EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I will respect that. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

Hullo I'm running late, and I've been boring y'all to tears with these dinky posts, you know, the ones where I whine about how much work there is to do, followed by a quick goodbye, mentioning that I've got to get to work? Yeah, those. Well. Here's another, although we have an opportunity for something more in upcoming days, as I delve through the KDE interface, capturing lots of screenshots for the chapters on the OpenLinux GUI. I am bound to learn some interesting things that I bypassed as I started playing in this environment, so look for a little more interest in days to come.

The patio farm remains healthy and productive - I'll get some new snaps up in a day or two. Last night we had pasta with sauce from the tomatoes, oregano and thyme (along with a few store-bought items, but only a few) -- Yum!

Oh, and yes, once again I've come to regret my forays into the world of Linux rants - I am just plain too busy getting work done, in and with LInux, to be bothered to argue the politics and economics of the thing. I used Linux for a while in very early days (94, 95), and returned for good in 99. It works for me, I pay for distributions I use, I buy every commercial product I use regularly, and that's how I vote. Them's my politics and economics. Feh!

Now to work with me - have a lovely day and I'll catch up with you in this space later. TTFN

19:23 - Good evening. I have had a semi-eventful day, though not much to talk about yet. Had a nice conversation with a prospective *major* customer for ETS this afternoon. This could be a large-ish sort of event, though it's hard to tell until actual orders start popping out of the fax machine and checks start clearing at the bank...

If you've been following the occasional blurb about the "Works for Hire" amendment that appears on Dr. Pournelle's site (which is where I heard about it - funny to think that I get my most important music news from Jerry), then you'll like this article, Four Little Words, to be found at Salon. I tracked into this via Doc Searls' WebLog (Thanks!) Found over on Slashdot, kuro5hin should be back up shortly, and there's a link to a place called Enigmatic. I haven't been in, yet, since they want a valid email address... heck, I can always create one if need be... be... bee... [email protected], that sounds good. I'll report back on this later, because they have software emulations of some classic encryption hardware, I have read. This is intensely interesting stuff to me.

If you haven't been by Technocrat, now's the time. Bruce is a top-notch guy, to judge by his writings - certainly someone I look forward to meeting one day. This is a low traffic, moderated commentary site, superficially similar to Slashdot, except no trolls, and only low-level flames. Recently, I found the article on Computer Warfare (among the OS makers) to be fairly fun.

Winding up for the evening, I just want to tell y'all, thanks for dropping by. I don't get much mail, so I am not quite sure what brings you here, but I am pleased to share a little virtual space with each and every one. Take care, see you tomorrow.


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Good Morning. I don't think... wait, let me check... nope, I didn't tell you that I managed to move wrong somehow yesterday morning, creating a major muscle spasm and/or nerve pinch under my right scapula. ::sigh:: Pain down my back, up my neck, and down through the fingertips in my right arm. Ibuprofin (aka Motrin [tm]) does help quiet things down a bit, but I need to have some food in my system, to buffer my stomach from the aggressive effects of the medication. It's more than an annoyance, but is actually distracting - I'll go off to be with the pain for a minute, then come back, wondering what the heck I was doing... Hmmm.

>...followed by a quick goodbye, mentioning that I've got to get to work? 

Yep, we know and love these but you always say something like : 

>have a lovely day and I'll catch up with you in this space later. TTFN 

Now what do you mean 'catch up with you' ????? 
You do realise that WE have to type our fingers off to catch up with YOU. Don't you? 

-- 
Svenson. 
Mail at home : [email protected] 

Grin.

From: "Steve Swickard" <[email protected]>
To: "Brian Bilbrey" <[email protected]>
Subject: why am I here?
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 01:43:40 -0600

Hi Brian,

    Just finished reading your daily notes. I once e-mailed you about a
problem I was encountering with a Linux Mandrake installation. I believe
6.0. I now attribute that to my own ignorance or lack of knowledge with
Linux. I have been running Mandrake 7.0 for a few months now and it is
very stable and I am learning my way around. I have also had success
loading this onto a cheap laptop.

    So why am I here? Well mostly because I took a wrong turn on the
Internet....okay just a little humor seriously I do enjoy reading your
daily updates and insights. Additionally you provide one of the few
places to gleam a little knowledge on Linux and Linux programs. I'm
still mainly using Windows 98(1st edition) and Outlook 98. I've grown
accustomed to this combination as well as Internet Explorer which I
prefer to Netscape. I will continue to use Linux though more and more.
Primarily I intend to eventually setup a home Network with Linux as the
server, partly as I am not willing to invest the money for a copy of
windows NT/2000.  How about a book on Linux Mandrake? Another question,
I also have a couple of Apple Mac's here nothing like a G3, or a G4. I
would eventually like to be able to share resources between the Windows
machines, Mac's and Linux. I raised this question on another daynoter's
sight and was pointed towards Netatalk and Samba. I was wondering if you
had any experiences with netatalk? Anymore I rarely use the Mac, so it
isn't imperative to network the Mac's so much if it becomes to much of a
chore to do so. I am willing to try and do a kernel recompile though.

    Thanks for providing both a useful journal as well as being
entertaining. I look forward to many years of pleasurable reading. Later

Steve Swickard
(God's country......Colorado.)

17:27 - And now for my answer to Mr. Swickard...

Hey, Steve-

When I look back, I see that it was modem connectivity that was
giving you the blues back in May. I presume you managed to work that
out?

Ya, Mandrake is really quite alright. MCP appears to have a lock on
the books that go with that distro - I suppose that I could always
approach MandrakeSoft and see what they have to say, but not this
week... <grin>

I have (2) Mandrakes, (1) Debian, (1) OpenLinux eDesktop, and (1)
OpenLinux Linux Technology Preview running (not simultaneously, and
not counting the Win2K partition I do the finish writing in, or the
Win98 partition on Gryphon)... is that enough? on three machines?
<WAG>

http://machardware.about.com/compute/machardware/cs/680x0maclinux/index.html

is a basis URL for the About.com coverage on 68K processor Linux ...
it appears that page has some links that might be useful in your
mac/linux trek. Alternatively, if you're looking to put Mac's
running MacOS on your network, then you'll want to compile the
kernel to make use of appletalk networking protocols (usually off by
default in most distro's I am aware of), and look at the LDP for

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Networking-Overview-HOWTO.html

which includes bits on Apple, Windows, Novell and Unix networking.

Glad to hear from you and know that you're still around. Take good care.

There were a couple of other tidbits I ran across that you might find interesting, but they appear to have left my brain at the alter, gape-jawed, so to speak. I must be suffering from CRS.

I did just try something interesting that failed, and it's all my fault, as I quickly realized. I set up a VM for OpenLinux last night, and I used pre-existing raw partitions on my second harddrive to do so. Just now, I remembered that I should be able to boot into that installation directly from the system, as well as from VMware... Hmmmm. I seem to have forgotten that as virtual raw partitions, they are on drive /dev/hda. As actual system partitions, they are on /dev/hdd. This makes the fstab and all the partition stuff break in a really ugly and nasty manner. Most *Nix... no, most OS's in general will tend to fall over if they don't find their root partition where it is expected to be.

I think I know how to fix this without reinstalling - by starting it in VM, then resetting the fstab, the Grub configuration file, and rerunning Grub, then exiting the install, moving the physical partitions to a new virtual location, on the virtual secondary slave IDE device, then testing the boot there, then trying again from the outer world. We'll see. What? No, this isn't for the book, as it is a thoroughly silly thing to do, and I don't strictly need to make it work, but it should work, and I am a sucker for making something work when it should.

Now to give that a quick try, then get to work - we have a lot of material to produce, Tom and I do. Oh, yeah, on the weird weather front, it's been raining off and on all day, with never a peep out of old Mr. Sol. Who knew??? Later.


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Good morning. Trudged through the edits on chapter 7, back from Tom last night, complaining mightily all the way! OK, not really - It went fine, just a few changes here and there, and now it's off for pal Moshe to have a gander at, making sure that I've not put anything too, too stupid in (but there will be). On the SETI front, check out this article on Scientific American (found it on /.), access is a little slow right now, but should pick up as it moves down the /. frontpage a ways. Are we alone? Why hasn't Bob Thompson found ET? The article addresses these questions.

We're off this upcoming weekend to celebrate Robert Michael's first birthday (my sister's son). A first birthday party is really for the people who attend, not for the guest of honor, but as a result, my niece (his sister) is likely to get lots of attention too, which she rather likes - I think we have a budding actress in her, even if she can't (currently) smile for the camera to save her life.

Today I am going to spend gathering safety and material data sheets for the contents of some products that we (ETS) are proposing to ship lots and lots of. Eeesh, I have such fun with documentation. Not! I suppose that I'd better get to it. Have an interesting day. TTFN.

18:48 - Evening. As I was saying last night, I wanted to prove (or disprove) that I could boot into a raw partition install of OpenLinux either inside or outside of the VMware environment. I got caught by the chicken and egg problem, however. I couldn't migrate the drive to be seen by OpenLinux as a virtual /dev/hdd until it was mounted as /dev/hdd, which I couldn't do until I changed it from hda to hdd, in a vicious, spinning circle. So I ended up redefining the partitions as being on virtual hdd (matching the actual, physical partition definition), and reloading. I might could have gotten in on a rescue disk and booted the system into hdd badly, and then gone through "repairing" it, but my thought was for Tom's Root Boot, but that write's a floppy as 1.72M, which the virtual floppy A provided by VM doesn't currently recognize (note to self - ask the VMware people about that). I also might have been able to use the CD-ROM as an emergency disk -- let me replace that "might" with "could" -- but I was running out of steam, so I cheated. Now I can boot into OLeD from a cold (or warm) system boot, or I can access the same partitions/system via a VMware machine. Very cool. It does have two different XF86config files, and VM parked a script somewhere in startup to move the XF86config link from one to the other, depending on which way I'm booting. Now I need to get into that script (one day), and make it work for the EtherNIC, too. But not today: screen-capture-O-rama tonight.

I did pick up some pretty flowers on the way home for my lovely, and washed her truck as it was looking nasty - not like it was dirty because it had fun, but because the accumulated dust and morning dew were making the beast look leperous. Hmmm. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Cool thing alert. I was looking for a feature in Gnome Helix, when I came across Gdict. No link at the moment, since the new homepage appears to be down, but you can find it on Freshmeat. This is a web enabled dictionary and spelling tool that uses regular expressions (of various types), the SOUNDEX algorithm, or Levenshtein distances between words to help identify mis-spelled words. Additionally, the tool accesses the Webster's, WordNet, US Gazeteer, the Jargon File, the Free Online Dictionary of Computing, The Elements, Easton's Bible Dictionary, and Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary to come up with a variety of definitions - you can search in just one, or all of these. To the left, we have a successful find on LART, and to the right, Melancholy. I like this a LOT!

Now to start making dinner, then into screenshot heaven. Later, dudes and dude-ettes.


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Good Morning! It's still grey around here, drizzling off and on, and supposed to remain that way through the holiday weekend. Even though Summer nominally continues until round about the day that the RSA patent expires, I've always regarded the Labor Day weekend as the official end of Summer. Clearly a "aw, jeez, why d I have to go back to school - I read more books this summer than ten of them will read all year!" - You can see I tried a little innovation with my whining and excuses... <grin>.

I grabbed about 50 screenshots of the KDE desktop last night, parsed through and ordered them, then culled them down to 26. That indicates about a 35 page chapter coming down the pike at me, barrelling along at warp 10. Late this afternoon I'll arrange the pictures in the chapter, caption them, put up the headers and structure the chapter flow around the images, and start slabbing explanations and mutable interface ideas and concepts around like there were no tomorrow... Might as well get to it, after all, as (probably) Steven Wright said, "I wanted to be a procrastinator, but I kept putting it off."

On yesterday morning's question about why Bob hasn't found ET, Svenson chimed in that he (Bob) has indeed found ET, and his name is Malcolm. <WAG> - heck, in that shot, he even appears to resemble that other ET, Dennis Rodman... Oh, wait - Rodman's hair resembles the color on the balls, that's what it is. Sorry.

To work, to work perchance to accomplish something. Who knows? The shadow knows, but with all this cloud cover, he bailed out on me. Later, people.

Update shortly, working on the Pix...

18:22 - OK. Thanks for holding out - since I edit live pages instead of crafting and publishing, there will always be times when you catch a page in progress, rather than just the Finished Goods Inventory version. Welcome to the end of Summer. Clouds continue to roll, a light breeze is roiling the trees and the leaves in the streets, certainly doesn't look like August to me.

The farm's doing fine, as you can see from the snaps above. In our newer additions, adoptions from our neighbors (who are returning to Finland next week), Earl the Squirrel lost only one day before starting excavations. So yesterday I put the new batch in bondage, and still, as you can see from the close-up, left side, bottom row, Earl got in around the wire, 'cause I left too much of an opening. Sigh.

Marcia's off doing the hair thing, and I have got boatloads of work to do, have spent time (a little time) playing with Evolution today. Evolution is the Gnome environment's answer to Outlook, and from the functionality already in place, most users of Outlook could (once Evolution is in release form) pick it up and use it with little to no training. No mean feat. There are configuration differences, and right now, in a fairly alpha state, I can give it a push with one pinky and make it fall over... Well, it's not quite that fragile, but it ain't production material yet, and there's no way to import data, as Tom noted with another product earlier this week. However, it's not clear to me that I would want to do that. I think that I can export to some file format from Outlook, then import that format into an OpenLDAP database, and serve it up to all my apps, including my favorite three mail tools, or a mail tool, plus a document merging tool, plus.... who knows. What? Pictures? Oh, sure, except that I sent them to Tom to gander at from work, and I didn't copy myself. I'll post some tomorrow, along with a little more commentary, after I've installed it here.

Good News! Quickly following JHR's return to the airwaves, Dave Farquhar puts in an appearance, both on his homesite, and over at O'Reilly. Welcome home, Dave.

One last tidbit:

UNIXWORLDWEEKLY 4/1 p.1

In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie 
and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language 
created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at 
the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:

"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their (Bell Labs) work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T 
Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from 
Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant 
simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading Bored of the Rings, a hilarious Harvard
Lampoon parody of the great Tolkein Lord of the Rings trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do 
parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the 
operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex 
and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody 
of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly 
warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create 
real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL 
and finally C, becoming the first programming language named after a Sesame Street character. 
We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a 
statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets 
to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when 
AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 
20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using 
this 1960's technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) 
of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working 
exclusively in Object Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really 
guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly 
prank so long ago." 

Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, 
NCR, Bull (formerly Honewell), and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland 
International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, 
Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would 
continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM 
spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news 
conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, stating 'a stable VM will be available Real 
Soon Now'. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, 
Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating that a similar confession 
may be forthcoming from William Gates concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating 
environments. And IBM spokesmen have begun denying once again that the Virtual Machine 
(VM) product is an internal prank gone awry.

There are hundreds of copies of the Unix & C Hoax announcement floating about the Wild, Wild Web, and after looking at a couple of tens of them, I decided that there was (a) no attribution possible and (b) no reason not to add One More Copy. You've probably all seen that before, somehow I missed it. Now to work with me. Later.


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Welcome to Friday and September. What happened to the sunny months? Did they blow past without me paying any mind, other than whining about the heat? Oh, yeah, that is what happened, huh? <sheepish grin>

Very short this AM, as I am taking Marco and Christina (the soon to be re-pat Finns) off to Cal-Train. They shipped their car away a couple of weeks ago, and car-less in CA is functional immobility. Hmmm. Poor kids. Tom and I had a nice long chat yesterday evening, laying out our game plan to get from here to the end of the book.

Just as well, this being short. Unlike other mornings, my brain just won't . . . "Engage!" Finger points off at Horsehead Nebula. Grin. Might as well water the farm and hit the road. Have a lovely day, peoples. Ta-ta.

18:47 - Interesting day, in a way. Some good things going on, and a lot to think about. One item that particularly stands out in my mind relates to this whole hoo-raw about copyright, piracy, napster, uptake, copy protection, adoption, etc., etc.

I want to head back about 18 years. In December of 1982, John Walker and a bunch of propeller heads put out version 1.0 of a little program called AutoCAD. Nothing much ever came of it <g>, but there were a couple of interesting features that came and went like the tides, as AutoCAD grew in popularity. The first couple of versions of the Computer Aided Design package were not terribly notable for their capabilities, but they ran on desktop PC's. It's like the old saw about the dancing bear, the wonder is that it dances at all.

As computer power increased dramatically, with the introduction of the 80286 <gg> AutoCAD started gaining favor on the Corporate level, and they decided that it was time to institute some form of copy protection. After all, it was well known that people all over the world were pirating the software, so it was the only prudent thing to do. Unfortunately, they almost killed the company in the process. Problem (the first) was that they pissed off their primary audience - engineers. Sure they had a copy at home on the computer there, made from the corporate disks. But they couldn't use it in two places at once... (Did I say that the copy protection was a dongle? It was.) Problem (the second) was that piracy (or as the engineers saw it: tool sharing) was the main method of people getting to know and understand the product well enough to pitch it and buy it into their corporations. New sales plummeted, and so did upgrades. That idea didn't last too long.

On another tack, a recent article I read talked about the marketing philosopy of the Grateful Dead. Let people bootleg. Let people "pirate" recordings. Let them do whatever they want. The Dead made money from their tours, and they made money from their studio forays - good money - because people paid well to see them, travelled to see them, paid for collections of re-treaded live collections from the official soundboards, just to hear the little differences in texture... Now THAT was proper viral marketing - the Dead was the number one money-making band in the years before Jerry died, and they gave away whatever they could. (If anyone could point me to that article, I'd be happy to post a link, I just can't remember where it was... Information Week??? ZD something? Ah, well... wait... OH, it was IW. Here's the link.)

Let's contrast this with my reaction to an event today. On one of my mailing lists, someone posted an article in its entirety, snipped from the Wired website. Privately (offlist) I asked the author of the message why he posted copywritten content to a public mailing list. Why not just a couple of lead-in sentences and a link? He had quite an attitude about my question, accusing me of "trolling" him. Hmmm. Got the juicing roiling among the three remaining grey cells. (Uh-oooh, here comes the gibberish...)

What is my obligation in protecting the intellectual property I generate? If I were assured of enough money to buy skittles, soda, new computers at reasonable (say three month) intervals, and travel when I felt like it, then certainly I would make more of a habit of giving to the communities I belong to. For now, what changes is the way I protect these pages, which now, today, reads "All Content Copyright © 1999, 2000 Brian P. Bilbrey. Use what you want, but be sure to give me credit, and a link, if online." My amateur version of an open content license.

Yesterday I decided not to sign an NDA in order to have a look at a beta of MetroWerks CodeWarrior 6 for Linux. First, it was under Texas law, which is really restrictive, but second of all, I would not be able to even mention the product on this site (as I just did) without written permission. So, feh. If I need it, I'll buy it, because I have heard good things about it, but then, I've heard good things about using Emacs as an IDE, so who's to know what'll come next.

I try to support the online communities I belong to now, in a variety of ways. I pay for the distributions I use full time (currently Mandrake and Caldera, previously RedHat, soon to be Debian and Caldera) Free software starts as an itch, perhaps, but it grows and matures because of other incentives.

Do I use Napster? Nope. Do I think they're doing wrong? Yes. Do I think it matters a gnat's ass hair's worth what anyone thinks about it? Nope. The end is in sight for strictly Copywritten material. Either many, many personal freedoms are endangered and the face of the Web changes dramatically, or content providers find a different way to make money out of a radically altered distribution chain. The buttheads and marketing yutzs who sit in the middle, taking money from the creators *and* from the consumers without providing value for their tithe are going to be hurting when they run out of money to pay lawyers to pursue unenforceable laws. Will there still be a market for CD's? You betcha. I could certainly download all my music, and cut CDRs and never spend another dime. What? Oh, right, my time's worth more than that, I think I'll just buy a few disks online, design a new website, sign another book, and sign for the CD's when UPS or FedEx shows up at the door, thank you very much. Heh. I cut tracks off of a bunch of CD's, popped my 20 favorite albums onto two CDRs. Oh, that was a few months ago - still haven't put them in the cup holder.

Now if it was legal for me to download a song here and there, check out new bands as recommended by the online communities with which I hang, I might could do so, and decide whether or not to buy the CD. Forget the clunky streaming partial audio thing. Forget watermarking - watermarking is like software dongles - you only annoy the most devoted part of your audience, 'cause they'll never make an audio watermark inaudible.

Yeah, I am rambling - I want to understand what's going on, I want to know what the world's going to be like, because it's comforting to think that I know what the hell's going on. Unfortunately, I think I lost my grip quite a while ago. So I do the best I can with these three little brain cells, and simply type for my pleasure (and your confusion). No editing, no second thoughts or chances. Life goes on, Bilbrey. Deal with it. Later, folks. I gotta get to work.


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Morning. Harumph. Information wants to be free. Hmmm. Don Marti said, "Information wants to be $6.95." Information doesn't want anything. Some people want free stuff without putting any value on the creator's time and energy, other people take, and provide value in return by paying forward, others pay in Simoleans (or your local equivalent). Do you subscribe to Jerry's website?

I do. I am sure some people think that that's a bit confused, after all, the information is posted, it's "free" in the literal sense, isn't it. But then again, I like Jerry. A lot. I've met him a couple of times, though I am sure he doesn't remember me from those occasions - it has been 15 years and more. I like his fiction, I like his technical writing and style. Jerry's column carried Byte for me for a long time - without him I wouldn't have bought the mag. I buy his fiction (Burning City in hardback, usually I've been cheap and bought in paperback, 'cause I've been reasonably poor until lately)... Subscribing to his site is a direct expression of my approval of the work he does on that site, and equally important, of my approval of the forum he provides for others and the dialog that ensues. In many senses it's like a heavily moderated strongly biased message board, and that's cool with me.

What am I doing here, then? I don't ask for subscriptions (though that Paypal thing might allow me to pass the hat, or at least park a hat on the sidewalk cement next to this soapbox) - but that's not the point of my activities here.

I have spent most of my life to date learning from other people who gave of their experience, their "information" freely. Some of those people are dead now, others have drifted away, I am fortunate that many are still in my life, and being joined by new people every day. The payment I make is to pass on some of what I know here. I make money with my experience in a wide variety of fields by performing my day job at ETS. I make (some) money by working on this OpenLinux book with the excellent Tom Syroid. I do the occasional consult for a few bucks. All that pays the rent, the back taxes, the credit cards, the food, the car loans (and yes, the occasional toy, like computers and more).

Here, right here is what I do for myself, for you, for fun, for whatever reason (or none) that I might have. I learn from your questions, I learn from figuring out how to provide answers, I laugh at the interplay - this place is a paying proposition for me, in every sense I consider important.

Brian:
 
Enjoy reading your stuff!!  Thursday, 31Aug. you mentioned using 26 screen 
shots, wrapping text, etc. into 35 pages.  If you have said before, forgive 
my asking, but tell us/me what program you use to integrate (publish) the 
above.

Thanks,
David Tanner

Hey, David.

Er. Um. {{word2000}}. That's the format the publisher takes, and the
"only" format that their style sheet (that provides the formatting
for their production department) comes with.

However, Tom and I are working on transitioning into (probably)
StarOffice 5.2, since it handles the revisioning flawlessly, then
only do a final whack at the doc with Word, to apply all the correct
style elements to the various bits. You know, I haven't tried
running Word over Wine, yet... 

Now we're off to Sacramento for Robbie's first birthday party. Happy Number One, Robert Michael!!! See y'all later, or perhaps tomorrow.


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Hi. It's noon, the chores and errands are all done, I have a crashing headache, and lots of things I want to accomplish today. One interesting thing - don't send a laptop to sleep while running eDesktop *and* with the screensaver running. I've slept Gryphon a number of times before, and always successfully (though the system clock needs updating after the fact) - but this is the second time that sleep during screensaver has locked the system hard. I really need to experiment with installing the apmd stuff, which would (should) fix this and other battery-powered Linux problems, but I haven't yet, and it doesn't come with OLeD.

We had a nice time yesterday, I split my time equally with adults and people I can relate with (the under-6 crowd). We got a lot of nice snaps, and I was able to take the pictures off the camera, burn them to CDR, and give copies to my sister and my folks right then and there, Wolf! However, I don't plan on doing the work necessary to post them 'til tomorrow, since I don't feel up to it. Maybe I'll be back later, perhaps not. Happy Labor Day weekend, if that's your bag. If not, good day to you, anyway. TTFN.


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