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.

Good morning. Sometimes it seems that Monday mornings are the toughest, and not just because they are tough. I seem to spend all my early energy making the transition from one week to the next, mucking links over here, adding entries to the index, checking and rechecking the in-page and week-to-week bits. Then a quick save, a frantic rush to test everything I did, fix what didn't work and resign myself to waiting for Marcia or Don to write and tell me what I missed.

Hmmm. That was interesting. As I typed away, working the second sentence above, Bluefish (the HTML program I use to paint the Graffiti on the walls, here at Hovel Bilbrey) just left the building. OK, it didn't leave, but it's current incarnation disappeared like a scene in a holodeck. No core droppings, which would tend to indicate that the program thought it had done something right and elegant. Heh.

Furnace repairman this AM. No, not some service guy or gal at this odd hour of the morning. Me. A few weeks ago, our furnace wouldn't start. The pilot light wasn't staying lit, and when it would, the stinking thing chose not to fire up. I put in a work order, and on the evening, Floyd (maintenance chief around these parts) told me all he did was rap on the thermostat valve body, which would stick every once in a while. Of course it skipped our whole first year in this apartment. Well, it just happened again. I guess it's time to let Floyd order a new thermostat valve thingamy.

Now to park a note on the front door, letting FedEx know to have the office sign for my RAM, should it come in today... let's see if there's a tracking update on the package. Yup, went through Memphis and Oakland yesterday. Should be here when I get home. Cool. In the interim, have a wonderful Monday the thirteenth, and I will catch you later.

Well, it isn't like I haven't been busy or anything. I got the extra 128M of RAM in - it arrived and Jim, down in the complex office, signed for the package at 10:05AM this morning. At least FedEx knows how to update a website and let a body know what's happening. Then this evening, this arrives...

Subject: Your Crucial memory has been shipped!
    Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 21:07:47 -0700
   From: Crucial Technology 
Reply-To: [email protected]
      To: [email protected]

 
Dear Brian Bilbrey,

Great news! Your Crucial memory upgrade shipped 11-MAR-00 
via FedEx P1 Saturday. The tracking number for your package 
is ############. You may check the status of your shipment by 
clicking on the following: 

http://www.fedex.com/ {TRACKING INFORMATION}

The address we shipped to is:
    {MY HOME ADDRESS}

Purchase Order Number: ######.

Congratulations on purchasing the best memory in the industry!  
We're confident you will find your investment in Crucial 
Technology's quality and service a wise decision.  If you have 
any questions about your memory or how to install it, please 
don't hesitate to call us toll free at 1-800-336-8915.  Please 
reference your personal Customer ID ####### when you call.

Sincerely,
Crucial Technology
The Memory Experts

I called back, Jenny claimed she had already credited me for the Saturday delivery charge. HMMM! I got the RAM, it works great. But your notification systems and customer service need just a little tuneup. Jenny said things are a little busy over there. Good. Hire more people, and do what you say you can do, or don't offer the option. I lost two days on a production schedule, having expected that memory on Saturday. No, that's alright. Just don't do it again.

On that note, I think that I will call it a night. Oh, yeah. Running Win2K, with a VM running Linux, each in a 128M space, is quite tasty. Little catsup, crunchy outside with a chewy center. Yum. G'night!


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Happy Tuesday. I am home for the next few days, working on a couple of projects. One of my early week chores about the AWN (Apartment Wide Network) is to patrol the perimeter, check the traps, make sure the claymores are still live, re-coat the pungi sticks, you name it. One puzzlement is why so many of my alerts come in at the DNS port (53). I don't run DNS (at the moment) because I don't have to. I can't imagine anyone setup to try and use my box for DNS (without talking to me first). Hmmm. Certainly there are exploits against older versions of most software. There are known exploits against POP2, and for all I know, someone really just wanted to hit the Orb Designs SecureWeb Server. Heh. Anyways, here's the list of trophies on the wall for the last couple of weeks. Now to get a cup of coffee.

wglnx02.sbb.at / 193.154.170.253  (109 - POP2)
muffins.cyberyder.de / 204.137.128.90 (53 - DNS)
yas.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp / 130.54.104.1 (109 - POP2)
cobak.domaingo.com / 209.123.128.12 (443 - HTTPS)
216.34.230.124 (53 - DNS)
www.kikkou.com / 210.188.227.4 (109 - POP2)
deizialoup.net / 209.96.170.42 (53 - DNS)

RESIGNATION
 -----------
 
 I am hereby officially tendering my resignation as an adult. I have
 decided I would like to accept the responsibilities of an 8 year-old
 again.
 I want to go to McDonald's and think that it's a four star restaurant,
 I want to sail sticks across a fresh mud puddle and make a sidewalk
 with rocks.
 I want to think M&Ms are better than money because you can eat them.
 I want to lie under a big oak tree and run a lemonade stand with my
 friends on a hot summer's day.
 I want to return to a time when life was simple; When all you knew
 were colors, multiplication tables, and nursery rhymes, but that
 didn't bother you, because you didn't know what you didn't know and
 you didn't care.
 All you knew was to be happy because you were blissfully unaware of
 all the things that should make you worried or upset.
 I want to think the world is fair. That everyone is honest and good.. 
 I want to believe that anything is possible. 
 I want to be oblivious to the complexities of life and be overly
 excited by the little things again.
 I want to live simple again. 
 I don't want my day to consist of computer crashes, mountains of
 paperwork, depressing news, how to survive more days in the month
 than there is money in the bank, doctor bills, gossip, illness ,and
 loss of loved ones. 
 I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth,
 justice, peace, dreams, the imagination,  mankind, and making angels
 in the snow.
 So . . . .here's my check book and my car-keys, my credit card bills.
 and my 401K statements. I am officially resigning from adulthood.
 And if you want to discuss this further, you'll have to catch me
 first, cause.."Tag! You're it."   

Doc Searls - a prime piece of Cluetrain Weblog called Patent Death Pending. Culled from Frank McPherson. Thanks! And good night.


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Hullo. Neat stuff in the tech news arena today. First there's this Washington State Judge who has thrown out the suit against an email spammer, claiming that Washington's tough anti-spam law is unconstitutional. According to Judge Palmer, the requirements that businesses determine whether their addressees are Washington residents presented an onerous burden which hurt business more than helping consumers - thus violating the interstate-commerce clause of the Constitution (US). More info here.

Interestingly, the case brought to light that the spammer was netting about $1200 to $2000 per month, while sending anywhere between 400K and 4M (that's right, 4 Million with an "M") email messages per month. Perhaps we ought to figure a way to add micropayments to the email system. Sheesh, I dunno. In other frontiers, people have been strung up first, then asked about it afterwards. But this is a shining new day, right? Then why are we still putting up with snake oil salesmen?

Apparently, one of AOL's subsidiaries is readying a type of Napster clone which allows people to build their own networks for sharing music - this lacks the central clearinghouse feature of the Napster. However, given the negative reaction by the legal departments of the various content providers and their shills, the RIAA, you might think to hear this from the General Counsel's office at Time-Warner, "Ummmmm, Steve? Can we talk?"

Lastly on the news front for now, people that downrev their IE to 5.0 with 128bit "strong" encryption have made their systems ultimately secure - they are locking themselves out. The stated solutions from MS right now are . . . TA-DA!!! Reinstall Window 2000. (duh, what a surprise), or manually edit the registry. Wheehoo. Chalk one up for Linux, where adding an application can't trash a whole installation. But then again, there's only one OS with the Browser that's integral to the OS. Aren't we glad!

The plants in the patio farm appear to have all taken hold and are going to be OK. If I was too rough on one in transplanting, it will usually show up within a couple of days. Now to kick some steroids into the mix - feed them once each week for the next few weeks.

Ooooh - a Linux based palm-top. Heh. Here's the link to the page - look at the screenshots, read the press release and the brochure. As Artie would say "Werrrry insteresting!" And for today's experiment, I am going to have a look a MI/X, the freeware X-server for Windows. There are commercial products that are apparently more capable, but my needs are slight and I'd rather not spend money on this at the moment... More later, with screenshots. TTFN.

Dan Seto wrote in earlier today, asking (and I paraphrase here, because I am not currently running the OS in which I received the message) why, oh why would I want to run an X-server on Windows. Well, the answer is right there - I am currently running at least 4 different OS installations on Grinch here, Win2K, Mandrake 7.02 Air, Debian 2.2 (frozen) Potato, Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 (Twice, once as a booting OS, once in a virtual machine). Here I am in the middle of writing a fair bit in Windows, on a special project. It is inconvenient to shut down all of the running processes, the VMware virtual machine, Word, Outlook, Netscape, etc, etc. Now, when I just don't want to reboot, I can run this application, just to share this drivel with you, right here and now! Wolf! Dang, now I *really* want to hear Run Through The Jungle. Sigh.

Of course, if I have a VM running, then I could accomplish the same job, just as easily. But at work, when I am not running Linux, I literally have no interest in doing a long, hairly textmode edit in this site. So usually I don't. Now I don't have VM at work. But I can get this, and it will work. Oh, btw, I find that the MI/X Server package is not freeware, but 15 day trialware, with a US$25 registration fee. Not too shabby, and this apparently (so far) works OK. I was able to open Bluefish here, and the Gimp, which is rather more challenging. I edited the image above to create the thumbnail, using gimp over a forwarded X session onto Grinch running windows.

I will exercise this off and on, and let you know if there are any problems. This is a link to other X/Motif stuff for not *nix systems. Eh? Oh, yeah. Good night!


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The full, general reason, of course, is to use the apps that are available under Linux, *while* working in Windows. I am easily able to work on something across an internet connection (_NOT_ a dialup) but with DSL at home and at work, I can run bluefish and other tools on my home box from work with X forwarding tunneled via ssh. The speed is actually improved by running it over ssh, since the data is encrypted and compressed for transmission.

Here's something picked up in my Wanderings I thought worth saving:

                 Locke: Here's the Cluetrain
                        Hit-One-Outta-the-Park Twelve-Step Program
                        For Internet Business Success: Relax, have a
                        sense of humor, find your voice and use it, tell
                        the truth, don't panic, enjoy yourself, be brave,
                        be curious, play more, dream always, listen up,
                        rap on. Do these things and you can't miss.

Picked up at an interview witht the man who started Cluetrain & the 
Cluetrain Manifesto. Sounds to me like a pretty good recipe for life 
success, not only business success.

Regards,

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

Good morning, all. I thought I would start by catching up on things I missed last night. There are a lot of interesting things happening in the world, and I miss most of them. That's probably alright, as interesting things can also be dangerous. Before I visit the Daynoters and/or assorted others, I really need to clear out the bottom of my bookmark list, which is where the things that I find of at least passing interest accumulate. Join me as I stroll through the bottom of the barrel, and see whether I come up with gems or junk.

• Feh. That's right, a link snagged solely because it is one of Jerry's favorite words. It also happens to be program which uses the new image library being developed by Rasterman, one of the coding brains behind Enlightenment.
• HTAccess Authentication. A tutorial on doing web-based user authentication. If you are going to be hosting a site and keeping bits private, you may want this one.
• The DNS Resources Directory. Way more than you ever want to know about DNS, from overview documents and reference pointers, to the standards guiding RFC's responsible for making all this work for thee and me.
• Magellan. I got all excited and sent Tom this link before I finished reading... this is the first public download of the Magellan code, but it is UI (User Interface) disabled at the moment, and in code review. I guess we are looking at May for alpha release. But the link here is the page to watch.
• Guido's Linux Home-page. A link farm for everything Linux. Occasionally very handy.
• MailTunnel. How very odd. This person has figured out a way to tunnel TCP/IP connections across an e-Mail bridge. Horrid latency times, I would imagine. But the persistence and imagination boggle. You could be behind the nastiest firewall in the world, and as long as email was let through, you could communicate via off channels (and TCP over e-Mail is a very off channel).
• FBI Files Online. The FBI's Electronic Reading Room is open, and has the files of some rather interesting people and places, like the report on the Black Panther Party in Winston-Salem, NC, Nicola Tesla, and UFO's just to name 3. I could get lost in this one. Good thing I don't have Acrobat on this OS right now... But the link is now here for us all. GEM!

Richard Smith, a perhaps common name, but one known to we who are familiar with the annals of Internet sleuthing... yes, that Richard Smith... had written an interesting bit (last November, but I just happened across it today) about Web Bugs. I can't begin to do the topic justice, just to note that it is another interesting way of tracking the way we move and visit, online, involving minature gifs from servers in other locations than the one you are visiting. Interesting? Follow the link.

Also, of great interest to those of us running Linux boxes is the following link into CERT. No, not that link, this one. Why? Because it talks about intruder detection, compromise recovery, configuration guidelines and security tools.

Part of what drove this exploration was the sensational rhetoric about the potential (not the actual, just the potential) for Linux virii and worms, etc. put forth by Simson Garfinkel and called The Coming Linux Plague. Rather like putting on the sandwich boards and rushing about touting the end of the world, if you ask me (Sorry, Matt [btw, that's a link good thru 03/19, then you will need to find it yourself]). As noted by one of the respondents to the article, if you do an install of Tripwire following a clean distribution install, before you connect to the network, you should have about 100% detection ability. If you also install Portsentry, run IPChains and TCP wrappers, shut off all of the services on your box, then update and secure the ones you are going to turn back on, you have strapped on your industrial strength, triple thickness connectivity condom.

So you don't run a zombie DDoS for someone else, you have Tripwire run on a cron job each night, and check the report each day. With the heavily protective default installation fileset that Tripwire uses, you will always have alerts, but that's a good thing, keeps you on your toes. Write down the running versions of, know and check for updates and exploits for the services you do run. Keep up with the bugtraq, CERT mailing lists, and keep an eye peeled for the security page of the distribution you are running.

OK, you know and I know that you aren't going to do all that. Hell, I don't, but I do my best. But you can do a lot of it, in a very little time. Keep backups of the bits you care about. Invest enough time in security setup up front and you should be OK with periodic (every week or three survey the world for exploits and updates), do take the time to set up and run the security setup. It's worth it. Yes, OK, I will write it up, very soon, with some instructions, resource links and whatever else I can come up with.

I believe that the average Linux user is a hair more clued that the average Win User. Yes, there are risky thinks that we could do... Here's an example of the right way to do something, rather than the shrill crap from Garfinkel's keyboard...

I log into Grendel from lots of places online. I do not run telnet. I run ssh, which doesn't expose cleartext usernames and passwords online. Once validated, ssh creates s secure, encrypted, compressed tunnel. If I am at a client that doesn't have ssh, I don't log in.

Let's turn this into a live fire exercise. I am given to understand that for idealogical and patent (RSA) reasons, I should really be using OpenSSH. Off to freshmeat. I search on ssh, then from there, I follow the trail to OpenSSH. Hmmm. From there, in the left sidebar, I follow the link for Linux sources to this location in Australia, where the ISP's have to censor your web experience, but you can work without fear on encryption. Heh. I read. And read. And read. This is security here, time up front is time well invested.

OK. I snag the tarball and the .sig of the tarball from one of the mirrors off of that site. Then I go back, and pick up the brand new patch file, which fixes a couple of things from the last release. I know that there are dependencies that I will need to pick up, but one thing at a time - now to check the signature of the file against the file itself. Ooops. I forgot to pick up the GPG public key for checking the signature. OK, given that I already have a validated GPG installation, I add the public key and check the verify the tarball's signature. I know that I haven't verified the key's fingerprint, but there is only so far I will go, tonight. Now, to untar the installation. tar zxvf openssh-1.1.1p1.tar.gz just about covers that one. Starting a ./configure...OK, I thought so - I have to pick up the OpenSSL packages and install them. Just a mo' OK, got it, this one is backed by an MD5 sum, and a signature from an out of date version of GnuPG. Sigh. We'll roll with it, though. Compiling and installing as I write (well, compiling) . . . hmmm, hmmm . . . Oh, to go and check out the problem working OpenSSL with OpenSSH - yields

yeah, you have to hack around some brokenness here with a symlink.

cd /usr/local/ssl
ln -s lib/libcrypto.a
ln -s lib/libssl.a

now do:

cd (wherever your openssh crap is untarred)
./configure --with-ssl-dir=/usr/local/ssl

and it should work.  Did for me, anyhow.

And the compile is done, so back to the OpenSSL instructions. make test ... passed with flying colors, su, then make install... and done. Now to follow those instructions. Sigh. More on this tomorrow - I am out of steam - yes, that means that the hint above didn't work as advertised. Usually this means that I didn't read something completely or yada yada yada... I picked a hard example. I suppose I oughta be using warshots, rather than those stinking blue-tipped babies....

I am wearing my green, are you?

I think I know someone who isn't wearing green and will be in for a major pinching this evening... heh heh heh. Oh, hi! Good morning and happy Friday to ye all. Sorry for the late post, but I have been on the phone, and working on a design rodent art - I want that sucker spattered. Maybe the .357 isn't overkill after all.

The tail of last night's tale: I had to make the OpenSSL libraries executable - the OpenSSH ./configure routine was finding them (and not saying so) but finding them unusable (and saying so, in such a way as to imply not the former, rather than the latter. Are you confused now? I am! Anyway, I executed a chmod a+x * on the library directory, then the links that I created to those libraries were found and functional - OpenSSH compiled and installed like a charm and I am using it as I write. Heh.

The upshot? Sure, there are ways to use Linux in an insecure and dangerous manner - true of any tool, whether another OS (say, from Redmond), or a chainsaw. Practice safe computing, folks. It's dangerous out there.

Now to build that electric fence...

Evening. I built another cage... the squirrels are the offenders and I have to cage our plants! Aaargh. The pellet gun concept certainly appeals, but since we face a closed courtyard, any miss is gonna break something. I will have an idea one of these days, though. I got a bit more done on the nameless project - and the work is backed up across the 'net to the data warehouse - we shall see how it goes. Back to working for wages next Monday, but I am going to squidge my schedule some.

Subject: Bookmark Browsing
    Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 00:44:04 -0800

.b - 

I don't waste enough time browsing my own hundreds of 
bookmarks? Now I find myself browsing yours? Sheesh. 
And also oi veh.

Seriously, the BM on HTAccess looks v. interesting. 
Added it to mine (I need just one more. Each one I add, 
I fully expect a BSOD caused by the unconditional 
surrender of Netscape.

Really now, all kidding aside, when was the last time 
your Bookmarks were weeded out and sorted? Can 
you even remember? I can't.

Regards,

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

Tomorrow is fishing at Lake Chabot in the wee hours through about midday, then back to project work for the rest of the weekend. Hope you have a nice one!

Oh. LinuxExpo (The original, with the .org moniker, not the Linux World Expo that IDG shanghied the LinuxExpo.com DN with) is apparently gone and dead. The explanation by Donnie Barnes is here. This turned up in my email earlier today, then jumped in my face again at Slashdot. Then I just bookmarked this one for reading tomorrow (as I am all read out) - 21st Century Unix by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

As you may have noted from my reply to JHR, we are out tomorrow morning early, but shall return. Have a lovely weekend. G'night.


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Good day to you. We did indeed make it up and out at Oh-Dark:30 this morning, and hit the water at about the same time the sun did. The day was a perfect fishing day - not one single nibble on my line, only one decent hit on Marcia's, and people right, left and sideways of us pulling trout out of the water like they were standing at the counter in a supermarket. One fisherperson to the right of us (4 rods down) acquired some really good eating - 7 lbs. of Rainbow....

So what was perfect about the day? Well, I had a good book, for one thing. When I got it, The Burning City moved to the top of my stack, where it sat, having 10 or 20 pages a night read from it - and I have probably 6 books in various stages of progress. But each day at lunch this week I would pick up Burning City as I settled, and usually only noticed that I had finished my food when my fork bottomed out and came back empty. Then I would force myself to get back to work on the project, and put the book aside. Difficult.

Today I knocked back the latter half of Burning City, finishing it by about 11:30. I made the conscious effort to read it slowly. Due to early speed reading training, I can kick out most novels in 2 or 3 hours, well enought to report the story line and the salient facts. To have the possibility of enjoying a book, I must read slowly. I enjoyed this book. Immensely. I have always liked Niven's work, and Pournelle's as solo writers. However, the synergy they generate as a team has almost always enthralled me, from The Mote in God's Eye forward.

This book is superior. It stands alone, and leaves me wanting more (of course, I wanted more of the aftermath from Lucifer's Hammer, too - but Jerry says probably not - Sigh). Other than one rather transparent section on the politics extant at the time of the fall of Atlantis (read a bit too much newspaper front page for my taste), the story and plotting are marvelous. As usual with their work, I find myself sharing the lives of the characters, wanting to know more about them, reading between the lines to flesh them out even further - wheeehooo. I wrote and thanked Jerry and asked him to pass the regards on to Larry. I thought you should know I liked the book as well.

If you want to make Jerry happy, then go to his site, and buy the book from one of his links (at the moment linked off the home page there), that way Jerry gets a few more pennies for his work. If you aren't buying from Amazon for political or other reasons, then you can try this link, or this link, which are a couple of other booksellers I buy from (I do no associate links - these are a service to you). Do buy the book though, or borrow it from your local public library if you haven't the gelt at the moment. A great read.

Hi. Have I gushed enough? I did take the time to take a shot or two - a duck giving me the evil eye, a couple of ducks racing (I dunno who won), and one shot of the hill taken at my favorite time of year - the green is just so lush. Now to work for me, so you have a nice time - catch you later.


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Well, like Red Dwarf, I am back from the dead. Well, not dead. Stunned, really. I did something yesterday while trying to load a test distribution on the back end of my second hard drive. By the time I came out the other side of the process, I had two blank hard disks. Thirty five empty gig of space, just begging to be filled with stuff. The problem, of course, is that there *had* been stuff there, and I kinda wanted it where it was. I spent about 4 hours attempting to recover, then, remembering that the absolutely critical data was backed up elsewhere, gave up on that effort, and devoted myself to rebuilding partitions - trickier than it sounds.

Windows, of whatever flavor, really likes to be loaded at the front of the booting HD. I could prepartition with Mandrake (my current and still champion distribution of choice, and not yesterday's problem child), but then Win wouldn't recognize the space left for it - and fdisk would choke. Sigh - after about 2 hours of progress ending at about 1 am last night, I was whipped and went off to bed. This AM, up at about 06:15, I wiped the drives and started from scratch - I will delineate my setup in a moment. There are a few things that still need to be fixed up, and I blew out my pgp info - If you have me on a keyring, dumpit and get a fresh key for me here. My key backup got trashed, too (I never expected a dual drive trashing), so I can't revoke that one - just make it disappear.

I have two main OS configurations now - one for some work (Windows 2K Pro), and one for the rest of the time (Mandrake 7.02). Windows owns the front 3 G of my 20 G hdc, and all 15 G of hdd. Mandrake gets the rest of hdc. All other test distributions will get loaded, executed and washed away within a VM from either Windows or Mandrake. I could have put yesterday's project into a jail, too, but I wanted to watch what happened with real hardware, rather than the idealized devices presented by VMware. Oh, well.

The freezer is stocked up (yes, a quick topic shift there, but something accomplished), most of my systems are back in order, apps loaded (though I have a couple of VM's to setup and load for testing purposes, and a couple of freebee apps to D/L and install). I dropped all of my recent email in the bitbucket - gonna have to do something about that.

.sig(s) of the moment -

MSCE: Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert
MSCE: Must Consult Someone Experienced