This is like the Rain God, in the Doug Adams book. He (the Rain God) had separate names for over two hundred distinct types of rain (in the same manner that the Inuit supposedly categorize snow). Today we are in for "showers". Back when I had a little convertible (Fiat 128 Spider), there was clear, drizzle and rain. Just three categories was all I needed. Clear and drizzle meant that the top was down. If it was drizzling harder, then I would merely have to drive a little faster to use the breeze off the windshield as a curtain to take the rain to the back of the car. Rain was defined as Water That Comes Into The Car At Any Speed. Made figuring out what kind of day it was going to be rather simple.

Of course it rained last night, and very polite that was. Just a couple of sprinkles on the windshield as we returned from dinner out. But hot on everything's heels is what they are terming a winter storm, with snow levels dropping to 4500 feet. Way. Now maybe I can break out the snow skis, and really hurt myself this season. Actually, there's another good reason for the running, huh?

Comdex starts today. Is anyone besides me happy to be someplace else? Yeah, lots of cool toys, but a quarter of a million people, all trying to see too much stuff in too little time. But keep an ear out for pronouncements from Billgatus of Borg, and the young Jedi, Linus Torvalds. Both are speaking today, I think. Red Herring features Transmeta today in its catch of the day (Transmeta is Linus' gig, and so secretive that no one actually knows what they are doing).

Linux.DaveCentral.com is featuring the Configuration HOW-TO today. This is the tips, tricks and tweaks howto reference that you will want to read to tune your system following installation. It is free online from a number of sites, among them this place. It offers very good advice. Meantime, I am off to the grindstone, gotta reshape my nose again. Have a lovely Monday. I will see you later.

The Center for Democracy and Technology (www.cdt.org) has sent me an email notifying about a new area on their site. Opt-out Online is a site where you can fill out online forms to opt-out of emailing lists, and generate opt-out forms for organizations that don't allow you to opt-out online. Seems like a worthwhile endeavor, and I have always found the CDT point of view to be interesting.

Marcia is apparently finding her new job to be interesting and over time (with a little luck) to be a stable and fulfilling position. However, break time is over, and I have a spot of work to accomplish myself. Later.

Is Linux really a threat to Windows? Funny you should ask that. Apparently, Linux was one of the "competitors" cited by Microsoft lawyers as proof that Microsoft isn't a monopoly. Well, much to the initial delight, followed by closely read dismay of slashdotters everywhere, Microsoft was declared a monopoly, and Linux a non-entity in just one document - the Findings of Fact. Microsoft must have believed the judge, because Bill Gates mentioned Linux not once in his Keynote at Comdex, last night. The word "UNIX" came up once, juxtaposed with the phrase most expensive boxes. Cute. Of course he didn't mention Sun, Netscape or AOL either, though he took sideways digs at Sun when he talked about top ecommerce site downtime. Bill also quoted Ted Nelson's prediction of the death of big boxes (IBM mainframes, etc) from the very first West Coast Computer Faire (a show I miss). But he did put out a call for lawyer jokes. The transcript of Bill's speech is here.

Svenson is harassing me about my sleeping habits, and how "representative of Americans" I am not. I sent him the following...

> I chided Brian for trying to deceive me about
> sleep patterns in America. Maybe he doesn't sleep
> but of course he is not entirely representative
> of your average American.

For which just about everyone is grateful, at latest report. It has been said that after they made me, they broke the mold, made sure the moldmaker hadn't reproduced, then killed him. No more mistakes like this one, my lad. Dropped me on my head for good measure. Immediately I fell into the "Me doctor?" "No, me doctor, you patient, she nurse." routine. You see what I am saying here. Confuse-a-Cat and Bewildabeast are all in a day's work for me. Sleep, well, you'll never catch me admittin' it. Four score and seven years ago, my grandfather was 14, just running away from home to go to Detroit to build cars. And he's still going strong at 101. So just you watch out. We have lots more years of the ill effects of sleep deprivation to witness yet. Hope you're looking forward to it. I am. My favorite recent bumpersticker -

    I don't suffer from insanity. I rather enjoy it.

And in a more serious vein, I was pointed to this link, found on the Microsoft site, although they have the not the views of the company disclaimer at the bottom of the page. This is another attack on free software, claiming (among other things) that open source software has no value (though some of it is good, some great), that it takes roofs and food away from programmers and that college kids who work for open source projects now are shooting their future careers in the foot.

The author must have missed the Red Hat IPO, Linus Torvalds working for Transmeta, Rob Malda making a couple of mil selling Slashdot to Andover, and many other money-making, open source ventures. However, I want to explicitly note that most commercial software comes with a warranty which basically guarantees that there are some readable bits on the media which the software was shipped on. Other than that, the publisher explicitly does not warrant the softwares function or fitness for any particular or general purpose, and in using the software, the user assumes all risks and liabilities. Yeah.

The difference between those commercial license terms, and the terms of merchantability and fitness for Open Source software is virtually nil. Oh, but for "No Value" from a commercial source, you have to pay, usually quite a lot. Open source software can also be expensive - unless you have the expertise yourself, or in-house. Then purchasing a support package for a significant piece of software is prudent. On the other hand, the cost of upgrading is a little lower :).

Sorry to rant like this, and there is something to be said for commercial, proprietary software. Many people, including open source authors and publishers recognize this fact. This is, in fact, the reason for the existance of the LGPL (Library General Public License) which allows proprietary software to link with LGPL'd libraries without becoming "virally" engulfed by GPL. But clue-free people such as the author of the linked article are simply wrong. That is his right, of course.

But he fails to note that significant value can be realized by a firm which supports Open Source software by employing the maintainers and implementers of said software. This is why SGI employs Jeremy Allison (Samba), Transmeta carries Linus, VA Linux Systems has John Hall (of Linux International), and a couple of the Enlightenment developers on staff, Red Hat employs Alan Cox (another kernel guru), etc. The list goes on and on. People that write significant pieces of GPL'd software are not going hungry. Their skills are valued, and their time is valuable. If I write a piece of code that performs a useful function in the OS community, then I have given back to the community that has helped me. If I write a lot, and my code has significant, larger value in the world, I would venture to guess that I wouldn't have a problem with employment. Hell, the people that do OS development in parallel with the companies they work for are walking talking billboards for the companies that support them, among the digerati.

There are many benefits to supporting OS. Many people have written about it, far more eloquently than I have here. Seek out the writings of Eric Raymond, of Bruce Perens, of Richard Stallman. The software is "free", but I still pay for it (far less than I would pay for equivalent functionality under Windows) in order to support the companies that do the work.

Whew. That's over. Now back to the normally programmed insanity you are used to on this station. Transmeta has a little more content up on it's site, but to get the whole message, you need to view source on the html. Now, this next site is humor about a company from Redmond. Don't go there, Tom. You don't have time. Sorry. By the time you have finished your book, I will have deleted the link. HAHAHAHA. Just don't look at Darth Paperclip, OK? Finally for today, we have here a link to a recompile your Linux kernel how-to article on PCWorld's site. Very slow, just now because it is being Slashdotted at the moment. Try again in a day or two. Have a lovely evening - I am calling it a night.


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The weather that they promised us has gone elsewhere, I guess - we are now showing sunny and low 60's today, partly cloudy the rest of the week, and showers for Saturday, which was to be the replacement fishing day. We shall see, though, because a four day forecast is simply a long-term lie. Nothing yet about the speech delivered by Linus last night. I see from another snippit of news that Al Gore, Internet inventor, deigned to visit the campus at Redmond yesterday after all, and is talking about the White House getting involved in peace talks between MS and DOJ/States. Does Al want to be Internet inventor and single handed savior of the PC industry from the Palm invasion?

Lots to accomplish at work today, as usual. I will update as seems appropriate during the day, as usual. Have a great one.

Tom mentions on his site today, an article, here, which is again addressing the eMatter project initiated by FatBrain.com. I mentioned this a while ago, at its inception, and it appears that some hot money (among others, Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures) has been tipped into FatBrain's bucket with the intent of growing the eMatter side of the biz. I think the whole thing is terribly cool. Hope it works for them. I like the model, because it brings the vanity press within the reach of many people. While this is liable to create a vast amount of less-than-stellar-quality work, there are distinct advantages to enlarging the writing population. Anyone who writes is, IMHO, thinking far more critically than someone who just moves their mouth. Even I say "like" and ";y'know" from time to time, but these verbal colloquialisms rarely make it into my writing.

Instant messaging saves money... Chat sessions with family in Michigan are much cheaper than the equivalent amount of information exchanged via actual conversation. But if I can't talk to family because they are on AOL and I am using MSN, this will slightly cramp my style. I know, I can have both clients operating, in the same manner that I have Outlook/IE5 and Netscape running on this system here at work. But it is awkward, the address databases are not shared, yada yada yada. Sigh. Same problem exists with messaging services. Of course, I can get everyone using a standard IRC client, and set up a home IRC server, and make things happen that way ... :) Then of course, there's ICQ, which virtually everyone can use - I even have a client on Linux. Decisions, decisions.

A little bird on the SVLUG list dropped this one off in the old mail box... a little known <grin>encryption algorithm used by Windows CE devices to save your NT password in the CE device's registry in between sessions... is a simple, single word (always the same word) XOR'd with your password. Sigh. Details here.

I checked the weather this morning online. Really. I reported what I saw - clear today, clouds for three days, rain Saturday. There it is, just a few paragraphs above. Then, as I drive to work this morning, with a couple of faint, high clouds in an otherwise clear sky, the radio weather person says, "Rain by later today..." Yeah, right. I see the sky, I saw the other forecast, someone is confused. Then, about 3 this afternoon, I look outside for the first time in several hours (prompted by the sound of tires on wet pavement) and by gum - it's raining. I check online as I write these words, and the site reflects reality - it is raining, but the rest of the forecast remains unchanged. Every once in a while, I forget that you can trust weather people about as far as you can throw a politician.

Weatherplanner.com claims to be able to forecast up to a year in advance. For a two week span, encompassing anytime in the next year, they will give you a weather forecast by location, for $10 to $15. A full 30 day prognostication from this moment is available for free from the site. I am going to log what they say about the next month (starting next week, of course) and see how they do, and whether they "shift" their predictions to match reality. Is that envelope really sealed?

Culled from Slashdot, Tim O'Reilly has an article on Salon.com, link here. In it, Tim discusses the razor-thin margin by which it appears that Microsoft is going to miss owning the ISP server market the way it owns the desktop. A well written piece of work. Do go read it yourself after you are done here.

Opera for Linux, the eagerly awaited browser, has made significant progress over the last couple of months, and we are looking for a beta release before year end. When it (Opera) is available you will hear it (the news) called from the mountain tops, but I will echo that information here, as well. There is also a new KDE browser project in the works, but it is pre-pre-pre-alpha at the moment, apparently. And of course, it (the browser) will be free. The interesting thing about Opera is, even though it (Opera) is the only browser I know of that isn't free, I have between 1 & 2 percent of my hits generated by people using Opera, and another daynoter is getting nearly 3% Opera hits. This indicates a strong product. I will be checking it out on all of my platforms when the Linux port is available.

I have had my run... just a mo', let me log that. Done. I am using a spreadsheet to log times and distances, so as to have some idea about my progress. The spreadsheet? Oh, Gnumeric. Part of the Gnome applications family, but it runs fine under KDE as well. Not compatible with anything, but then, I don't need it to be. Have a nice evening - I may check in later.


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Another rainy morning - I guess that qualifies as partly cloudy. We woke to the sounds of siren after siren tearing up our street, some emergency services vehicles on their way to (probably) scrap up some poor individual who forgot he can't corner at 60mph in the rain, and ended up close and personal with Mr. Telephone Pole. Mind you, that's just an eddicated guess. That's a lot of guessing this morning, isn't it.

Will the real Svenson please stand up. This fine gentleman maintains an interesting and varied set of daynotes, and works on software for AS400 systems. Additionally, he makes a comparison between the new pre-pre-pre-Alpha version of the KDE browser, and the RTM version of IE6.0... He signs his name Svenson, his sent-from address is to Jan Swijsen, his reply-to address is [email protected]. I repeat, will the real Svenson please stand up. I want to believe that I am not insulting somebody by using an anglicized version of their name, just because everyone else does.

This evening we are going to have a preliminary report going up on Wine, the Windows API software for Linux. I got MS Word 97 running last night on Lcow, here. No, don't be rude. I don't have that second spindle with Windows on it anymore. I linked in to Marcia's hard drive to access the binaries, and it just worked (sort of). There is some tuning to do, but I will have a couple of screen shots up later. Meantime, try to do better than just survive. I will too.

Anglicized name?

I am Jan Swijsen, but in high school (well that 'middelbaar' for ages
between 12 an 18) I got Sjon Svenson as nick name. I used that for articles
in the student paper. I kept it on at University (some prof made the
connection between me and an 'unknown' Swijsen on the exams day:) .
So I keep using Svenson for personal stuff.
By day I send mail from my company account because I cannot reach the
Mailbank servers trough the firewall for sending mail. And of course my
company account is on my real name.

I live in Belgium (Hasselt) and I work in the Netherlands (Venlo). I help
with program development. But these Dutchmen don't laugh when I say I am
doing Development Aid. Pfew.

Svenson

BTW "RTM version of IE6.0" is there another than the Run Time Misery
version??

RTM = Release To Manufacturing, although I like your's too... ;)

There's a new Byte.com columnist in town - Nancy Hanger - she works for Baen Books, and does freelance work as well. In this article, she passes on a hot tip for a variant on virus protection that you may want to check out. The product is Grr!, available from www.greyware.com. Read Nancy's article, then hie thee over to Greyware and pick yourself up a trial copy. I am, for every connected computer here at work (and for Marcia's machine, at home, tonight).

As promised, now we are going to talk about wine. I am posting this in bits, as I do a little more research, and decide on positioning for the graphics, so bear with me, please. Speaking of the graphics, they are big... ranging up to 222K in size. The alt text for each thumbnail will tell you how large the file is. These are full size screen captures, in order to show you the program... or rather the effects of the program. So, without further ado, away we go.

Wine, in this context, is not an alcoholic beverage, but a much more potent and heady concoction. Let's say you are trying to move away from your Microsoft addiction, but you have this little problem. All of your work to date is in various Microsoft formats. You would love to be able to learn, use and run Linux, but you can't afford another computer. Dual boot, I hear someone say... well yeah, but there are horror stories lurking in the shadows of that tale, and hardware that has run a non-MS operating system tends to throw off the yolk pretty rapidly (this linux box ATE a hard drive that had Windows loaded on it - OK, the drive probably would have died anyway, but the story sounds SO cool).

Ah, back to the main thread. Wine is an self-referential acronym, like so many program names in the Linux pantheon. WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. Instead, Wine is (to quote from the description posted on Freshmeat) an alternative implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting legacy Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing unmodified Windows 3.1/95/NT binaries to run under Intel Unixes. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft Free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available.

The premise here is that you can run your Windows executables (for example, winword.exe) while in Linux. Forget dual booting, just get a 5 gig hard drive, load Linux, get and setup Wine, and run your Win apps as necessary (and when you must, you can wean yourself, I know you can). The upper left image in this section shows Microsoft Word running, spell checker active, within a KDE screen. You can also see a small console window at the lower left of the image, where I ran the import command to do the screen capture. I was running this on my second virtual desktop, codenamed Larry (of the four desktops: Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp). Screenshot 2, above and right, shows me running WordART. I don't know what came over me there, but it sort of worked.

Now, this is the biggest image (why they are different sizes I know not - computers are, after all, 3/4 magic, anyway), which shows active change tracking, and the wordcount dialog open. It all looks wonderful, huh? Actually, it is, I think. It is promised that this is very alpha software, is Wine. And it crashes a lot. I haven't done nearly all of the RTFM that I will need to do, to configure this software properly. Also,the product is under heavy, active development. There are relatively frequent updates.

Wine does have competion of a sort - VMware is a virtual machine manager which will allow you to actually boot Windows onto a virtual machine from within Linux. The disadvantage here is that you do actually have to boot Windows, then run the WinApps under Windows on this virtual machine. VMware is also a commercial product, asking for $99 to $300 license fees, depending on personal or commercial use.

Wine is free, as in Open Source, but you don't have to have a Windows license to run it. You should own copies of the binaries that you are executing, and it is unknown (by me) how well the Office2K products run under Wine. The homepage is here, where you can get binary and source tarballs. There is also a source for RPMs (that's listed over at Freshmeat, search on Wine). The Wine homepage is at www.WineHQ.com. If you are in transition from Windows to Linux, then you might want to be mucking around with this. Bummer of the moment - WineHQ appears to be down. RPM's and tarballs are available here, and documentation comes with the download.


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Feedback is the main dish on this morning's menu. Jakob Nielsen has a new Alertbox up on his site, talking about how web conventions become standards... This is why I don't use underlining for emphasis, and do leave underlining on for links. To me (and I surf, just a little :) bit), underline = link. There are efforts underway to change this convention, but I am going to lag the leading edge. Maybe I will wait until all pages are metalinked through LDAPv.10 hypercontent directories, and my computer tracks my eye movement, and asks me if I want more info, when I linger in a specific area.

If it is from Microsoft it could easily be interpreted as Ready To Malfunction
cause if it weren't they'd call it Beta.

I am used to having my name mangled. The most common mistake is putting two s'es
in the middle : Swijssen. It happens so often that I don't really notice any
more.

I am just back from the dentist, he found an inflamed dental nerve. Next week I
go back for a final check and a new filling. I am really looking forward to it
:-(

Svenson

Brian:  

Thanks for the information you sent me last week.  I finally finished
all of it.  It is very interesting, especially the emphasis placed on
software that is easy for physicians to from an ergonomic standpoint. 
I don't know much about Linux having never tried to install it on one
of my machines but will be interested to follow the development of
this software package.  Of course, the fact that the package may be
free is very attractive.

The corporation that owns our medical group is investing heavily in a
Community Health Record that is being built by IDX Corporation.  We
will be a beta site for this computerized medical record package that
is supposed to tie together physicians, hospital, medical labs, and
pharmacies across regions of the country not just in our local area. 
We have pieces of it now but not the full implementation yet.  I've
already seen that it has shortcomings based on the fact that the
programmers designed it based on what they thought would be efficient
and fast for physicians not by bringing in the physicians and finding
out what they needed.  (That is one of the major attractions of Dr.
Johnson's project)  

I have bookmarked this site and will be following Dr. Johnson's
project.  I also follow your discussion about Linux and can't wait for
a real competitor for Windows.

Give Marcia a hug from Delanae and I.  Thanks again

/jim

Jim Crider
[email protected]
http://www.docjim.com

I sent Jim this link , to a paper entitled Open-Source Medical Information Management.

Brian,

I read about your WINE experiences in your website (nice site, BTW, I like
it), and you mentioned VMware, which is a commercial product. Did
you know that there is a group working at a open source version of
this concept? You can find them at: http://www.freemware.org/

This is from their site: "The goal of the FreeMWare project is to
create an extensible open source PC virtualization software program which
will allow PC and workstation users to run multiple operating systems
concurrently on the same machine."

Since I have an interest in different PC OS's this looks like a
worthwhile goal to me, much more comfortable than dual (or triple)
boot configurations.

It seems that they are in the very early stages, but they have a lot
of relevant experience from a former effort creating a X86 emulator
(http://www.bochs.com/).

Have a lovely day,

Willem ([email protected])

And on that note, off to work I go. Have a great day!

Following Willem's prompting, I checked out the Freemware site, looking for evidence of life. They are drawing on a successful emulator project, Bochs, as noted by Willem. The lead developer in both cases is Kevin Lawton, who currently does Freemware as his open source project, and bochs is his bread and butter project. This splitting of time is clearly delaying the project. To quote from the developers page -

Release notes for FreeMWare 19990826a (unstable)

This code is extremely experimental, and will likely result in a 
system crash, and who knows what other ill effects. Don't run it 
on a system with any important data on it, and make liberal user 
of the sync command! Expect to have to use the power button.

Good looking project, designed (to my way of thinking) as a product to be used as a crutch to wean people from one OS to another. A little too flamable for me to play with right now, though. Note that the last release was in August. Probably this isn't moving forward fast enough to suite anybody's preference.

Culled from Slashdot, LinuxCare's site currently is running an article written by Rick Moen entitled Fear of Forking: How the GPL Keeps Linux Unified and Strong. In the article Rick addresses a lot of the fears of corporate business regarding the lack of a single point of responsibility for Linux. Along the way, he delivers quite a wonderful, abbreviated lesson in the history and development of bits of the Open Source movement, and Linux in particular. Well recommended. Read it and learn something else new today. I did.

Also, everyone should note that I forget to update the time of update thingy at the top of this page, about 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 times. Please forgive me. As I have said before, I am a professional Village Idiot, born out of his time.

Sick Humor (mine, sorry). I sure do feel sorry for those Texas A&M kids. But really, this sad event belongs in the letter Bob Thompson got (this link, page down once or twice to the section about the Darwin Awards (week of Nov. 15, 1999)) And meantime, the story over at Yahoo! News keeps bumping up the number of dead students, and bumping down the intended finished height of the bonfire stack. By the time we're done, there will be 35 students dead from the collapse of a bonfire which was supposed to achieve a height of 3-1/2 inches. Aargh.

Meantime, a good article over here, at Red Herring, on the subject of Red Hat, and it's acquisition of Cygnus. This is a significant deal, since next to the kernel, the C-compiler is crucial to the overall development of Linux. The Red Herring take is, of course, as it relates to Red Hat's incredible market valuation, and the company's need to buy and build infrastructure to support that valuation. Over at Salon, this article takes a look at the Open Source, philosophical, distribution-wars side of the deal. Two interesting articles to end the day with. Good evening.


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The emails and all that can wait. TGIF, though. I feel ratty this morning. No, I am not running for political office, Bob! Wednesday night, after my run, I had a bit of a cough, which had the feel of a "flu or bad cold coming on" cough. So since then I have been dosing with vitamin C, Zinc and Echinacea, and hitting the symptoms with Theraflu. So far I have managed to hold the fort, but I dunno. Sigh. I suppose the timing is better than having this happen, say next Tuesday, leaving me fully infectious in time to see the grandparents.

Rick Moen noted to me last night that there were some corrections that were going into his article, and that he would be posting a revised copy on his site, www.linuxmafia.com shortly. When he does so, I will be revising the area above and posting the link anew, as it will be a persistent link, rather than the mobile one available at the LinuxCare Site. OK, having bashed through the mail, I see an interesting reference to some SNMP monitoring tools that I must look at someday, a little mail from Syroid that bears further pondering, and a vast amount of gubbage.

Zo. Have a great day. Hope I feel better.

It turns out that taking a half day off actually does make a body feel better <SEG>... Had a good lunch up at Jose's Caribbean Barbeque, up on El Camino in Palo Alto with a friend. He was disappointed that they were currently out of alligator! Yikes. I went mainstream myself, and had some hotlinks, along with beans & rice. Yum.

Back home and doing a little site maintenance - if you have linked directly to any of the archived Graffiti pages, now would be a good time to change those. The filenameing policy had been JYYYYMMDD.html, the problem being, that the archives, which I plan never to touch the code in again, munch space in my file windows at the beginning of the listing, pushing the files I care about (like current, etc) out of the window. So I have replaced the 'J' with a 'z', which gives me a listing with the archives at the end, like they should be. I could have put them in their own directory, but then I would have to modify the image and other links as each week ended. Since I am fundamentally a lazy person (hopefully in the Heinlein sense of "Too Lazy to Fail"), I find that this will serve me just fine. I think I caught all the links, but if you find an error, let me know.

Also, I migrated the javascript rollover menu version of the Homepage under the Development page, and put up a new home page with many fewer images, and no javascript to get in people's faces. It was fun, I learned something, preserve it for posterity and move on. In other news...

Being home early gives me the opportunity to spend time doing something I wouldn't normally do - that is, traverse an entire Slashdot article's comment tree - I was watching the commentary around the GPL & Forking post from yesterday (you will remember that I posted a link to the article on the LinuxCare site - page up to find it). Definitely a higher signal to noise ratio than is the Slashdot norm... although, like many longish comment trees, the noise goes down, the deeper one gets - neophytes have no breath control to read that far down.

Ah - Email impaired again. What a surprise. What a joy. What? Oh, that was just me being sarcastic. You can send me email without attachments anytime you want, at [email protected]. I like getting mail. I don't even mind spam most of the time, it is a matter of a moment or two to click the delete button.


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Well, after a brief spelunk through the other Daynotes sites, I still feel less than inspired (not their fault). Heading into winter doldrums, I fear. Tom is struggling with his book (or his book with him, one is never quite sure which). Bob has a link up today to the Border Collie rescue web site - arghhh (why "arghhh"? - because we are in an apartment, wouldn't be fair to a dog, but we want one). Dr. Keyboard appears to be sticking to his schedule of three to four days between updates, then putting them up on separate days, like, yeah right, we're fooled <grin>. I had a brief exchange with Dave Farquhar, who has temporarily disappeared (no updates for more than a week). I was concerned and dropped him a note - bottom line is, Dave's ill, but OK, just low energy and we have not seen the last of him. Get well soon. Jerry has a link to Dan Bricklin's photo journal of Comdex, some of which is really rather fun, though you definitely want at least a fast modem - don't try this at 28.8, kids.

Meantime, Marcia and I are off to meet with a guy about insurance. Ick. Gotta be done, but ick. Why, after all I am immortal, right? Right? Sigh. I know, silliness. Meantime this virus (biological) of mine keeps poking at the fringes of my health, probing the defenses, trying to wend it's way in. I seem to have been reasonably successful at evading the worst of it, but clearly, we're not quite done yet.

We are making plans for Thanksgiving, followed by the tree construction ceremony. Is there anyone else out there who only celebrates Christmas for approximately the three required days (shopping on the 24th, the day itself and leftovers / tree burning on the 26th)? Anyone at all who can sympathize with my plight, who understands just how much trouble I am going to be in just for publishing this? I tremble at the knowledge that our Christmas shopping is already done. I always used to be a last day shopper!

More later, as the mood strikes me. Have a gorgeous Saturday. Oh, yeah, the scheduled rain isn't. Sunny and (let me have a couple of peeks out the window...) mostly clear, some popcorn clouds in the northeast quadrant, but within a couple hours the winds will clear those, and bring on whatever's next.

Yesterday, I went to Freshmeat, looking for something to do. I found freeciv, an OS version of Civilization II® (a game from Microprose®) A small download, a client/server game that can be played solo, by running the server and the client, both locally. Definitely more primitive than the Civilization: Call to Power demo I looked at last week, but the price is very right, and it will stay on Lcow at least until I figure out how to play it effectively.

Today, following a surprisingly informative and hardly unpleasant at all session with our insurance guy, I decided to start playing with koffice. It turns out that in order to do that, I need the latest versions of Qt from TrollTech, and some of the most recent bits of KDE (the unstable tree). I was able to complete the compilation of Qt, then I decided to do something a little silly - that is, upgrade the live libraries... blew up KDE entirely. Sigh. So, I log back in as me (bilbrey), using Gnome, instead of KDE. Now I am still fully functional, computer-wise, in this mode. I am just used to KDE. So, off we go to Red Hat's site, to peruse the updates section of the 6.0 release RPM tree.

While I am there, I might as well grab the 2.2.5-22 kernel... wait a moment... OK, the new kernel is installed, but not booted into yet, for some reason. Perhaps I have a little more RTFM to do. Anyway, the mild upgrade/reinstall of KDE and Qt was fully successful, more later on the kernel games - maybe it is time for a fresh source/compile/install. Also, I think a little more research into LILO. Check you soon - If you come by later, and the site is down, it will probably only be for a couple of minutes, until the boot cycle is complete. Thanks for your patience.

2.2.13 compiled OK. Well, duh. But does it boot? Nah. Most of the way, but not entirely. Some more explorations to do on that topic, but not tonight, methinks. Meantime, I have to install the ftape modules manually, so that the backup will happen tonight (no modules in the new kernel, though I probably should have... what if - No. Not tonight. I have had enough. See you all tomorrow, or at least, soon, I hope. Good night.


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Shopping and chores are going to eat much of this day, and while I would like to finish some of the things I have been working on, it is time to spend some time away from the computer. I know this is an irrational thought pattern, and prone to repetition and can lead to having a life (a dangerous concept, that). I may drop in later and say hello.

Hola. QCAD v1.3 is out for Linux. The windows version is still .1 downrev, but don't worry. I have played with this a little bit, and will do more, as time and requirements permit. On the surface, the package seems the same, but there are apparently several under-the-hood improvements, as well as a new font or two, and perhaps some improved dimensioning (dunno about this last, I can't find the release notes page)... OK, new construction features, improved rotation, cut & paste (very handy, that), text DXF handling improved, better file utilities, expanded drawing area, font creation... Sound significant - but I still can't seem to print properly.

Ah, printing... I saw a note float by about printing across the network, from Linux source to Windows printer. Then someone else wrote, "If you have Red Hat 6.0, just use printtool as root, answer a few questions, and have fun printing." The follow-on response was something like, what files does printtool modify if you are using a real distribution <duck>. I ran printtool, answered a few questions (easily answered by sharing the printer from the Win98 box, and looking at the workgroup name in Control Panel/Network/Identification pane. ID the printer, set the print filter, and send off a test page to complete the setup. Of course, I haven't been able to print from any other application yet, but we'll get there.

Nothing else real exciting - I am supposed to be able to answer the question "What do you want for Christmas?" My guess is that my off-the-top response of "To wake up and find out it's January already!" is the wrong one. On the other hand, we just took a bird out of the oven, and my that does smell good. Doesn't help, knowing that I am going to be bloody sick of turkey before very long, but in the meantime, I might as well resign myself to the inevitable.

After claiming illness as an excuse <g>, Dave Farquhar returns to the fold, like the prodigal son. We shall slaughter the fatted Athlon, and roast it forthwith, by withholding it's Kryotech cooling... Oh, speaking of Kryotech, the SuperG is now available. That's right, kids - 1,000 MHz Athlon powerhouse. Gimme a beowulf cluster of these baby's. Have a lovely rest of your weekend, or a tolerable Monday if you are anyone but Dan Seto or his neighbors. See you tomorrow.


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