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.

What a blast! Last night at The Fillmore Los Lobos with The Wild Magnolias opening. Driving to SF through a light drizzle, what a drag (and I *really* hate going to the city - parking is usually a pain in the butt, and I don't like having to deal with panhandlers - Both were none-problems last night). We got there about 7, picked up our tickets at will call (oh, THANKS, KFOG - the best radio station in the nation), got in line and in we went. A little over-priced food (but real food, just the same - much better than stadium food), and down to the floor. Marcia was a little surprised, no seats, and more when I pointed at the people sitting on the floor. Hmmm.

The flare of a lighter here and there. "They aren't supposed to be smoking - that's illegal." So is what they are doing, dear. But it isn't cigarettes they're smoking ... Ah, the Fillmore. I would love to say I communed with the ghosts of Jerry and Jimi, hung out with Bob Morrison's shade, and that of Lenny Bruce, but then again, I gave up chemically enhancing my reality a great number of years ago (unlike many around us last night), so will just say - great venue.

The Wild Magnolias were very New Orleans, stompin' and shoutin' fun. Then, by about 9:40, Los Lobos took the stage. They scream. Played some songs from the new album, some I knew, all interspersed with fine instrumentals. About 5 songs into the set, we were visited by a guitar Goddess. Bonnie Raitt jumped up and started playing. She's been at that slide guitar professionally for near 30 years now and hoooo-weee. She played with them for about 3 songs. The last was a sort of odd jam that wended its way around to being a cover of Mr. Fantasy. Heh.

That all was offset by standing in the same two square feet for about 3 hours, and having my ears assaulted - it was very loud. I am certainly not as young as once I was, more's the pity. Sigh. We didn't hang out for the tail of the show, 'cause it was a school night. Home by 12:15 and now ready to slog through another working day. Hope your's passes with minimum pain and maximum joy - catch you later.

16:45 - Marcia wrote me with the following...

Subject: Bob Morrison?

Who is Bob Morrison? I've heard of Van and Jimmy but don't know Bob . . . help? Is this a blonde moment?

ARGH!!!

Heh. Then shortly after, Chuck Waggoner dropped a line into the water.

Subject: <PRE> tag

Small matter, but since you abandoned tables for the current design (which I like best of all Daynoters), your blockquotes of mail, etc. pushed type off the right of the my screen, requiring horizontal scrolling to read those blockquotes (and only the blockquotes).

I did some experimenting, and upon elimination of the <PRE> tag, the need for horizontal scrolling goes away, although the blockquote's typeface becomes TR.

Admittedly, I view on a 15" monitor at 640X480, therefore my screen real estate is at a premium, so this may not be a big concern to you--but just thought I would let you know. IE5.01 is my browser. The problem is non-existent at 800X600, but I--for one--can't read print that small on a 15" screen.

Don't worry: I'll keep reading if you decide 640X480 is not worth changing things to accommodate.

--Best, Chuck Waggoner

That is a couple of letters done the way Chuck would prefer. Any feedback, peoples?

18:29 - Three cheer's, everyone! Tom's done! Just got off the phone with the bloke just now, and he's finished. Look for his brain and his life to rest up for a few days, but I would imagine that he will reappear among the Daynoter's shortly.


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Later update posted here (wha?) - Tom's back in the world - he was in-country fighting the Nutshell wars, but now he's posted. Welcome Back Tom.

It must be (your computer working, that is), or you wouldn't be reading this, I presume (unless over my shoulder, as Marcia often does). Happy Leap Day. Does this refer to our desire to have candidates for political office to leap off the nearest tall something? It carries that meaning for me. Personally, I don't care if the calendar keeps up with the solar year. I think a slow rotation, so that we can have Christmas in the summer time occasionally, like the Aussies get to do, would be cool (or rather, warm), so to speak.

In amongst the spam I found commo from JHR, which I have excerpted as follows...

About Meta Tags: I like knowing how things work. with that knowledge, they can sometimes be made to work better. In the particular case of Meta Tags, I was under the naive impression that their sole function was to serve as bait for search engines, and omitted them. Then I found out they were much more than that at Bruce Hamilton's site http://bruce-hamilton.com/tutorials/metatag.html I have found the whole site to be most useful and helpful. I inserted the appropriate Meta Tags, and that pretty well fixed REDIR's full auto function.

I was afraid that a Firewall/Server Box might be contradictory. That means I will need three boxes: Da Man - BOX0, BOXL for Apache and anything else *x related, and BOXX for the Firewall, razor wire & mines between me and the World. Is there any possibility of getting by with a peer-to-peer NW (BTW - what is a peer - one who pees?), or will I have to go to a hub? I gather that running Netbeui & Netbios on anything connected to the 'Net is not too kewel, security-wise. Barn door left wide open.

The drill is make a good firewall, have a separate, non-routable IP address group inside (say from the 192.168.0.x set), and don't run netbios and netbeui. Just use tcp/ip for all your interbox communications, works quite well.

Oh, and make backups, under the assumption that you will get fatally cracked tomorrow. Use non-dictionary passwords on all resources which are available over the internal network, to make it as hard as possible to anything inside, and keep up with the security measures commensurate with your concern over your internal stuff, and the amount of time it would take you to rebuild from scratch.

If I had to rebuild every box from bare metal up in here today, it would take me about a day. I spend perhaps an hour once a week surveying the various security pages. Add an hour a week for NT stuff which is work related. No more. Otherwise you can spend your life worrying and upgrading your security - oops, sorry, no room for that jpg, I need this firewall addon.... sigh-shrug-grin.

Peer (n) : 1. Hereditary English Position conferred by Right of Birth, Title and Ownership of Real Property 2. One who pees. 3. Resources made available for Rape, Pillage and Burning by Insecure Mickeysoft Networking Protocol.

Dentist round 4 for me this afternoon. This time, I know not what they plan for my mouth. Either they told me and I forgot (unlikely), they didn't tell me because they figured that if I knew I wouldn't turn up (possible), or they didn't tell me because I didn't ask (most likely). Anyway, short work day with lots to accomplish in it - see ya. TTYL.

Well. I continue to pay for years of neglecting my mouth. Sigh. Fortunately, it would seem that I get to keep these two teeth, just massive holes dug into them by the excavation equipment rented by the dentist, followed by rebar and a nice blend of 4 bag concrete. So perhaps I exaggerate a bit. Two fillings down, and these were dicey - could have lost one of them if the cleanup didn't go well. Two more fillings on the other side, then I think some planing, then probably either implants or bridgework. Who knows. This is actually quite a good dentist, correct and accurate with the novecaine, a fast, no mistakes guy who communicates in english with his patients (or at least with me - a good dentist??? probably speaks his milk tongue at home - Martian).

Then home again, and back into the artwork fray, as you can see, above left. I did one with the large stylized burst in red and white, as requested by the powers that be, then did the blue-tone here, just for me. I think I like this one more. You don't get to judge, since I ain't posting the other one.

Subject: Congratulations Mr. Syroid
   Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 17:45:54 +0100
   From: Chris Ward-Johnson {[email protected]}

At last, something decent to read besides my own stuff. Oops, did that go out to everyone?

Regards

Chris Ward-Johnson
Chateau Keyboard - Computing at the Eating Edge
http://www.chateaukeyboard.com

Subject: Interesting Win2k bug / Request for information
   Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 16:36:12 -0700
   From: Matt Beland {[email protected]}

I've noticed an interesting little problem on my Windows 2000 Professional workstation, just curious if anyone else hasnoticed this.

Setup programs run very, very slowly. For example, I installed Veritas Backup Executive on it this afternoon, and it took over 10 minutes for the install program to run. I hit the install button, the little "preparing to install" window popped up and headed on over to 99%, hung there for 10 minutes, then the install screen came up. After that, it ran normally, and the installation was successful. Everything else runs properly. It's only installation programs.

Setup.exe and Install.exe both respond the same way, so it's not a filename problem. I'm halfway suspecting registry errors, not least because that's one of the things that always comes to mind with Windows problems, but I'm not seeing any other symptoms of that type of problem. Anybody got a hint?

Matt Beland
Systems Administrator
iTOOL.COM
http://www.itool.com

"Do not meddle in the affairs of SysAdmins, for they are quick to anger, and lack subtlety."

I found that on my work box, I had no unusual install delays. Win2K RC3, O2K, Adobe Illustrator 7, Adobe Acrobat 4, AutoCAD LT 98, Netscrape 4.72, assorted other lesser apps. In no case did I have an unexpected hangup in install. I would have noticed. The Win2K itself crawled, but that's to be expected on a PI-200, even with 128M of ram and a fast-ish HD. Hmmm.

And enough. Good night.


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I awoke this morning with a horrid headache, probably the result of sleeping badly because of jaw pain from my visit to Sweeney Todd yestereve. I am sure it will be better tonight, just in time to not retire early, but to hare off to the SVLUG meeting. Tonight's topic is Internet Telephony, with a presentation by Greg Herlein of Quicknet Technologies and the OpenPhone project. Demonstrations and discussions. Sounds interesting.

There is a minor hunk of mail in the inboxes this morning. Perhaps it's time for a gander. OK, the backup worked, tapes now swapped. Commo from Syroid, who still manages to sound busy. You'd think the world kept going while he buried himself in finishing his book or something. Heh.

Then a ZD Alertdesk, forward that to work for later perusal. Wonderful subject line though - 'Security goes Open Source.' Oh. They've noticed, have they? Peer review good enough now, eh? hehehe! Ditto on the forward for the TechNet Flash - to work with you. Ah, sigh. I haven't managed to fix that cron script yet, keeps choking on the MySQL log rotations, over a line that exists in every script. What to do, boy wonder?

Some more feedback to JHR. Some of the HTML behaviours are tricky.

Subject: Re: Business Recognition
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2000 09:13:21 -0500
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Dear Candidate,

You were recently selected by The Office of the Managing Director for a free listing on The International Executive Guild's Who's Who.

Our Researchers gather information from many recognized sources, including professional associations and societies, trade organizations, newspaper and magazine articles, professional reference publications, web presence, and referrals from existing members.

{SNIP}

Two days left. OK, then there's next week and the week after. But when the week starts with a Sunday night out in the City, I guess I just don't ever feel caught up with my sleep. Ah, well. Last night's presentation on Internet Telephony was interesting. Greg is a coder second, manager first I think, but his true techies as well as his CEO and Craig (?) from the Open H323 project in Australia were in attendence to provide shouted footnotes and extra info. Point in fact, the stuff works. He talked about why you want dedicated IP Telephony hardware (provides the encumbered codec's in hardware, not to mention that Greg's company is one of those selling the beasts) and how he has gotten quicknet to GPL the whole shebang above the hardware. Good presentation, great mix of promo and quite technical, and when Greg didn't know something he said, "I don't know." How refreshing.

We experienced a test of the backup system last night when I got home. We have determined that the version of Netscape on Marcia's box doesn't like large Sent folders. Why? Well, it was over 37 Meg. When I got home there were none. I tried to do single file extraction from the tape and was unsuccessful, and so unloaded the whole tape into one of my spare partitions on Grendel. Tonight I will restore the Sent data to Marcia so she can distribute its contents through her other folders. No archiving ability in Netscape that we can see. Hmmm.

Yesterday, I finished the board and sheetmetal designs for the Cat5 Interrupter that we are building - a product that is SNMP enabled and allows network control of connect/disconnect of LAN cabling. Test fixture product of the first water. We sold 10 before they were even designed. For a while it seemed the gating function for production of the boxes would be the relays, as they are an old design, single source, but we are getting them straight from the manufacturer, Fujitsu. Thanks there go the the local PMM for Fujitsu who managed it somehow, when we got a 12 week lead time quote out of Arrow Electronics.

Later, experiments with the bootable business card from Linuxcare. More on that tonight. In the meantime, it's raining out there, so I had better hit the road. Have a lovely day, and do keep up with Tom Syroid, who is apparently already turned up the heat several notches in his life, and right after finishing Outlook in a Nuthouse. Y'all have a great day and I will see you later.

> when Greg didn't know something he said, "I don't know." How refreshing.

That is, you know, one sure way to tell an engineer from a marketing dork. Engineers say "I don't know" quite frequently, but you'll never hear a marketing dork use that phrase. I've encountered many marketing dorks flying under false colors, but that always gives them away. I've also run into more than a few engineers (for real or just by inclination) in marketing positions, and that phrase always gives them away, too.

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

Lots to do and little time. A first cut at the taxes, beef stir-fry for supper, Burning City and Open Sources at my side, what to do, what to do? Well, there's the obvious things, but... oh, right, complete the restore first. Then finish the highres artwork TinCans for poster purposes, then taxes, then supper, then books. OK. Maybe back later, maybe not. Later.

Some links regarding last night's presentation at the SVLUG meeting, on the topic of Internet Telephony. The slides from Greg's talk are available, concatenated onto that one linked page (that's OK, it works, given the material and the format). Then an email showed up about using Voxilla for OpenSource VoIP - the HOWTO is here. I haven't played with this yet, but it looks really rather interesting, and I probably ought to talk Troy into getting O'Reilly to lay out the bucks to hook both he and Tom up - as much time as they spend on the phone, $300 US for a couple of cards, and a little setup time will pay for itself the first month. Tom?

Oh. Haven't got the image I want yet, no taxes 'til weekend, no more bootable business card experiments (though it does boot, I tried it), and supper was excellent. Good Night.


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Thank God Its . . . Friday! Long week. There's a couple of new pages to take a look at Phil Hough's at this location and Bob Walder's over here. I have seen mention of these before, and we want to give these a good hard look, I am told. So I will. Why don't you check them out too, and tell me what you think.

Otherwise very quiet on the email front this AM. We watched a little of What's My Line last night, the Drew Carey + other comedians improv show. Funny. I did a little MotoCross Madness and we played Boggle for a while (spot the word). Tomorrow's schedule includes the OSH HowTo Fair, over in Pleasanton. Hopefully it will otherwise be a quiet weekend.

More later, to be sure. In the interim, have a great day. Later.

Home early. Marcia asks me to point out that our lovely hosts at PBI have seen fit to have a DOA email server (I can't even ping the bugger at the moment, that's down!). If you need to send Marcia email for some reason, send it to her Yahoo address. That's it for now. TTFN.

Dear Mr. Bezos,

I shopped for a couple of books at bn.com last week.  
I probably would have picked them up at your place 
if it weren't for the lawyers getting you to use their 
department as a profit center.    I strongly agree with 
your right to do what you are doing with your firm.  I 
also believe that you (in the corporate sense) are 
behaving in a reprehensible and wrong-headed 
manner, and I look forward to your return to sanity.  
Because you 'can' do a thing doesn't mean you 
'should' do a thing, and IMO you shouldn't be 
patenting rather trivial implementations of prior art 
and using them offensively.  While I haven't affiliated 
with your company on my website (I do no affiliation, 
just recommendation), I can no longer in good faith 
recommend your place of business to my readership.  
I wish you luck in your endeavors, as I am sure you 
can easily live without my linking to your site and 
without my few hundred dollars a year in book, 
music and other purchases.  Sleep well.

-- 
regards,                I replied, in my best eastern dialect
Brian Bilbrey           "Were you addressing me, a$$hole?" and
www.OrbDesigns.com      the conversation went downhill from there.
[email protected]                      RBT

A gorgeous day. Not a cloud in the sky this morning, and as the sun is sinking into the west, the temperatures hover in the mid 60's (~18°C), with a few light clouds about the hills. Must be a gift to us today. That and the email appears to be partially back.

Sad news. My grandfather died last night. He was about two weeks shy of his 102nd birthday. Still, he hit his goal, to live in three centuries. And my, did he see a lot during his years. When he was born, buggy whips (and buggies) were big business. Cars, planes, space travel - the world kept changing around him, he adapted and kept right on.

A genuinely nice man, he had a great banter - did well at sales, and often talked of his achievements and such in the insurance industry. He retired from his first career in 1955, but didn't stop working, at least part time, until after his 85th birthday. If my memory serves me correctly, he played golf until about his 92nd or 94th birthday. He was always ace at gin (cards) and billiards, had a soft spot for a pretty girl - any pretty girl.

I recall a Christmas many years ago when my brother had brought his girlfriend home for the holidays, and she was wearing a rather short short mini-dress. My folks were concerned that perhaps my grandparents might be offended. They need not have worried (much). I still don't know what my grandmother thought of it all, but in a stage whisper, my granddad said to my brother that her dress was too long. Heh.

We saw him last in late January, as he was trying to bounce back from a fall, and a cold. He knew us, but was very low energy. The cold became pnumonia, and recovering from that took the stuffing out of him. The word came earlier this week that he wasn't doing so hot. He wasn't in any special pain that we know of, and he just died in his sleep. I love him, and I am going to miss him.


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Thanks for all the kind thoughts and words. What follows is just a couple...

Subject: Your grandfather
    Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 20:56:18 -0500
    From: Robert Bruce Thompson
      To: bilbrey

Sorry to hear about your grandfather. I know you'll miss him.

You're fortunate to have had the opportunity as an adult to know your
grandfather. My mother's father died before I was born, and my father's
father when I was about 9.

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

Subject: Grandfather
    Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 21:30:09 -0700
    From: John Doucette
      To: Bilbrey 

Hi Brian

Sorry to hear about your grandfather. Sounds like he was a bit of a
character, likely a bit of him in you.

I remember when I was young I always enjoyed visiting my grandfather, 
as he always had great stories of the early days of piloting aircraft, and
homesteading on the Canadian prairies.

John

And life goes on for the living - that is the point, after all. We went to the OSH HowTo Fair out at Pleasanton today, met and spoke with Nick Stellino (PBS TV chef), saw a cooking demo, lots of power tools for the home garage (when we have a home garage). Picked up some free stuff, and lots of ideas. Always a fun thing to attend.

Now, in order to load and run V2.0 of VMware for Linux, I need to rebuild my kernel. SYL.

Nope, didn't have to do that (recompile the kernel), but I find the problem that was perplexing me. The modules were loading as 2.2.14-15mdk, whereas the kernel was loading as 2.2.14-1mdklinus. Dunno why. I whipped into the nearest virtual phone boot, spun about to become SuperUser (aka su), then

cd /boot
ln -sf System.map-2.2.14-15mdk System.map
ln -sf vmlinuz-2.2.14-15mdk vmlinuz

Thus synchronizing the System.map, vmlinuz (kernel) and module-info files. For some odd reason, Mandrake doesn't have a module-info for ...mdklinus, even though it has (and defaults to) that for the System.map and vmlinuz links.... Oh, yeah, then, upon reboot, I learned that in order for my changes to take effect, I needed to rerun lilo. The reason is that lilo gets the location of the kernel from the vmlinuz symlink, but writes to the MBR the actual location (not the location of the symlink, duh, because filesystem stuff isn't loaded yet). So, to register the changes, just rerun lilo, no changes to lilo.conf needed. That solved all my vmware-config.pl problems and VMware 2.0 Released is cleaner and faster than 1.2. Highly recommended - more reports on those explorations as time goes on. To tide y'all over, I leave you for tonight with the following...

From: Jack Andresen
Sent: Friday, March 03, 2000 6:03 PM
Subject: Yah!
Importance: High

 GREAT WRITER

 There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to
 become a great writer.

 When asked to define "great" he said, "I want to write stuff that the
 whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly
 emotional level.  Stuff that will make them scream, cry, and howl in
 pain and anger!"

 He now works for Microsoft, writing error messages.

Gentlemen and Ladies - thanks for your condolences and concern. All will be be well here at Hovel Bilbrey, Junk Food at the Computing Edge (That's different enough, isn't it, Chris? But true - I am surrounded by pop cans and bags of potato (No 'e', sorry, ex-pres candidate Quayle) chips).

I am getting ready to spelunk further into searching tools - I think that HT::Dig might provide us with better service than Perlfect. Also have some updating to do on the Daynotes Mirror, what with new entries and more. Significant, since I am apparently NOT the only one using it as an access page. Feedback from you regulars would be helpful. More later, but for now, kaffe.

Busy today. Been shopping for food and for patio stuff (plants, planters, etc). Also (finally) got around to overhauling the entire daynotes mirror (http://daynotes.orbdesigns.com/). I have polled the other Daynoters for their input and feedback, but I would certainly welcome suggestions from everyone (Don Armstrong, are you out there? ... Don is my best proofreader after Marcia). Lightened up the background, pushed in the small DN logo, restructured the layout a little bit, added in the newcomers, and CSS enabled the whole site. About 4 hours. The advantage is that future style changes will be much easier. Search tools for OrbDesigns will just have to wait for another day.

How's your Sunday going?


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