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.

I have left Svenson (relatively) speechless - my life is complete. <G> This regarding yesterday's exchange on viruses and Linux with Moshe.

> Having read, and re-read my response, I find that I agree with myself.
> What a shock. Heh.

And you are not the only one to agree with your words. I tried but
couldn't add anything significant.

--
Svenson.

Linux users protest the DVD-CCA case and the DMCA at the Library of Congress - details in this article at The Register. There's a fairly long diatribe on the SVLUG list about the woes of dealing with PacBell DSL, which has eaten the rest of my morning. Sorry. More later. (Oh, good morning!)


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Good Morning! Yesterday was fairly non-productive. Hmmm. Yes, of course I got some things done. But I am working on the section about awk and sed - the tricky bit is that the code samples I am writing don't work. I mean stuff as simple as:

sed 's/^[ \t]*//g' infile >outfile

That literally falls flat. It is supposed to take one line at a time from the input file and do a substitution on each line, removing all the leading (^ = beginning of line) whitespace ([ \t] = spaces or tabs), left justfiying every line. Doesn't work. I am supposed to be writing about how this works. Instead I am not able to make it work. Sample after code sample from various online resources doesn't work. It appears to be the escaped control codes, \t for tab, \n for newline, etc. that aren't recognized in the scripts. Hmmm. Well, I am going to do what I can, say what I find and move on - the section on Perl's coming up and I am a "little" more versed, there. Does this sound familiar, Tom?

Good news - Shelley's Dan has noted that Shelley came through surgery well, and is home and recovering. Huzzah!

Hey, Bob!!! How does this sound? Isn't everone looking forward to a day ruled by Mickeysoft, A-O-Hell and Network Solutions must die? The linked story is a write-byte (equivalent to a sound-bite, with about as much substance), about AOL and NSI teaming up and co-branding. Oh, goody. Hmmmm.

This afternoon, to the dentist for a routine mangling^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H cleaning, then back in the chair, trying to get enough sed working to at least convey the flavor of that scripting editor. Moshe? Any feedback?

Later. Have an interesting day!

16:33 - Back from the dentist - Much as I whine about going, these are good people, capable and inflicting no more agony than necessary to get their jobs done - the bottom half of the mouth is scraped clean - the uppers will be next Thursday (so expect more whining as that day approaches).

Clearing email of substance, I save them up (as I do bookmarks), to share once in a while with you visitors from the outlands... BOFH (at The Register) has a great writeup on the IHATEYOU virus... OpenSource release announcement: QCad 1.4 is out - DXF compatible vector drawing package can be found here. I am going to have another go with this package shortly - I had not yet got the hang of the UI, but the product appears capable as a 2D drawing tool. More on this as time goes on.

Kirk Bauer has written some useful GPL'd utilities - If you haven't seen them, then check out his page: especially a couple of interesting RPM management tools. I am not sure I want a system that updates itself, but one that fetched the updates then mailed me and asked me if I wanted to install THOSE particular updates, now that might be interesting. It's still in Beta and free for the price of registration info, FrameMaker for Linux. Console based email for Linux and others from Mutt.

Then here's a really interesting article from Ars Technica, called Network Services in an Uncooperative Internet. Topics include TCP hacking, attacks, and denying DDoS attacks. Recommended reading. 'nuff for now. Later.


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Good Morning. Got a good start this morning, though my jaw is a little tender from yesterday's manipulations... Then there was mail:

Bored? Time on your hands? Feel like a little surfing? <gg>
From the AIX mailing list:
 
These sites are excellent starting points.  
They all have numerous links to some excellent tutorials. 

http://www.oase-shareware.org/shell/  (Excellent Source) 
http:// www.ling.helsinki.fi/users/reriksso/unix/index.html 
http://www.herring.org/techie.html  (cornucopia) 
http://sam.dkrz.de:8888/ab2  (Sun with ecellent tutorial) 
http://www.faqs.org /faqs/unix-faq/shell/intro/

Cheers, 
/tom

Not to mention, I really want to be moving faster than this. I have spent two afternoon/evening combos, mostly working (or not working, actually) sed. I expect and had told Tom that this chapter would be ready this week. Now I am not sure. I don't like not doing what I said I would do. I really, *really* don't like that. Tom likes what I have done on the chapter (I don't), but there's 15 (or is that 1500) more pages needed for it...

Nothing very interesting in email other than that. Out in the patio farm, the tomatoes are doing well all 'round - lots of flowering, we'll have to see if the weather picks up and allows fruit to begin setting. A picture or two today or tomorrow afternoon may be in order, just to keep the story moving forward.

On the hardware front - I found that the struggle to be happy with specifying a new machine was definitely becoming more hassle than it was worth. While controlling every chip and bit and byte has distinct advantages, it was costing me more time than I had (as opposed to more than it was worth). After looking at a couple of local vendor quotes to my exact specification, then looking at doing a roll-yer-own, then going back to Dell and looking at their offerings, the answer became Dell. Good enough is good enough in this situation. Thanks for all the help and feedback - It will come in handy when we need to build a new machine for Marcia in a few months.

Now off to row a trireme back and forth across the Agean for a few hours (nope, not sure about the spelling, too lazy to care right now). Have fun, see you later.


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Happy Thursday. I think. Yesterday it rained again. OTOH, we have our first tomato set out on the vine... Definitely pix this afternoon, and I also have about 7 harvestable bush beans, maybe 8. Yesterday I kicked sed in the a** and booted it right out of the park. Tom suggested that I read the section in a key reference book (Linux in a Nutshell), to ensure I haven't left out anything crucial. . . Like what, bits don't work!!!??? Yup, just a little feisty this morning, and still haven't had any coffee yet.

In last night's stroll through a Google return, looking for various references, I found this... Programming Texts/Tutorials - a link farm. Very, very cool. Tom expressly called me late last night to call me a bastid for sending him this one. Then I was able to sleep with a smile on my face.

Subject: Long lines.
    Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 21:56:17 +1000 (EST)
    From: Don Armstrong
      To: [email protected]

Brian, your page has suddenly become too wide for 800
pixel-screen. Don't know why, precisely. Longest thing
I can see is the one line on Wednesday:
"These sites are excellent starting points.  They all
have numerous links to some excellent tutorials."
You have that along with the links in blockquotes, but
I haven't yet dug into HTML enough to be able to say
definitely that that is the problem.

Sorry for lack of contact for a while. Many things
happening. Still ongoing. Fill you in in when time
allows.

Regards, Don Armstrong.

There's another blurb or two to bring forth, but I shall hold until this afternoon. Look forward to seeing you again then. TTFN.

.sig of the moment - this one turned up on Rick Moen's messages today; I first saw it on an admin list or Usenet group last year. If you've seen or read Dune, then this should ring a bell...

     It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
  It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
      It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

------------- Begin Forwarded Message -------------

This virus works on the honor system:

If you're running a variant of unix or linux, please forward this
message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files 
at random.

------------- End Forwarded Message -------------

---
If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving
an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life
without even considering if there is a man on base.

Dave Barry

Welcome to my Friday. Really, it's like any other day of the month... The difference is that for the next two days, I won't drive anywhere to spend all day sitting at a keyboard. The good news is that I am having fun, and I get paid for it. Heh.

Had a couple of AHA moments. First, last night, I caught an item on Slashdot about a package called ... Oh, the old gray cells just ain't what they used to be. Ok, OK! the package is called Evolution, and it's a groupware suite, according to the blurb. Outlook-like according to what I've seen. Magellan competitor. Good. A little health competition in that arena and I actually will be able to pitch Netscrape in the hopper. Anyway, while I am not minded to play build games with an alpha snapshot of Evolution, a Beta of Gnome Helix might not be such a bad thing...

Off I go, surfing my way over (or rather, up) to Helix Code. Reasonably fast site, read the instructions, decide to look behind Door Number ONE! As root, point yer lynx browser over thatta-way, and pipe the result to a shell process and voila - a self-installing 86 package, 80+ Megabyte Desktop environment including applications and more. I had to restart the install once, I think because of a network hiccup that trashed one of the rpm files. Recognized I was running Mandrake 7.0, and installed very nicely. Explorations and screenshots as I have time, but I was *very* impressed with the install.

Second, (as you saw earlier this week, I've been whining about sed. Moshe tried to help me, and I just didn't get it. If I type a line like:

sed 's/^[ \t]*//g' inputfile

Then my understanding from all I've read, and experience with other bits of Linux and UNIX over the years means that (s) Substitute (^) from the beginning of the input line ([ \t]) space or tab (*) as many as there are (//) replace it with nothing and (g) do that repeatedly (which may be redundant in current circumstances). Apply this rule to every line in the file inputfile.

The kicker is, that in strings and most regular expression environments, \t is the typed representation of the control character that means tab. However, apparently, for these purposes, one does not use the string representation of a tab character, but instead a quoted, literal tab (as in press the tab key). I can't do this from the command line, only from within a script file (as a tab on the command line gets expanded by the shell).

Now this must have been a secret! Thanks Moshe! You see, I must have been a village idiot in every one of my prior lives. I am not this time only because there aren't any villages to speak of left in California. (There are some we don't speak of, though). But WHY can't any of the resource material say tab literal (press the tab key). You're right, too easy.

'nuff. Later.


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Good Morning! A brief, late update for you: In case you hadn't noticed, Syroid Manor and Daynotes Main are down. As a matter of fact, iTool (Zanova) is down. Not iTool's fault, so far as is known - their upstream provider is down, too. Hmmm.

Emergency Measures: Do NOT (permanently) bookmark the following links - Tom has made access to his site available at http://142.165.206.61:80 and a mirror of Daynotes Main is up at http://142.165.206.61:8080 (Note that Tom is running virtual webservers based upon port address). If you need to email him, Tom recommends holding off until iTool is back on the air, as his [email protected] address is hosed as long as the iTool account is down.

Here in cloudy Sunnyvale, all is reasonably well. I slept until I didn't need to sleep anymore, which I haven't done in a month or better. Mostly I've been up every day quite early and back at work. Finished Chapter 17 draft 1.5 last night, printed it and shut down. This morning I am going to read it, edit, post in the edits and send it up Tom's way through one of the hidden passages in the castle... Together we'll get this one into the publisher Monday.

Time for nose to grindstone... Later.

11:20 - REVISED: Syroid Manor and Daynotes are live (at least for the moment)!


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Good Morning. The coming storm hasn't quite materialized yet - the weather people over at Yahoo have pushed out the rain to Monday, and downgraded it to showers. Doesn't seem much like May to me, but I shan't complain - the later it rains, the lighter the fire season will be.

Jerry had a reference yesterday to a ComputerWorld article. Don't go there yet. It points to a vulnerability in an ActiveX control that is being warned about in a SANS Institute bulletin, here. Don't go there yet. The bulletin credits two someones (both named) for "raising the visibility of this dangerous problem." Now, the name of this dangerous ActiveX control is "scriptlet.typelib/Eyedog", which was not printed in the ComputerWorld post, nor completely in the SANS report, which leaves off the Eyedog part.

In the discussion of the vulnerability in the SANS report, I read "Although the hole and correction have been known for nine months; exploits have been so rare that people have not bothered to close the hole." Hmmm. I remember "Eyedog" from somewhere. Over on ZDNet, I search on Eyedog. Lo and behold, up pops Bubbleboy. Not exactly a rare or unheard-of exploit, eh???

Never have I accused the various anti-virus people of creating the problem they fix, nor do I think that tire sales outlets pay road crews to leave potholes unrepaired near their shops. But I do accuse the anti-virus people of irresponsible reporting of problems, and effectively, fear-mongering. Reporting an old, previously very well reported vulnerability smacks of the following imaginary conversation overheard in the halls of the SANS Institute... "We weren't in the news at all with this ILOVEYOU thing - we missed the starting gun entirely. We MUST put out some kind of warning about something IMMEDIATELY or they will forget we exist." I can't blame Computerword on this one - they print news from the reports they receive, probably several hundred a day - they could have remembered as I did, but oh, well. OTOH, SANS is out of line on this one - not mentioning the name of the previous exploit, or the "Eyedog" portion of the scriptlet name, to cloud the provenance is just plain wrong. Shame!

Subject: Hello!
   Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 02:33:24 -0500
   From: VEVE ROUDY {[email protected]}
     To: [email protected]

Hello!
I have heard from Internet
that using the voxilla packages
could help you to place a cheap call
pc to phone  to USA via Internet.
is it OK?
if yes ,tell  how to use voxilla commands
or others  to place this call.
Bye...

One product that works for VoIP (Voice over IP) without special hardware is Speak Freely, written by John Walker, of AutoDesk fame. The URL for the Unix version is http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/unix/, there is a link to the windows version too. In the windows version, it integrates quite nicely with ICQ. Speak Freely gives you a half duplex connection (first you talk, then I talk), and works with system sound card and microphone. Not as good or easy as picking up a telephone, but far cheaper... Good Luck!

From the bookmark collection, have you heard about TransOrbital? They are a private firm going about the commercialization of space. I looked hard and couldn't see any sign of a D.D. Harriman associated with the joint, but according to their site, first probe launch is next year, with a lunar mapping and photography mission. Don't forget, people, I still want to go!

Enough for now. Back later, now to breakfast and to write...