Monday, Monday - Good Morning - reading my mail and updating the links - hang loose for a while, eh? . . . Tom sends me this link, about QCad, a CAD (Computer Aided Design) program which has now been released under the GPL licence. No time now, of course, but I am interested. More as we know more.

We have the strong possibility that all of the following links now work...

http://www.OrbDesigns.com
www.DutchGirl.net

Now there are a couple of oddities... First, while I was able to use both of those URL's from my folks house yesterday afternoon, Tom, up in Saskatoon, was able to get DutchGirl, but not Orb. I think we are looking at the time delays in a DNS propogation map. Next weirdity - if you do a standard whois, which queries rs.internic.net, you get a No Match for the above names. If, however you go to the NSI site http://nsiregistry.net, and enter, say, orbdesigns.com. Up pops the info that ORBDESIGNS.COM does in fact exist, is registered with Register.com, and the relevent whois server is whois.register.com. That they don't interoperate, and refer to one another says that the LDAP schemas either aren't set up right, or NSI isn't working real hard (jeez, I wonder why) to make it work transparently. If you query NSI, it should be able to redirect you to the correct server, which then answers your query. Why this doesn't is anyone's guess.

I will be especially happy to hear from those of you for whom one or both ot the above links do not work, although you could also let me know that both work, and where in the world you are. Email me at [email protected] and let me know the results. TIA for your assistance.

More as time allows.

First, an excerpt from email Marcia sent me last week, attributed to Steven Wright...

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a workstation... <grin>

Reporting in from Phoenix, AZ, USA, Matt Belend says both links work. First in the door this am. Thanks, Matt. Tom Syroid is in with the report that Orb just went live in Saskatoon in the last hour. Whereas Dutchgirl was live yesterday (yes, Tom, I know I am being repetitive)... very weird, since the domain updates were simultaneous, and as I noted in my reply to Tom, @home servers here in the US knew about both domains yesterday, since that was the test from my folk's house. Odd.

Aloha and Good Monday from the sunny Honolulu, Hawai'i!

I can get to www.dutchgirl.net fine. But www.orbdesigns.com is a no go. I guess it takes a little longer for updates to reach us here in the Pacific...Keep up the good work.

Aloha,
Dan [Dan Seto]

That from our Hawaiian correspondent, Dan Seto. Thanks.

And followed shortly thereafter by another from Dan, saying that the trade winds, which had held things up apparently, relented and OrbDesigns was now also live in the islands. Meantime, I got some feedback and information from Bob Thompson...

orbdesigns.com resolves; dutchgirl.net doesn't.

This from Winston-Salem, NC and the bellsouth.net nameservers.

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

When I expressed further my confusion over the matter, he replied with the following, which helped clarify the progression, which happily proceeds without my understanding it.

What you're seeing is perfectly normal. In theory, when my resolver stub hits the DNS server at bellsouth.net looking for www.dutchgirl.net, the bellsouth server should examine its local files. When it doesn't find the domain, it should query the root .net nameserver to locate the authoritative nameserver for dutchgirl.net. Once it has the IP for that, it should query the dutchgirl.net nameserver to resolve the IP for the host www. In practice, it obviously doesn't work that way. Most of the big ISPs apparently update the root files every few days and don't query the root nameservers. Things should get better over the next day or two as things flush out.

Magic. It's all magic. In the meantime, for those who are interested in some of the prime source material for all things internet, you might check out the IETF, or Internet Engineering Task Force site... Links off of that page will lead you to the RFC's which help guide and define the standards by which you are reading this and sending email, etc, etc. Lots of dense, dry material there - but if you need it, you need it really bad.


Orb Home / Top

A couple of reports from Europe start the day off right - the DNS records for Orb Designs (this site) and Dutch Girl Productions (Marcia's home for her writing and playwright stuff) pretty much appears to have propogated through the systems. Bo, then Svenson, are in with the following ...

You posted
>>>
Next weirdity - if you do a standard whois, which queries
rs.internic.net, you get a No Match for the above names. If, however
you go to the NSI site http://nsiregistry.net, and enter, say,
orbdesigns.com. Up pops the info that ORBDESIGNS.COM does in
fact exist, is registered with Register.com, and the relevent whois
server is whois.register.com
<<<

NSI = Not Served Intelligently ?

I agree that this excellent practical example of disagreement between the different whois servers/databases is curious at best, and damned inconvenient for domain searches. Thanks for the heads- up on this.

I note that for your domains it lists: "Whois Server: whois.register.com" For mine: "Whois Server: rs.internic.net". This tells me that NSI is not importing domain info registered by other registrars into its own database, only the bare reference into the central TLD registry. I am not sure that the terms of the agreement actually requires NSI to do more, since the new independent registrars run their own database-whois servers. The problem arises because we all have the habit of querying the "usual whois" and not the central TLD database.

Anyway, you will be happy to note that your domain now works from here too. With or without www prefix. Also dutchgirl of course.

/ Bo
--
"Bo Leuf" <[email protected]>
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/

Both http://www.OrbDesigns.com and www.DutchGirl.network here in Holland, for DutchGirl.net that is not surprising of course. All the girls here are Dutch girls

Gosh, did I wish I had a Work Station on my desk. Currently I have to make do with a PC. :-)

Svenson
[[email protected]]

And I thank the gentlemen from the EU, noting that they are there, I am here, and I am jealous, as I haven't been across the pond in over 20 years, and it looks to be a few more until we shall be able to enjoy that trip (California Lotto, anyone?) Surveying the rest of the mail, I see nothing of dramatic import at the moment. Later.

First off, a great big THANK YOU to all of you who have assisted in letting me know how the DNS beast came to life, dragging OrbDesigns.com and DutchGirl.net through name servers across the globe. More of you wrote than I posted, but you know who you are, and thanks!

I experienced today a moment of extreme blues. No, unfortunately it wasn't a great track by B. B. King, or Johhny Lange. I, in a rush yesterday, managed to edit several files on the corporate website with Netscape Composer. I cannot remember why I forgot that Composer mangles the text, screws with the paragraphs, and sundry other bits.... aaarrrgggh! Now I can clean it up with an ascii editor, just like I did the first time, but I am thinking that I need something better. I am not going to use Front Page. Jerry seems to be leaning towards Allaire. Tom? Anyone else? Recommendations are welcome.

The "findings of facts" from Judge Jackson are due on a Friday afternoon, coming soon to a computer near you. If you are reading these words, then you already knew that. Techweb will be providing coverage on that day here, and if you want to know when it's coming down, have a look at Techweb's homepage on each Friday at about 5 pm Eastern Time. Dr. Jerry Pournelle will be assisting in that coverage. Now that the serious notification bits are out of the way, I also found a few interesting things.

There is a site called billwatch, wherein I found a link to an extract of Microsoft's Revised Proposed Findings of Fact, September 10th 1999. The page extracts those items which reference Linux from the FPFF. Of course, I followed the link from there to the actual document on the Microsoft site, here. Having completely read the detailed table of contents, and selected bits from the document, I would prefer to call this Findings of Fiction.

Let me state for the record (once again), that I am not anti-Microsoft (rabid or otherwise). I use Microsoft products daily, and find them good enough most of the time. That said, I find the upgrade cycles onerous. I find the products, while good enough (after a few service packs), subject to feature bloat, and terminally incompatible with prior versions. Yet and still, they mostly do the job. Oh, yeah, and everyone else I have to work with uses MS products too, so we all have to change to something else as a block, or you can throw document interchange and productivity in the hopper.

But statements like the following (from the Detailed Table of Contents) lead me to believe that there are people in Redmond smoking substances that I gave up at a much younger age...

• Actual or Potential Competitors to Windows Face No Significant Barriers to Entry
• Microsoft's Distribution of Internet Explorer at No Separate Charge as Part of Windows Does Not Constitute Predatory Pricing.
• Microsoft's Agreements with ICPs, ISPs and OLSs Did Not Foreclose Vendors of Competing Web Browsing Software from Access to Necessary Channels of Distribution.

Note: The above bits are from Microsoft's site, © 1999 Microsoft, and here is their copyright / terms of use page.

Actually, I like the third one best. Overall, this document is a wonderful collection of doublespeak, lawyerspeak, side-of-neck-speak, forked-tongue-speak and other such nonsense. These people have confused reality with a shrinkwrap license. And they will never know any better. On the other hand, it isn't clear to me that Justice has proved its case. Perhaps to Judge Jackson, but what about the inevitable appeals. And there are some claims in the FOF that I would have to agree with. Microsoft has benefited the consumer. I agree. There has been progress with technology and computers that I don't believe would have been made without Microsoft or an equivalent, unified driving force (probably corporate). I do, however, think that their time has come. I may be wrong, but in 5 years, when the appeals are over, and Win2K Service Pack 12 is about to be released, Microsoft will be broken up, ala the Bell System. That is, if Linux doesn't make them irrelevant first (probably less likely).


Orb Home / Top

Mornin' All. We are looking at low 50's to low 70's and rain today. The depths of a California winter! <grin> My chores today include completing and releasing to vendor a new printed circuit board, completing (and fixing) the changes on the ETS site, and beginning to review and update our UL listing file. It turns out that some rather interesting things were done in the original filing. That is, everything is too detailed. Instead of rough dimensions, full fab drawings were submitted (revision controlled documents). This means that as we make relatively modest physical changes to our products, the products fall out of compliance, even though, for UL (safety) purposes, they haven't changed at all. Sigh. Matt Beland found time yesterday evening to comment on the Findings of Fiction...

I think I'd have to say that, although Microsoft has done many, many stupid things, including things that may or may not be considered "unfair," that's still no reason to force the company to be broken up into many distinct chunks. We did that with the Bell system, to "benefit the consumer." Gee. Thanks.

The point is that we live in a society that is supposed to be based on capitalism and individual strength and accomplishment. Very well, we now have a small group of people (Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, et. al.) who've used their strengths and intelligence to become a dominant world force in the software market. Along the way, they've made some bad decisions, and they've ticked off a lot of people, consumers, competitors, and others. Essentially, what we have here is a complaint from Netscape and other competitors that Microsoft was too tough for them, and they don't think that's fair. That sort of argument doesn't get you far on the playground in elementary school, why should it in the legal system?

To clarify, I'm not anti-Microsoft, pro-Microsoft, anti-Linux, or pro-Linux. I am a systems administrator. I use whatever tools I think will do the best job without causing the bean-counters to burn me in effigy, be it Microsoft or Linux, open source or not. Competition is, I think, a good thing; I like what I see in Windows 2000, Server, Advanced Server, and Professional, and I think Linux has a lot to do with that; Microsoft has a visible competitor, and in order to survive, they have to be much better than that competition. THAT is fair, THAT is a level playing field, and THAT is the way things should be. Your reward for being the first real success in a market is a dominant position and a stable market; your goal in breaking into a market is to innovate new ideas, new technologies, and better ways to convince that stable market to shift to you.

Brian,

> That is, if Linux doesn't make them irrelevant first (probably less likely).

I am not sure that is so unlikely.

Ok, I don't believe Linux, today, has the capacity to usurp them. And I doubt that any 'Linux company' has the marketing power to push MS out. If however I look at the financial state they are in, I get the impression that their stock value is hugely overrated. If I look at their corporate history, with incredible growth rates, I wonder what is going to happen the day they stop growing with double figures.

Some Linux companies are jumping on the stock market so speculants that have invested in MS because of its high growth and predicted future could easily swap side. They don't care about the actual products from MS or Linux.

Once MS shares start sliding MS itself could take a huge slip. This is not the way most Linux-ers see the 'imminent' fall of MS but it is the most likely way out.

And five years is of course a long time. If MS is still plodding on with Win2K in 2005 they are sure to slide under the horizon.

OTOH Maybe we will be talking about MS Lindows (tm) by then.

Svenson

On other fronts, Tom rang in on HTML editors with GoLive, the tool he's been having problems with. Apparently it is growing on him. But it doesn't run on Linux, Tom! Oh and Happy Birthday John Cleese. 60 years young and still strange. I wanna grow up to be like John. (Thanks for the tip, Marcia).

Well, on Tom's recommendation, I have downloaded Adobe GoLive4.0 trial version, and am giving it a test drive at work. There's a lot left to learn, but I found one thing I hate, right off. If I select print preview, or print - the software locks. I have to kill the process using task manager (oops couldn't save that, could I?) Fortunately I am running NT, so that isn't session fatal... but sigh. That said, I do like being able to swing back and forth between the wysimwyg screen, and the html-code screen, globbing in some content, then fine-tuning it a bit.

I got some mail from Svenson today, which is carefully filed away in my inbox... at work. So I am going to paraphrase our interchange, and eat crow tomorrow if necessary. I wasn't terribly clear (in my email to him) about what I see as a paradigm shift in the financial markets. According to fundamentals which were valid information for evaluating the worth of a company ten years ago, the market can be considered to be grossly overvalued today. I believe (and given market behaviour, other people do as well) that the fundamentals of a company are changing. There are intangibles in the braintrust of a firm. There are the highschool kids who are running major firms. How can you, as an investor, put a value on what I might invent tomorrow? It is an insane, chaotic field of play, one liable to bankrupt some as it bankrolls others. And what will happen next? Your guess is as good as mine.

Matt thinks that breaking up Microsoft would be a bad thing. I think that I probably agree - in the long run, it will be better for the market (both the financial market, and the rather larger software market) if MS is allowed to stumble over its own appendage, wounding itself in the process. And as I noted, there is no guarantee that the company from Redmond will be able to hang on to a large chunk of their workforce, as so many of those workers are all millionaires. Funny thing - some of them just might cash out and become open source junkies <grin>.

Another point that Svenson brought up was the way that MS is pouring products into the maw of (so-called) higher education. There were (as have been noted in these pages before) incidents where students have not been allowed to connect computers running Linux onto dorm networks, where Windows machines were allowed. Also, it has been reported recently that Microsoft will be virtually giving away client software to instructors and students, provided the data centers and IS departments will standardize on NT. (What? While MS Hotmail STILL runs on OpenBSD and Apache???). My take on that is that some schools will allow themselves to be hornswaggled in this manner, while others will not, seeing the endless (almost addictive in its nuances) upgrade cycles that lay in wait, in the shadows of the future.

Besides, if I can figure out how to run Samba, and hook my Linux box into an NT network, imagine what a college student with a book by, oh, say... Syroid, would be able to do (... I know, Tom, not til next year, but at least you can capture a bumper crop of freshmen, eh?). Maybe more later... who knows.


Orb Home / Top

Thursday morning jumps of to a running start with this letter from Swenson...

> Since I *really* know nothing about economics, I am probably talking
> through my hat. But I find it interesting.
As long as that is your red hat :-)

I am not an economy buff either. I am a biologist turned coder and I let my father manage my financial stuff. So here I start blowing of from my hat.

It used to be that the real value of a company was determined by its assets, buildings, machines etc. . These days you must add contracts and patents and such as real assets because they represent tradable items. The real value was (past) what remained after a company went bankrupt and thus could be used to pay debt. For a software company the real assets typically are ridiculously low compared to the stock value. The new 'norm' that you intended probably takes the accumulated 'knowledge' into account as well. That knowledge is of course a real asset but it is hardly a tradable item.

The stock market is of course a market with supply- demand dynamics. The result is that most companies are rated above their real value which is no problem. The overrated part of a company's stock value is (should be) based mainly on expectation (forget speculation for a moment). Any overrating is a kind of risk taken by the investors, calculated maybe but still.

MS is overrated at a much higher ratio than most other companies this means there is a larger possible effect that changes in expectation have. Once that expectation gets a dent you never know where the value will find a (relative) stable point. For MS the expectation is huge, above average growth and when that doesn't materialize the flood Gates open and capital flows out.

When that happens MS may go down the drain. Or survive as a leaner player. Or bounce back to ridiculous heigths.

The problem is that when it happens a lot of people are going to lose money and all software companies will be under scrutiny. The funny thing is that the companies trying to kick MS will probably loose out if they are too successful with their kicking. If MS bounces it may find that a lot of its concurents did not survive the ride.

Oeps, my hat is empty :-)

Of course if you are interested in this type of economic musings you should get Bob involved. He probably can flay me with economic facts and rules. He probbaly finds as much holes in my reasoning as there are in MS products.

Svenson

And of course, it is too early in the day to make such statements, since even I am liable to find fault with them in just a couple of hours... sigh. Well, today is the last working day of the week. We are taking a four day weekend to do... nothing. Sounds like fun. Relaxing at least - I still haven't recovered from our vacation. Have a great Thursday, I will catch up with y'all later.

Progress - I completed enough of the revised site design for ETS to let da boss check it out. We shall see how it goes over. The board I designed yesterday is in production at a fab house. And today is, I have just remembered, Friday. I like the four day weekend idea! Back and forth a few times with Dan Seto (our Hawaiian friend) and he has decided to pitch his hat in the ring. Well, I will let him tell you...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Email Address Added
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 11:55:49 -1000
From: Dan Seto
To: [email protected]

OK, it took me awhile but I did get another email address so I can get mail
from my day notes page segregated from all the SPAM out there. It's not from
aloha.net, which I had tried unsuccessfully to do for over a week, but
rather seto.org. Maybe at a later date I can get aloha.net to respond to
my requests but I'm not holding my breath.

Now that the mail address is up ([email protected]), feel free to mention the
site and the day notes page (seto.org/current.html). And thanks for the advice
and help. [ed. There appears to be no www. in the front, so I have edited that from his link]

Aloha,
Dan email

PS Hope you had a good four day weekend! Such a life. First a vacation
and now a long weekend. Trying to become a state worker or something?

I tried to warn him - he'll lose sleep, wondering "I could have put that another way?" trying to figure out which content is interesting, getting no mail for a week and wondering if the world went elsewhere on holiday, leaving him behind :). None of that fazed Dan in the least. A Legislative Analyst, Dan holidays in my area and doesn't tell me until afterward. Be warned.

Check out his site at seto.org/current.html. If you find it interesting, and keep going back, let him know, let me know or let Tom know. Enough of that sort of encouragement can migrate him onto the daynotes homepage. But first we have to find out if he will crumble under the pressure. (evil grin). Hey Matt, if this works out, since Dan is an islander, I think the volcano ceremony, eh? Or maybe something more obscure - he sounds like a Rumpole fan - perhaps something involving Hilda and... surprise guest, Hyacinth Bucket.

.sig of the moment, a feature I just dreamed up. Today's was found on a mailing list posting... There is another great .sig I have seen recently and must find for you, but this will tide you over in the meantime...

"Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser."
Dave Thomas, Strange Brew

On a Linux topic, I currently run Netscape 4.7 as my browser and mailtool. There are other options out there, but so far, none have topped NS on the convenience factor. However, I am waiting as fast as I can for Opera for Linux (progress page here). While I am OK with Netscape, it does lock up entirely on me about 5 or 6 times a day. Fortunately, I simply execute the following script (execute is exactly the correct term)...

#!/bin/sh
# ~/scripts/Killnetscape

kill -9 `/sbin/pidof netscape`
rm -f ~/.netscape/lock

Install that script, name it what you want, make it executable, and if NS chokes on you, execute the script to execute the process. Please note, the shell command in line 4, following kill -9 is enclosed in single backquotes (an unshifted tilde key on most keyboards). This is also referred to as the backtick operator, used for command input in scripts. It substitutes the results of the contained command in the larger command. Vurra useful bit of info.

Bandwidth is nice. Major, reliable bandwidth is very cool. If you live in the South Bay (Sillycone Valle), check this out - The Bandwidth Coop. They've got DS-3, and that means (28) T-1 channels (another evil grin). So they are coop-ing T-1 connections at cost. Currently my DSL is reliable, but if it ever goes seriously south, then this may be the way to go, since they are very local to me. Check'm out.

And then there's this - Technocrat.Net - run by Bruce Perens, one of the leading lights of the open source community. Configured similarly to Slashdot, it is an intelligent look at the politics of Technology. I figure a few of you might want to give it a read. Comment counts on posted articles range from zero to the low two digits - that is not overwhelming. I read a lot of what is up there right now, and there appears to be a reasonably high signal to noise ratio (as opposed to /., which has a large noise to signal ratio). Recommended - take one daily.


Orb Home / Top

And a very Happy Friday to you all. I am mucking about with PGP this morning, in my usual ham-fisted, instructions-what-instructions, sure-there-are-supposed-to-be-a-few-of-those-bolts-left-over mode <grin>. I have done the key generation bit, and now I suppose I better figure out just what I am supposed to do with this (OK, I know what, just not how yet). More later. I also have to set up separate logging for Marcia's site, which is being virtual hosted in a sub-directory. I need to direct the logging to a different directory, and setup the log analysis and search functions for her. I love learning how to do new things! This from Swenson, regarding Dan Seto and my comments from yesterday...

And don't forget the reed skirt and coco nuts.

PS
I did not update yesterday because of a broken cable. The pins broke off
and remained in the female connector of the PC so my spare cable
wouldn't fit.

Svenson

--
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.

Well, I haven't had vast success with security, certificates and such, yet. These things are a little more challenging in Linux, because they don't just autoinstall themselves all over the place, the way a windows sub-app will worm its way into your guts, never to be extracted.... Oh, sorry, got a little carried away there <grin>. I have a PGP cl client up and running just fine. I haven't yet figured out how to use it with Netscape. I have also attempted to sign up for a personal cert from Thawte. The confirming email with the rest of the instructions still hasn't arrived. If it doesn't arrive today, I will have to start all over again tomorrow.

So, on to the next thing, which is discussing virii and security, scanning, encryption and other such topics with the good Mr. Syroid. His brain moves so fast sometimes it makes me dizzy. I presume that he was one of those kids who screwed up the bell curve for everyone when he was in school. Now I am going to have a look at setting up the logging and such properly for Marcia's site.

Wow - a very busy afternoon. I have had success at encrypted communications. I have successfully setup the search function for Marcia's site, and her site accesses are now separately logged. Everything that was supposed to be working right now, is. Then I decided to send Tom this message...

When you almost have all your scripts working, you have disc 2 of Springsteen Live in the cupholder, playing *Badlands*, in the midst of a Clarence Clemens sweet solo, when you accidentally close a window, and right over the top of Clarence comes the voice of John Cleese...

"Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?"
sigh.

Now it's time to cook dinner. Hope that everyone survived the week in great shape. Later.

Good morning, all. A tempest raging in the local Linux user's group over a new Linux distribution company called LinuxOne. Their website is here. The interesting bits are that (A) no one around here knows who they are. (B) They appear to have a distribution where they substantially did a diff substitution of LinuxOne for RedHat on all the files of a RedHat ISO image (not personally witnessed, but reported by someone who did the check). (C) With minor changes in the details, their S1 filing is a word-for-word copy of the RH S1. (Note- the S1 filing pages are BIG - be prepared to wait if you go there.)

One particular bit which stood out in my eyes as I put the two filings side by side is that all of the strategies but one were directly copied (with the name changed). The one that got omitted was "continuing to invest in the development of open source technology;". Bear in mind that none of this is illegal behaviour. Will the larger Linux community regard it as moral or ethical? And will the market even notice that there may not be a whole lot of substance behind this particular offering? Because the GPL explicitly does allow exactly what LinuxOne is doing... Still, it's odd. Oh, right - did I mention that they incorporated in May, have had absolutely NO income as reported in their S1 filing, and value their stock at $8/share. hmmmm.

Enough on the tech business front for today. Meantime, Tom and I are (and have been) going back and forth on viruses and security and such - read the update on his site. Some more of what I have written is on Dave Farquhar's site, leaving me absolutely nothing original of my own to post here, since everyone else is posting for me (time for a little pout - NOT). When the going gets tough, the strange get even stranger, that's w-w-what I say. How often do you throw a box of toothpicks on the ground and attempt to count them? Do you go around in a lavender jogging suit, collecting leaves and stuffing them in your jacket. The answers to these and other questions later today.

Over on Slashdot, there's a bit about the settlement in the Toshiba suit. To save you all from a fate worse than death... Toshiba has been selling computers with a faulty FDC chip for about the last 10 years. They have known about the flaw, but have not repaired it. The flaw (apparently) doesn't show up unless certain operating conditions are encountered. A pair of lawyers glommed onto the fact, and filed on Toshiba, who have settled for an approximate $2 Billion (That's right, there's a 'B' there). The lawyers get about $150M. I posted the following comment...

<sarcasm>
While I understand that Toshiba did something heinous and horrid by perpetuating this error-prone floppy controller chip for a decade, while the error was known, is it possible that we could pay the lawyers a little more, for the service that they have provided to mankind, nay, the whole universe. It would be worth putting several quality hardware vendors out of business just to help those guys buy a couple of new Mercedes... </sarcasm>

But really, rather than the lawyers, or the justice system, doesn't the public also have a part to play in the ridiculous levels of awards (odd word choice, that) at trial? It is the jury that will award multi-billion dollar punitive damages - thus leading to exagerated settlements like the above. The lawyers work for a percentage, and will always be overpaid. But an under-educated, unthinking, under-clued jury is at the root of these types of settlements. It is the jury who says "These people are just awful - let's fine them 10 billion dollars", as if awards of that magnitude don't have social costs of their own. If juries were reasonable, then... oh, forgive me, what AM I saying.

As noted elsewhere, Daylight Savings Time (speaking of which, when am I going to realize some of those savings, or is it like SSI, irreparably broke(n)) ends in about 14 hours (by my lights). I get back the hour of sleep that was stolen, that's right, stolen from me in April. This is the twice a year opportunity to have all the clocks correct at the same time, because they all run at slightly different (& wrong) rates - some are about 10 minutes off as I speak. Even Lcow here is off, and needs to be sync'd with a network timekeeper every day or two. This is, however because the cpu load that Seti@Home puts on keeps the clock going funny. I lose about 3 to 4 minutes a day when Seti is running, and virtually none when it isn't. Just ran the setTime script, and added 3 minutes to the clock. Last run was yesterday (I think, maybe Thursday). I suppose I ought to add that to a cron job... (Don't say that, Tom!)

Speaking of which, I still have "impaired" email service from Pacbell (been going on for a couple of days now)... If you simply must get through to me, use the emergency email address [email protected]. Please send text only messages, as I get this box via elm from the commandline.

Dan Seto has decided to take on Linux... I just dropped him the following line :

> So the moral of the story my children is that you can fool some
> of the people all of time, and all of the people some of the time,
> but Linux, as a replacement for Windows, has no clothes.

The faithful would have you drawn and quartered. The pragmatic would say, "OK, then don't use it. Stick with a system subject to viruses and the BSOD and the MS upgrade cycle." The strange (including myself) would stand at the podium at the UN, pounding my shoe on the desk and shouting odd and incoherent things :).

So you purchased and installed Caldera OL2.2, huh? Why back a revision level? The version that has a "good" installation rep is 2.3 (the current rev). I am running RH6.0 (haven't seen a need to upgrade to 6.1), X, KDE, Netscape 4.7, WordPerfect8.0, StarOffice5.1, Apache, Sendmail, etc. On a 233MHz PII, 128K ram, SoundBlaster, Creative Riva TNT 16M, tape backup, cdrom, floppy, 5G HD, of which 2.5 G is in use. It all worked (except for sound) on initial installation. Certainly Linux is not vying for king of the desktop, yet. Yet. But things are improving. I am quite happy with Linux as a desktop environment.

Clearly it is still a YMMV product. But I have not been fooled, and I am happy.

Which is of course the point of having a soapbox. You plunk it down on the corner, climb up and say your piece. If you do it well, you help the people around you to think about things - thinking is a good thing, exercise does a brain good. But make sure when mixing metaphors, to mix well.

"Was that spring foward and fall back, or..." Oh, hi. Last update before the clocks get changed, at 2 am tomorrow. Nope, not me. I'll be lazy and change them tomorrow. Meantime, some canadian firm has purchased Hercules Graphics. (OK, so they bought the name and the brand recognition. You can still buy RCA branded stuff, too). The buyer, Guillemot, has info here, the link came from Slashdot. All my early machines had Hercules graphics cards in them. That was back in the days when the instruction manuals came with the information necessary to write directly to the graphics hardware to create your own images. (Then Borland came along and offered libraries of code to do the hard work for you - it was cool).

We are going to break out Trivial Pursuit, the Millenium Edition. This is harder for me than the Baby Boomer stuff - 'cause a lot of the questions are related to today's crop of network television shows, of which I watch... none (with any regularity, anyway). So have a lovely evening all. Catch you on the rebound, when we revisit Amaya for Linux (there is a new rev out, and I am hopeful), and OpenH323 - the open source, Linux version of the stuff needed to talk to people using netmeeting. That and I am wending my way through Running Linux, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Programming Perl - then it's back to Applied Cryptography. Life? What life? <grin> Good night.


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The clocks are (mostly) changed (I am saving the VCR for later). Well. Amaya. I had previously downloaded a binary .rpm of Amaya 2.1.x, which displayed nicely, did what they described in terms of links (double-click to execute link, since the editor was integated, I maybe could learn to live with that, maybe). But I couldn't enter text anywhere except in a page. Dialog boxes. URL box. Nothing. At that time I gave up on Amaya, since why put a lot of effort into something new, when what I have works well enough, eh?

Well, this week Bo Leuf gave Amaya a shot, and appears to be giving it a tentative thumbs up. So off I trundle to www.w3.org to have another looksee. A new version, 2.2.x is out. OK, let's give it another try. Download the RPM.

[bilbrey]$ su
[bilbrey]# cd /usr/local/RPMS
[RPMS]# gnorpm
    gnorpm is the graphical rpm management tool that comes with RH6.0
    use gnorpm to check the package size and sig, see where it installs and install it.
...

So I open a new console, and type in Amaya. Same looking screen... aarrgghh. Same behaviour. Can't type in any input in any dialog, or anyplace except in the main window, in edit mode. Which means I can edit the Amaya home screen page. NOT my goal. OK - now a little more determined, I uninstall the RPM and dispose of it in the nearest /dev/null. I go and download the sources, then...

[bilbrey]$ su
[bilbrey]# cd /usr/local
[local]# tar zxvf amaya-src-2.2.tgz
    which builds a source tree in a new subdir, Amaya.
    then I read the readme's, and the directions, and follow them
[local]# cd Amaya
[Amaya]# mkdir LINUX-ELF
[Amaya]# cd LINUX-ELF
[LINUX-ELF]#../configure
    which trundles, does it's thing, and comes back at the bottom
    saying that the config has been done, it can't find motif
    and it probably won't compile...   so off to the W3C site I go
    locate the info that the recent lesstif release will (should)
    be sufficient.  I get that RPM, install it, and run the configure
    again.  Still it can't see motif.  sigh.

So I remove all the bits which I have downloaded or installed. I am sure there are some simple reasons why I can't do something which should be perfectly easy, but I really don't need a new editor for this environment, and I only wanted to evaluate Amaya as a browser to have a look at the speed, etc, for point of comparison with Opera, later. But if I can't enter an address in the URL line, a browser is useless to me, not to mention that I really don't want to learn my fingers to double-click a link. Amaya 2, Brian 0. Sigh.

Methinks it is time to survey a little email, make breakfast and go for a walk. Maybe I will have better luck with the Netmeeting equivalent stuff later today (yea, right, snurf). Stop laughing so hard, Tom, your day will come, my lad.

Sunday morning walks, the Wodehouse Way. We went for a stroll in Rancho San Antonio Park this AM. The park is set up against the eastern side of the hills which stand between Sunnyvale and the Pacific Ocean. Nice day for a walk - there are hilly bits and flat-ish bits in the park - we did mostly flat-ish bits for a couple or three miles worth. The only problem was that so many of the weekend runners and cyclists were out that parking was fairly problematic.

A command decision had to be made. I don't have the time to muck about with OpenH323 right now. I don't have a need for the product. I do have enough other projects. 'nuff said. Drop Phil Collins No Jacket Required into the CDrom and away we go. Oh, by the way - if it turns out that I need to be running both an MS Windows environment and a Linux environment, I may be able to get away with VMWare, rather than laying out lots more cash for another box. (On the otherhand, this is only a 233-PII, plenty of horses for Linux, but slow as a dog under Windows... sigh). I haven't yet played with VMWare, but I may yet. It costs only $99 for non-commercial use, and I have only heard positive comments about it from users on my mailing lists.

Very little new to report, I have a new version of Bluefish here in the Linux waters... One very cool feature is tear-away menus. That is, on the pulldown menus, there is a dotted line bar which creates a floating window containing the menu options... for instance, the image at the left is created by clicking on the Tags menu, Formatting submenu, and clicking the tear away button. Then I can park that menu window just outside the edit window, and have all my formatting tags near to hand, so that I can make really obnoxious paragraphs like this _with ^no effort at all.

Also, I have been mucking about with the kernel again. I can successfully compile and load a new 2.2.13 kernel, optimized for my hardware. But then the system is down (as far as online-ness and web- serving, etc is concerned) and I can't justify the downtime to play with the system - I really do want some more hardware one of these days. We shall see. Meantime, I do have the sources for Bluefish, and I have already discerned a bug I want to track down in the code.

Oh, why was I playing with the kernel? Well, it's because that is the current section of Running Linux, 3^rd Edition from O'Reilly. I am having fun learning all this stuff. Moshe Bar, a strong Linux supporter and developer, has put out another of his intermittent articles to his mailing list. If you don't get mail from Moshe, you should. He has a couple of websites, one is here, which is hosted by WebJump, and contains at the bottom, a way to subscribe to his mailing list, and there are also links there to his previous mailings, although the current one isn't up yet. His other site is (apparently) hosted on a Cobalt Qube in his villa overlooking the Mediterranean, in Italy. Are you not jealous yet? I am. The content at CVS.sentience.org is slightly different, but overlaps that of the WebJump site. He does Linux kernel development, and is very, very bright. Strongly Recommended.


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