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.

Space Corp Directive number 198736 Stroke Zed Sub-paragraph 3345.6 explicitly states that Space Corp personnel should not sleep in on a Sunday until the sun is well over the yardarm, then consume a double expresso in the evening after 9 pm and have any hope whatsoever of getting any sleep at all the following evening. Hmmm. Do you think I violated that one. Do you? Do you?!?!?!? Thank you Mister Rimmer, Sir.

Today is the day when the man who beat Childe Roland at his own game goes live online. That's right, folks, in less than 15 minutes by my clock, Warlock and his alter ego, J.H. Ricketson are online at Warlock's Tower - AHA, in a quick link check,the gentleman himself has just flung the gates wide, so go on in and have a look around. Just keep an eye peeled to the gate - The Tower is not a place to be trifled with at any time. Pay attention, there is a "here" link somewhere on the beach page - I found it.

Off to work I go. This just in from last night's surfing at Slashdot - Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity - a symposium put together at Stanford by Doug Hofstadter (of GEB fame) - I might could try to attend that, if only I could be sure it wasn't for fools only. This week is short form catalog week. I may put up a pdf or two for critiquing, if you have a minute or two later on.

17:00 - There's an opensource competitor for Tripwire, called AIDE, now available at this location. That should just about cover the security front for the time being - I am going to do some research on this and think about running AIDE, one of these days. I will quote from the nascent manual...

General guidelines for security

   1.Do not assume anything 
   2.Trust no-one,nothing 
   3.Nothing is secure 
   4.Security is a trade-off with usability 
   5.Paranoia is your friend 

Where does the time go? Here's one answer - email. My spam reduction rules and such are working fine. Of the 75 unread items in my inbox since 22:30 last night, only three are spam - the rest include a few personal messages and the balance is from the three reflectors that I am subscribed to - Linux-Admin, UUSCA and SVLUG. All good, interesting material, with the occasional flamefest to liven things up. It's just that an average of 200 email items a day seems to build up like ice on the wings. A slow steady drag. Sigh. I'd better slog through them - back in a few.

.sig of the moment ...

And sanity is really just a one trick pony, anyway. I mean, all you
get is one trick, RATIONAL THINKING!  But when you're good and crazy,
the sky's the limit!"  - The TICK

18:40 - Only 45 new messages rung in since this AM ... someone isn't doing their job! A couple of interesting things to point out, stuff I came across today. From a link on Slashdot, this article by Lawrence Lessig called Innovation, Regulation and The Internet ... give it a read - I want to address the topic, perhaps this weekend, but not right now. Also of interest, apparently AO-Hell has gotten itself added to the ORBS RBL. Heh. Perhaps Beos 5.0 is up and available (free) from this site, although it may be challenging, due to the Slashdot effect. I wonder if it works in a VM. Ah, well, I am downloading now, anyway - more when I know more.

A few minutes to throw together some burritos and wolf them down, then into research mode I go. Time to get ready to write some more. TTYL.


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Howdy. The sun is shining, birds are chirping - looks to be a gorgeous morning. Clearly, it's time to go to work in a tilt-up, here in earthquake country. Tilt-up is the manner of construction used for many industrial facilities around here. Pour the slab, then form the walls, flat on the slab and pour them. Let'm cure, then tilt them up. But when the ground moves, won't they just tilt down again?

Found some problems with one of the Linux installers last night - the partitioning tool out and out lies - this is probably my difficulty that ended up killing Grinch a couple of weeks ago. I did some careful version investigation after noting my partition table data from the partitioning tool in my working Mandrake installation. I think a call to bug management central is in order today.

Haven't had time to do the Beos 5 thing yet... probably this weekend. I am going to be back home early today to meet with my old friend Albert - he runs a cleaning service in the area and we are looking for a little help on the deep cleaning side of things. Marcia and I are so busy these days that we are loath to spend potential free time on the periodic real cleaning that does need to get done. Picking up here and there is easy - properly cleaning this place eats a day.

The patio farm is doing fine. I'll get some more snaps and post them this afternoon. Now, however, I must run. TTFN. And there are the promised snaps. One new thing - in it's previous version, gPhoto couldn't handle the Olympus D450Z without core droppings and no output - to get data from the camera, a boot into windows was required. Now, at revision 0.6.3, it works. Mostly. I was able to get all of the images, but indexes with thumbnails and live previews killed the program dead. One feature not offered on the software that came on 2 CD's with the camera ... live camera control. Now I can take frightening pictures whenever I feel like it. Heh.

On another front, PBI email is STILL in a world of hurt - I am sporadically getting email from the last two or three days, a message from Tom last night got rejected by the server as spam! Well, no comment <SEG>. Dunno what to tell you - until I get enough time to research the mail daemons and decide what to install and how to install it, getting me by email is apparently going to be hit and miss. During the biz day, I can usually be caught at bilbrey(at)etslan.com, which I check a few times a day. That account is serviced by LookOut, which I don't leave running (as opposed to Netscrape, which I do).

Work to be done and dinner to be eaten... oh - My sister-in-law Sue and her husband Bill were the pleased recipients of a new computer the other day (they are the ones that Marcia maintains the Spoelhof site for) - They have been working with a decade old Apple machine for the longest, and we chipped in 50% to get them a brand spanking (ooh, more spanking) new HP Pavillion. Big smiles, according to all reports. Now I simply must run. Later.


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Happy Thursday. Wow, do my legs ever hurt. I have been pushing pretty hard, skipping only one day since I restsarted last week on the running kick. 2.5 miles a day. I have aches where I haven't even had places since I was a teenager (too long ago to properly remember, I presume I had aches then too, but only remember the "good" stuff). I have added a couple of ibuprofin to my breakfast regimen. Email is still farked - I got only 15 messages with origin dates ranging from Monday to this morning. If there is something you have that I need to know, email me at work, which appears to be on a different subsystem, since it is corporate hosting rather than personal.

I did receive an SVLUG message today originating from the group designated troll - a LAB (lazy-assed bastard) who is persistent in sending messages without bothering to RTFM, check online resources, or ensure that his question is even appropriate for the group. (To kill all suspense, yes, I answered his request, this time, and was reasonably polite about it) In this case, he was hunting problems with fonts in his free download version of Corel Wordperfect 8 for Linux... and saying he got it from Caldera - hmmm. Wondering about font transitions from the Linux version to the Win version. I pointed him at the correct company, then, saying that I would do his research for him, found the resource page in the Corel site, the name of the newserver, and the name of the newsgroup he needed to subscribe to. Some people literally *choose* not to get it, and leech off of a community without giving back - this is one of the lost and homeless of the OS community, deranged and wandering, you kick 'em down a buck or two every once in a while.

Aha - I just got the copy of the email that I sent to Tom yesterday morning about this time. Heh. Have a fine day, I gotta run. Later.


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19:00 3/31 WARNING - THE LOCAL DSL LOOP APPEARS TO BE HOSED - SORRY. still @ 22:30 Sigh

Good Morning. TGIF. Time for a cuppa joe - two minutes, please

<cue "pleasant_background_music">

And now, the sounds of John Denver being strangled....

</cue>

Back. What? Oh, sorry about that. I was wondering where that old Monty Python LP had gotten to ... heh. The name? Matching Tie and Handkerchief, if I recall correctly. The dust jacket is long gone, and the label is faded to near nothing. Which one ... Oh, the John Denver bit. That's alright, but my favorite one from this one is the Henry Kissinger song, "He's got better legs than Hitler, and bigger tits than Cher." Yeah, Friday is a crass day sometimes, isn't it.

Busy as a bee last night. I snagged a copy of the OpenLinux 2.4 eDesktop off of the Caldera FTP server night before last. When I got home today last night, I ran md5sum on the ISO to confirm that the download was error free (unless the 51 byte md5sum file was also in error, in just the right way to match the error from the 650M ISO!) Burned it to CDR, and gave a shot at loading it as my third true booting OS, for testing purposes. This one, like eServer, really doesn't like my partition table or my hard drives or something. But both products only recognize 8G drives, when they are 20G and 15G respectively. eDesktop saw some of my existing partitions, eServer saw none of them (which I think was at the root of my system death 2 weeks ago - me not paying complete attention to the partitioning messages and/or bulling through anyway). The only Caldera product that properly recognizes my partitions, and let me load it, was OpenLinux 2.3, the oldest of the three products. Hmmm. So I loaded eDesktop in a VMware machine, where it happily resides, for the moment. It would appear that eDesktop would *really* like to have a clean drive upon which to load itself.

I was/am having mail problems - PBI's servers are sucking dead squirrels through 1/4" ID Tygon (tm) Tubing. So, prior to dumping out of Win2K (where I loaded eDesktop into the VM), I decided to play for a half hour, and loaded BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition. It lives in a 512M file over on the D drive (which is the designation of the Maxtor 15G /dev/hdd, as far as Win2K is concerned). Other filesystems are mountable, and there are some cute toys in it - the Be help/file/web browser Leatherman thingy (ie: it is supposed to be all in one, doing many things . . . not so well, depending) doesn't always render images properly, and apparently has NO productivity apps that ship with it, or even demo's of such. I think this is a teaser to drive sales of the BeOS 5.0 Pro product. Well, duh, I know, but really - show me the goods - on the basis of the PE, I have no clue why I should even consider laying out the $70 for 5.0 Pro - and their site is deadly slow, even over the DSL connection. And it took some *hunting* to find that price - I don't think so.

Oh, right, mail problems. So, two nights before last, I used wget -r ... to snag a copy of the whole HP OpenMail tree off of the FTP server. OpenMail is the commercial (but free for less than 50 users) mail server thing that (apparently) looks to clients like an Exchange server (or an IMAP server, depending on your client). Loaded it, did some reading, initialized and read some more, configured some of the services and read some more, and apparently have it up and running locally here. I would appreciate some test messages sent to [email protected] - I am liable to reply to some of them more than once as I test out various clients. I do need external testers though, because the thing is smart enough to intercept internally destined stuff and snag it without even ever hitting the wire. Wrapped it up about 20 to Midnight, and now it's time to hit the road, Jack.

Have a great day. Things can only get better. TTYL.

> Hi
> 
> This a test of the Bilbrey emergency ( someday to become production ) email
> system, not to be confused with the really sucky PBI mail system.
> 
> John
> 

To the left is a screenshot of the OpenMail X/Motif GUI Client for the HP OpenMail server. Got this part working great, though I don't know what to do with (or about) attachments... let me send myself one to see about incoming. For outgoing, this client appears not to have the option. OK, I can receive an attachment, but I don't know how to save it out to disk from the message client. I think I found how to send attachments with this, but I would much rather access it with a normal client.... let me see.

I will probably break something while experimenting... Oh, btw, if you have your email tool set to ask for an autoresponse, then the Grendel postmaster will send you one automatically when I open a message using OMGUI. I am sure there is a regulation for that too, but Bob and Dan Bowman already know this behaviour.

> I have gotten return-receipts saying that the message had been received. I
> have gotten return-receipts saying that the message had been read. This is
> the first return-receipt I have ever gotten that says that the recipient has
> performed an action upon it. It does leave me wondering exactly what action
> you performed.
> 
> How literate, though. Few people would have written "upon it" rather than
> "on it". Nice to know that your mail server speaks proper English.
> 
> 
> Robert Bruce Thompson
> [email protected]
> http://www.ttgnet.com
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 7:40 PM
> Subject: Delivery/Disposition Notification
> 
> 
> This is an automatically generated Message Disposition Notification message.
> It is to inform you the recipient of your message has performed an action
> upon it.

On the Outlook topic, I am sure that you are right, but when I tried that from work today, I had forgotten about some firewall features that needed to be modified ... I locked myself out of the box from my work IP. Now to reboot Grinch into Windows and give it a shot - I also believe that it will be able to be seen as an IMAP server by Netscrape. We shall see.

19:00 3/31 WARNING - THE LOCAL DSL LOOP APPEARS TO BE HOSED - SORRY. still @ 22:30 Sigh


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The DSL connection is still behaving like a White House Intern. Good morning and happy Saturday, day of Fools, first of April.

Interesting day that Tom picked to out my involvement with OpenLinux Secrets, eh? Seriously, thanks, Tom. Since this whole daynotes thing was really rolling (unofficially) long before I appeared on the scene, I have been honored to be associated with this group of individuals. I have heard that a man is known by the company he keeps. I am priviledged to be in fine company indeed.

Regarding the writing game, I am reminded of a story told of Oscar Wilde, who, at lunch, was asked how he had spent his morning. His terse reply, "I added a comma." At supper the great author and noted wit was asked what progress his afternoon had brought. "I took it out again." was his reply. Needless to say, we don't have time for lots of styling - this is a thousand pages on a reasonably tight schedule. Just about all of the style issues have been hashed out, and it is time to get down to production - I have two chapters to plunk out by week's end.

There are some more hardware configuration issues. I have not had very much luck with the OpenLinux installers - to my way of thinking, the partition manager for the latest two versions is broken (since it won't properly recognize the partitions as set up by Mandrake. But then again, I do have a rather complex partition setup.

Tom and I have been talking about this. Turns out I have what might be called a "spare" HD in Grendel. Spare, in that I found it when I was spelunking through the configs and setups on the Gateway that Grendel inhabits, yesterday. Upon exploring the fstab file, I remember WHY I have this drive - I was doing VMware tests on it back in early December (loading RC3 in a VMware 1.2 for Linux setup). Since Christmas, Grendel has only been a server - I have him set up to boot into runlevel 3 only (no X).

So, here's the gameplan. I am going to modify Grendel's fstab, and pull that drive. I am going to pop my primary (holding Win2K and Mandrake) out of Grinch (thus, a backup bootable configuration, ready to roll). I am going to put in this 15G drive, strip the partition down to metal and reload with eDesktop. Using Caldera as my prime OS for the term of production for this book is a Good Thing (tm), as I will get to note and fix all the glitches. Tom has done this with eServer, I believe. So Grendel will be down for a short time (about 10 minutes) later this morning, for a drive-ectomy.

On the OpenMail front, [email protected] is fully live and open for business. This just in from Gary Berg...

> Hey, congratulations on planning to do the book with Tom.  Now I know where
> all your time will be going to the next 6 months...
> 
> Now if you get a chance to buy up another "black horse" computer like Tom
> did you could write up some really interesting parts of the book...

Think nice thoughts for my friend and boss, Jack. Jack had a small stroke or a TIA event or something on Wednesday. Jack is a fair bit like me and some other people I know. The only thing that will actually keep us from our appointed rounds is Rigor Mortis. Needless to say, he was at work on Friday, but is experiencing some difficulties and is extremely frustrated. Do me a favor: say a prayer or hoist a pint or whatever your method is - I wish him a speedy recovery.

Now I had better get down to brass tacks and start producing. I have no intention of letting myself (or Tom) down.

21:03 - First, there were a couple of congratulatory, gloating messages...

Subject: congrats
   Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2000 02:02:03 +0200

>>> Just about all of the style issues have been hashed out...

Yeah, that's the illusion writers have to get started. 

Welcome to the productivity club. Looks like you have a fun and 
busy year ahead of you.

/ Bo

-- 
"Bo Leuf"
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/

Subject: RE: Testing
   From: Gary Berg
I was always amazed that since Tom & Bo were working on the Nutshell book
together how little Bo wrote about his trials and tribulations of working on
the book with Tom.

You've decided that you like eDesktop so much that you are going to replace
your normal operating system with it?  It seems to me you just started
writing about it a couple of days ago.  Grinch is the newer box that you got
recently with lots of disk and CPU/RAM?  Is Grinch the box which serves out
your web site?  Ideally you'd make your web server some relatively slow box
that you can dedicate to that purpose and save the faster box to run on
yourself.

I'm glad stuff with your new email setup seems to be working OK so far.  I
would assume you could use any POP3 email client to access your new mail
server, even "Lookout" or something like that.  Especially if you can't send
attachments .

As I'm sure you are aware you want to not have an open SMTP relay on the
'net.  So I assume you closed that before you even tried to set it up for mail.

Regarding relaying, starting with version 8.9 of Sendmail, relaying is denied by default, and has to be enabled. This I have not done, and HP OpenMail uses Sendmail as it's MTA.

Yup, the plan changed again. I need a drive for Marcia's box - we got one of the last 4G IDE drive machines on the market last year and that little HP is seriously out of space. So I will set Marcia up with the 13.4G off the tail of the IDE chain from Grendel later.

What I did with Grinch, with huge success and massive high-fives. Well, when I thought it through again, caffeine perking through the arteries and water sluicing over me in the shower, I had brilliant idea number one. The 15G /dev/hdd is only on Grinch for VM's and experimental stuff. Now admittedly, I had 5 running Linux distro's + BeOS running in that space. But right now, I have to be able to work with a Caldera product as a booting OS, not just in a VM. There *are* limitations to a VM, and I didn't want to butt heads with those while testing for "normal" use.

/dev/hdd, which had been a Win2K dedicated 15G volume, got stripped down to the metal. Then I popped in the eDesktop CDROM that I snagged the ISO for, this week. While I refused to let it muck with upper level partitions on /dev/hdc, where my working partitions are, I was (and am) happy to play with a whole separate spindle. That said, the autodetection of hardware (excepting the monitor, which I had to enter the parameters for in a dialog) went wonderfully. First pass through the installer, I gave it the whole disk and effectively said, "You figure it out - how do you want to partition this space?" I then used the back button, and went into the partition manager again from the expert angle. Hmmm.

Partitions set up roughly as 2G for / (root), 250M for swap, and the balance (12G+) to /home. That is not a partitioning setup that I approve of. So I stripped off the stuff that the auto-partition had done, and did this, instead.

/dev/hdd1	/boot		24M
/dev/hdd2	/		467M
/dev/hdd3	swap		255M
/dev/hdd5	/usr		2204M
/dev/hdd6	/home		2953M
/dev/hdd7	/var		246M
/dev/hdd8	/tmp		246M
/dev/hdd9	/usr/local	8056

su
cd /
mv -r opt /usr/local/.
ln -s /usr/local/opt
exit

boot=/dev/hdc
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
vga=normal
default=linux
keytable=/boot/us.klt
prompt
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
other=/dev/hdc1
        label=win
        table=/dev/hdc
other=/dev/fd0
        label=floppy
        unsafe
image=/boot/vmlinuz
        label=linux
        root=/dev/hdc5
        append="hdb=ide-scsi"
        read-only
image=/boot/oled/vmlinuz
        label=oled
        root=/dev/hdd2
        read-only

Feh. Not just any feh, but this Feh. Short update this AM, as rebuild and research was completed yesterday, so today is writing day. I got pitched off of one of my mailing lists (UUASC) because of all the bounces generated by the PBI servers (thanks very much, guys {NOT}). I resubscribed using the Orb address - all is well. I am eventually going to figure out how to access OpenMail as an IMAP server, then all will be right - Changing my LookOut configuration to C/W in order to access OpenMail as an exchange server broke some things. I will have to see about changing it back.

In yesterday's news, Posner announces that settlement talks are over, Mickey$oft and DoJ + 19 State Attorneys General cannot agree (and, after the sharp moves MS made following the last "agreement", who can blame'm). Thus the door is open for the Findings of Law from Judge Jackson this week, followed by several months of thinking about how to remedy the situation. Then the appeals begin. Meanwhile nothing changes except that more Microsoft (and taxpayer) dollars transfer themselves to the pockets of lawyers (the larval form of the genus Politician). Sigh.

Word landed from Dave Farquhar (whose site is down at present) that there is a new virus in the land. The warnings are bold and prominent on Pournelle's page, which is a Good Thing, since he has a large audience. This beast attacks unprotected Windows shares across the Internet. Shut the hatches, circle the wagons ... oh, wait, wrong enemies - Get a firewall, turn off your shares (or at least password protect them), better yet, put a linux box between you and the world. (you're not surprised by that, coming from MY fingertips, are you?). Check the NIPC alert out.

Good day. Maybe more later. TTFN.


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