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

Good Morning! First, unmourned changes to take note of. Some time ago I noticed that I was not doing a very good job at all of maintaining the Week's Highlights (or Lowlights, as some would have it) section. So I dropped it in mid-August. Nobody seems to mind (probably not many people saw it, because my re-director page drops you right on the day, letting you miss all the stuff at the top, including the ugly picture)!

I understand this is Columbus Day! hurrah. An unreal school/bank/business holiday to celebrate the second guy from Europe to "discover" the continents of the Western hemisphere (several hundred years after some Viking or another, but don't get any big head over this, Minnesota!). Hmmm. As if the people who had been living here for tens of thousands of years already didn't count somehow... harumph. Well, regarding the holiday, the good news is that the commute might be a little lighter (but I doubt it). The downside is that while the schools, banks and many government offices are closed, so are some businesses. Probably one I need to talk to today.

From the links section, here's one on How to Write Secure Code, a good looking link-farm that has about three pages full of pointers to various White Papers, and online HOWTO documents. Then there's this one, for the Procmail users in the crowd: The Procmail Tips page (it uses frames, but don't let that get you down, there's some excellent data here). Last, a link to one of David Strom's recent Web Informant mailings, about Anniversaries. I always have fun reading stuff about computers that has phrases like "Those were the simple days..." in them.

Marcia just called from the road to let me know that someone nearby already has Holiday lights up... I quietly noted that this is ironic coming from a woman who's been working on ornaments for the last two months, and has finished two thirds of our Holiday present shopping. You note I use the word "Holiday" rather than any specific religious or ethnic celebration - I wouldn't want to annoy Bob. <g>

Time to run. Have a lovely day, TTFN.

Good, damp morning to you all. The rain started up yesterday about noon, then the skies cleared around dusk, then a new set of clouds rolled in and rained on us some more, all night and continuing. The drive this morning should be properly horrid, with people playing slip and slide to the delight and profit of body shops all over the Bay Area.

Jonathan Sturm has joined the ranks of the Daynoters. Welcome, Mr. Sturm! I was alerted (or was that "altered" by the announcement on the backchannel, and promptly added him to my Start page, as well.

Then, later, I saw that Jonathan had immediately joined the Daynotes Seti@Home group that Bob Thompson founded, dragging his (Jonathan's) 900 work units along with him. ::sigh:: A little guilt is a marvelous thing. I took a little while and went dredging through the old emails. Found my ancient Seti@Home account info, and brought it back to life, updating the info to the Orb Designs contact and website. So I joined the group as member number 8² (=64, a nice geeky power of 2), bringing along my original 154 work units painfully ground out on a single PI-133.

Overnight, I have learned two things. First, Gryphon the Acer Travelmate, with his PIII-600 SpeedStep processor, kicks butt. Of the 5 machines I brought online last night (3 from here, two remotely from work), Gryphon clearly is the performance leader (as you can see from the lead picture of the day, which is rather large at 184K), with the first work unit completed in only 6:20. Which brings me to the second thing I learned. Now I remember why I finally gave up on Seti@Home - the servers are worse than my DSL line, they're worse than a White House Intern, they go down, and they stay down. I can't even get to the website now, much less the data/results servers. Now I have 5 machines waiting to turn in completed work units. How annoying.

Now to work with me, as I am running late, and have a new report to generate out of the MRP database... if I can remember how. Then back here for the continuing work on the security add-on products chapter. TTFN.

Welcome to Wednesday. Reports say this is to be our third consecutive rainy day... I'm enjoying it. Also it's dropping snow in the Sierra range. Unfortunately I am so far out of shape at the moment that skiing would probably end in me Bono'ing a tree, if I didn't rip all the ligaments out of my knees first. Yeah, there's a message there, but I don't have time to heed it.

Yesterday I did some good work fininshing up the section on PortSentry, then delved into Tripwire. I was just about ready to do a third, final install, and write both versions up, when I caught hold of the license text out of the corner of my eye. While it's nominally a free-for-non-commercial-use license, there's some very odd clauses in it... like don't put it on a system connected to the Internet. WTF??? What good is a piece of Intrusion Detection software that I can't put on an Internet connected box? Rick Moen of SVLUG assures me that Tripwire is going GPL, and should have a new version out in weeks. This is, of course, after the book is to be completed, so I'll be calling Tripwire, Inc. today. On the subject of the license, I asked Rick if perhaps it was just my mis-reading/confusion. He replied:

No, it's probably an instance of lawyers on crack, working in league
with salesmen on LSD.  But the nice thing is that all of that will be
going away, presumably within a few weeks, as they finish going GPL.

Heh. So for the moment, I've blown away four precious hours, but with luck I'll be able to retrieve them today. Then, on the topic of DVD movies on computers (on which I briefly ranted last week), I received the following missive from Mike Garvey, who really sounds like he knows his stuff.

Subject: Computer DVD!
   Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 12:01:12 -0700
   From: "Mike Garvey" {[email protected]}
     To: [email protected]

Brian,

Don't be too quick to dismiss computer DVD! I agree that watching a DVD
on the typical computer monitor (17-21") is not a very satisfying
experience -- most agree that "home theater" presupposes a display at
least 27", but EVER is so strong and final. Read on.

If your experience with computer DVD is based solely on that hardware
decoder board, then you are right to be not impressed. Hardware
decoder boards give only average video quality, comparable to a
standalone DVD player with S-Video (not Component) output, so there is
no advantage to using one of these over a standalone player. However,
if your display device supports it, SOFTWARE DVD (PowerDVD, WinDVD)
decoding using a reasonably fast computer (600+ MHz) and good video
card (GeForce-based) will easily match and sometimes exceed, the video
quality of much more expensive video processors such as line-doublers,
-qaudruplers, etc.

Newer digital displays including HDTVs, as well as various projectors
(CRT, LCD, DILA, DLP) have RGB inputs (sometimes VGA) that will accept
the output of this HTPC (home-theater PC) and display the image at
resolutions that exceed the DVD standard 720x480 along with excellent
color-fidelity, and minimal motion and other artifacts.

As far as audio goes, the Sound Blaster Live Value II cards can output
digital audio (coax or optical) to your Receiver or Processor and for
those who want even better-quality sound, there are now available high
quality audio cards (M-Audio DiO 2496) that offer near-audiophile
quality for under $400!

Many people, including myself, use a HTPC as a supplementary component
that may have one, two, or more of the following uses:
o Scaler for DVD video (a SUPERIOR one!)
o Scaler for analog video sources (a work in progess).
o Slideshow viewer for digital photos
o Watching better-than-VHS-quality Internet downloadable movie
   trailers from quicktime.apple.com
o Digital CD player
o MP3 jukebox
o Big Screen Videogames
o Big Screen Internet

For more information, please check out the following site:

http://www.avsforum.com

Read the discussions in the "Home Theater Computers" forum. Some
messages posted by the moderator, Mark Rejhon are an excellent place
to start:

http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum12/HTML/001066.html
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum12/HTML/001661.html

I was first exposed to the HTPC two years ago with products from
Digital Connection (MPACT-based hardware decoder cards) when someone
complained about the Hollywood-Plus just as you did,

http://www.digitalconnection.com

and it has been an eye-opening (pun intended) experience ever since.

As far as DVD-RAM goes, that's a different application -- archival
storage. For now, I stick with the old standbys: tape and CDR. For
our clients, we have been also using "near-line storage" in the form
of additional drives (storage is cheap!) on other computers. I can
highly recommend Retrospect from Dantz as a supplement to standard
backup software.

http://www.betterbackup.com

Although we have a DVD-RAM (Creative) we have not really used it
much probably due to issues of data- and media-interchange.

Mike Garvey

Thanks for reading (and writing), Mike! There's loads of good info
there, more than I have time to delve into at the moment. However,
I've archived this for myself (and posted it for others), and will
check things out further once the book's done.

On DVD-RAM and competing standards... Ya, it's worth waiting for the
dust to settle, though the CDRecord software in Linux does already
recognize (SCSI) DVD devices, I think.

That's the other part, of course. I wouldn't really want to pay
Redmond to watch movies. A Linux solution is needed. Besides, I use
the computer interactively. I reserve movies for my vegetative
moods. <g>

Good Morning. If you're into this, then you're interested to know that they've released KDE2 RC2, with distro specific RPM's to be appearing on the mirrors. My guess is that they'll be hosed for a week or two with people downloading, then it'll be worth a shot. (sidenote: it's not yet on the SourceForge mirrors yet... there may be a distribution problem in the works if the mirrors can't get to the RPM's

Other than that, I remain pretty fried. I am fighting off some kind of flu/cold combination. However, that aside, I had a good productive day yesterday. I resolved the license language issue with the good folks up at Tripwire. They didn't intend for the software not to be used on Internet connected boxen, but for the software not to be distributed/distributable on public networks. No problem. For updates on the likelyhood of a GPL'd Tripwire, keep an eye on Tripwire.org.

So I finished the section on Tripwire, and I have a few more experiments to polish off the section on AIDE. Then it's off to the races with PGP/GPG and SSH/OpenSSH. Anyway, lots to do. Now it's time for me to head out to work. See you later.

Good Morning and welcome to Friday.It would appear from the news out of the Middle East that once again, we are headed to Hell in a bucket, but I doubt that anyone over there is enjoying the ride. I would appreciate any corrections, of course, but here's my thumbnail, under-informed yahoo from California sketch of how I see recent events (explicitly disregarding the Cole and movements in Iraq). Very much against the will of a portion of the population, Israel has been grudgingly moving towards both peace and sharing with it's Palestinian neighbors. Israel took a lot of land during it's dearly fought wars of survival. America, along with other nations, has repeatedly urged the Israelies to (best as possible) forgive and forget, oh and by the way, give these people back their homes, won't you? So, much as it hurts, events had appeared to be calming, and the tide of the times leaned toward giving the Palestinians back the land that was taken (at least, some of it). Now most people would regard this as real progress out of the Israelis, who are justifiably paranoid after having been persecuted and scapegoated around for a couple of thousand years. But no, for some reason, the Palestinians are being whipped up (or goaded) into behaving like assh*les. Watching the news last night, looking at Palestinian representatives picketing outside the Israeli consulate, I wondered. Why not ask them how they felt about their countrymen beating unarmed Israeli soldiers to death. Ask them how much sense it makes to provoke a hair-trigger organization like the Israeli military by gathering in mobs and throwing rocks. Each time someone dies, it's Israel's fault??? Gimme a break. Of course there are no easy answers, but Arafat and other Palestinian leaders are doing their own people a disservice by not trying to control them. Maybe we should treat them all like Raven, and tatoo "Poor Impulse Control" on all of their foreheads. Feh!

Well. Hmmm. Anyway, I've been continuing to fight the bug, with moderate success... I am not very sick, but I certainly am not up to full steam. I did get through about 2 sections of the chapter I am working on, and looking to try and finish it by evening -- my last scheduled writing day for this one is indeed today (We timelined the balance of the book a few weeks ago) -- Actually, I'll be pleased to finish it tomorrow sometime, which would be more reasonable, given that it'll deserve a cleanup pass or two. No pictures yet in this one, just lots of code listings.

On the Seti@Home front, I am starting to move up a bit. 29 work units completed since I joined on Monday evening. My average time is running at about 9:45. Here's the Daynotes Gang SETI page. I am not likely to make it to the top, as there are people who are better than an order of magnitude ahead in units completed, but this is OK, anyway. Kinda fun in a group-joining and belonging manner.

I am definitely running late. Take care, y'all.

14:25 - Hey. Back again, and at the keyboard for the weekend. I've been working half-days for the last ... is it 6 weeks now? Quite a while, anyway. Trying like mad to keep up and finish the book. Unfortunately, I've burned through all of my accumulated vacation and sick time. So it's back to full time job starting on Monday, and fit in what writing I can after commuting plus the normal 8-10 hour day. My goal for the moment is to finish Chapter 20 today, and write 23 over the weekend. Not bloody likely, but a worthy goal, all the same. Of course, my cliff-walking with illness remains touch and go, but that's life. Where did you say we put that winning lottery ticket, Honey?

Jerry has posted a good, thoughtful piece on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict today. He's been on the ground there, as I haven't, and he expresses himself well. I have this recurring image of Bill Shatner, "Why can't ... we ... all just ... get along?" in his own ... style. I'm no good at thinking about things like this, because both sides of the conflict have points in their favor, but also both are behaving like bloody fools. Maybe we ought to do what someone suggested once long ago. Go in, forcibly disarm everyone, put up a wall, a fence, whatever. Embargo the whole region. Yeah, OK, poke food through holes in the fence. Put'm in jail for being bad planetary citizens. Then, in 25 years or so, tear down the fence, and rehab those left standing. I'm worried that some idiot over there is going to start flinging nuc's.

I really didn't want to be thinking about this. ::sigh:: Now let me go write about encryption products... Later.

Hi. Too much to do, and I am just getting started. We lost power in the early evening for a while, and I took the opportunity to restructure the power arrangements, concentrate plugs on fewer high density power strips, etc. You've read Bob talk about his power setup before... all the outlets in our apartment are on a single 20A breaker. I know, yes, we've blown it just once though. We cope through careful manual power management. However, I have been lax in the UPS department, and I have to rectify that. Today, I think. But I have work to do on the book, and cleaning to be done... and ... and. Well, I'll just start at the start, and get done what I can. In the meantime, some email:

From: "John Doucette" 
Subject: Israeli/Palestinian conflict 
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 16:20:43 -0600

Hi Brian

What I was thinking the other day was that these two groups are prime
examples of why man needs to colonize space. Then we have options of
shipping them off to start new home lands far from each other, or leave them
planet bound and the rest of us can leave.

John

Hey.  Shades of the Dorsai, man. Of course, neither of those
cultures would be considered predecessors of the "Friendlies"  That
reminds me, it's time to hunt up my copy of Tactics of Mistake, it's
been a while.

Of the two options, I think I'd pull a Louis Wu, and leave them
here. I'm for the high road, if they'll have me.

Subject: Jerry P.'s Take on the Situation
   Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 22:39:56 -0700
   From: "J. H. RICKETSON" 
 
Brian - 

Glad you read Jerry's take on the Israeli - Palestinian mess. I was extremely 
impressed by it. A cogent, even-handed analysis. It takes a really big man 
to say "I just don't know." IMO, anyone who claims otherwise re the mideast 
is lying to others or, worse, to  him/herself. 

US made that terrible mistake in the 'Nam - trying to impose "Peace" on a 
peninsula that had only known 25 consecutive years without war over the 
past 2000 years. US repeated the mistake again in Yugoslavia - though not 
at such a terrible cost. Bubba dimly realized that body bags are NOT good 
PR - although a small, tidy war is a very handy attention-diverter as needed.

I like Jerry's idea: Wall the mideast off and let them kill each other off. (Just 
so long as plenty of oil gets through that wall!) There are some areas of the 
world where 3M is the National Sport. It can be played by any number, 
young or old, male or female, indoors or out. 3M? Why Murder, Mutilation 
& Mayhem, of course! I believe Ireland even achieved a sophisticated 
system of inter- and intra-mural leagues in the sport!

Nostalgic note: When I was 17 in '48, I took the course in Modern Hebrew 
in college, then spent a year on active duty in the USMC, prepping to 
volunteer in the fight for Israeli independence. At that point I didn't even 
know what goyim are. Fortunately, another "Police Action" intervened, and 
the Commandant requested my services, or my life might have been quite 
different - or shorter. At that age I was the kind of dumshit that volunteered 
for things.

Regards,

JHR

Ya, it was a good'un from our Dr. Pournelle. I really have to wonder
what school they send diplomats to, in order to cope with people who
keep killing each other... Oh, right, Georgetown. 

It's odd really. I want to say something like "it isn't as
straightforward as once it was, we used to know who the bad guys
were (aka WWII)". But in the War to End All Wars, and the Great War
which followed, Americans were deeply ambivalent for quite a while.
It's that sleeping giant thing.

Why don't we send Barak and Arafat to Dream Park and let'm duke it
out in warbots ... oh, right, fiction... ::sigh::

Glad to hear from you. Take care.

Well, I feel entirely non-perky today. I've been awake for the better part of 3 hours, ache-y and generally cranky to boot. I got up about an hour ago, and after doing inbox maintenance, thought I'd drop in and say hello. Good morning and welcome to my Sunday.

I 've been feeling guilty about not having UPS protection for the computers, but there've been so many competing demands for my attention and dollars that I just sort of procrastinated that away. That ended yesterday. On Friday evening, I was doing a test compile in eDesktop under VMware while I wrote about it in Word, when the power went out for about 20 minutes. 2 hours after that, I had all the boxes back online properly (there were boot errors on Grendel the Web-serving Gateway boxen that had been hidden by the fact that I hadn't rebooted in several months). That, in combination with having to fsck nearly 15G of HD under VMware, then replicate all of my work that hadn't committed yet (from scratch, the safe way), consituted the final straw.

I took the recently arrived advance payment from IDG via Studio B, parked it in checking rather than savings, and went to Fry's. I got a cart (rare, rare occurance), and headed down to power central. Walked past all the other crap, much of it in iMac clone translucent color crud, hunkered down and started parking APC's in the cart. A BackUPS 650 for Grendel, and matching BackUPS 500's for Grinch and Marcia's HP. I got Grendel's installed yesterday afternoon. Then I got apcupsd, compiled and installed that. The APC UPS Daemon is called beta software, although it's in version 3.7.2, and is in a "stable" branch. But it works, and just fine, too. There's even a ncurses-based (text menuing like old DOS programs) menu driven access program called ... PowerFlute. Isn't that an odd name? APC doesn't support this, but they are known to work with the author's of the program.

Today, I have yet to install the UPS' on Grinch and the HP. Also, I have to finish writing about OpenSSH and get that chapter into Tom's hands, plus do edits on the Samba chapter he's kicking my way. I sure wish I felt healthy. But it'll get done. Now for some Q&A via email...

Subject: RPM question...
   Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 14:37:33 +0200 (CEST)
     To: [email protected]

Hi all

I want to do a update using RPMs. My problem is each rpm is in a different
dir. I mean is all are under /gnome/SuSE/*. This where * is 33 different
dir's. I tried "rpm -U /gnome/SuSE/*.rpm", no go. How should I do this? Or
will I have to update 33 different times?

BTW I'm trying to upgrade from Gnome 1.05 to 1.2....

TIA!

Hi, Jim -

Ran into this myself with the KDE 2.0 Beta 5 stuff. There's the
cheap and easy way: copy all the rpm's into a single directory
(which I used, drag and drop from the interface, a sucky redmondian
sort of solution). Also there's something like this

cd to/parent/directory/of/RPM/subdirectories

find . -type f -iname *rpm -exec rpm -Uvh --nodeps {} ";"


****
the nodeps is necessary, because you're not updating all of the RPMS
at one time, and dependencies are going to temporarily break.

Subject: Re: scripts that run as root
   Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 07:24:54 -0400
   From: Sean

Brian,

I had heard of sudo before, but I have never had much luck at getting it 
working.  That seems to continue to be the case.

When I enter, for example, `sudo /sbin/losetup -e blowfish /dev/loop0 
/home/tschulze/cf.conf` it gives me the password prompt, but will not 
accept the root password as correct.  If I try too often, and it 
continues not to recognize the password, I get locked out.

Editing the /etc/sudoers file with visudo is also proving to be a 
headache as it repeatedly tells me that there is a syntax error in the 
line: # User specification

If this worked, it would probably answer my needs, but its beginning to 
be a bit frustrating.

Cheers, Sean

Ooops.

>From _man sudo_

By default, sudo requires that users authenticate themselves with a
password (NOTE: this is the user's password, not the root password).
___________

Observe the bit in parenthesis. DON'T USE ROOT PASSWORD!!!

Herewith is a modification of my /etc/sudoers file (which works
fine)...

*********

# sudoers file.
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# See the sudoers man page for the details on how to write a sudoers file.
#

# Host alias specification

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL) ALL
bilbrey gryphon = \
        NOPASSWD: \
                /usr/bin/apm, \
                /usr/bin/netoffice, \
                /usr/bin/nethome, \
        PASSWD: \
                /sbin/reboot, \
                /sbin/halt

*********

I hope the above helps, as the sudoers manpage is one of the suckier
things in existence. I made the above work by empirical testing.
PASSWD is the default, so I start w/NOPASSWD. Here's my take on the
User Priv spec 

username hostname = [[PASSWD: | NOPASSWD:] command [, command...] ...]

Best wishes.

Finally, please do go check out Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox, on Request Marketing. An excellent read, recommended. Now to brew some coffee, and get to "actual" work. TTFN.