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.

Making a few updates to the structure here. Since it's Oh-Dark:30 here, I probably fubar'd something. Anyone find it (Don, you there?) please drop me an email - I tried to test, but my eyes still aren't pointing in one direction.

So here's the drill. The current.html redirector page will point in to the current day (or if, god forbid, I skip a day, the most recent day). You will note that each day now has within the week navigation, for ease of use with the occasional readers. Next to the bolded day name is the updates times - so you can glance at that and see whether or not I think something has changed. Like before, it is possible that I fail to change that. The time stuff isn't going to link down for the moment, but anything is possible in the future. These are my pages. Their purpose, aside from giving me space to vent my spleen and talk tech, is to share space with you here in Cyberia. So they're yours, too. Let me know.

Lowlights from Last Week - Mandrake 7.0 was released. I downloaded the tree, and did over-the-network FTP installs to Grinch, and to a VMware machine here on Grendel (which didn't work so very well). Some of the DeCSS people went to court in San Jose last Tuesday, and we're waiting for the judge, meantime two other suits proceed on the east coast - Support the EFF in support of our freedoms. I have been working with Steve Tucker on bringing his Linux box to life, over ICQ. I may have been some help, but experimentation is King when learning Linux (sounds like Steve is doing great). Got a CDR/RW drive (IDE, from HP) so I downloaded the Mandrake 7.0 ISO, and burned that (success, first time, out of the box - doesn't bode well for the rest of its life). Now I was able to load Air onto a VM quite easily. A couple of gripes, but overall, it went fine. Lots of screenshots from that, as well as a couple of (far too clean) home office shots graced these pages last Sunday.

On the menu for this week - Bringing sound up in Grinch - there's a Turtle Beach Montego in there, and I noted on Dave Farquhar's site that Linux drivers are out from the chipset manufacturer. More details as success or failure looms. There's more cleaning to be done about this joint, and always 75 more things than I actually have time for. Thanks for joining me in the race. Only one pertinent email out of the 30 or so overnighters...

Subject: Bilbrey & Svenson work areas
   Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 07:52:17 -0500
   From: Robert Bruce Thompson 
     To: [email protected]

I nominate Svenson for an award for best work area. I think we should fine Bilbrey.
 
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

Without too much stress, Shawn rings in with the first fubar of the day - With all the other changes I was doing, I forgot to change the dates next to each day. Fixed. Thanks, Shawn. Later.

So here we are, the end of a very damp Monday, more or less. That is, it's more or less the end of the day (altho' not really), but it has been very damp, raining without pause since I have been paying attention. Very odd for this part of the world. Usually we get breaks of some kind - enough to fit in a couple of sets, or 9 holes, or something.

I added time down-links from the beginning of each day - a tad more work at this end, but in testing it during the interim, I find that I would want them there, were I named Joe User. Haven't heard any peep of feedback from anyone today. I will choose to regard that as the good Sound & Lights (technical theater) guy that I am. If I do my job right, nobody notices me. Hmmm. That's OK, actually. I am just enjoying myself, here.

A Mandrake 7.0 Air update... First, I have been remiss. The website for Mandrake is at this location - http://www.linux-mandrake.com. They do very good work. There are tweaks, and I am writing up some reports on my troubles that I hope will help them tune this for the next batch. I have yet to try a couple of paths through the installer that are fairly obvious. - I have re-installed on Grinch with the CD I burned yesterday, and had major networking problems - ended up having to fix bits by hand and reboot to be sure that they took. I am still suspicious that Linuxconf doesn't actually do what it says it should, and a killall -HUP inetd didn't bring up my changes, and my connectivity, but a reboot did. Sigh. I shouldn't have to do that, means I don't know enough.

The sound card drivers available from the Aureal (thanks, Dave) look like they should do the job, but I haven't been able to get them running yet - apparently it looks like the compiled module shows as a different version than the kernel, and I really don't feel like a kernel rebuild in order to get sound, tonight, so I won't.

Really feeling kind of draggy and slothful today/tonight. So I am flinging myself into Perl for a while. Hope it helps. Maybe more later, maybe not.


Orb Home  /  Top (& search)  /  Index & Links  /  Email Bilbrey

Priorities are what life is all about. To paraphrase Doug Adams, the progression of civilization is epitomized by the following three questions. "When is lunch?"- an important concept in your basic hunter gatherer society. "What is for lunch?"- the key to a group which has progressed far enough to have choices. "Where are we going to do lunch, darling?" - The decline and fall of civilization as we know it.

The rain continues. According to both Yahoo, and MercuryCenter, we can expect the rest of today as well as some of the next couple of days to be dampish. Overall, this is a good thing - we were terribly shy on the moisture scale, and those poor ski resort operators were getting tromped on. One aspect of the weather that I appreciate the most is the impending greening of the hills. It takes a round of rain like this to take the cloak of fall grey from the hills, and gown them in fresh green. Looking forward to that.

Frightening - The "Bilbrey School of Design", kinda makes you shudder, doesn't it? Me too, but then there's this... 'Disclaimer, I am also of the un-Bilbrey school of color design and like a dark background and contrasting text.' - that from Seto, on the back channel, and this, '...but please note that I am of the Farquhar (un-Bilbrey) school of blue or red on black.' (Bowman) OK, so maybe I am the un- or urBilbrey, one by whose negation things are defined, and Farquhar is the one with the school. Cool. I actually like that. Then there was this kind note -

Subject: Your Site - "Look & Feel"
   Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 21:00:41 -0800
   From: "J.H. Ricketson" <[email protected]>
     To: [email protected]

Dear Brian,

Hope you're enjoying our "Sunny California" weather. Enjoy it while it 
lasts, and think of what it does for the ski bunnies! Actually, I rather 
enjoy being cocooned in a nice warm, snug home and listening to it rain 
on the roof and deck. Very cozy feeling. Plus - I'm retired and I don't 
have to get out in it unless I run out of Rainier Ale. That qualifies 
as a life-threatening situation and calls for immediate action.

Anyway - I like the new look & feel. Well organized, intuitive, and very 
readable. Congratulations. Keep up the good work. I really appreciate the 
effort you and the rest of the Daynites mob put into it.

My best regards.

JHR
--
[J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo]
[email protected]                       

I am looking to be retired, as well, but given the family history, I will be late for my funeral at age approximately 108, because I have a project to finish at work :).

Time gone - out into the commute with me. Later.

A brief drop in, just to acknowledge Marcia for catching the latest fubar in the design - two identically named anchors (targets, whatever), especially one named current, simply will not do. Fixed. Thanks, Darlin'.

Drives die. We know that drive quality comes and goes, what's hot this year ain't so hot last year, yada yada yada. Which entirely fails to explain the 5 dead Western Digital HD's in my hands over the last 12 months. Grinch's HD is dust, and I am real busy. Sorry for the short shrift, but you know. Instead, pop on over to Marcia's, check out her musings if you haven't recently (if you haven't ever, then shame). Maybe later.

Got the snap linked at left from an old friend Dan (not a daynoter). Though y'all might get a chuckle out of it. Got the Win98 part reinstalled, including Office and other squiggly bits, most of which I am going to have to download again. When I can bring the CDR/RW back online then I will probably burn my downloads directory to a disk, just for ease of use. One little problem though - in the clean up, I appear to have misplaced the docs and installation CDROM. Hmmm. You don't suppose . . . nah, I couldn't have cleaned them out to the dumpster, now could I?

Dave let me know that he also doesn't have a school of design, but that breaking the rules takes talent. I, of course, manage just fine without talent. Brute force and persistence, that's my forte. Along with a decent dose of warped humor, and hardware prices that just keep dropping, how can a guy go wrong. (No, please don't answer that question, I'd like to stay married <g>). G'night.


Orb Home  /  Top (& search)  /  Index & Links  /  Email Bilbrey

Good Morning. Peeking out the window I see a mostly clear, cold morning, with fog adorning the hills about. The mail was fairly light this morning, and the following headline jumped out at me at Yahoo - Cuban Boy to Meet Grandmothers at Home of Miami Nun. The other day, when I was talking about Hollywood running the world . . . I may have been right. Truman? But surely that headline isn't generated by a news person. That reads like straight script.

The Coca-Cola Company has posted an operating loss. Not my fault - I do my best, darn it. Oh, the DeCSS code, of course, is one of the exhibits in the hearings taking place in San Jose. Some kind soul has posted some of the declarations and exhibits. You can read what they don't want you to read by clicking on this link, then following the dvd-hoy-reply.htm link. I don't direct link in this case, because you should see John Young's disclaimer below the link. This is especially significant, since the DVD CCA is going back into court this morning filing an emergencyex parte motion to seal the records, since the code they are trying to stifle is now a part of public legal record. heh heh heh - I really don't think they get it.

Running late, so I will catch you later.

Sorry, had this all down in Thursday for a while. Hmmm. The reason for this mid-day is that I have found that it is now (at least temporarily) illegal to post the DeCSS code here in California. Check my DeCSS page for details. Meantime they arrested and questioned the Norwegian kid who RE'd the code so that he could watch his DVD's on his Linux box. And they arrested his dad, as well, since the kid posted the info on his dad's site. There are many articles about this event here's one. There are lots of disturbing trends evident in this whole shebang, but enough for now -back to work.

Good news. The Grinch is fully back to life. One Maxtor ST0192000U later, Win98 and Linux Mandrake 7.0 are both up at full steam. The longest operation was remembering to boot using the Win98 rescue disk, allowing me to partition large disks. (The Win98 is an upgrade to the Win95 that came with, and the boot disks are all vintage Win95, sigh.) Office2K's loaded up, as well as Illustrator, PhotoDeluxe II, Acrobat 4.0 and AutoCAD Lt. Data files retrieved from backup on Grendel and all is right. There was very little beyond the initial installation on the Mandrake 2/3 of the box, since I had just started playing with it. I think that I am going to set up Samba to support a network mountable partition, directly off of Grendel, to save the backup having to mount a share from Grinch. Should be a lot faster, though I am probably going to upgrade the hub to 100Mbps anyway - easier for moving large docs and images around.

I am still tracking what happened in court this AM regarding the sealing of court records including the DeCSS code. The disclaimer on Jonh Young's Crypto page has moved from the top links area down into the text body area. The code is still posted as a copy of the exhibits, so one presumes that the records have not been sealed. Let's check a couple of other sources... No new news.

I have some Perl work to get caught up with, before the prior knowledge drops out of one of the leaky points in this village idiot's brain <G>. Later.


Orb Home  /  Top (& search)  /  Index & Links  /  Email Bilbrey

Someone was saying something about low traffic yesterday. That must have been a harbinger of things to come, in a form of negative fulfillment. Hey. Good morning. Happy Thursday. So, in and out of the shower, a quick check of Grinch, and all appears stable. Now for the Linux test. I am going to run a kernel compile. That stresses the machine something fierce. I know people on the mailing list who swear by two or three passes through a kernel compilation as the best ram test there is. When you get to linking, if a corrupted file is found, then dollars to donuts ...

Anyway. Low traffic. Pop onto Grendel and (as Bill the Cat would say) "Aaack-pbbsbt!!!" 97 new messages overnight - hmmm - 80 of them in the SVLUG list - I know someone's mailer has been set up improperly, so that SVLUG messages get bounced to the list, creating duplicates. One hopes that is the case.

Heh heh heh - MS issues the first security patch for Index Server 2.0 and Indexing Service in Win2K. Heh. Linux, anyone? <SEG< The mail from my cron daemon indicates that the backup went fine last night. Swap tapes, one to work, new tape in the drive.

Subject: stuff sent
   Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 06:24:40 +0000
   From: [email protected]
     To: [email protected]

Thanks for ordering from Copyleft.  This is to confirm that your order,
with invoice nnnnnnnn, was just shipped with UPS tracking no:
 XX YYY SSS EE NNN OOO W

                                Thanks,
                                tedd, the guy who mails people

Subject: Cron  run-parts /etc/cron.daily
   Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 04:02:01 -0800
   From: [email protected] (Cron Daemon)
     To: [email protected]

error: mysql:8 unknown option 'endscript' -- ignoring line
error: apache.former:17 duplicate log entry for /var/log/httpd/agent_log

Then there's the following, snagged from among the many copies of things on the SVLUG list - how to co-exist W2K and Linux ... details on what it is doing tonight - I am running late. G'day.

You need to install LILO to the boot sector of your root partition (im
assuming you can get into linux, probably through a floppy, if you can
reinstall it anywhere else).  You then need to make an image of LILO, this
can be done using dd:

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/boot/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

You then need to copy the bootsect.lnx to a dos floppy, and then put it in
your c: partition in win2k.  Edit c:\boot.ini and add this line:

c:\bootsect.lnx="Linux"

this adds a 'linux' option to the win2k boot menu, which takes you to
LILO.

have fun..

Evening. TGIAF, that's wot I say. Good glow from tonight's run, about 50 minutes worth (of run, that is). The warm, relaxed muscles will tighten up on me and make me miserable by morning, 'til I stretch and run again, but it was a good evening to run.

It's raining mail... Definitely someone set their autoresponder up in such a way that the mailing list is getting bounces. Sigh. 70 more messages tonight, more until they cut the jerk off. Rule number 1377-stroke-ZED: Thou shalt not allow one's autoresponder to reply to messages not directly addressed to you.

Grinch seems to be happy with his replacement HD. No odd noises emanating from bits of computer that shouldn't be that noisy. No odd, sector not found messages. Sheesh - I thought I had left sector not found messages long behind me. Runs through a kernel compilation - make bzImage in 00:08:33. Snappy. Something about a faster CPU and PC100 memory, methinks. That's a PIII-600, 128M of 100 MHz Ram. By comparison, the PII-233, 128M of 66 MHz RAM, lots of spare HD on Grendel is running a timed compile right now. Not quite apples and apples, since we are talking about two different kernel revision levels here 2.2.13 on Grendel, 2.2.14 on Grinch, but mostly the same thing. Results when they are in. Now on to Perl. Wait! Now how's this for results - Grendel rolls in at 00:11:07. Hmmm. Did I do something fancy to this machine that I don't remember? Ah, well. Maybe it has to do with the priority of the job - more on this later, perhaps.

Large Image Warning. But the image that I am sending to UPS Customer Service, and referring to MS (more on that in a moment) is of the shattered MSDN January 2000 Library CD's. I come by this frailty legitimately, being an owner and occasional user of Visual C++. What I find unacceptable is that someone at UPS found this, in this condition. I know because all the little bits were collected, placed into the box, then taped up. So I was ready to let this go, then thought better of it, because the UPS driver simply left this trash at my doorstep (literally)!

Now for annoyance number 2. It is easy to locate an email address to send something (complaint, praise) to UPS. There are NO email addresses that I have been able to find, at least on the MSDN portion of the MS site. Inexcusable. Selling software? Customer service is number one ... hmmm. Sorry, what was I thinking? So I have to fill out a stinking form, and HOPE they get back to me. Since I can't send them the picture directly, I am sending them a link to the image here. Hope they get the hint, eh? Probably not, since upon submitting the stinking form, they come up with the disclaimer that they PROBABLY won't respond, due to the volume of submissions they receive. Sigh. G'night.

TO UPS Customer Service :

As you can see from the attached image, I have a little problem with the shipment from Microsoft to me. Not much that can be done about it at this point from your end, I have let MS know so that they might replace the shattered disks.

What astonishes me is that the package, which had clearly had the small bits poured back into it, then been taped shut, was delivered to me in such a condition. Would your policy in such a case not be to return to the sender for replacement, instead of delivering a pile of garbage to a customer, thus hurting two reputations with one delivery?

Best wishes at improving your services.


Orb Home  /  Top (& search)  /  Index & Links  /  Email Bilbrey

One observation that countless people have noted, down through the ages, is that problems are interesting. Things that go smoothly, trouble free, serene and easy are not only boring and un-newsworthy, they are hard to write about. Extremely repetitive problems ('Oh, darn, had to reboot the windows box again!') are seriously boring. That's why linux is so much fun, has so much buzz. While it is a rock solid, very stable platform, there are foops in the loading, there's unsupported hardware, there's lots of window managers, all customizable. My god, choices. This is buzz generating stuff here. All that and inexperience crashes even rock solid systems in new and innovative ways every day.

Good Morning. TGIF. This in from Bo, on the service issue noted last night.

Subject: service
   Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:46:34 +0100
   From: Bo Leuf
     To: [email protected]

You posted apropos UPS...

> Would your policy in such a case not be to return to the sender for
> replacement, instead of delivering a pile of garbage to a customer,
> thus hurting two reputations with one delivery?

You me and everyone else, but clearly some people get trained by the 
same experts in customer gratification who traditionally train post 
office workers . When reading your comments I did have this 
vision of someone consciencously counting all the pieces and taping 
with utmost concentration -- a job well done.

Twenty years ago, I imported books and rpg games. In 81 I visited 
one of my suppliers in NYC and got a first hand glimpse into the kind 
of people who were employed to pack stuff. Hmm, yes, I began to 
realize why shipments were incomplete and incorrect so often. The 
manager explained that the problem was a common one in the US at 
that time, with unmotivated workers in the packing and shipping 
departments who frequently did their jobs (sort of) while in a joint-
haze. Looking again at his packing line, with these young guys moving 
in slow-motion, I just shook my head.

/ Bo

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

Time for me to run. Sierra manara.

Bob questions my use of garbled spanish sounding words. I presume you can guess where he was going when he translated to "Mountains of S...", but in reality, an occasional habit of mine is to speak in fake Spanish gibberish, in self-mockery of my 6 years of Spanish, of which I have retained . . . nothing. Sorry.

Highlights from the day on PacBell... "All of California may not have connectivity at this time due to the AT&T Global Network being down." That was at 14:35 PST. Latest, about 20 minutes ago (19:04) "Parts of California outside of the Los Angeles area may not be able to connect to the Internet at this time due to an ATT Global Network outage." The first describes the Internet as DOWN, the latter as Impaired. If only LA is connected to the Internet, then I would have to agree, the Internet is impaired. My first warning of problems came from Dan Bowman - but I hadn't noticed any difficulty at all, and could connect world wide all afternoon. I sure hope that this is not affecting Shawn negatively (just thought of that).

I am pretending to work a little with Shawn, who is striving mightily with an FTP load of RH 6.1. Meantime, I am struggling mightily to transfer my VMware work off of Grendel and onto Grinch. I believe that VMware will benefit mightily from a 600 megawiggle processor and faster ram. We shall see - a full report on the first install tomorrow. Odd, though, as the automounter for the CDROM drives under Mandrake 7.0 appear to be ready and able to battle the VMware for control of the drives. Sheesh. I am installing Win98 on a VM as a first pass. Should be interesting.

Oddly, I have heard nothing from either Microsoft or UPS about my recent delivery. <G> However, we are hosting a V-site for my sister- and brother-in-law, Bill and Sue, who do mission work in Brasil. The site we set up for them can be found at spoelhof.dutchgirl.net. Also, the daynotes mirror that lives here on my box is available as a direct alias now, at <<gone>>. Hope you find them interesting, informative and useful. Lastly, I am pulling the sample site information that I had done speculative development on, as I don't own the art or the information. They have apparently decided not to retain my services, but I got another strong bite today. Face meeting on the topic next weekend, so we'll keep our various anatomical parts crossed.

Lastly, for now, our connections to the world are going up and down faster than a White House Intern... ooooh, sorry. Some days I hate computers, others... well, we'll see. I know people can see us, as I watch the server logs scroll by. But I can't see more than three feet past the end of the wire leaving this building right now. Very strange. Betcha there are some very 'happy' ATT techs running about right now trying to save their boss' jobs. Later.

A couple of final notes to finish out the night -

Subject: Network problems
   Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 23:53:35 -0500
   From: "Gary M. Berg" 
     To: Brian Bilbrey 

You are annoyed - my ISP is AT&T Global Network (previously the IBM
Advantis network)!

Suddenly this afternoon, from work, I couldn't get my incoming mail.  I
couldn't even DNS the POP server (hmmm, maybe I had that right the first
way I typed it - the POOP server!).  I finally broke down this evening
after trying again and set up my CompuServe account to dial in to the
net.  It worked, I sent mail, and found I could find my AT&T Global
account.  Logged off, dialed in with AT&T Global, and it worked too.
Sheesh!

The echoes continue to reverberate about the SVLUG list, as the bouncing mail comes and goes. Dan Bowman was hosed on connectivity at work, is just fine at home. Best wishes to Bob for a speedy recovery from squeeky-ness ... apparently Malcolm just laughs at him <g> Win98 is up and running in a VMware 2.0 for Linux (Beta) window - report with lots of shots, sometime this weekend. G'night.


Orb Home  /  Top (& search)  /  Index & Links  /  Email Bilbrey

J. H. Ricketson, who recently sent some interesting material to Dan Bowman, responded to my email of yesterday, expressing interest in seeing more about VMware. I presume that he saw the original Win2K on VMware report that I did back at the beginning of December '99.

As noted in last night's report, I began playing with VMware 2.0 for Linux (Beta), and got it up and running. In a command performance, here's the VMware 2.0 Beta report. This time, I have linked in a script capture of the entire VM machine installation, prior to the configuration and loading of the first VM. Also, note that all reports are available from the Meta-Journal - an index of these pages. I've been at this for 3 hours - mostly images, half of which I decided not to use. Probably did this too early, and without enough caffeine in my system, to boot. In addition, I have a lot to accomplish (non-computer today, and we have guests for an early supper this evening. I will probably drop in a couple of times, to print the derogatory mail this report will bring (yes, I am joking - I only print glowing letters -g-). Or/and maybe a late update. Happy Saturday, y'all.

Well. Overall, quite a day. Got lots done, the apartment sparkles. We had a lovely supper with our friends Pat and Nathan, a belated birthday celebration for him, among other things. You may or may not have noticed that Orb was down for about 45 minutes this morning. Therein lies a tale.

I had noted some odd behaviour recently in trying to ftp in to Grendel from the allowed hosts (recently being within the last couple of days). Now I am running Mandrake 6.1 on this box, and there are things different about this distribution from the RH6.0 upon which it was originally based. I had forgotten about chkconfig, you see, so I didn't know what services were starting. I went tearing into Linuxconf instead, and in error disabled xfs. Apparently my scrambled little grey cells couldn't remember that that is the X Font Server - I think I translated as eXperimental File System. Anyway, I locked the system up solid, restarting first inetd, then X. I am sure the services to the outer world were fine, but I couldn't touch the box. So, after a little mucking about, I realized what I had done, and rebooted with a three-finger salute.

Ctrl-Alt-Del is trapped by the OS, and a clean shutdown occurs as a result. Much better than a powerdown. The forced fsck's after a dirty shutdown are painful, so I was grateful I could shut down. I rebooted, and at the lilo prompt, entered 'linux single' - the equivalent of a safe mode boot. There I was able to run 'chkconfig --list', and confirm that I had shut off the xfs. Sigh. Easy from here. 'chkconfig --level 5 xfs on' and I was on the road again. A quick reboot later - all was both hunky and dory.

I noted in an email sometime this afternoon, 'You break Linux, then learn stuff fixing it. Windows breaks, and you learn how to reboot.' I know that goes too far, and is certainly an exaggeration, but there is more than one grain of truth there.

Subject: Shipping and packaging
   Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 13:27:25 -0700
   From: John Doucette {[email protected]}
     To: Bilbrey, Bo Leuf 

Hi

I worked for a warehouse once that picked, packaged and shipped orders to
7-11 stores etc and to other regional warehouses. Frozen goods were shipped
in insulated boxes with approx 2 cubic yards of capacity. It was not
uncommon for the packers to intentionally squish frozen goods to get the
container closed. To my knowledge there were never any complains about
damages from the stores or warehouses. It must have been an accepted
practice.

Also in the big walk in freezer, pickers would walk on everything to get at
what they needed. It was not unheard of to see foot prints in the frozen
cakes.

When I first started working there I took exception to this behavior, but in
time I was brought over to the dark side and I too was damaging goods to get
containers closed, and leaving foot prints in the cake.

John

Part of my way of living, that I actually manage to follow most of the time, both personally and professionally, is to treat others as I would be treated, especially when they aren't looking, and may never know. I find that pays off for me in peace of mind, if nothing else.


Orb Home  /  Top (& search)  /  Index & Links  /  Email Bilbrey

Stupid Bowl Sunday. Wait, let me check, I think . . . no, not yet, but in the dawn light, the clouds are lowering, the wind is picking up, and the forecast is for rain. I guess no adventuresome Sunday drives to get away from this one. I know, we don't have to turn on the tube, but we live in an apartment - there are neighbors who will be shouting, screaming, yelling, eating nachos. Well, it's not as bad as Christmas. There isn't as much of a retail run-up, and if it is accidentally on, then at least some of the commercials have been known to be entertaining.

Subject: VMWare - Thanks!
   Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 23:55:08 -0800
   From: "J.H. Ricketson" 
     To: [email protected]

.b -

Ah the joys of PacHell. I was with them for a ~couple of years (charter 
member & beta tester) until they got greedy and arbitrarily raised their 
rate. Byee! Thence to DNAI.COM, where I lived very happily until they were 
taken over and overall quality rapidly declined. Byee!

Anyhoo - Thanks much for your prompt & informative post (01.29 Daynotes). 
Exactly what I wanted. Bookmarked for future reference. I am VERY 
positively impressed by VMWare. It seems to be exactly what I had hoped 
for. Even if there is a hit for the emulation process, I am no gamester, 
and even at worst my PC can process faster than I can type. So - no problem.

You lost me on one curve though - the discussion of spindles/virtual 
disks/physical disks. Could you point me to a URL or book that discusses 
the finer points of these in greater detail?

As you are aware, I tend toward paranoia. As a result, I do not want to 
casually mix Mandrake in with a now rock-steady multiboot system. I have 
read horror stories of what IX/UX will do to an MBR. Would it be feasible 
to put Mandrake & VMWare on a third SCSI HDD in the same box as DISK0 & 
DISK1 in my multi-boot system? Or would I be better off keeping it in a 
separate box?

I appreciate that you are at least as busy as I, and that there are far 
more question-askers (manymany) than answerers (1), and that your time is 
valuable and finite. I don't ask for a dissertation. Links to URLs or 
appropriate books will be just dandy, and that at your convenience, when 
you have the luxury of spare time. When push comes to shove, I'd rather 
read your Daynotes than a specific answer to me.

Regards,

JHR
--
[J.H. Ricketson in San Pablo]
       [email protected] 

I am rarely too busy to answer questions - I find that questions give me a focused reason for learning something in far more depth (in order to explain it properly, or die in the attempt). Glad you liked the VMware thing.

.sig of the moment time... See you later. Oh, yeah - and the rain is on.

"you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect"