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.

Another wonnerful weekend - gorgeous weather, friends and family, even got some writing done at the expense of several free moments. Ya, I am a whiner, but get cool with it - nuthin' serious. One thing I am serious about: we're cancelling our SJ Mercury News subscription altogether. Not a bad paper, but we rather under-utilize it, and as you can see from the left inset on the bean picture (top left below), their delivery people leave a little to be desired - they pitched the paper up straight through my bean strings and into the beans themselves, killing off a couple of home-grown plants (sprouted from last year's harvest). Want to plant a couple more in that corner - that way we have a continuous flow of veg.

As you can see, the patio farm progresses well - should be enough fixin's for a real good squirrel stew one of these days. Hmmm? Oh, sorry. Monday morning and all that, I understand. You needn't look at the shots, there's nothing very interesting about our plants, but I like showing off, so indulge me if you wish.

In other news... There is no other news at the moment. Nothing interesting happening at all. Move along. Move along.

Happy birthday. 

Boy, are you getting old.

Bob

Robert Bruce Thompson
http://www.ttgnet.com

Later.

Thanks especially to my lovely wife Marcia for sicc'ing this rabid bunch of Happy Birthday people on me. I will get even - trust me on this.

I'm not afraid of old farts like you.

Robert Bruce Thompson
http://www.ttgnet.com

Subject: Have...

a happy birthday!!!!

Your MoeLabs team 
(which inludes just me)

Moshe

When I run hdparm -u1 -d1 -X66 /dev/hdx, I seem to get nearly a 50% speedgain in bits like program loads (large ones like emacs and Netscape). Any thoughts on these other parameters?

***** New Topic *****

SSH on Tom's AIX box - can I cross-compile to an "AIX on RS6000" target here on the PC, using GCC, and compile static (so's not to require the libs)??? Is this (a) viable? and (b) a good, bad or indifferent idea.

And now for something completely different - Stan Klein, an attorney and IEEE member on the Intellectual Property committee (which is how I get clued in, because my boss Jack is also a committee member) has been working hard against UCITA - the following piece crossed my screen last week, and Mr. Klein gave his permission for me to post here.

[Correction - according to Stan's son Ed, NOT an attorney. Mmmm, makes sense since Stan clearly has an abundance of clue. /bpb 11/2001]

-----Original Message-----
From: Stanley A. Klein
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2000 9:47 PM
Subject: UCITA will make Maryland the most tech-hostile state in the nation

I thought I would share with you something I submitted for consideration as
an op-ed piece to the Washington Post, and sent (in slightly different
form) as a letter to the Governor.  BTW, the last paragraph concerns the
"bombshelter" legislation that has passed the House and Senate in Iowa,
subject to resolution of some amendments in the bill to which it was
attached.

Stanley A. Klein
Principal Consultant
Stan Klein Associates, LLC

FYI: My opposition to UCITA arose out of my activities as a member of the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers -USA Committee on
Communications and Information Policy.  For details of IEEE-USA's
opposition see www.ieeeusa.org/grassroots/ucita.

****************************************************************************
****************

The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is one of the
very worst bills to have ever passed the Maryland General Assembly.
Passage of this bill is a terrible way to enter the new millennium and the
digital age.

Incredibly, the legislators can truly claim that they improved the bill.
The original bill would have provided manufacturers of a wide range of
consumer goods (from VCR's to automobiles -- anything with a computer chip
buried anywhere inside it) a massive loophole for eliminating consumer
protections.   That loophole was closed by amendments, but was probably
included as something to sacrifice to protect the provisions put there by
the large software publishers and on-line services who pushed the bill.

The vast majority of these provisions were untouched by the amendments.
They enable the large software publishers and on-line services to stifle
competition, engage in abusive business practices, and grab tight control
of e-commerce and the digital economy.  The prestigious American Law
Institute, which participated in most of the bill's drafting process,
ultimately rejected the bill and withdrew from the drafting process,
stating that the bill was "a flawed approach to basic issues of contract
law" and a "delegation of regulatory power to licensors who draft form
[non-negotiable] contracts".  In the opinion of legal experts, the
allegedly protective amendments to the bill in critical areas will be
ineffective in protecting important rights granted users and publishers'
competitors under Federal copyright law.

As amended and passed, the bill makes Maryland the most legally unfriendly
state in the nation to:

*       Start and operate a small software development or computer consulting
firm.  The bill creates a high-risk legal and financial minefield for
small, unwary high-tech companies.

*       Operate a university or library.  The General Assembly rejected
amendments that would have maintained the status quo for libraries and
universities under Federal copyright laws as books become increasingly more
digital.  The wild copying of software claimed by proponents in scare
stories to defeat the amendments is already a Federal crime and would
remain so.  But the library community is deeply concerned that the transfer
and use restrictions on digital publications enabled by UCITA will lead to
the end of free public library service as we know it, and universities
believe UCITA will cripple teaching.

*       Use computers for business or professional purposes, including at-home,
non-consumer (because they are business or professional) activities such as
telecommuting and job seeking.  Consumers may remain with some protections
but everyone else loses the protections they enjoy under current law.
UCITA legalizes abusive business practices that have been struck down by
courts, enables even more, and takes away rights all users enjoy under
Federal copyright laws.

*       Participate in the free/open-source software movement (the basis of
Gnu/Linux, Apache, Samba, and other low cost, non-proprietary systems that
run about one-third to one-half of the Internet and e-commerce).  UCITA
enables publishers to stifle the development of non-proprietary software
that can exchange data with proprietary formats, currently legal under
copyright law.  Also, there is great concern that the warranty provisions
of UCITA, even as amended, place volunteer developers of non-proprietary
software at financial risk.

*       Attempt to maintain a secure computing environment.  The "self help"
provisions of UCITA enable software publishers to embed security holes in
their software so they can break in an disable the software if there is a
license dispute.  For example, if a user violates a license by publicly
criticizing the software (a prohibition allowed under UCITA), the publisher
can break into the user's system and disable the software.  Until now,
denial-of-service attacks as a tactic for settling license disputes have
been very rare because they almost always result in a lawsuit.  The Federal
Government is taking the existence of  "self-help-capable software" (i.e.,
software having the embedded security holes to support this kind of
denial-of-service attack) very seriously as a threat to the integrity of
Federal Government computers and is in the process of formulating its
policy response.

The serious adverse effects of UCITA won't all occur immediately.  They are
more like slow strangulation or a self-induced infection with AIDS.
Enactment of UCITA required the political muzzling of important Maryland
institutions that understood the dangers in the bill.  The action of the
Maryland General Assembly in enacting UCITA takes us back to the bad old
days when Maryland's example was one to be scorned.

Fortunately, there is a state setting an example to be followed.  The Iowa
General Assembly is in the final stages of passing legislation that would
void any agreement that invokes UCITA (by means of "choice of law"
provisions) when a party to the agreement is a resident of Iowa or a
business located there.  That's what Maryland should have done.

Good Morning - since it was someone's birthday yesterday, I simply mucked about for a little bit, ate like a pig, and generally had a nice evening. As you might can see, I have been playing a little with canvas. To the left is a shot of the main working screen, tabs at the top are tool dialogs which can open in place for single selection, or tear off (as I have done with two of them). Real TrueType font format - all I had to do to fill out the set was copy all of my .ttf files over from the windows partition. To the right is a print preview. There are grids, snapping to grids, selectable precision and much much more - this is a pretty nice tool.

To the left here is a snap I took of the second printout I made. The first was odd because the grid isn't invisible, so I printed everything on an 0.025 background grid - not what I wanted. The picture isn't photo-quality, but then I wasn't expecting that. Interestingly, among the output formats is .pdd. Hey, cool. This is as easy to use as Illustrator is, reasonably similar in UI and function that it takes very little time to ramp up for me. Some day I will do some replication work and see how it comes out - my only need for this part of my work is Adobe Acrobat for Linux (not the reader) - right now I use Illustrator to create camera-ready art for ads and such - TIFF output and I can get that. Also I do datasheets and other online resource stuff that I like to post in .pdf, since it is fairly compact and prints well in addition to displaying well.

Then Moshe chimes in, with a cautionary answer, and I must fly - Later!

>
> Never one to pass up an opportunity - that's me...
>
> A question, if you have a moment - I read your feedback on Bob's page
> about hdparm. You addressed the -u1 issue, what about -d1 and especially,
> from my perspective, -X66. I am running fairly recent hardware (ASUS BH6
> mobo) and a pair of nearly new Maxtor's.

As the man page says: "
-X66 is used to select UltraDMA mode2 transfers (you'll need to prepare the
chipset for  UltraDMA beforehand).  Apart from that, use of this flag is
seldom necessary since most/all modern IDE  drives  default  to their
fastest PIO transfer  mode at power-on.  Fiddling with this can  be  both
needless and risky."

It couldn't be said any more concise than that. I never suggest fiddling
with these parameters because the risk is just too big.On my recent machines
the mode is selected automagically at boot. So it is already in the fastest
mode. If it works for you, that's great. But, be careful with advising
others to use it. Linux was known until very recently to run well on
hardware, which is true. This parm would harm these users.


>
> When I run
>
> hdparm -u1 -d1 -X66 /dev/hdx
>
> I seem to get nearly a 50% speedgain in bits like program loads (large
> ones like emacs and Netscape).
>
> Any thoughts on these other parameters?
>
>  *****  New Topic *****
>
> SSH on Tom's AIX box - can I cross-compile to an "AIX on RS6000" target
> here on the PC, using GCC, and compile static (so's not to require the
> libs)??? Is this (a) viable? and (b) a good, bad or indifferent idea.


I doubt it would run. Your machine would assume that the stack grows
downward, whereas on AIX it grows upward. You might also get some word
alignment problems and more stuff like that. It is a nice experiment if you
have the time. But for the time you are taking to do this, you could just as
well compile dynamically on hydras. The static executable is bound to be BIG
(almost all various libraries are used, math, crypt, string, netio, user,
kernel). It would be the biggest memory hog on hydras.

Why not just compile it on hydras? I know the compiler doesn't work. But
that's a minor thing. I will find time today to fix it. I promise. I am
installing this big beast here today at a customer's site, a big HP server
with 12 cpus and 6GB RAM. Have been busy also writing articles, books,
checks.

Have a good day after birthday.

Moshe

Now Tom can laugh - in the process of making our Sunnyvale to Saskatoon connectivity work with SSH2 last night, I broke my internal connectivity. When I got up this morning I could no longer log in to Grendel the server from Grinch the workstation. Now SSH2 is running on Grendel and all is well again, but the event ate my update time. To work, perchance to dream... Later.

09:35 - Back again - running SSH2 on Windows at work, and the MI/X X Server, editing this page in GUI mode over a secure compressed connection. Heehaw. Still cain't check my orb email from within a Windows environment - couple of reasons for this that I shan't go into at the moment, but the email situation is going to change shortly. Again. Meantime, work to be done, so I shall depart once more. Have a lovely day.


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Good morning and happy Thursday. It is raining on Mongo. Here however it is wonderful and sunny - this is why it's called commuter hell. I should be driving to fish, or hike or... well, just about anything except work. Oh, food and roof, roof and food. That's right, knew I was forgetting something.

Broke my problem children in Chapter 16 yesterday - there are commands which have root user functionality, but are listed in many references as user commands. This is because a "normal" user may access these commands and "work" with them in small, brain-damaged, limited ways. Struggled to fit these square pegs into the round holes I have laid out for 16 - nah, punt up to 18, where they really belong, I guess and voila - knocked off a few more commands, a few more pages last night. This is a good thing.

Snaggled down copies of Mandrake 7.1b discs one and two yesterday. I ran into a hitch or two along the way - there are only about 3 sites serving up the Hydrogen iso images, so they are slow and fault ridden - I was occasionally getting 5 minute delays in the middle of the d/l. I would ping the server and get back 3 garbled packets. I may end up learning how to build my own iso images one of these days - as the sites that only had the files, but not the iso's were doing fine. Then of course, I was downloading into my home partition on Grendel and neglected to do a free-space check first - got the small (disc 2) image (211M) first, then ran out of space 460M into the large (disk 1) image.

After several bits of grief, got two clean images, passed md5sum checks, and ready to roll - burned the discs fine - no coasters -and did a trial install late last night. Fairly clean - very little change from the last installer - a couple of beta-level hitches though. Couldn't retrieve the crypto stuff - failed to grab the mirror indicies for some reason. X setup in the installation failed (though I was running in expert mode, selected the experimental install of XFree 4.0, with monitor, keyboard and mouse hiding behind a KVM switch - I may have just confused the damn thing). I ended up having to cold boot out of the setup - screen was locked solid, couldn't switch away to a console or anything. Hmmm. Got it up and running though, ran Xconfigurator and brought up XFree 3.3.6 and all was sorta well. More to learn - But this isn't my working distro, yet. (Well, duh, it's a developmental beta, with grave warnings of broken-ness all over).

Now to work, have an interesting day. Later.

17:10 - No early updates tomorrow - I am taking Jack and Trudy to SJO for their flight to Las Vegas for the NSCA show. ETS will be there, showing off video over UTP, Wallace and Grommit previews and other daring feats. Oh, did I say I was getting up at 4:30? Yup, so no early update. Later in the morning - yes.

A fun link - I looked at this page this afternoon, then went outside to look at clouds rolling in and said hmmm. <SEG> OTOH, if you haven't heard about this yet - ArsDigita University - check it out., the only problem (for me) is that I never (quite) took the time to finish that first four year degree - and while we could afford to do one of the University of Phoenix-style things... hmmm, I just don't know - some days it just feels like I am too busy learning new things to go to school. I also suppose that I will *never* have a confidence inspiring college transcript, though I might slow down in my seventies or eighties enough to read a subject for a degree.

Feeling old this week, actually. No fun at all. Sigh. Ahhhh well. To work.


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Good morning and happy Friday. While I normally despise getting out of bed at 05:00... what am I saying, I still hate it! However, all went well, no traffic or other hitches - airport run went fine, I had my keister parked in my shoulda-been-an-aeron here at work at 06:40. Not as good as fishing, but we shall see. I am reasonably awake and functional.

Julie Bresnick, over on Andover NN, finally managed to put into words some of my fascination with the Open Source - GNU/Linux thing...

Talk about exposing myself to smart people! Every third line in my notes 
on the speakers and panel discussions make reference to my lack of 
understanding. "What?" or "I simply have no idea what they are talking 
about" or better still, "is that English?" 

I have reinstalled mutt-1.0.1i-6mdk. I have the same bug.
I have done a strace -ff -o /tmp/log mutt and I think I have found the bug:
in the log.pid of the process launched after emacs:

open("/tmp/mutt-purple42-20326-2", O_RDONLY) = 0
unlink("/tmp/mutt-purple42-20326-2")    = 0
open("/tmp/mutt-purple42-20326-3", O_WRONLY|O_APPEND|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0600) = 1
dup(1)                                  = 2
execve("no", ["no", "-oem", "-oi", "--", "[email protected]"], \
[/* 46 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
_exit(127)                              = ?

Just got off the horn with Tom (virtually speaking), as I was logged into Hydras remotely, and we ran a talk session (sort of an on-box version of ICQ). I was testing my SSH2 installation in the Linux Mandrake boot portion of my work box. I have 7,013 things to accomplish today, however, so I have better start at them. Have a great day. Later.

17:15 - Fun stuff and outtakes... dog shoots cat... Using linux to mount an ISO image without burning a cdrom:

mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop filename.iso /mnt/iso

Ooooohhh - (in Homer Simpson dulcet tones) one last thing - the whale disposal story - Hmmmm.


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Howdy. Marcia's off fishing, I am struggling to alert status, after only two hours in a semi-upright position. I got up at 06:00 with her, but email and the ensuing explorations have apparently eaten the last two hours. A couple of sideline items - graphical menu explorations and modifications in the GUI environments available on Linux.

First, my personal favorite, IceWM, which is a small, fast window manager. I don't have any icons in the field - I can right-click anywhere in the desktop to get the menu, so... Menu modifications: the main configuration directory structure lives below /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/icewm (on most RPM based systems). Duplicate this structure (dotted, that is ~/.icewm... )in your home directory, and make mods there. Local configuration overrides system-wide configuration files. For menu mods, the file to pay attention to is (ta-daaaa) ~/.icewm/menu. A bit of the top of my menu file follows...

prog Eterm Eterm Eterm
prog rxvt xterm rxvt -bg black -cr green -fg white -C -fn 9x15 -sl 500
prog xterm xterm xterm
prog fte fte fte
prog Netscape netscape netscape
prog Gimp gimp gimp
prog "Canvas 7" canvas7 /usr/local/canvas7/canvas7
separator
menu Mandrake magic {
       prog "Mandrake Update" updates-mdk MandrakeUpdate
       prog "rpmdrake" rpmdrake rpmdrake
       prog "DrakConf" DrakConf DrakConf
       prog "Mandrake Doc" doc-mdk netscape /usr/doc/mandrake/index.htm
       prog "Mandrake News" news-mdk netscape http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/fdoc.html
}
separator
menu Applications folder {
    menu Editors folder {
        prog fte fte fte
        prog vim vim gvim 
  *
  *
  *

OTOH, KDE uses a GUI tool to edit menus. As shown via the link at left, the menu editor works with views of the menus, and a multiplicity of dialog boxes to create, edit, move and destroy menu items. Shown in the image is a new item dialog, and the sub-box for selecting an icon. Once added to a menu, items can be dragged and dropped onto the toolbar, or onto the desktop. What I haven't discovered yet (mostly because I haven't looked) is which files are used to generate this data. I believe that each menu entry has it's own .kdelnk file (rather like a Win9X shortcut is a file, with properties and points to the actual executable). and then there's a file someplace that organizes the kdelnk files... more to learn when I have the time and inclination. The GUI tools work just fine for me though.

Gnome and Enlightenment have eluded me so far. I simply haven't enjoyed working in those environments and so know slightly less than nothing about them. Now for another cuppajoe, and a bagel or two and into the book. Chapter 16 will be done this weekend. Later.


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Good Sunday morning to you all. I've been doing a little bit of exploration on Mandrake 7.1 Hydrogen beta this AM, trying a couple of things that were reported as bugs on the 'cooker' (mandrake development) mailing list, to see if I could replicate the behaviour and add to any of the reports. I couldn't even confirm two of the reports, as I was able to get the expected functionality just fine.

Found a fun article on Nerd Herding (Coding Team Management) over on Freshmeat. Also, Jakob Nielsen is out with a new Alertbox on progress in the Internet tools... specifically Napster, IE5 for Mac and Yahoo FinanceVision (whatever that is). I am going to go read it when this post is done, but his quality is consistently high - I can always recommend.

Made a lot of progress writing yesterday - 16 should be done by bedtime tonight (which leaves things a bit open, dontcha think? 70 - 80 more pages for the kitty. Then this week is scripting. I think I am tired already. That said, gotta run. After Alertbox, checking what Marcia posted (about her fishing trip yesterday), and a quick Daynotes stroll, I have some breakfast to wolf, a patio farm to tend, and a whole mess of writing to complete before sundown. Take care.

20:00 - Had a little bit of fun mixed in with all the research and writing... I was testing something on Mandrake Hydrogen beta this morning (as noted above). I checked the behaviour in MDK 7.02, wrote part of my response, then closed out, booted into Hydrogen, tested the function (gui access to FTP sites in KDE, kinda like CuteFTP functionality in a Windows Explorer window) successfully, booted back into 7.02, and finished the message. In the email, I noted that while I was gone ... (insert Jeopardy Music here) ... just like that. I got the following response this evening:

by "(insert Jeopardy music here)" did you mean
[embed src "jeomain.mid" autostart=true]      see attached file

Then, from the walking quote machine, the man who brought Burn All GIF's day to life, Don Marti, who once said, "Information wants to be $6.95." Now I bring you another .sig of the moment...

Think of the Linux community as a niche economy isolated by its 
beliefs.  Kind of like the Amish, except that our religion requires us 
to use _higher_ technology than everyone else.
            -- Donald B. Marti Jr.