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.

Morning. After the weather sources saying alternate sunny for much of yesterday, mostly it just drizzled off and on - certainly not much sunny at all. Today it's just plain raining. Ah, well. My allergies are kicking in just a little. Until the last couple of years, I hardly had any reactions at all this time of year. Now, a few sneezes and a little more congestion in the pollen months are my continuing fate, I fear. Yesterday's rant about SANS issuing a moldy old (several months old) ActiveX vulnerability drew no mail at all. Are we simply used to this behaviour, expecting it? Hmmm.

From the weekend's work: Chapter 17 on Scripting is ready to go into the hopper at IDG. I made a good start at Chapter 18 on System Administration, laying in the bones of the structure, and the front end table of configuration files that the chapter works with. After confabulation with Tom, we determined that we have overlapping chapters, we won't need to write chapter 23, so we're farther along than I thought! Heh.

From the weekend's play: I was able to get KDE 1.90 (Beta 1) installed, but not fully working. The bits I really wanted to look at (from the book perspective) were the Koffice tools, Kword and Kspread (and Kpresenter?) But I couldn't get those programs to initialize - some library problem or another.

Checked the trapline at the edges of the property, a few new routes added to /dev/null, a few extra hosts in the hosts.deny file. How nice. Now I have to go tank the vehicle and make the commute. Have a lovely day, people. Enjoy life - it's the only one we have.


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Mornin', y'all. Recently (over the weekend, in a fit of jollity), I upgraded the Gnome desktop GUI to the beta of Helix Code - very nice, much faster and I really like the display handling. It still may be too crowded for my tastes, which have become rather spartan, with continued use of IceWM. However, a couple of updated games have shipped with, including that depicted to the left, Gnome xBill. Many alternative OS's, many machines, many little Bills attempting to load windows onto the aOS boxen, your mission - kill the Bill. Heh.

Very short this AM - the new Dell box showed up at work yesterday, and I had too many other things going on to be able to set it up, so I have to go to work and play... What? The box? Dell T600r, PIII 600, 256M Ram, 40G 7200 HD, CDROM, Sony CDR/RW, nVidea 16M, SB Live 64PCI.

TTFN.


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Good morning and welcome to the middle of the week. A very quiet day on the Orb email front, two messages from Grendel (yes, my server, Grendel), and one from Svenson, on the belated Monday post-rant about SANS Institute posting a brand fresh spanking new warning about an old, shop-worn vulnerability. Like any good used car dealer, they simply rolled back the odometer and tried to sell it as nearly new. Heh. Here's Svenson:

> Are we simply used to this behaviour, expecting it?

Yes.

Before Internet Times (something like BC and AC dates we have BIT dates
and AIT  dates now) we used to receive 'news' only months after it
happened. Just check, in printed magazines, for the 1GH Pentium. Due to
printing death lines articles have to be completed long before they get
printed. Hence the long delay before the 'news' arrived. We lived with
that for decades (going back further --centuries, aeons,...-- the delay
grows as well) and are not yet accustomed to the instant news
availability.

TV and Radio have provided us with instant news but they have never
provided in depth background information. They are just extended
headlines.
And newspapers, while reasonably current and providing some more depth
have never done well in technical information.

>...so we're farther along than I thought! Heh.
Don't believe that. Maybe you could say you're less far behind than you
thought.

BTW redirection is going to last sunday.
--
Svenson.

[1] Since the product is incompatible with other products (aka Motherboards, to pick a far out and unlikely example), clearly the answer is . . . to recall the other products! Oh, wait, for once that wasn't a processor problem, was it. Sorry. Heh.

PPS: (not mailed) - if my redirect page is sending you to last Sunday, then it is being cached by a server that is ignoring the "no-cache" directives. I checked and both the auto and manual redirects were set correctly on Monday morning.

Lastly (for now), I saw a message (on linux-admin) about how to run X on a system with i810 video on the mobo ... Someone had already replied, recommending upgrading the entire distro. I jumped in with an emphatic "Ummmm. No." If you need to upgrade the X server, then upgrade the X server. Should I change from Windows NT to Windows 2000 because it comes with a new driver for my video card? Nope, go get the NT version of the video driver and install it. There may be other reasons to upgrade a distribution but not this one.

Must fly, more - more - more things to do to bring the Dell online - I spent 3/4 of my day yesterday working on something else. TTFN.

08:49- A fast response from Svenson...

Subject: Re: Printing "Death Lines"
   Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 17:08:03 +0100
   From: Jan Swijsen

They have to weigh what costs most, replacements or reimbursement. 
But they cannot decide which Pentium to use to calculate the costs.

Hey I learned something new today, dead and death are not the same 
(remember I am native Dutch speaking). Up to now I supposed that 
"death" was English and "dead" was American but that the meaning 
was the same. So when I wrote "death line" I intended "deadline".

Of course reading what I write in stead of what I mean can put a 
mean twist on my notes and mails.

Subject: 
   Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 11:24:21 -0400
   From: Robert Bruce Thompson
     To: [email protected]

> PPS: (not mailed) - if my redirect page is sending you to last Sunday,
> then it is being cached by a server that is ignoring the "no-cache"
> directives. I checked and both the auto and manual redirects were set
> correctly on Monday morning.

Better check again. It used to work for me, but your new week's page didn't
refresh Monday. I doubt that Sjon's ISP and BellSouth both just
coincidentally decided to start caching your page at the same time.

--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

17:30- Definitely a day from the karma gods that grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Work got done, just very little of it mine. We lost a CSR this week (not actually much of a loss, mind you, but at least she was able to answer the phones and take a message or two. Three people out sick today, Jack at a TIA meeting (they're thrashing out the draft standard for Category 6), Bill at the San Diego customer site, the booth to knock down, pack and ship for next week's show (meaning that Jack and Bill are gone again, for another few days). I am tired and I *still* don't have the Dell box set up fully. Always more important things to be working on (corporately speaking, anyway <g>)!

Subject: 
   Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 12:14:16 -0400
   From: Robert Bruce Thompson
     To: [email protected]

You probably accidentally enabled "Send last week's page instead of this
week's page = true" deep down in one of those *nix config files somewhere.

--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

# currenthtml.conf
# Config file for confusing web visitors

if (get_browser_email_default ~= ("thompson" OR "svenson")) {
   send_wrong_page == TRUE;
}

Bob caught me! Heh. Oh, I have redlines back on the catalog - about 2 hours of editing and I am done - publish with Acrobat and this baby is on the wire - that's second on my list for tomorrow, after setting up my old box for Trudy. Her's is going to feed video to a bank of 20 Active VGA balun sets - big order that needs a dedicated test rig. (Interesting how I justified my new box, eh?) I will probably publish a link here, too, since I love to show off (a little anyway), and I have been pushing hard on this catalog for quite a while now.

Here's a link to an article/posting by Tom Christiansen (of Learning Perl and Programming Perl fame) on the topic of Csh Programming Considered Harmful. Kid's, according to Tom, this isn't safe stuff to try at home. This is a good 'splanation of the merits (and de-merits) of various shell programming environments.

Microsoft's version of Proposed Remedies found here. In all the ILOVEYOU hoohaa of the past couple of weeks, this kinda slipped in under the radar, but a vigilant slashdotter tracked into it and so here it is. The first half of the document is definitions of terms. The second half is about 3/4 of what they should have agreed to early in the settlement process, rather than getting everyone's dander up. Heh.

Hey, I have got to get to work. Later, dudes and dudettes.


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Quiet morning here on the western front - I hear the hooting of an owl, the howl of a 'yote, the blare of an insistent horn and the soft clatter of fingers and keyboard. Maybe only the latter two are real, or maybe the former, who knows. Don't tell me -- the psych board!

Good Morning! More on the caching front from Svenson. I would note that he was writing me at three am, except that he lives at approximately - 0200 UT, so it was just after lunch time...

Now what ?!!??! 

I still got redirected to last Sunday both by Opera and Netscape. 
So I press the refresh button. Same problem. (now why doesn't 
that happen in real life, I mean getting stuck on a Sunday?) 

So I go looking for the source of the redirecting page. Not 
easy because it redirects before I can grab the source. 
(maybe I am slow, I have never been good at fast finger 
computer games). Because I cannot get the source I clear 
the caches to see if I can grab it from there. 

In Netscape, the cache is empty so I go to the site out on the 
wild wobbly web. I get redirected correctly now so I dive in 
the cache, .... which doesn't have the redirecting page in it. 
Heu...??? WTF was I being redirected by earlier? 

In Opera, before going anywhere, I clear the cache (via the 
menu) but then find there are still files in the cache directory. 
And the redirecting page is in there. So it is cached and 
pressing the reload doesn't replace it and clearing the cache 
doesn't remove it. The "no-cache" clearly doesn't do its job 
here. (Maybe an 'expire' tag could help here? Hmm, I see 
testing times ahead.) So I clear the cache directory manually 
(via the DOS del command no less) and then the redirect work 
as expected. And the source (picked from cache) looks OK. 

Conclusions : 
1: The 
    <META NAME="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
    <META NAME="Cache-Content" CONTENT="no-cache">
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Content" CONTENT="no-cache">
doesn't work as it should. 

2: And 
    # currenthtml.conf 
    # Config file for confusing web visitors 

    if (get_browser_email_default ~= ("thompson" OR "svenson")) { 
       send_wrong_page == TRUE; 
    } 
Doesn't work as it should :-) 

3: caching is black art 
-- 
Svenson.

Dentist this afternoon, to mangle the part of my mouth left untouched last week, so only at the office a half day today - must fly, my pretties. Later.

16:30 - this just in from the good Sir Gary of BunkeBerg ...

Brian,

Since you mentioned using Acrobat, I've got a question:

We're creating forms in Word 2K and then "printing" them to Acrobat.  
Whatwe're finding is that we seem to lose an occasional character 
here or there.It's just flat not there in the resulting PDF file.  Does 
that ring any bells?

-------------------------
This email was sent without any attachment and should have arrived 
without any.  If there are attachments, DON'T OPEN THEM!

I will keep my eyes open for this however. Which variant are you using?

Cool, here is the response of the Andover.net lawyer to Microsoft's request for posting removal. Asking some very sharply pointed questions, mind you. Heh. Now for some farm pix: We're eating a some bush beans every few days as each plant start to come online - pretty soon there'll be enough in production to accompany dinner, rather than just be hors d'oeurve. Note that the Chinese parsley (cilantro) in the picture to the right appears to be experiencing a rapid inflationary period similar to that noted event, the Big Bang. I appear to have omitted the beans from this week's picture taking, so ...

Haven't heard from Tom, and this is a good thing. Hope he's having a good time with the family, and enjoying at least a little downtime. If he's really lucky, the laptop blew up, just like Moshe's did. Now Tom might not regard that as a "Good Thing", but blessings often come disguised.


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TGIF! Slow start for me this morning - I am feeling rather lethargic, probably because it's already warmish. The summer weather is headed our way, with 3 digits (F) slated for Sunday. On the back-channel, we're looking for a good Linux-to-English dictionary or glossary of some type. My personal preference is to get the more technical books and dive in at the deep end, hoping not to drown before learning to swim in new waters. Makes it hard describing some things to new arrivals ("Sure just dive into those choppy waves over there ... Oh, BTW, watch out for shark!") Heh.

Don has joined into the caching fray, reminding me of a correspondence from January (The link is in his letter):

Subject: Odd caching
   Date:  Fri, 19 May 2000 23:21:46 +1000 (EST)
   From: Don Armstrong <>

Brian, the caching problems Svenson and the Hon.Robert
Bruce Thompson are seeing sound somewhat like that which I
related to you on January 21 at [ this 
Graffiti 
page ].

Could it be that that option had become turned on for Mr
Thompson's IE5?

Could it possibly be that Opera is becoming more
Microsoft-like, and emulating that ridiculous IE option?
Now THAT would be truly disturbing virus-like infective
behaviour.

Regards,
Don Armstrong

More later, gotta join the commute. TTFN.

What a hoot! Which one's Balmer, or was he around at this time? Still a rather motley crew, don'tcha think? Certainly one of the group shots chosen as "Least Likely to Become Millionaires" in some survey or another. Heh. This came to me by way of Jack's friend Bob Campbell, who probably doesn't know that all of his (runny) mail gets forwarded around by Jack. Ah, thanks, Bob.

Then Svenson landed with this one this morning, but I was (and have been) in a massive rush all day - just now slowing down a bit...

Subject: sounds
   Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 08:57:25 +0100
   From: Sjon Svenson

> I hear the hooting of an owl, the howl of a 'yote, the blare of an
> insistent horn and the soft clatter of fingers and keyboard.

Hooting of an owl? You cant be hearing me can you.
And are you sure the 'fingers and keyboard' aren't really a bunch of
squirrels? ( minds eye : insert picture of Brian jumping up and running
to the 'farm', shotgun in hand and steam coming out of his ears  )


While checking out the cache issue I think I found out why clearing the
cache in Opera didn't seem to work. All the pages that I had open (with
assorted graphics) were left in  the cache, all the rest was out. So it
looks like Opera doesn't display pages off the web directly but first
copies them to cache (disregarding the pragma's) and displays them from
there.


--
Svenson.

I don't think that browsers are required by the RFC to pay heed to those meta tags - perhaps it's just proxy servers...

Temperatures are up into the 80's here, though things are fairly dry - we certainly don't suffer from the problems of combined heat and humidity in the manner of other parts of this world. It's really kinda nice except for the pounding headache, the scratchy heat and the knowledge that I plan on working for about 6 more hours in this... Alf wider 'zine.


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Oh, hi... Sorry for the late post, we were up early (way early), then I couldn't get back to sleep, so read the rest of John Barnes' Mother of Storms. Good read. Then when Marcia returned early from her fishing expedition, we had breakfast and went back to bed, not to awaken until about an hour ago. Heh. I don't know that my brain will recover it's composure from this odd sequence of events.

Wheeehooo - it is *HOT* here, and still early in the day. It's showing as over 90 in the apartment, and we have all the windows open, and 3 fans running. I am going to finish this out and go get the aircon out of the garage and get it installed. Probably the last straw in terms of power consumption (my luck), but everything is backed up...

In researching the nuances of a few Linux disk maintenance commands (explicitly tune2fs), I found a really cool tip for the book, but didn't necessarily understand the wider implications - I fired off an email to Ted T'so of MIT, author of many chunks of the Linux kernel. (Try cd /usr/src/linux ; grep -r Theodore *). Graciously he gave me a several paragraph answer which provided the answer I was looking for - making the find both a caution and a tip.

Hey, this is much nicer with the fan blowing directly on me. I might actually get some work done. That said, I'd better actually get to work. First let me check the mail... This was sent to Don, copy to Svenson and myself from the man who has trademarked "Dishwasher Darwinism", Bob Thompson:

Subject: RE: Odd caching
   Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 07:59:21 -0400
   From: Robert Bruce Thompson 

As far as I know, I'm using the same caching options I've always used. But
around here it's never safe to assume. I did recently start using kiwi again
as my main workstation, and I did re-enable caching in WinGate. But I think
the caching behavior was normal for at least a week or two after the move to
kiwi, and I'm pretty sure I noticed the strange caching behavior before I
re-enabled caching on WinGate. But who knows?

--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

Ah, this was from yesterday. Dave, who administers the UUASC list, sent in a link to this page, which has much to do with the recycling of an old VAX 11/780. Heh. Now I must fly. TTYL.


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Here it is, noon and I am just now posting. Cool. Didn't sleep as late this morning, but chores and errands came first - the farm is fed and watered, the Costco run is done, broken sunglasses replaced with something that looks a little more . . . Matrix. Finally got through all the email, and ready to start writing. Finished the section on drives, media and maintenance last night.

Today is startup and shutdown processes, complicated by the fact that the default bootloader for OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4 is Grub (GRand Unified Bootloader), which has some distinct advantages over Lilo. Grub doesn't have a 1024 cylinder limit on bootable partitions, its got a prettier interface, and is more capable at handling the boot duties in a multi-boot environment.

One drawback: I don't know jack about it. This will make the writing a little more ... work-like. Ah well, to it - at least I have songs from the new Eric Clapton / B.B. King collaboration being played on my radio station to help me through it. Have a lovely day - I might even post more later if the mood strikes. TTFN.


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