EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy say so, I will respect that. If I don't know that you want your email address published, then I won't. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

Well, as happy as Monday gets, anyway. For early on the first working day of the week, I feel rather chipper. I guess (knock wood) that the vitamins and zinc are doing their job - I did not feel the urgency yesterday for any decongestants, so we shall see.

Netscape: Password

     Could not log in to the mail server.
     The server responded:

        Cannot contact server sims1.snfc21.pbi.net

     Please enter a new password for user [email protected]
...

Some of you might recognize that server that is out of contact. You might have sent me mail and had it return'd as unrecognizable - this was the beast that done it. Sigh. But why can't Netscape parse that message and determine that MY password has nothing to do with the error??? Ahhhh, email impaired. Well, at least that gives me more time in the morning than I usually have.

At work, I have a new server coming in later this week, to replace the three year old beast that has been running night and day. You see, the company has been running on 4G of non-raid drive with a PII 200 at the wheel. It runs, but is no longer fast. The tape drive backs up at a snail's pace. So, the new box will be a PIII 500, dual scsi, dual 9G IBM drives, mirrored, on site spare power supply. I will rest a little easier. To help insure a smooth running operation, I got a couple of new NT books, including the ones by our friend, Robert Thompson. He was also able to recommend other 'second best' books that I should have on my shelf. Thanks.

Time is passing and I ought to run. Have a great day, I will see you later.

Pair.com is in motion. If you didn't catch up with any of the Daynoter's over the weekend, you might not know that pair.com is moving their datacenter. This will affect Jerry Pournelle (www.jerrypournelle.com), Bob Thompson (www.ttgnet.com) and Steve Tucker (www.wakeolda.com). At least those are the ones I know about. Even if you can get to their sites, their email server may be down, and you will get bounced messages if you send to them. How do I know this? I just got some bounced mail. Yup, that's one of those good news/bad news sorts of things - the email is up again.

Otherwise, the weather has a snap to it, but the skies are mostly clear, and the day commences properly now. Catch you later.

Tim Werth checks in with me regarding tax software...

Withholding the e-mail address is fine.  Although anyone who wants it could
scan either Bob's or Tom's or Bo's site to find it.

I understand your trepidation on Money but don't be afraid to try Kiplinger
Taxcut.  I switched to Taxcut from TurboTax several years ago.  There are
things I like better about each product but it's probably a toss up as to
which one is better.  Add in that Taxcut is cheaper AND in the Deluxe
version throws in ALL States that have an Income tax and it isn't even close
on value IMO.  If you buy the State version from Intuit they charge for
every additional State that you need (a pain if you live in one State & have
income in another).  I think that was the time that I said never again to
Intuit.  Taxcut will also import all of your data from Quicken as well so
don't worry about that one either.

L8r,  Tim

Then Matt chimes in on my diatribe of Sunday evening...

Subject: Wasting money on space
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 1999 10:59:19 -0700
From: Matt Beland 
To: Brian Bilbrey 

Regarding your comments about Robert Rudzki's comment on the Mars Polar 
Explorer; I'd say I'm the most qualified member of the Gang, with the exception of
Jerry, to comment. Being a rocket scientist and all, doncha know.
 
I'm not going to bring up the literally millions of new products and technologies 
spun off from the space program.
 
I won't mention that the wonderful technology that allows Mr. Rudzki to 
send his emails comes from the space program.
 
I won't even bring up the fact that the entire mission cost less than one month's 
welfare budget for the Los Angeles metro area.
 
I just want to know one thing. When is the last time Mr. Rudzki's managed to 
accomplish something on the scale of a space shot? Successful, nearly
successful, or otherwise? The day he manages that, he'll be qualified to criticize. 
And since I have - see http://home.hiwaay.net/~hal5/HALO/index.shtml - I'll
criticize; we didn't spend ENOUGH money on it. Not spending enough money to 
adequately test flight hardware means we don't find out about problems until
AFTER the spacecraft gets to Mars.
 
Matt Beland
Systems Administrator
http://www.itool.com 
In the words of the immortal Socrates: "I drank what?"

In the spirit of showing off, something I do so rarely <g>... If you missed visiting over the weekend, I did a report on installing Win2K in a VMware virtual machine, overloading a Win95 install. I have this link to the report , which has improved PNG thumbnails, much smaller than the 0.9 release of the writeup. Lastly for this turn of the wheel, you will remember that I did a bit of a question on this weather planner site that Yahoo Weather directs you to. Well, the premise is that they use some historical data and some 'proprietary algorithms' to determine what the weather is likely to be anytime in the next year. They show you the next 30 days for free, and charge from $10 to $15 US for a forecast of a two week window anytime in the next year. I took a few notes on their 30 day forecast... up to today they have missed every maybe raining day, but yesterday it was supposed to be raining here for sure. Oops. Glad I didn't pay for that forecast. I didn't give you another link to the site, because, well, why bother.

Bob Thompson's place is back online again. Pournelle (here) remains online, and Steve Tucker is off. Thought you'd like to know. Now Bob hasn't updated for this week yet, but it is still Monday, and he can always claim that pair.com took his server offline before he had a chance to post... <g> - see y'all this evening.

---

ALERT - You should not be linked directly to this page.
That is, if you are looking for the new week's page, that is. Your pointer to Grafitti should aim at http://www.OrbDesigns.com/bpages/current.html/, as that is the redirection page that will always point to the current week page. If you really want to skip the current page, then on Monday mornings, pay attention to the Next Week above, when it becomes a live link, then the new current week is up, and you can move your direct link accordingly. YMMV. G'day. (posted Monday 12/06/1999)

---

The DOJ has posted the PLAINTIFFS' JOINT PROPOSED CONCLUSIONS OF LAW at this site. No big surprises in this one. DOJ uses the statements that are in the Findings of Fact (which were fundamentally identical to DOJ's proposed FoF) to support their proposed Conclusions of Law. That is, that Microsoft has violated the first and second sections of the Sherman Act, and should be subjected to the appropriate remedies. Given that Judge Jackson virtually rubberstamped the DOJ's proposed FoF, one could only assume (if standing in the Redmondian shoes) that he could easily do the same for the Conclusions of Law. This would certainly give a tangy flavor to the settlement talks currently in progress, eh?

Oh, yeah. Bob did post finally - apparently his was the first server disconnected at Pair, put on a truck, shipped halfway across the state before the mistake was realized, and they turned around and ran it across to the new world class datacenter <g> On the other hand, the server that Pournelle's site apparently had a cumulative downtime of about 10 minutes. Who knew? I certainly feel a need to recognize that Bob is back, since I was harassing him for not being up early enough to get his post ftp'd up to a server that would be offline most of the day <g>...

On the difficulty of bookmarking current.html, now that it flashes past in the blink of an eye. Mine is now set for just one second's delay, because I am an impatient cuss. John Doucette rings the bell, then slips this under the door...

This could be considered a drawback to making current a 
redirection page - it ain't there long enough to bookmark.

In IE5 at least, you can hit the stop button and the 
redirector stops, you can then bookmark the page.

Then on the topic of which mail to publish... Tricky, that. I would like to think that I would publish just about anything that anyone sends. But several key factors mitigate against that ever being true. First and foremost, I want to bore neither you nor me. This is a stump. It is my stump. I am reasonably happy to share it which whoever wants to chime in. But there are places I will not go, causes I will not espouse, claims I will not propogate. All that, to the best of my ability. But where do I draw the line between offensive, and offensive to me because of my biases and ingrained brain warps?

Oh, yeah, I know what you mean by offensive, but that's just my sense of humor - comes of being dropped on the head a few too many times, and then watching vast amounts of Monty Python during critical formative years. Well, not just that, but reading Frank Herbert in the 4th or 5th grade - one visit from the good Baron Harkonnen is quite enough, thank you very much. There, you see, sidetracked again. Clearly unfit for the job, ain't I?

Anyway, I will do my best to be fair, and present viewpoints that I may regard as anethema. Leper jokes are allowed. Child pornography is out. Actually, pornography is out, although sex is fair game. Dead baby jokes are OK, if told in good taste. But on important or non-trivial issues, I will be fair, as only I can be on the field of my choosing, where I can also choose the weapons. Sounds only right, hey?

And to think, it's only Monday. Mañana, dudes and dudettes.


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Subject: Appropriate Content
   Date: Tue, 07 Dec 1999 07:39:37 -0700
   From: Matt Beland 
     To: Brian Bilbrey 

What about jokes where child porn stars club baby seals with dead babies?
 
Matt Beland
Systems Administrator
http://www.itool.com
 
In the words of the immortal Socrates: "I drank what?"

And he also qualifies for .sig of the moment... <g>. I have had just a little more mail in the ol' box this morning than that to which I am accustomed. I have a bit of a rush on, because KFOG is releasing Live from the Archives this morning - last year they cut 30K CD's and sold out in 2.5 days. What is this disc, you ask. Check the KFOG website link here. Essentially it is a CD which generates money for SF Bay Area food banks - over $400K last year (I think?) - a great cause, and some very good music on that disc. Just for a sidelight, here's a talkback rant on ZD, regarding RedHat that I find both amusing and disturbing ... Amusing just because, and disturbing because some people might buy into the line of trash being offered. Now I have to jump in front of the traffic, but will see you later.

Oh, and no, don't take us too seriously and get offended by the humor - we're not evil, just sick and twisted - we make jokes about these things because we would put a lot on the line to stop most of these bad things from happening... ta-ta.

I am experimenting at work with the BlackICE product from Network ICE. This is cool, although like most products I try out - I am using it without reading the directions at first. This means that I can't even use FTP from this workstation without opening the correct IP addresses to the corporate hosting servers on the Pacbell machines at PBI. <G> I know it's just a new toy, but will be needed as we move into fulltime (rather than dialup) connectivity for the company. Yes, I mean BlackICE on every box, even behind the firewall. Belt and suspenders, ladies & germs.

After the dual deluge of this morning (lots of email, and rain in on the way to work), there has been virtually none of either since that time, so I have very little to report at the moment, and some work to complete, so I will return the nose to the abrasive wheel and get back with you later.

Howdy. First, there's this exchange with Chris HypenatedWard-Johnson (aka Dr. Keyboard) picked up in the middle -

Is this the first chink in the Linux armour? 
Do Linux servers REALLY melt under heavy loads?

My understanding is that a single pentium III server running apache will not start to saturate until about 5 full T1 lines hit it full bore. I would not, however, be able to handle an OC48, but would LOVE to try <g>...

Next, after three stops at three different stores, I found a Wherehouse that still had stock on Live from the Archives, and they were down to their last box, 8 hours after the disc went on sale. What's the big deal, you say? Well, other than the advantages and general feelgood you get out of purchasing this CD (see the earlier post), there's the following playlist...

• Church - Lyle Lovett
• Still Rainin' - Jonny Lang
• Anything But Down - Sheryl Crow
• Meet Virginia - Train
• Talk of the Town - Pretenders
• Shimmer - Shawn Mullins
• Ship of Fools - Elvis Costello
• Great Divide - Bruce Hornsby
• Slide - The Goo Goo Dolls
• Johnny Was A Pyro - Patty Larkin
• Tired of Talkin' - Robben Ford
• Skin and Teeth - Joe Henry
• So It Goes - Wes Cunningham
• Blue Sky - Patty Griffin
• Ground on Down - Ben Harper

After a conversation with that Canadian feller, Syroid, where we discussed the absolute joy, happiness and centered relaxation he has found, as an author with a book under deadline. Yeah, you want me to what? OK. Actually, I like talking with Tom a lot, since he is very nearly as warped as I am (although he is sure to claim primacy), and a good sounding board. Then it was coming up on supper time.

We supped this evening on pork chops marinated in a little teriyaki sauce, some white wine, shallots and a smattering of seasonings, then seared and simmered. The chops were accompanied by some broccoli and pasta with pesto. I know - nothing like a fresh gerbil or two (nummy), but it was alright.

To close for the evening, our newest daynoter, Dan Bowman, has a bit of humor that I had a guffaw or two over, posted here. Dan, of course, needed to get his own site up and running, as most of the other daynoters were coming to realize that better than 50% of their output was composed of correspondence to, from or about Bowman. Clearly he needs to change his name to Dave, climb on a ship and fly far away - but in the meantime, we suggested that perhaps an easy first step in dis-engaging would be to get his own site up and running. He appears to be taking it rather well actually <g>.

Have a nice evening, night, day, afternoon... oh, whatever time it is, wherever you are. There are a lot more readers dropping by than there were a month ago, from all over. I am honored by your presence. Until tomorrow (my time), then. G'night.


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'Hump Day'. What an odd phrase, given all the connotations that the words might carry. But anyway, Happy Wednesday. Why happy? Each day can be a celebration - Remember Arthur waking up with a scream in his cave each morning. <g>

I have mail to prove that either Tom was up writing at 03:40 this morning or Tom knows how to forge mail headers. Given no other evidence than that in front of me, I will grant him the technical skills to have done the latter, but will swear up and down to his editor that he was slaving away at a hot keyboard long before we were upright. Oh, hi, Troy.

Jim Crider (Doc Jim) managed to make it home from a professional basketball game and still put up a respectable post for the day. Dan Seto, hasn't posted his AM yet <g>, but then it is only about (what is it really - don't want to look it up right now) 01:45 or so his time... Both recent gang recruits are keeping up pretty well, and I have no doubts (see yesterday) about Bowman's ability to pull his own weight. Bravo, gentlemen.

Spotted at Slashdot. If you are using Linux, hare on over to Fox.com and watch your browser fail, as the site determines that you aren't running MS Windows or MacOS... Well, the browser doesn't fail, but you can't access content, because they point you to a page that tells you that you system doesn't meet requirements for viewing their site. Wait, let me try with Lynx... Nope, a text-only browser TOTALLY confuses Fox.com. Lot's more interesting stuff, too, but I am out of here.

More as time and propriety allow - off to work now.

Now for a little more on security... Security really has to do with trust, as you find as you read Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography, Phil Zimmerman's info and many other sources. You see, if you want to be secure, unplug your connection to the net and leave it off. If you want to do online shopping, receive email, browse Bob Thompson's website - any one of the hundreds, thousands of reasons for being connected today - then you are going to have to compromise your security. [BTW - When I give links to an online bookseller, it is because I was there looking up the author's name or some such - I haven't taken the time to set up 'associate' type thingies with any online sellers, and I am not sure I want to at this point - topic for another day]

The questions are, how much compromise, how much security, how much connectivity do you need? These and other factors pull in disparate directions, and it's up to you to find the balance. As I noted the other day from work, I installed a recommended security product for Windows environments, then had to explicitly open a hole in the wall thus erected, for me to do some basic FTP work. This makes a lot of sense in the Windows arena, where systems are by default wide open, and even if you do your best, what have you forgotten?

It has been noted that Linux is far more secure (in a native sense) than Windows products are. Certainly this is true - if you sit down physically at my desktop machine, you can physically damage the machine, and read lots of data, but you can't change files which my user account doesn't have access to. Not too many users of Windows set up restrictive permissions. Now it is also claimed that Linux is more secure as an online entity. Well, that depends entirely upon setup. If you do a custom Red Hat 6.1 install, as Tom Syroid just did, then it is possible that you have lots of services listening at various ports (entry points to your OS for services), creatings holes in the wall, being not only services for you, but paths and highways for interlopers. Fortunately they are usually far easier to keep control of than Windows boxes.

Things to check right now... Just for fun, head over to /etc and have a look at the file called services - use a tool like more or less to view this - do not edit this file (we are talking comparable to manually editing the Windows Registry in terms of possibility of fsck'ing things up) These are the services that may run (or be running) on your system right now, and the ports with which they are associated. Look at Port 25, you'll see mail. Port 80, www and http. Lots of entries, aren't there. Hmmm.

Now look at the file called inetd.conf. inetd is a sort of superserver - it provides stop, start and restart services for a lot of connectivity services within your system. Lots of those services may start as enabled, open or on. I disabled most of mine. If I need a service, then I will turn it on.

There is lots more where that came from... check out this link - Kurt Seifried has made quite a collection of linux security tips tricks and howto's on this site...

Actually, I was headed into PortSentry territory, and decided to sidetrack a little bit for y'all. The PortSentry homepage gives a decent intro to the capabilities of the product, and it's functioning as a part of the suite of programs which comprise the suite. From the homepage, I click on the downloads link. This takes me to a page where I can download the product. I move the xxx.tar.gz file into a sandbox for downloads and untarring that I created over in my /usr/local partition.

I execute tar zxvf portsentry-1.0.tar.gz, which creates a portsentry-1.0 subdirectory, full of README files and source - no binary here, when it comes to security, look at the code and roll your own is always the safest method. If the code doesn't mean anything to you, then at least you know that other people were able to view the code, and would have raised a hue and cry should there be fecal matter heading towards the rotating blades. Yup, that's another advantage of Open Source.

README.install is 13 pages of design, reasoning, method and installation information - in this case, I will read... and pre-edit the configuration files as advised in the README, and in the configuration files themselves. Having dotted i's and crossed t's in several files, I type make linux, and proceed. Well, installed and running - so well that I have managed to block one of my virtual machines entirely from accessing the net through the host OS... sigh - now how do I fix that... More on this another day, and there are other things that I have installed which I will go into at some other occasion. Read Seifried's work (linked above), and decide which point of compromise, trust and usability to balance yourself upon. Remember, if the cost of breaking your security is greater than the value of what you secure, and you follow good backup procedures, then you're going to be just fine.


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04:45 - I have been lying awake the last hour or so, listening to the rain on the roof, the intermittent slap of tires on wet pavement, the dripping through the leaves. Giving up sleep simply means that once I am upright, then my eyes want to close. Sigh. So here's an exchange between Svenson and myself [one message, compressed and reordered] -

 
Brian Bilbrey wrote:

> > On the home front things are rather quite.
>                                        ^^^^^
>
> just one transposed 'te' 'et' and you sound rahther brit, don't ya know.

Not quite quiet ya mean.

Well I did run the spell checker but some dyslectic stuff doesn't get
trapped. I am quite good at transposing letters, especially when I switch
from my left hand to my right. Example "changed" often comes out "chnaged".

Another error that I only noticed now is "de diskette" this is dutch for
"the diskette".

Sometimes I wonder how 'foreign' I sound to native speaking guys.

Svenson

You get your points across, and I believe in general readers of your site and your correspondence understand what you are trying to say, and even *most* of the nuance. Don't worry about it.

And now on the lighter side of the news, Dr. Keyboard has decided to take me to task for the state of my desk (see Saturday of last week). Of course he offers links to a photo essay of his working space near Montpellier in France. (Isn't that where the Conehead's, Pramat and Beldar came from?) But anyway, I care not. I am happy working in this space, whether it is clean or messy. Rather have this, than a space that looks like a BBC desk, perched in the middle of a James Herriot/Yorkshire Dales whelping house (with RATS!). <g> Who sits there? John Cleese, saying, "And now for something completely different..."???

Ah, hell. I guess I will climb in the shower, then go to work. At least I can startle the people who get a *really* early start on the day by turning up at 06:30. I have a PCB design to finish, a sheetmetal silkscreen to proof, an on-screen slide presentation to update for a rep visit next Tuesday and for the BICSI show in Florida in January, another set of data sheets to work on, and a reps/distributors price sheet to adjust the formulas on, print to PDF and email out (as a preliminary). Just another day, really. Have a good one yourselves and I will talk to you later.

Later is now. Can I tell'm it was all just a test, Tom? No, huh? Well, in the nature of a security test then... When I installed various and sundry software condoms on this machine, in order to pretend to protect it from the outer world, I protected well - from myself, as well as others - I closed off the ports used by sshd. So all day I sit, agonizing over the missing 'N' from Svenson's name above (now there, to highlight my error in glaring red).

Now clarified. Meantime, good news abounds - Marcia is now a permanent employee in her new position (was contract temp to perm). We are happy campers, although we were before, because these are nice people to work for and with, I am told. More details soon, over on her site, DutchGirl.net, today or tomorrow, I am sure.

In between all the agonizing <g>, I actually got lots done today - I think I completed the design phase of a new family of four products (I will modestly point out the location of the promo's when they are done). Tomorrow is time enough for price sheets and powerpoint.

In other news, large rounds of applause, kudos all 'round and massive high fives are the least of the results in Mountain View at and near VA Linux Systems, which re-priced last night at $30, and closed today at about $240 - that's right, about 695% first day gain - blows the last record holder out of the water, netted $132 M into the coffers for growth, etc and yields a current market cap of around $12 B (that's right, B as in Billion)... not threatening the MS ~$500 B, but still very cool for a Linux company. Also winning this week were Andover.Net with a successful dutch auction IPO, and strong gains. Up in Canada, Corel and Perle Systems both have done very well this week. Nope - I don't own any of those stocks. Sigh.

Now loading Baldur's Gate into the WinVM... <g> Need I say more? G'night!


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Baldur's Gate and Riven both loaded fine in the Virtual Windows machine. Unfortunately, the virtual hardware isn't up to snuff for gaming. Ah, well - that wasn't my purpose when the process started, but I thought it worth a shot. Hey, good morning! Happy Friday all (or Saturday for you readers on the right side of the International Date Line).

Last night, we had a nice dinner out at a place called TGIF's (I know, a day early, just shoot me) in celebration of Marcia becoming permanent at the company she has been temp'ing for. Her title is Senior Contracts Negotiator, and she is loving her job. Since Sun Micro made the mistake of redeploying her, she had not found a place really to call home - until now. 'Ray, Marcia.

On the unfortunate side of the ledger, we lost my great aunt on Wednesday. She was 3 days shy of her hundredth birthday, but had infections and such that had her in quite a bit of pain, so it was a blessing and a release that she was able to let go. We will be attending a service for her on Monday.

Now, on the subject of Brian's spelling at o'Dark:30 of a Thursday morning...

Well, if Svenson is too long you can always address me as Owl. That is
shorter and every other daynutter will know who you are talking about
:-)

Now you have been agonizing on a mis-typed name. I advise you to hop
over to Marcia and console her, she is probably agonizing over my name
as well ( let her put in a red 'v' :-)  )

BTW you nor she should agonize on my mis-typed name, I often do some
self mutilation in the style of Svenon or Svneson or so. It is about the
only thing (apart from my password at work) that I can type in blind and
at speed. And I often don't check it.

BTW2 My spell checker flagged Marcia as an error. No problem for me, I
just press the Ignore button. What do you do in such a case. You cannot
press Ignore, now can you :-)

Svenson

Joy, duty and humor out of the way, I have to run. Work calls, and we are short-staffed today, so I am liable to be horrendous busy. Y'all have a great day and I will catch you up later.

Hi again. I know that was fast, but I have the following point - counterpoint to post. I have edited bits out to anonymize the message I received. More as I know more -

I haven't seen the virus itself, and I haven't heard from any of my usual
spies. The person that sent me this, however, usually knows what he's
talking about.

-----Original Message-----
From:   *****
Sent:   Friday, December 10, 1999 8:20 AM
To:     ********
Subject:        VIRUS Warning from ***** IT Security - today, Friday, December 10th, 1999
Importance:     High

On behalf of ***** IT Security:

VIRUS Warning - today, Friday, December 10th, 1999

This virus is spreading rapidly across the Internet today, Friday, December
10th, 1999

Virus Name: Worm.ICQ_GREETINGS (alias: Passion)

WARNING: There is NO anti-virus cure for this virus at this time!

Recommended Actions:

***** IT Security recommends that you take the following precautions:

*       Never open executable attachments (files ending in .exe, .com, .bat, .shs, .vbs, etc...)

*       If an attachment is received unexpectedly, even from a person you
trust, ask the sender before opening the attachment.

*       DELETE without opening any attachments with the file name
"Icq_Greetings.exe"

*       If you have executed the attachment called "Icq_Greetings.exe" then
your machine has likely been infected. Shutdown your computer. Call our Help
Desk at ***-***-****!

Details:
What Does the Virus Do?
The nature of the virus payload is currently being investigated. Initial
indications show that this file may attempt to format several local drives.
Upon execution the virus "appears" to immediately return control to the user
with no error messages.

How Do You Become Infected?
If you have executed the attachment called "Icq_Greetings.exe" then your
machine has likely been infected. Shutdown your computer. Call our Help Desk
at ***-***-****!

How Do You Know You Are Infected:
Currently unknown

How is the Virus Transmitted?
Currently unknown

What OS and Applications are affected?
All Windows Operation Systems

How Prevalent is the Virus?
No report yet, but appears to be spreading quickly

PS: If I am wrong and this is NOT a hoax, I would be pleased to be copied on any communications with authoritative sources, to validate posting a warning - after all, I have done virus updates throughout my company twice in the last two weeks for the real deal, and the activity levels are high right now, which of course also leads to increased susceptibility to hoax messages.

Now what I just did may be construed as a warning, but really is a information piece to everyone about checking out authoritative sources - This particular one came from someone I trust, and he may have gone through all the steps I did to attempt to validate the warning. I checked Symantec/NAI, McAffee, DataFellows, CAIC, ZDNet and other locations looking for positive or negative confirmation - No joy. The advice about what to do to protect yourself stands, and is easy to say, sometimes difficult to follow. YMMV. Later.

Marcia notes in a response to Svenson that "My excuse is my fingernails -- extremely long for typing 100+wpm on any keyboard so I do tend to miss letters occasionally and, unfortunately, even at work, tend to forget to run the spell checker. And, NO, Jan, Brian had better not 'ignore' me! The 'Marcia' spelling that is my name will be more well defined on my upcoming Sunday [12/12/99 -ed] post but, suffice it to say, it is the Midwestern American spelling which is appropriate, since I was born and raised in Michigan."

So there. Later, all.

Virus Alert... Yup, I was wrong. The alert above is for real - the virus name is Win32/ICQGreetings.Worm, and here is an authoritative reference to information about the beast. Still nothing on Symantec's site - but you can bet I will be bumping them in about 3 minutes. Thank you to the original source for getting back to me so quickly with more information.

I guess that for the most part, when that nice Mr. Death pokes his head in the door at the Bilbrey clan, we reassure him that he is at the wrong address, so sorry but mistakes do happen, even with your efficient staff, you old reaper, you. But every once in a while, the knock on the door is right after all.

I make jokes about mortality for a couple of reasons. First, I do have an extraordinarily good set of genes, performance tuned for longevity. Someone in our family passing away in their eighties was just hitting their prime, so to speak. Also, of course, in my past behaviour, I faced mortal danger through personal stupidity on more than one occasion, and through a combination of luck and perseverence, came through. Now my only truly stupid trait is commute traffic (verry dangerous, don't you know). As I have read before, all good humor is really about pain (preferably someone else's). But with the strong UK background in the family tree, self-deprecating humor appears to be most functional for me. As with most things, this can be a strength as well as a weakness.

As I turn most fears of getting older and mortality into a joke of one kind or another, I maintain a relatively even mental/emotional keel. The insulative effects, though, don't prevent the short, sharp shock (thanks, Pink) from breaking through and rocking the boat just a little. So, for the nonce, I am a little reflective today, a tad withdrawn perhaps. This is OK, of course - part of life.

Speaking of life - have a look a Beland's post for today, here. They are doing the lab life thing again. Life is like Pandora's box for us carbon-based descendents of apes - stick your hand in the fire once, say ouch, then go on to invent thermonuclear weapons. (I thought I sounded just a bit like James Burke there, don't you think?) Anyway, like many other human activities, this one shows as much promise as danger and, well, nothing risked, nothing gained. Beside - someone is gonna do it - we might as well know about it, eh? [the above link expires on 12/12/99 at midnight, right, Matt?]

Beyond that, we swing into our Holiday Social Calendar this weekend as well. Bah, humbug, sez I... wait - did you say free food? OK. Count me in. Maybe more later - I am just a little washed out from the week.

Bear in mind these things as you visit me (and I am honored that you have taken the time to do so) - I don't (yet) pretend to be a professional writer. I am pleased, as I read the other daynoters and find that I can merely bask in the glow reflected by their respective talents. I do have that level of focus (perhaps), but I don't think that I have truly tried to apply that to these pages. I share with you what's going on at the moment. Hope that you don't mind too much. Have a nice evening. TTYL.


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Mornin' all. I have been sitting here for a while now, answering emails, reading a bit here and there online, sucking down a little caffinated beverage, looking at the morning paper just a bit. Call me a slow starter.

San Jose is waffling away money in its attempts to get a new City Hall. The story is currently here at MercuryCenter - the online presence of the SJ Mercury News. San Jose has paid a prominent architect 2.5 million dollars in order to not like anything he has yet done. Admittedly the process started before the current junta (oops) administration, came into power. But really now - and they were/are planning to pay the guy another $10 million for the detailed and construction plans once they like his design. I going to go buy me some more pencils - clearly (once again), I am in the wrong business.

Tip of the day - Have you ever logged into an FTP site, only to mis-type the password, and find yourself with an ftp> prompt that leads you nowhere? Did you terminate the FTP session and restart? Did you use the disconnect command, then open a new session? Well, instead, try user. FTP will then re-prompt you for username and password. Sure, you could use one of those systems that stores your password for you, or you could have your name and password on your system in plain text in a script you execute. And since whatever you do, the username and password go out over the wires in plaintext, any in-system security only protects you from sitting at your console type attacks. But those count, too.

That's all for the time being, as sunlight is streaming through the gaps in the blinds, letting me know that we should get out and about for a little while at least. Probably I need to get some new shoes to go with the new everything else I got yesterday. Hint- don't go shopping for a new suit - it is a shock to the psyche and the wallet. Later, people.

One of the nice things about VMware is that it allows me to play with Linux without 'endangering' (mostly) my current installation. I have been hearing rave reviews about KDE 2.0. Of course it is only available in development snapshots at the moment, and I really don't want to muck up my existing base configuration. However, I can fire up the VM configured for Linux, currently loaded with the 'potato' revision of Debian (the unstable, but almost ready for release edition). Put all the bits into Debian and start compiling. We are not talking about greased lightning here, but then again, I am CPU challenged at the moment, especially in comparison to this. I guess you could call it PC-envy.

Meantime, I went to www.kde.org, did a little reading here, a little reading there - not enough to really understand anything, mind you. Just enough to be dangerous. Then I spelunk'd down the ftp tree to the unstable snapshots branch, and started downloading... oops. From Germany. I forgot. Back up the tree, then into the mirror listing, then down in the /pub/mirrors/kde/unstable ... portion of ftp.varesearch.com - they are just up the road from me. Now things flew - I was getting 1.4 to 1.5 Mbps - close to at the upper limit of my download speed. Very cool. 11 meg file in 66.7 seconds. Head on over to TrollTech to pick up the latest copy of Qt - the widget library upon which KDE is based.

Now to the compiling - what you see above left is the beginning of the compilation process for Qt, running in a console window in GNU/Debian Linux in X/WindowMaker, running in a VMware window in RedHat in X/KDE 1.1.2 ... hehehe. Of course I am not having fun. This is hard work. (snicker)... More as things progress.

Oh, and this quote from mutagen, posted on /. today...

Ah yes, the fine line between "unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos, affording Man a greater understanding of the origins of life... itself!" and "incompetent bastards who repeatedly slam your tax dollars into distant planets"...

British expat Chris Ward-Johnson, aka Dr. Keyboard, is currently only one day behind the curve, but *now* he has taken exception to the current-linked redirection pages that some of us instituted. Apparently it is too difficult to edit a bookmark for some of Dr. K's readers. While I am sure that none of the visitors to this site are so challenged, Bob Thompson created a IE-enabled javascript AddToMyFavorites type of link at the top of his page, so I stole it. Fair's fair, after all. Anyway, this is now referred to as LINKING II at the top of this and every new week's page, going forward. Hope this helps, Chris... [All changed again, read below -b]

Bob is himself being given fits by Linux these days - and since he is truly gifted when it comes to playing with hardware and software, the problems really can only be laid at the Linux doorstep. Setup is non-trivial. MS stuff sets up with little to no intervention, and everyone knows how to give the three finger salute when MS starts screwing up... BTW - the three finger salute is a seriously bad thing to do to an *nix box, including Linux. Doesn't do unrecoverable things, unless you are running an ecommerce transaction server, and the buffers hadn't all be flushed to disk prior to taking your machine down... but then again, if that is your circumstance, then you probably have disabled your power button, and know how to switch virtual consoles to fix your problem and bring your machine back on in a graceful and elegant fashion... for a *nix, anyway.

But yeah, Linux isn't quite primetime yet, and I seriously hope that it doesn't pull a belushi - but then again, these are interesting times. I am sure that Bob will resolve his showstoppers, and bring things online. And once you *do* have it working as you desire, it does just keep running and running... very cool.

Hot update on linking from Bo Leuf...

The "simple" bookmark solution to a current-page redirection page is 
to on each normal page include the link (back) to current. This gives 
two features:

1. From any archive page you can go to the current week via the 
redirection.

2. Most browsers (I think) allow you to hotlist/bookmark the "link 
document", i.e. the URL that the link points to, without loading it.

/ Bo

Speaking of which, does anyone else out there remember Nethack? Sort of like Rogue, but cool - character-based graphics, yea and verily, brothers and sisters - CHARACTER-BASED GRAPHICS for the latest version of this game, freshly released and can be played on your 286... <g> The site is www.nethack.org.

Feedback and toys - I will let the feedback intro the toys. First out - Dan Seto :

It sure seems we are getting more and more complicated.
 
Alternative 1:
Do not use automatic redirection at all. In other words, still use what most 
of us are using as a "current.html" but remove the automatic redirection.
 
Pros: Simpler is better.
Cons: Reader has to manually click on the link which would then take 
them to the current posting.
 
Alternative 2:
Redesign the current.html to be an index of the postings which includes 
manual links to the current and past posts (essentially what Dr. Keyboard 
and Bo are doing now).
 
Pros: Simpler is better.
Cons: Download time of the index grows each day/week as more is added.
 
Old fashioned say you? Well, yes. But I think it solves more problems 
than it creates and it works *on all browsers*.
 
Aloha - Dan
 
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate"
"plurality should not be posited without necessity."
 William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349).

Then Bo chimes in with his three franc's worth...

Yup, this pretty much sums up a lot of web stuff -- kinda 
complicated, on the one hand (pro/con), on the other hand (pro/con), 
on the third hand (pro/con). Things that seem to make perfect, 
efficient sense, often turn out to have a lot of disadvantages in 
terms of how browsers and users actually work (or don't). From 
Bob's JScript solution (sort of IE-specific) at one end to meta-tag 
redirection on the other (not 100%, but almost, yet makes 
bookmarking the "current" less than easy). When I think about it, 
there are a number of reasons why I'm not rushing to move away 
from my Index->weekpage model. As for the size of Index, this gets 
slashed radically in a few weeks as I move the 1999 links to a 
separate page. Incidently, that's another reason why I don't go for 
day-by-day as e.g. Dr Keyboard-Dayupdater -- a weekly page keeps 
the index list tolerably small over a year. The overhead of by 
weekend attaining about a 20-40k page is not excessive, I think. (Dr 
Keyboard's graphically embellished day-pages have larger transfer 
overhead.) I actually prefer being able to scroll back and forth over 
a span of several days as I read some of the others' weekly pages, 
especially since I tend to load and read offline.

On a related subject -- inverted chronology. Although I use this 
frequently myself in other contexts (logs), I for some reason have 
problems reading a journal organized in this way. perhaps only 
because most journals are organized in correct order, and log entries 
are generally so short that the eye easily, even on screen, grasps the 
inverted order. With longer texts, the shift from top-to-bottom of 
lines, to bottom-to-top order of daily blocks simply becomes too 
disruptive. Vertical pingpong...

Thoughts from the server class...

/ Bo

To which I have no direct answer at the moment - my thoughts are leaning the way of what I was saying to Seto... Then I received the following from Gary Berg -

I'll have to admit that I really don't like the "currentpage.html"
re-direction type of solution; it seems to solve the problem, but it is
a bit inelegant.  I don't have any good suggestions of how to fix it,
but I do know that there ought to be a better solution.

Actually, I suppose the better solution would be what Shawn has done
with his stuff, generating the information from code.  But that kills
bookmarking, unless you do something where his current.asp page just
tosses the code from the named page to you.  BTW, have you been able to
get to Shawn's page this weekend - I get internal server errors trying
to get to his homepage?

Actually, Doc Keyboard's stuff isn't bad, but it is painful if you want
to read several days.  My biggest complaint is that he has too many day
pointers on the same page - that starting page has got to be huge.  It's
not bad at work on the fractional T1, but on a dialup it takes a while.

Nethack - ah, yes, I remember Nethack.  Spent many an hour playing with
it.  It's the same argument as between books and movies - your
imagination may create better monsters than the producer/director does.
I also remember Adventure and Dungeon from our old DEC PDP system; I
still remember laughing at the solution of how to kill the dragon!

And that brings us to current - Any reader feedback? I intend not to return to having a current.html that I rename something else at the end of the week. Either the scheme in effect now stays, or I change the (non-index page) entry point of the system to the index page, metajour.html. These are the choices I see at the moment. Any others (aside from cease and desist, Tom)?

Saint Nick dropped in a little early for Brian - last night at supper I was noting to our friend Nathan that he had more computers in his home office than Bob Thompson - Nathan was up to 8 that I could see, and didn't count the 4 systems in other locations in the house. I offered to relieve him of some of his burden, and Marcia let me get away with it. We now have a PIII box, currently clocked at 600 MHz, w/128M ram, 18G HD, DVD - I am setting up Motocross Madness - I haven't played with the Sidewinder Pro in months. Happy Sunday, all.


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