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.

We had a nice trip on the weekend - saw much of the immediate family and baptised the kid. A couple of pictures below, many more linked off of Marcia's Musings page.

Happy Monday!!! It's still raining here, joy of joys. Supposed to rain and drizzle through much of the week. Yippee. Now for some mail...

Subject: Tomato Farmers
    Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 00:32:22 -0700
    From: "J.H. Ricketson" 
      To: [email protected]

.b -

Hope you're having better weather this weekend. San Pablo has cold, grey, and spitting rain
Good weather to stay inside and work on a book!

Tomato farming in the Bayrea hills has always been problematic - not enough sun & hot 
days to set the blossoms. They have a product called "blossomset" that when sprayed on
fools the tomato plant into thinking that it is OK to set the fruit and drop the blossom.
OTOH, in the Bayrea flats, in Emeryville, I once saw the most humonguous tomato
tree that could be imagined. The stalk was as thick as my wrist, and unstaked.
It was growing close to the Bay, probably on alluvial soil. I couldn't believe my eyes.
Less than a mile away tomatoes simply don't grow.

Period. Paragraph. New subject: Furry-tailed rats:
One approach is to use ordinary rat-size snaptrap rat traps. I got this idea when the 
SF Examicle ran a series on refugee groups trapping  - and EATING! our little furry 
friends, in GG Park. This caused hysteria & loose bowels among the Tree Huggers 
& Animal Rightsers. They could care less that these people were HONGRY. They 
were Hmong (Viet for "animals") refugees. Montagnards. Not ordinary Viets. They
were survivors - with thousands of years of survival under adverse conditions in 
their history. I kind of like them, as you have probably guessed by now.

Anyhoo - Get yourself a rattrap or two, bait them with with peanut butter for
openers, then try various other bait until you find one that is irresistable.
Perhaps cooked bacon might work. Rats can't resist it. But BE SURE TO
NAIL THE TRAPS DOWN, or chain them with light metal chain. Anything
as big as a furry-tailed rat may not be killed immediately, and will drag the 
trap off to where you can't find it.

Good luck, Trapper Brian! And good luck with the Tomato Ranch!

Regards,

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

Re Squirrels... The people around here with bark breath may not like kill trapping either. I continue to think about it. This is the first year they have been so aggressive with the crops.

Pictures eat time. Must run. Back this afternoon. TTFN.

17:00 - A couple of interesting things and a big Thank You to take care of. Let's start with the thanks... Stephanie and the whole team over at VMware have been kind enough to comp me boxed copies of the VMware for Linux and for WinNT/Win2K products. I first purchased the product last fall, and played with installing Win2K (RC3) in a VM under Linux - and got it running. I experimented with the beta of 2.0, and found it to be a better, more stable product than 1.2. When 2.0 became available, I bought the upgrade. 10 days later, Tom drafted me in to work on a Linux book, to be written in a Windows word processor environment - you betcha VMware is beginning to look awfully handy. Tom introduced me virtually to Stephanie, and she has been gracious and courteous. THANKS! There is a feature of 2.0 that I was unaware of until seeing the boxed sets today, "suspend and restore". I hope that means what I think it does - this is going to be fun. More when I know more.

Canvas. A program I have heard of. Beta for Linux new with version 7.0 of the program, released last week. Cool. 6 month's free trial on the beta, unsupported but please send bug reports. Hmmm. Standard, if annoying. Normal EULA. Waitaholdonasecondtherefella. The second splash screen says ... well, just look at the image. Hmmm. Off I go to the install directories. cd /usr/local/canvas7, then grep disclos * reveals

8. U.S. Government Restricted Rights: This Deneba Product is 
"Restricted Computer Software." Use, duplication, or disclosure 
by the Government is subject to restrictions as set forth in 
subparagraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and 
Computer Software clause at DFARS 252.227-7013 or  
subparagraphs (c)(1) and (2) of the Commercial Computer 
Software - Restricted Rights at 48 CFR 52.227-19, as 
applicable. The publisher is Deneba Systems, Inc., 
1150 NW 72nd Avenue, Miami, Florida  33126. 

Yes, I will write and ask them what they mean. I think I could like this program, and it certainly doesn't cost what the Adobe products do. Again, more when I know more. Lastly from my backorder list of existing items, Jakob Nielsen has a new Alertbox on the wire - Reset and Cancel Buttons. Jakob remains recommended reading for webmasters and power users.

Culled from Kuro5hin, Encryption matters, part 1 and now Part 2, RMS is going to be interviewed on Slashdot shortly, and on Technocrat, Bruce Perens responds to a Security Focus Critique of Open Source Security, which itself was a reponse to this Slashdot feature about the IIS hinky code, written by Eric Raymond. Can I fit a few more links in here? Bored and looking for some interesting reading? Check out ESR's writings on his site. Now I must to work - have a lovely evening.


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Good morning, y'all. In a move entirely unlike the week's forecast as put forth by the sundry papers and broadcast news organizations in our area, the ceiling in the big room outside the apartment is blue(ish) and apparently someone has turned that huge halogen bulb on real high... Right now the light is blasting in between a pair of houses across the street, blowing through the mini-blinds like they weren't even there, and piercing my eyeball every time I even glance to the right. Hmmm. Not at all like the grey wet stuff predicted.

Very little mail this morning, so instead the backup last night fails for me. Turns out there's just too much stuff. I suppose that a larger drive would be a good thing (this is only a 400/800 Colorado T-1000 hanging on the floppy chain), but not at the moment it wouldn't. That's OK for the moment - I have about 50M of stuff that I can clear out of my home directory, which should buy us some room.

Dreamt this AM of getting pulled over for driving upwards of 100 mph in a Honda Civic (I've owned a couple of those in my day). I didn't think it was possible that I had been going *that* fast, but was trying to think of a way to crack the security on the engine computer so that it would mis-report the top speed . . . Heh. I do drive a little near the top of the range, and practice firm defensive driving (the best defense is a strong offense), and know from practical experience that a nutcase swerving lane to lane is much safer at least a mile back of me. I wonder if the message is "slow down just a bit." Probably - commute traffic is so tension-building, though.

I bow to the Master! I certainly couldn't have done better myself, though I have blown the OS on Grinch and Grendel multiple times (and have done so in other boxes at other times with other OS's). Tom done a good-un, though. Is there a place for a tinker in the land of mass production? And another thought - if I can't compile SSH on AIX (because of missing libraries, etc.), I wonder if I can't cross-compile here on Grinch to a static target (requiring no Libs on the destination box). Makes a bigger executable, but it may just work. We do want to be able to have secure commo to Hydras.

On the road. Catch you later.


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All quiet on the western front. Good morning. As a little break from yester'eve's writing, we had a paramedic in to do the exams for life insurance. All went well and we expect to be insured in the next few weeks. Then you can watch from the sidelines and see which of us remains standing at the end of the cage match. Heh. Just kidding, of course. Also last night, through supper, there was an interesting show on PBS re El Niño. These people spend 250+ days a year at sea, interpreting data and servicing an array of 70 bouys. Sheesh - that's tougher than touring with the Dead was (or so I've heard).

Ransom Love (of Caldera, not Corel - my bad) is calling Linux a proprietary platform. No, I can't possibly do his "arguments" justice, but here's an article on ZDNet about his comments at Comdex / Linux Business Expo. Hmmmm. Say, Jerry sure is talking nice about Linux, Penguin Computing and WordPerfect Office for Linux, in his column over on Byte. I think that little Netwinder box has a strong mojo.

There's always more to read, do and say, but I shall leave that until another time, as the wage slavery allotment is about to commence. Have a lovely day and I will return later.

14:32 - Quickie, this just in from Deneba, publishers of Canvas - the program I whined about regarding non-disclosure...

Subject: nondisclosure
    Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 15:55:03 -0400
    From: michael cardenas 
      To: [email protected]

Ok, I removed that from the splash screen, it doesn't apply. Thanks!
And _please_ talk about canvas all you want! I'll be checking out your page...
____________________________________________________
Michael Cardenas
Lead Linux Programmer
Deneba Software
Miami, FL
____________________________________________________
For the usual open source hooplah, see

http://www.opensource.org/
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html#AboutFreeSoftware

Tom is sitting on the porch (Porshe?), I merely switched monitors - now parked in front of the 19" EV-900 here at home, beginning to slog away - Tom gets it however, and does work until his eyeballs have drained onto his sleeves, in the wee hours of the morning - Me, on the other hand - I try really hard to keep my working day to under 18 hours. I know, just another slacker. More on Canvas when I have time to work it a little bit - like I said, I have motivation for wanting to like this, as I am looking for a tool to do this stuff on Linux. Later.


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I would say that we are trailing down towards week's end, but this doesn't end, does it? Good morning! I was home by a little after 2 yesterday, and kicked about 16 more pages into the hopper (along with cutting some pre-existing material that I decided really didn't need to be in the commands chapter - I am trying to keep from writing a 200 page command reference - there are still 25 other chapters that have to fit in the 1000 pages. Heh.

How are you this AM? Checked your email yet? Of course you have! David Strom, in this morning's Web Informant newsletter (see his article in the current week's Byte to learn more about him) talks about the book Blur. Blur is apparently about the blurring (duh) of our work and home lives. Daynoter's, of all people, can't understand this. My blurring occurs between work and fun ... Wait - I thought I was supposed to be working. This is fun - they pay me? The actual hours sometimes blur, as the evenings wear on.

There's nothing that really grabs my attention over at Slashdot this morning - on my morning reading list is Daniel Dern's Letter from the Editor LARTs and Office Penguins (also over at Byte). For those of you not yet in the know, a LART is a Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool, which can range from a nerf gun, to a wiffle bat to a Louisville Slugger to a Walther PPK. Depends on the level of Readjustment necessary, I suppose. Hmmm.

More on the wire later, I am sure - have an interesting day. Bye.


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Morning. Happy Friday. Sorry about the 10 hours of downtime - Pacbell DSL in the SF Bay Area went down hard yesterday. I have the sense of an pilot error somewhere in the outer marches. Back now, thanks for all the "thoughtful" emails - Yes, I do pull Tom's. although given the number of times I have reinstalled on these systems, I prefer to call them Brian's...

There was a post on the SVLUG mailing list of the Sigh. RMS is beating the drum again..., requesting that people use GNU/Linux rather than just Linux. Then there was this response:

Subject: Re: [svlug] [Fwd: GNU/Linux]
    Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 17:55:15 -0400 (EDT)
    From: Abhijit 
      To: "Justin"
      CC: Svlug 

richard stallman's frustration is understandable. the gnu guys certainly
deserve the credit they ask for, but saying "gnu/linux" in place of
"linux" everytime is simply awkward! 
besides, its way too late to change anything now; linux is too popular for
that.

On Thu, 20 Apr 2000, Justin wrote:
> 
>       I don't know how many of you read BUGTRAQ but Mr Stallman posted this
> today.. Looks like he's still beating his drum.
> 
>       Justin.

As both things (the GNU tools and the Linux kernel) would be nowhere without the other, acknowledgement is important. This is offset by the "a rose by any other name..." principle. Certainly GNU/Linux is easier on the eye than Linux/GNU... heh.

One hundred twenty three emails later, I am through - only took me 32 minutes. Now to the store to pick up some fresh fruit for the potluck at work today, then on to my day. You have a great one too, if you please, and think nice juju at the DSL installation, so that it stays in operation today. Maybe I will ask Warlock to conduct a ceremony for me. TTFN.

To the right and left you see thumbnail links to the final versions of the art and text we worked out for the most recent campaign - these posters went to NAB with our distributor Brill Electronics, and they will make an appearance at NSCA and VDV as well. Art and words by Brian and Trudy (one of my bosses). Tools used - Toshiba M4 digital camera, The Gimp and Mandrake Linux 7.02, Adobe Illustrator 7.0 and Windows 2K. The images are the same, only the text is different.

Home, doing laundry and getting ready for yet another run at the book - 'though I learned last night how much I have become dependent upon the 'net... I have books open all around me as I write, but go online for confirming information every few sentences - much tougher to write when a prime resource is unavailable - Hell, I might even have to make up a fact or two. Nah. Wouldn't be right, wouldn't be ... prudent. <SEG> Sorry!

Thanks for calling to check up, Dan! We didn't know until this afternoon that Dan had rung up to make sure that all was well. (Marcia had her box dialed in, using our voice line, at the time - and we didn't check the message center until she arrived home this afternoon).

You know, I would really rather play, surf and write about it here, but commitment is set. Gotta run. Later.


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Howdy. Sorry for the delay, but we have been shopping, and I have been surfing and generally lazy. For some reason I am deep tired. I think that I am working the little gray cells harder than they have been called upon to do in recent years, and they're a little shocky.

Happy Saturday, approaching onto Easter Sunday for those who celebrate the religious holiday which replaced the ancient fertility rites associated with the vernal equinox and planting time. Bob is talking about celebrating the equinox, but, ummmm, wasn't that last month?

On the shopping front, we executed a quick strike on the local Costco, getting in and out with only a couple of items that weren't on our list - not too bad. Then we went by Fry's, where I could find nothing that cried out my name, begging to be taken home and played with. Hmmm, maybe I am NOT feeling well, after all.

Following the nice letter from the lead Canvas for LInux developer at Deneba, I received notice that a new beta, 2 by number, has been released and please come get it if you will. So I do, a 15M, 2 minute download. Then I uninstalled beta1 with a quick rpm -e canvas, then installed the new version by rpm -i canvas-7.0b2.0-1.i386.rpm. (These done as root, followed by an initial start /usr/local/canvas7/canvas7 to activate the program and enter the reg number they mailed me). After that, I can start Canvas running as me, rather than superuser. I note (finally, having missed it the first time), that Canvas runs over Wine (which is a Windows API layer to provide compatibility mode for Windows apps). The new beta has one distinct plus - I can load JPG files (beta1 couldn't). Printing initially seems fairly capable too.

One major hink - Sub-dialogs give the whole program the jitters - can't close the dialog, can't close the app, can't open and use other windows in the desktop... A little more experimentation to validate my experience and I have found the solution - Set Window --> Managed Application Window, NOT Managed Application and Floating Windows. The latter, which appears to be the installed default, causes problems. Also, in failure mode, I can open the IceWM window manager, and kill the client in that fashion. All I want is enough stability to explore the UI and the functionality. More later, as it's fast coming up on book time.

Enough. CYL.


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Fishing, huh? Well, anyway, knocked off early last night, about 20:00, since I was having a frustrating day, anyway. I kept getting caught in the details, technical and grammatic. Very little forward progress. <hmmm> Sometimes, like yesterday, the problem is one of those "explain in 3 to 5 paragraphs a topic that several books have been written about. Yes, we know that the books don't all agree with each other, much less the online sources, but be both correct and succinct."&/hmmm>

Where was I... OK, knocking off early. Played a round of Dune2K ($9.95 @ Costco, out of Westwood Studios), then Marcia and I watched Blade Runner. I find that, although it's been 20 years, I remember the story fairly well. Good movie.

Dead mail morning, a few desultory messages on use of structs and arrays in C (turns out to be an indexing problem). That's it. A quick pass through the daynoter's reveals that Jerry will be off for Paris soon (yes, we're jealous). Dr. Pournelle is also justifiably (in my humble estimation) up in arms over this whole Elian fiasco. Who thought up that particular scenario, hmmm? Say goodnight, Janet.

Running the rest of the daynotes: Bob Thompson, before commenting on Elian, gives us a nice eulogy on Phil Katz, inventor of PKZIP, who passed from this world on the 14th of this month. Bo is reporting on Dan S., Elian, Waco and EOS. Shawn is staying up late, playing with Linux and Canvas, perhaps taking the weekend off from notes, though. Svenson is working with laptops and chickens (don't ask). John continues his work with Netware - I keep an eye on his travails, since I know a lot less about Netware than I would like. Chris is worried about civilization in general (can't say I blame him). Matt's taking the weekend off, can't blame him either. Dave Farquhar has been nailed to the wall with an FTP access problem that leaves him unable to post (heard on the back channel). Sigh. Steve Tucker has been up since the wee hours, and is by now back home in bed, I am sure. Dan Seto is a weekday guy, but is celebrating being admitted to Grad School - Hooraw. Jim and Delanae went to tiptoe through the tulips yesterday. Dan B. spent yesterday trenching and filling, and is probably at it again today. Ben Rota has a fairly recent comment about product vs. company loyalty. Check out Moshe's site, if you haven't recently - he's got Microsoft on a slide (again). Bob Walder is apparently taking the weekend off, but football is over, so there should be a little more tech in days to come. Phil is watching racing and downloading Linux, and Frank wishes us a Happy Easter (as many of the Daynoters do) in conjuction with a link about Mickeysoft's future (for those that don't know, the red dates in the calendar to the right of Frank's column are links to previous days (and months)). Lastly but not leastly, JHR has a successful Saturday in hardware and web surfing - check it out.

In other news, my lovely Marcia notes that we baked (and enjoyed) our Easter ham last night. Today we are off to lunch out with family, and I have some preparatory work to be done, printing picture proofs for my grandmother. Have a lovely Easter Sunday, think nice thoughts and we'll see you later.

18:45 - Back from an Easter Sunday Brunch that started at 2... it was buffet-style at La Hacienda, on Highway 9, between Saratoga and Los Gatos - very tasty, and I reminded the staff of the danger of an all-you-can-eat setup, when I am coming to town. heh heh heh! Marcia and myself, my folks, my grandmother, Aunt Trish and her friend Mallory. Much jollity, a good time. Holidays do have their moments. Now back to the grindstone. G'night.


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