right, the x786 with less than a gig of ram and no, it still won't work properly! Now hush up, and let me tell you the story of how Linus stood at the Gates of Eternity and took his best shot... right after this commercial announcement from Pepsi.

Yikes, what a terrible dream. I sure am glad my schooling wasn't quite so... so. And we do have Linux to play with. I was terribly amused to read in PC Week (treeware edition) about poor Larry Ellison. Some sick puppy schedule Linus to start a talk about 1/2 hour after Larry's keynote started... Seems Larry started talking to a full house, and ended up with a half empty room, as people bailed right and left to listen to Linus. That's funny.

We ate take-out chinese from a place that we are so familiar with that they start preparing our food when they see us pulling into the parking lot. Since then I have been working on a side project, and I just downloaded the Netscape 4.7 Communicator package - needless to say, the version I get to download comes from the unsupported list. There are a couple of core-dumping bugs, hard to replicate in general, in the 4.61 package. We shall see over the next few days what they managed to fix and/or break - I can't imagine shoehorning in Netscape Radio without breaking some feature that I actually care about. Certainly I spend too much time at this machine. Good night.


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Well, good Friday to you all. I have clearly reached the point in the week where my desk and my little gray cells are equally messy - and equally impossible to deal with. I have been working with Data Sheets all week at ETS, as we are making a big push to rationalize the product line, taking a machete to the deadwood in the various product catagories, giving the new, growing products full and correct documentation. The hard bit is that these products appear as about 60% magic to me, since I am not an EE (I only pretend sometimes). Taking video signals off of coax, balancing the signal and putting it on twisted pair wiring is something I sort of understand in my head, but clearly not in an intuitive, visceral manner. This of course is the problem in selling these things - they work great, but convincing people that you can work magic (that is, run signals over the unfamiliar media types) is difficult.

The process I go through as I design a datasheet is to collect as much of the pre-existing product info as I can, read it all, and let it germinate for a while. I get product off of the shelf, take pictures of it with the Toshiba PDR-M3 (a good camera), and then move, clean-up and write the image to be used. Then I pop open AutoCAD LT, and draw a block-diagram style usage diagram. This is usually where I learn exactly what I don't know about the product, and go up the food chain to get answers about how the product does what it does, areas of applicability, etc. Then I can write the text, features and benefits, blah blah blah... when a product group is done, I convert all the docs to pdf, making individual data sheet and product block downloadable files.

Sorry to bore you with all of that, but the process is much on my mind - what I am actually thinking about is how I learn new things - I think that it is time for a fresh look at The Mind's I, I think by Hoffstadter & Dennett.

You know what I really hate? Settings that change their defaults without my explicit permission. Most of us have experienced this at one time or another. I am working in Word97, SP2, in WinNT4.0, SP5. I have Adobe Acrobat 4.0 installed, and my printer default is an HP Laser Printer hanging off of the network. When I select from the print dialog inside Word to print to the Acrobat Distiller, the system default printer (as selected from Control Panel | Printers) changes to the Acrobat Distiller. Then the next 7 things I print turn up in Acrobat, instead of on the printer. Aaarrrggghhh! Does anyone out there know how to disable this reprehensible behaviour?

And a surfeit of good news, as well... Order levels here at work are doing their best imitation of a ballistic missile which has accidentally achieved escape velocity. This is cool. And my Monday meeting appears to be bearing fruit - we may have more news here shortly. Hope your week is ending as well as mine appears to be. ttyl.

Shortly will be later. In the meantime, I see that Win2K has been fairly firmly delayed until February (but we're still releasing to manufacturing this year, so it is like we shipped, right? Oh, and scalability, hehehe - we meant realiability and availability. Sorry) The bazaar development model (which drives Linux) has the potential to deliver more robust software on a faster delivery cycle, with very rapid bug reporting/patch cycles. About a month ago, Linus called for a feature freeze for the 2.3 development kernel, which should lead to a code freeze later this month, and a new kernel before the end of the year. However, there is no board of directors or possibility of shareholder discontent which will drive Linus to release a product before it's time. And features which the community is clamoring for, such as a journaling file system, are just going to have to jump into either the 2.6 or 3.0 kernel - depending on how feature-laden the following kernel will be.

Other projects include (perhaps) LDAP continued, Running Linux continued, Sendmail (eeek), fall cleaning, guests, decisions, decisions, decisions... So glad you can drop by and put up with all of this. If you haven't yet, and you are ready to see the abuse you miss, check out alt.sysadmin.recovery. Learn of the LART, the BOFH and then go to the source , Simon Travaglia... the original (apparently) Bastard Operator From Hell.

BTW - Apparently Netscape 4.7 Linux 2.2 does not display PNG images. Then again, neither does Netscape 4.61 Win... And I thought it was supposed to. The good news is that the phrase, "What did I do wrong?" actually has meaning in Linux - mostly when something goes wrong with a program after a windows install, the install fubar'd something. Here, I probably just have to RTFM. Later.

Jerry's current view for Thursday (can be accessed from here) notes "The Internet is not a finished product..." and as evidence, I offer the following email message ... please note the dates, and the fact that it and an indentically dated sibling JUST showed up in my mailbox.... (btw, the message regarding both NSI and its forms all remain true, so far as I know -

Subject:  RE: priority one : Domain Modification Blues...
Date:  Wed, 28 Jul 1999 18:25:26 -0700
From:  "jerryp" 
To:   

NSI must DIE!!!

Thanks

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Brian Bilbrey [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent:   Wednesday, July 28, 1999 3:38 PM
To:     [email protected]
Subject:        priority one : Domain Modification Blues...

Once again this day...

I have had the blues more than once attempting to migrate a domain
registration, or simply to change some of the information listed since
people have this awkward tendency to move on...

when you fill out the web form at NSI, they massage it, send it to you
in email format, and ask you to send it to [email protected],
neh?  well, the problem I had, when all was said and done was - their
automated domain modification system had some formatting problems with
the template generated by their automated web template generating
system.  Specifically:

item 2.  blah blah blah  

had a tab between the "2." and the rest of the line - this was causing
the dom-mod system to vomit.  have a look for that, as I spent two days
of email, and 1.5 hours of musak on hold time to learn this one...

regards,

Bilbrey

Good News on the Netscape (pronounced Mozilla) 4.7 release - while I still cannot view PNG files, at least when I hit reply to someone (who shall remain nameless) who sends me mail in html format, this version does not die, leaving core droppings behind (Yet - I have a statistical sample of one - not good).

Lastly, an anatomy of an attack on a linux box ( the Hack PC Week challenge) - the results are in, and someone with more time than I broke the box... look at the writeup here.


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Dogs in Elk. What an odd phrase, you might say. Well, then check out Dr. Pournelle's mail page for Friday, here. Laugh, as I did. You might not wonder, as I did, that there was someone in the world far more deeply strange than I am. Eeek. Thought you should see that. More later.

Bit of a false alarm this AM, I have been mucking about with all of the networking setup scripts in conjunction with the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file, trying to get apache to recognize www.dutchgirl.net, rather than just dutchgirl.net. Still no joy, but then, aha - orbdesigns.com works. This is the second domain name for this site, now that marcia's is recognized, I went ahead and bought the second name. It so transpires that I have merely seen myself in the mirror, so to speak. Since my name resolution looks first at my hosts file, then goes out to look at DNS in the great wide world, I was seeing orbdesigns.com without it ever traversing the net.... Well, duh you may say, but I jumped too soon, and sent Tom a link including the orbdesigns.com bit. Oops. Don't work unless you are me! Probably a few more days. After all, I didn't register this name with NIS. I used Register.com to get the domain, same price, only no silly forms - when you make an edit, they do mail you something - a link to go to and confirm your changes. Much easier than the Internic mail forms from hell. DNS services are provided FOC (free of charge) by Granite Canyon.

So the upshot is that I have done the right thing (Did you hear that, Tim?). I now have the Bat Book, the Camel Book and the Palimino (?) (Sendmail, Perl and Apache) joining my Running Linux and Linux in a Nutshell. I have reference. I shall learn. Strong in the ways of the script shall I become. Cron jobs will not fail (again).

As I traverse the Daynotes circuit, I find the following on Svenson's site ...

How many hours are there in an American day?
Or don't they know what sleep is?

Actually, we don't. Do not expect anyone else to admit this. However, all the global competition and business has forced this measure upon us. What with needing to be on the phone to Brussels at 04:00 PDT, then getting in a day of business here in the US, THEN having to be up at 02:00 PDT to conference call with SEA vendors, why bother with sleeping at all. This also explains the unholy fascination which many Americans have for each new coffee shop that opens. The key question - have they managed to brew heretofore unknown concentrations of caffine into a single cup? This is internet time, my friend, which is roughly equated to dog years on amphetamines.


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Welcome to Sunday. This Sunday has been specially handcrafted just for you by a team of mutant sherpas, under the direction of Zaphod Beeblebrox. Now you should be frightened, very frightened. Actually, for the last hour or more, I have been going through Apache, The Definitive Guide, from O'Reilly and Associates, by Laurie and Laurie. This is a well written book, clearly elucidating the concepts in setting up the apache server by way of demonstrating the server directives which can be entered into httpd.conf. And the author's are in perfect agreement with the advice I received from Bo Leuf. The problem is - it doesn't work. Now Bo tells me that it doesn't matter what is up at the DNS bits in the outer world, that the canonical name dutchgirl.net is all that is minded by the nameservers - all the rest is only dealt with here on my server. The problem is that requests for dutchgirl.net arrive here and are parsed just fine. When I type in a request for http://www.dutchgirl.net on my browser on any other machine than this one, no request even gets here, that I can see. Now I am told that the zone files up on the net which inform the nameservers just do that minimal bit, as described above. However, you must be aware, that since the nameservice is provided to me by Granite Canyon, I wrote my own zone file, under their direction, and something might be missing... the current zone file follows -

; Name Servers

dutchgirl.net.  IN  NS ns1.granitecanyon.com.
dutchgirl.net.  IN  NS ns2.granitecanyon.com.

; RP records for zone changes

dutchgirl.net. IN RP marcia.dutchgirl.net. Marcia.Bilbrey.dutchgirl.net.

Marcia.Bilbrey.dutchgirl.net. IN TXT "Marcia Bilbrey"

;  addresses canonical names
localhost.dutchgirl.net. IN A 127.0.0.1
dutchgirl.net. IN A 216.102.91.55

; aliases
mail1.dutchgirl.net. IN CNAME dutchgirl.net.
mail2.dutchgirl.net. IN CNAME dutchgirl.net.

; mx, under the assumption that I will have
; sendmail up and running one of these days
*.dutchgirl.net. IN MX 10 mail1.dutchgirl.net. ; GLOBALOK
*.dutchgirl.net. IN MX 20 mail2.dutchgirl.net. ; GLOBALOK

dutchgirl.net. IN MX 10 mail1.dutchgirl.net.
dutchgirl.net. IN MX 20 mail2.dutchgirl.net.

Now, I think that I need to add the following line under aliases :

www.dutchgirl.net IN CNAME dutchgirl.net

Any takers? Oh, I will have to have them reset that password before I can make any changes there, sigh - I lost the stinking thing - that is hid it so well that I can't find it. On to other topics - On the Seti@Home front, I currently rank 57,633 out of 1,319,654, with 109 data sets processed - I have fallen back because I forgot to restart setiathome when I did an unneccessary reboot a couple of weeks ago.

Around the net - Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox is up here. The topic du jour is prioritized web design - read it and see for yourself. Apparently, Microsoft held a turn in your pirated software for legit versions party at Justin Herman Plaza near City Hall in San Francisco, and nobody came. Really? The story is here (found via slashdot). Also currently on the plate from Slashdot, but I saw this first a couple of days ago, Rick Moen wrote a response to a query about the Linux Myths and Gartner report brouhaha. Referred to as Debunking the Gartner Report, it can be read here.

I have a few projects today, myself. Marcia has to be given access to her own site info, so that she can execute her updates without my intervention (and editing <g>). And I would really like to get sendmail up and running. Plus Costco and grocery shopping are on today's list, so I shall catch up with y'all later.

The shopping is done, and I have been playing with Javascript. A new index page is under development, here. The bits to make images do their roll-over magic are right there in the page source, please feel free to have a look. I think that I have voted the orange out, but haven't done anything about it yet. I am going to take the rest of the day away from the machine - catch you next week.


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