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.

Howdy, all. Thanks for being patient. We got out for a couple of days and made off to Morro Bay, on the central California coast, about halfway between SF and Los Angeles. Although the weather was to be sneered at, a good time was had. We stayed in a place that I simply cannot in good faith recommend, so will not mention their name publicly, but if you ever go to Morro Bay, write me and I will tell you where NOT to stay. We shall discuss food shortly.

However, on day 2 of the adventure, we went whale watching. Two dramamine with breakfast made sure that there were no problems, as it was a fairly choppy day. Not terrible from my perspective, but there were other passengers decorating the waters from railside. To the left you see just ONE of the MANY pictures which I took of the waters occupied just moments before by a whale. Sigh. They really weren't cooperating, but then again, after the treatment they have had at our hands over the years, I find it bloody amazing that they let boats anywhere near. 2.5 hours on the water, and we saw one head, couple of bodies and several blows. No tail shots to be taken advantage of.

To the right you find a shot of the original switchboard used at Hearst Castle. It adjoined a dial-less telephone - you pick up the handset and tell the operator the number you are calling. But first, food.

Both evenings we ate at Dorn's Original Breakers Cafe. The first night, we had a prawn cocktail as appetizer. My meal was broiled salmon filet over steamed spinich, with rice pilaf and lightly saute'd broccoli and carrots on the side. Yumalishious. Marcia had the beef brouchette. Apparently the meat just melted in her mouth. No room for dessert for either of us. Breakfast on whale watching day was chicken-fried steak, eggs, potatos, toast, coffee.... A many hour nap was called for. Instead we went to sea in a small boat. Hmmm.

Sunday evening we returned to Dorn's, as I wanted a shot at the dead cow flesh. We both ordered New York steaks. Aged and marinated to perfection, again with rice, joined with perfectly steamed zuchini. Not to be sniffed at. Dorn's is highly recommended, and not just because we didn't have to wash up afterwards. Great food, very generous portions, friendly service - Dorn's gets three thumb's up from this motie.

Monday, as a side trip (sort of) on the way home, we went to Hearst Castle, as previously alluded to. Nice swimming pool, eh? Also a dining table of European monastic origin. Much of interest. Marcia has (will have) a lot more pictures of our trip on her pages.

All in all, it was a wonderful mini-adventure. It is nice to be home, and since it was a holiday weekend, I was granted partial immunity, and only have about 175 emails to wade through. That said, I better knock them out.


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

Good Morning. I am still not nearly caught up with the world after three days away (OK, so I had to sleep. Alright, Chris?). You may or may not remember having seen Dan Bowman's post of last Saturday regarding the Stanford study about how the net isolates and and leaves us less social animals than before. Dan took exception to that, and I do as well - in much the same manner. Dan said it so well that I left it alone. For another take on the topic, also not agreeing with the study 'conclusions', Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox is on this one like flies on paper, too.

Yesterday, I put up a brief description and a couple of pictures of our trip to Morro Bay, from over the holiday weekend. What I left out, duh, was the important bit. The trip is really about Marcia and I getting away together. Living here in the valley, the pace is really rather frenetic. It is nice to get someplace where the VenCap people don't have their claws so deep into the land, and just enjoy the simple pleasure of each other's company. Now dat's what it is truly being, boys and girls. That said, Marcia has a big report with *lots* of pictures up here.

Nothing else of vast interest this AM. I am for a cup of mud, and the road. Have a lovely Tuesday, I will see you later.

I have been struggling away with some new artwork for a couple of ETS ads. I kind of like the one on the right. How about you? I also figure that an extra 4 hours is enough for home work (I took a break to make chicken stirfry for dinner). Haven't heard yea or nay, but I presume that Tom came in at the wire, and Outlook in a Nutshell is in production. Good on him. Remind me to order that later this week - I will be needing it for work. Also been having fun with JHR, but I think I am going to shut this puppy down. Got lots of lightning about. Gonna make for a good show. Good night.


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

And a FINE damp Wednesday to you all. The lightning last evening didn't adversely affect us, although the thunder was wonderful - wide, deep and rolling. Some fun news from the reels, yesterday, though. Judge Jackson compares Microsoft to Standard Oil, then proceeds to dismantle their copyright defense. Methinks they may wish just about now that they had been a little more aggressive at the settlement board over the last few weeks.

I learned some interesting things about using the Gimp to do illustration (as you can see above). Clearly the ability to use a tool, and talent don't go hand in hand, but I am having a good time, and getting my ideas to come out of the end of the process, which is the goal, anyhow. One of the real difficulties that I am having is that the documentation for the Gimp just sucks large rocks through a garden hose. The online (http://www.gimp.org) and printed (Sam's Teach Yourself Gimp in 24 hours) documentation I have both suffer from not giving the correct path to a command. Tricky when commands are 3 and 4 levels down in the menus.

I understand that documenting this sort of project is really the third cousin of the dog-catcher's second wife: ill-regarded and left until after development for a release is done, at which point the decision is made. Documentation, or start coding the next version. For external documenters, the job is harder, because the target keeps moving. Interesting thoughts colliding in my head on this one. Later.

"Good Evening?" He says smarmily, trying his best to do an oily Eric Idle lounge host impression, somehow, indescribably failing miserably . . . and being cheered by the fact. Just an excerpt below from one of JHR's many missives of the day.

Brian - FWIW, I must say that I prefer the left-hand image. Immediate reaction: 
friendly. beautiful. very hi-tech. intriguing. Immediate reaction to right-hand 
image: ewwww yuck!  Dr. Frankenstein's lab. Something found on the road after 
an extremely messy auto accident. Sorry to disagree - but truth is mandatory 
among friends.

Coming up soon, Los Lobos at the Filmore in SF. You may remember that I won tickets to that one on KFOG recently. If you like acoustic alternative and classic rock, then keep an ear on the KFOG world service (online radio), as they are running over the upcoming weekend all six of their Live from the Archives CD's. KFOG refers to this as a bootleg weekend.

.sig of the moment:

Bill Gates is an eye monocle and a fluffy white cat away 
from becoming a James Bond villian.

Morning. Dates are fixed. In the rush of unpacking and all Monday evening, well, I just plain forgot to change all the in-page dates. Sorry. Heh. You can tell it's spam when Women.com is inviting me to vote. Last I checked, the equipment was wrong for that particular label. Spam, Wonderful Spam....

Got Adobe FrameMaker 5.5.6 Beta for Linux last night and installed it. Here's the link. A little tricky - I should make some post about this tonight - From what I remember, FrameMaker is unparalleled at handling technical documents and editing. This is a free, license-set-to-expire-12/31/2000 Beta version. I had given 5.5.5 a shot, but had some difficulties (conflicts with mode resolutions in the SVGA X-Server or some such). This appears to have cleared SOME of that up, but of course, I am running a more capable video card now, and running at 32 bits 1280x1024. There are some odd initial configuration bits that I don't understand - park the help files in ../usenglish, then the program looks for the help files in ../ukenglish. Hmmm. Where's the config file???

Here's an interesting link to look at - HP's OpenMail. I think I mentioned something about this before. This is HP's Exchange Server equivalent, supports Outlook, and who knows what else, right now. Unsupported, 50 user, full function version is available for the right (free) price. For more info, click on the Linux link in the Hot Topics off the above page linked. I need to take a long hard look at this one. Free is perfect for small companies, and as/if they grow into more than 50 users, well then you can afford the real deal, huh?

Time to run. TTFN.

Subject: re ad artwork
   Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 17:26:47 -0600
   From: Robin Whitson {[email protected]}
     To: [email protected]

I vote for the nova one. Looks more professional.

Enjoy the column. Looking forward to using the Linux resources you put up
last week. Am building a Pentium Pro Linux box over the weekend (I hope).

Robin Whitson

Which distro are you planning on bringing up on the PPro boxen?

Home a little earlier than normal today, since I was over on the peninsula after lunch to meet with an old friend about some promotional / retail packaging for one of the ETS product line. A nice box is better, I think, than plain jane blister packing, but then there's always the $$$ to consider, eh?

Zo, ve haf to vind anoter vay to make you tok, yees? Into Programming Perl I go, having finished off Learning Perl before we left for holiday over the weekend. Through another CD into the coffee cup holder, let the ripping begin. I am building a couple of mp3 disks for work and such. Are there standard boomboxes out on the market that play mp3's? Haven't heard. Also, any recommendation on Windows MP3 clients? I know from nothing on this. Probably more later.

Oooooooh - NEW .sig of the moment (culled from Slashdot)

"If I wanted your input on this project, I'd cut out your entrails 
and divine the future from your liver." - DigitalMuse

Hi Brian & Marcia:
 
I need some help searching for a good source for making a custom music 
CD.  I am sooo lame on searching the internet and I thought you
might have some actual experience with a good site for this.  I checked 
out muscimaker.com, but it did not have two of the artists I have to
have (Janet Jackson and Ah Ha) (workout music, of course).  Let me 
know if you have any leads for me.  This is obviously not urgent in any
way

Friday. A good name for one of the better days of the week. I have just spent the last 45 minutes reading interesting emails about partitioning and other topics, instead of typing here. One interesting trick was revealed to these eyes - symlink /opt  to /usr/local. Some programs like to install one place, some the other, but they can actually all live under one roof, if you move your /opt tree over to /usr/local, then rm /opt and ln -sf /usr/local /opt (as superuser, of course). (Don't forget the move existing contents step!)

Email is doing the White House Intern thing again. Sigh. When will I learn? As noted a couple of weeks ago, I have been looking at providing full service email on grendel for Marcia and myself, since PacBell's email servers were down for about 3 days in a row. Now the problem is merely an intermittent password authentication problem, which PBI techs claim to have solved sometime yesterday afternoon. Hmmm. The issue here is that most if not all of the Pop and Imap servers are relatively fragile, in a security sense. Haven't had the time to fully research yet, and don't know when I will. Maybe sooner than later, though. I continue to look at OpenMail, and may setup and configure that. Be an interesting experience, if nothing else (probably more work, though).

Now I must be off to the races. Later.

Welcome to my weekend. Hopefully, it's your's, too. Interesting day. Got some mail indicating Moshe's site was down, and volunteered Grendel as a temporary home until he rebuilds his machine. With luck, MoeLabs will be up and running again sometime in the next 12 hours, hangin' out at Chez Grendel.

Also came across this on Slashdot. If you find programming interesting, and C++ in particular, the interview of Bjarne Stroustrup is online now. Well done, good reading (if not exactly riveting, heh). In that interview, a link to Stroustrup's papers page. Some good stuff up there.

Dave Farquhar passed on a link, www.linux.org/dist/english.html, in response to a question from Dan Seto about Linux living nice with Windows. I had noted that the RH 6.2 Beta that I played with offered that as an option. May be worth giving a shot. Later. Back to Perl, for now. Probably no dinner tonight, because I had a late, large lunch. Probably just enough room for dessert late in the evening.

Interesting, I am ripping and encoding on both Grendel and Grinch at the moment, building up a big MP3 library to cut to CDR at some point in the near future. Grendel, which is the far slower machine, has a MUCH faster CDROM drive, about 32X would be my guess. The Creative drive in Grinch is a fair bit slower. Ripping appears to be primarily gated by drive speed. Whereas encoding is CPU bound (well, duh!). The upshot is that Grendel rips at about 4x Grinch, but encodes at about 0.25x Grinch. This process would be helped by a dual processor box, but I doubt that will be enough justification for Marcia (this year). See ya!


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

Well, harrumph! My main inbox (unsorted, non-list mail) had one spam, and two cron-job mails in it. That's all. Sigh. OTOH, 2000 raw hits, and over 500 page views in the last two days. Hmmm. Ok, a little bit of yesterevening's mail to round things out.

Subject: Rippin and Encoding
   Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 21:23:38 -0600
   From: Shawn Wallbridge [[email protected]]
     To: Brian Bilbrey 

If it helps you with convincing Marcia. My Plextor 40x UW SCSI CD rips at
25x and I encode at about 5x. That's on a Dual 450 w/ 320MB. The Dual
doesn't have much to do with it, but it I can have two encoders running at
once. Just think of all the time you could free up for trips to the beach ;)

Oh, perhaps coffee would help. Concentration difficulties this AM, for some odd reason. There's a couple of interesting bits over on New Scientist - signature recognition and something that a couple of Aussie physicists are claiming that we are noting but frothy randomness (well, they say it a bit more technically).

Aaargh! First the One-Click patent, and now THIS! (Sorry for the long URL). But it would appear that Amazon has now been granted a patent on Affiliate Programs. I am sorry, but I always thought that patents were to protect the physical implementation of ideas (that is, "devices"). Now perhaps I can see some wonderful new thing that can ONLY be done in conjunction with hardware and software being patented, but hasn't Amazon merely taken the tupperware party concept online and called it a patentable concept, here? Well, at least we know now HOW they plan on being profitable. Sigh.

09:22 - I knew I needed coffee! Anyway, errands, chores and more today. Costco run in the immediate future. Who knows what else? Laundry was handled last night, including the salt encrusted things from our whale-watching expedition of last weekend. I am still on the hunt for a Wacom tablet - who knows what the day may bring. Hee. Later.

21:10-ish - Back from a nice supper with my maternal grandmother. We weren't sure about the weather, so Marcia and I shopped, and I cooked for us at her house. We took her some fresh cut flowers (but someone had already beaten us to the punch on that one). Dinner was seared then simmered halibut, with a little onion salt, fresh cracked pepper and olive oil to start, then lemon on, a little chardonnay in the pan, cover and simmer while the herb-butter rice cooked. Right at the end, steam some squash and heat the bread. Voila!

Back to find my RedHat 6.2 installation went off very nicely this time. A couple of oddities required a near reboot (init 1 followed by init 5 to restart most everything cleanly) which brought the network up (I had mixed subnets in my data, sigh. I know, I change distributions with grave regularity, but it's fun, and I lose very little, since I don't overwrite /home, /usr/local or /mnt/spare (the 6 gig, mount it anywhere portion of my 20G drive). Clean root, /usr, /var, /tmp and swap, load and go. Right now running in Gnome, because of default-ness. More on other choices later.

Ah, I have to change the mouse configuration in /etc/X11/XF86Config ... wait a moment. OK, the RH installer (Anaconda?) created a symlink from /dev/psaux to /dev/mouse, and I allowed it to believe that the mouse was a stock generic PS/2 mouse. It is, however, an MS IM wheel mouse. By going into the config file after the fact, and changing the protocol from "PS/2" to "IMPS/2", the wheel is usable as a button (actually works quite well under browsers as an open link in new window button, thank you very much).

I shall call this update over, so that I can shut down my link to Grendel, and restart the X-Server, test the mouse, and get a couple of tools this default load missed. TTYL.


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

Groveling dampness, wet and cold to you all... oh, hey, Good Morning (said with just a single frightening hint of David Hartman, way down in the gullet). Yesterday's rain never really materialized until overnight, when the floodgates opened once again. Today, which was supposed to be showers (according to Yahoo Weather) is now only supposed to be cloudy, and meanwhile the rain continues to fall. I always wonder why weather people are functionally incapable of looking outside before divining a forecast from entrails or whatever. The SJ Mercury site at least shows that it is raining, hey.

Subject: RE: Help! My server is down!
   Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 09:27:14 +0100
   From: Moshe Bar {[email protected]}
     To: [email protected]

HI Brian

Yes, I am still planning to put the site, but I first have to find the
backup of the web site on the tapes to be able to ftp them over. It is also
column time and I my book is due in 3 weeks. Oy vey! Am I busy or something?

Many thanks

Moshe

Subject: Very Good News, etc.
   Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 04:35:53 -0800
   From: "J.H. Ricketson" {[email protected]}
      To: [email protected], [email protected]

Dear .b & Dan,

I was searching the web for a Windows equivalent of WebLint validator, 
when I came across a dissertation on exactly what the Meta Tags did. 
One pair prevented local caching. Bingo! This was what was causing 
REDIRECTOR's erratic behavior, and driving me up the wall and across 
the ceiling like a gecko. I put the necessary lines in, and now 
REDIRECTOR worksperfectly no matter how many times I relocate the 
target in JOURNAL. On to bigger & better things. Thanks for your
patience.

.b - thanks for the WebLint tip. Sounds like the answer to a maiden's 
prayer. I found the site, and added it to my HTML bookmarks. I found it 
needed Perl. No "perl*.*" on any HDD. Then it occurred to me - hey! - 
this is a Unix thing! I have to table it for the time being. It would be 
casting Perls before [Unix-ignorant] swine.

My reasoning & Game Plan: 

First, I want to become proficient enough at HTML code so that I can build, 
publish, & maintain a web site I'm not ashamed to go public with. Learning 
the language, its syntax & ideosyncracies & "Gotchas" takes a lot of intense 
concentration and some time. I don't want to dilute that in different and  
confusing directions. I don't want to risk corrupting my physical internal
memory by attempting to absorb another language & syntax right now. Linux & 
Perl will happen - in their own good time.

Parallel with this, I have to nail down a site host. I think that is about 
done except for the finish work & trim.

Then I have to immerse myself in the mysteries of FTP (sounds like something 
Bill the Cat would say), CGI bins (are they like bit buckets?), scripting 
(yet another language & syntax), publishing, and all that arcane stuff. I'll 
be using, at least at the outset, WS_FTP. WebHosting.com recommends it,  
so they have some knowledge of it and the capability to support &
handhold newbies.

Last but not least - Apache. I'm persuaded. That will mean putting together 
another box (most of the parts are on hand), tentatively to be a firewall & 
server, if the two functions are compatible.

Does this Plan make sense? Any comments / suggestions will be greatly 
appreciated. What about WS_FTP (from Ipswitch) - heard anything good, bad, or 
ugly about it?

Overall, one of my aims is to decrease my dependence on you guys to hold 
my hand. I'm learning to walk a bit, and will get better at it. There will 
never be a time when at least one of you already knows something I don't. 
(</A>), yet I dont want to clog your email stream on a daily basis. 
I'm already much obliged.

Regards,

JHR
--

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

Lastly, Spam clogs my inbox. You, not at all - have at us - that's part of what community is all about.

Then I note that the email from Grendel's cron daemon backup job seems awfully short . . . It would appear that the write-protect slider on the tape moved during insertion - no backup since Friday night. Sigh. Replacement backup in process. Mandrake 7.0-2 ISO file in download. Coffee is hot, and a bagel has my name on it. Catch you later.

14:25 - Why Mandrake 7.0-2, you ask? Well, first, there were some changes in the install (not quite enough, actually, but we won't go there, now). I was looking for Debian to work for me, and that was asking a little much right now. There are broken things in the frozen distribution that I don't know how to fix (just yet) It would have worked fine for me, had I not wanted to run X. (This was yesterday) So anyhoo, I reach for my Mandrake 7.0 CDROM. Lo and behold, it would appear that I do not have this disc here - must be at work. So, as a tide-me-over, I go to pitch RH6.2Beta on. NOW I remember what I don't like about the beta. First, my easy to choose Window Managers are Gnome, KDE and AfterStep. I am not a real big fan of Gnome or Afterstep, and there is something broken in the 6.2Beta installation of KDE - Every action opens a corresponding (but unasked for and unnecessary) console window. Sigh. I try to bring down Icewm and or WindowMaker - I can't seem to select those as my default WM's. Clearly a failing on my part, but still. So, I snag MDK 7.0-2, then into Windows long enough to burn one coaster, then a good disc - and here we are. Working happily in WindowMaker. Couple of minor difficulties in transitioning the user data, but that's easy to handle.

That all done, I think a quick mouse edit and I am off to the races. Los Lobos tonight, report from the Filmore tomorrow. G'day.

Lastly, attacks - names are given, to persecute the guilty. Some of these appear to be merely DNS inquiries, others, repeated attempts at the telnet port. Tar them all with the same brush, say I. ** indicates persistent buggers. Total of 21 logged attacks in the last 4 weeks.

wglnx02.sbb.at / 193.154.170.253
frente.nettravel.com.br / 200.242.124.4
------------ / 210.23.255.249
------------ / 209.83.72.214
------------ / 209.113.97.2
------------ / 210.191.72.4
monet.telebyte.nl / 194.235.214.12
ns.kams.or.kr / 203.229.151.250
------------ / 216.32.140.200
mci-pc2.rfc.ucl.ac.uk / 128.40.117.136
------------ / 210.104.236.196  ** 
------------ / 210.99.62.160
209-67-232-128.bst0.flashcom.net / 209.67.232.128
------------ / 209.3.75.52
24.64.104.216.ab.wave.home.com / 24.64.104.216
ns.pfsfhq.com / 216.0.222.7
dt012n3c.san.rr.com / 204.21018.60