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.

Happy Monday. Unexpectedly (at least by ostrich-boy here), it's raining, again. I say ostrich-boy because I didn't look at the news at all, just worked on writing. Having broken the DNS logjam finally on Saturday morning thanks to a hint from Greg Lincoln, I eked out 17 pages. Not stellar, but it'll do.

The bad news is that there are now two cases of cancer among our friends. This life-threatening disease stuff is seriously no fun, and my heart goes out to Barb and to Cheryl. Barb has more surgery today, and Cheryl is doing the big chemo dose this Thursday. Think good thoughts for them, won't you?

Marcia clowned with me yesterday about "how little" I am writing... heh. Of course, I thank you, gentle readers, for your forebearance during these last weeks of the book. I am not doing much interesting with computers that isn't going right into the book, and IDG would have a snit if I posted that work here. Mainly I don't have time for much else. Once this current chapter's out of the way, we'll be down to three more plus an appendix that we'd like to do later, in conjunction with the Author Review process. I figure about 10 days to completion, less if things go well...

It was fun writing yesterday - The Bridge School Benefit was on, a live webcast. Oh, the Bridge School is a local (SF Bay Area) program for kids with severe speech and physical impairment. It's strongly supported by Peggy and Neil Young (yeah, that Neil Young). So each year (this was the 14th annual), Neil gathers a bunch of people together to play music at the Shoreline Amphitheatre. This year the bill included (aside from Neil, of course): Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Tom Petty, Beck, Dave Matthews, Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Tegan & Sara. A great collection of headliner bands, all playing together over two nights, all funds donated to the Bridge School. Most excellent.

Now it's time to hit the wet roads, and see just how bad the traffic is. It depends on whether someone's playing bumpercars or not. Take care, y'all!

Good Morning. Well, we're in full bore silly season (I use "bore" in the sense of dull), with the snail-mailbox filled to bulging each day with a combination of election, bond measure and other rhetoric joined at the hip with collections of catalogs and other early holiday season consuming guides. Maybe we should have Harry institute Trash Day (was it "Harry"?)

Gush and Bore have one week to go. One thing I seriously don't envy them - life on the campaign trail must truly suck. That must be why there's such a long interval until the winner is seated: rest and recuperation time. Two months in the Bahamas will take away a lot of the stink from shaking babies and kissing hands (and both can afford that, easily).

The Russians have launched the first ISS crew. Through inattention, I didn't know that the tin cans were ready to see a 4 month stint of habitation. Accompanying the CNN article is a nice snap of the Soyuz on the pad. Are they taking signups?

Anyway, it turns out that MCI/Worldcom is as yet incapable of properly repairing a phone line. They had busied out the main line last Thursday so that calls would fall through to the rest of the lines in the hunt group. Apparently they sent a tech out Friday who made a change or two, pronounced the line fixed, and they took away the busy-out. No line yesterday morning, and once again calls going straight to voice mail. Sigh. Don't you think they'd be smart enough to check with the customer and make sure the problem's fixed, rather than just taking the word of Dingus McGee, Ace Technician?

So they've scheduled another truck roll for this AM, and I definitely want to be there to meet with the guy. I tested the line prior to our PBX, and there's no tone. The problem must be back at the POE (Point of Entry). So, have a good day all. Later.

Hello. Chapter 24 is now in the pipeline, more or less. It's now in Tom's capable hands, awaiting only a brief introductory section on Apache which provides a punt up to the chapter dedicated to the topic. Oh, right, and he's got to clean up all of my broken English as well <g>

Hmmm. I just lost connectivity - the Downtime script couldn't connect, so it recycled the modem. Not that that helped. Something upstream just went dead. No ping ability at all, though the modem appears to be responding properly. We'll see if things are better at work.

Finally (for the moment), there was this announcement on Freshmeat: Apparently Netscape has frozen and won't allow me to cut & paste, but Linus has announced the release of Linux 2.4.0-test10-final, the first of the "greased weasel" series of kernels, leading up to an actual stable release. Not yet, folks, not yet, but getting there.

Dunno if anyone will see this - it depends on what's going on. Have a lovely day out there. I'm off for work. Later? Who knows? Take care.

Well, it took an 11 hour day at work yesterday, but I think the phones are fixed. Something got seriously hosed at the CO sometime last week and they broke our main line. The PacBell tech who finally came out seemed to know his stuff, although it took a long time to track down where the problem was, and how to make it right. Still, it's fixed (at least for the moment).

Good Morning! Needless to say, I didn't get much in the way of writing done yesterday as a result. Tom and I nattered on the phone for a bit, and cleared up a couple of bits that I'd mucked up in 24. I'll do a fast pass edit on it this AM and send back to him for final and submission. Tonight I start writing about Sendmail. Your prayers are appreciated, and it's been nice knowing you if I don't come up and out on the other side ... <g>. Yeah, well. Flair for the dramatic, dontcha know?

Having been ignoring as much of the political crap-slinging as I can, and finding our mailbox full each day between holiday grud and election grud, it's time to pay attention. I am going to read the voter handbook, and decide what to vote NO on. Then I'll go back through and decide if I want to vote yes on any of the bits that I didn't discard on my first pass. Then everything else gets an automatic NO. One of my favorite political statements, painted on an industrial building in Benicia (North SF Bay) : "Vote NO for President. Anything else just encourages the bastards!" Double-grin.

I'll probably be more alert later, and likely to come back with a more coherent commentary, so (with luck) I'll see you in a while. Take care.

17:59 - Welcome back. I bailed out at about 2 this afternoon, came home and settled in to start working on Sendmail. I have two pages written, and a couple of hundred read -- there's lots of documentation on Sendmail. After all, the Bat book from ORA runs to about 1000 pages, and there's reams and reams of online refs, system docs and manpages. Should be easy to condense down to about 35 pages definitive, eh?

We passed on some SF Symphony tickets for tonight. They are going unused by my folks, and they gave us first right of refusal, a gracious gesture. Unfortunately, between Marcia's chiropratic appointment, and Tom and I working hard to have the book done next week, I just couldn't see it. Ah, well, too bad.

I'll tell you one thing I don't like about the end of Daylight Savings Time (besides the name - who are we saving it for, anyway?). I've worked hard, and was finally driving to work before sun-up, which is a good thing, because the first half of my morning drive is due East. Now they change the clocks on me, and I've got the morning sun in my eyes again! I didn't notice on Monday, which was horrid overcast, but Tuesday on has just been a joy... NOT!

Over on Slashdot, Robin Miller (aka Roblimo) has posted his review of Mandrake 7.2. I agree, wait for 7.2.1 - there are still a couple of broken bits. I tried installing on Gryphon, and it installed marvelously for me, but then died at frequent intervals for no good reason. I think it was related to the combination of KDE 1.94 and XFree86 4.0.1 and the ATI Rage 64 Mobility Pro that's in my little buddy. I didn't have time to muck about with things, so up went Debian and that's that for the time being. More explorations after the book's done.

Now, back to work with me. Have a nice evening.

Good morning. I am watching with a little concern, and just a bit of amusement, the hulla-baloo over some maroon over on Linux Today calling Dr. Pournelle a paid shill. Yeah, publicly accusing someone of something that can hurt their livelihood is libelous, but then public figures are the subject of opinions. "Al Gore invented the Internet, snicker, snicker." The difference is that back in the days of Dead Tree Byte, when someone said that Jerry was full of it, or writing something only because they gave him hardware or whatever, it was effectively the same as locker room talk, with about the same effective radius. The Internet has moved Speaker's Corner onto the world stage, and not conveyed one iota of brains in the transition.

I have read, and continue to read Jerry's material: fact, fiction and opinion. I do so because I like his style. He, too, holds opinions and is unafraid to speak them, from NSI must die to the inevitable reruns of the never-ending Fry's saga... grin. Jerry works with lots of technology, and tells us about it. In some ways I look at it like the work on many of the PBS home improvement shows. Not too many of us are ever going to use $20K of Italian marble in a master bath, but boy-o-boy, didn't that look nice when they were done. In the same vein, Chaos Manor has many more than enough computers, and Bob stated it best yesterday, more hardware is simply a burden at that point. But Jerry, and Bob, and all of the rest of us write about the material we receive not because we got it for free (or because we paid for it (in the case of most of my writings)), but because that's what we have, to write about, DUH!.

On the other fronts, political and social, I often don't agree with Dr. Pournelle, but that doesn't keep me away from what he writes. I hope always to find the time to seek out and try to understand viewpoints that I don't agree with. That's important for me. I find Jerry to be a first rate thinker, even when I fault his conclusions.

However, some of the reactions to this tempest in a teapot are fairly amusing. After all, referring to a submitted piece as "The Voice of Linux Professionalism", as if it were an official stance by some standards-making body is a bit over the top, as well. The Linuxen (as a mob) are young, irreverent, and careless of the feelings of those around them. This is true, even as most of them are kind and decent people in close proximity. There's a strong bandwagon mentality that permeates many online communities - it's as old as humanity to loudly agree with anything that the group seems to be going with, even (or especially) when you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Ah, well, lost youth.

I fully expect to receive heaps of villifying emails, horrid reviews and accusations of illicit sex and drugs with a Redmond-based shepard and ALL of his flock, just as a mild reaction to the book that Tom and I are about done with. I have no creds in the community because I don't write code. I am not a Maddog Hall, or Donnie Barnes or Eric Raymond. (I do have a finely tuned flair for self-deprecating humor, however.) I belong to that crew because I use Linux, and talk about it, and advocate it in my way. I hope that people find what we write useful, while acknowledging in advance that we're liable to hear far more from the screwballs and people who wanted to know why we left out X and Y, who cares that the book couldn't be 10,000 pages. That's OK. I know how hard we've worked to make this useful and right.

Now that my week's rant is out of the way, I must off to work. Have an interesting day.

Good Morning. We have a high pressure cell sitting off the coast here, keeping the autumn storms off, and ensuring nice weather for Dan Bowman's birthday. Marcia sent him a card yesterday, on the premise that Shelly might not let him touch computers, and he sent a thank you. I replied:

To: Dan Bowman
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: It's the BIG One! - from Marcia & Brian

Well, I was gonna hold off until tomorrow, at least, or do the
decent thing, and ignore the day altogether, just as my dad trained
me to do for his birthday and my own. However, if I ignore Marcia's
birthday, then you can plan on attending my funeral... ummmm, what
day was that? 

Anyway, since my beloved jumped the gun by a day, I'll second the
condolences ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H best wishes for the day, and hope
you really, really enjoy your 30th birthday. That was what you said
it was, eh?

Subject: RE: It's the BIG One! - from Marcia & Brian
   Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 22:01:31 -0800
   From: Dan Bowman {[email protected]}

Thanks. I really don't know what to do with this one. Normally I can blow
them off; this time, even I can recognize some sort of milestone. I mean,
like, you know, like, for real, man, like twenty, twenty five years ago, I
never thought I'd even have a chance of reaching fifty. Motorcycles, drugs,
women, jealous husbands, working the streets (several close ones)... Pick
any two...

So really, I'm sitting here with a wife for life, two kids, three cats, a
mini-van, a house, a pool, two jobs, six computers, a real decent job,
two soccer games to got to... I've seen a heck of a lot worse.

So I think I'll enjoy the day,

dan

I've also been remiss on another front or two. A belated Daynotes welcome from me to John Dominik. John: I haven't read as much of your site as I'd like - The impending deadline keeps me from many things. Welcome! Additionally, in conjunction with the return of Dave Farquhar, his prolific style has run him out of space on his old hosting site, and he has neither the time nor energy to devote to his own server setup (It's the content, duh!), so has made the move over to Manila, with a new site on EditThisPage The older stuff remains at Access2K1, but I've (finally) changed my Dave reference on my public start page over to the new place, as well as putting in John Dominik, and adding Kuro5hin back into the mix.

Now, I really need to get to work - I'd like to write 25 pages on Sendmail today, have them be perfect, and ready to submit by Monday. An ambitious goal, perhaps over-ambitious. But I make absolutely no progress towards it while visiting with you. Sorry. Perhaps I'll be back later. TTFN!

Good Morning! Well, sort of good-ish, in a nasty, "gollum" IRS-y kind of way. We were awakened this morning at about 7 by the morons downstairs listening to the local hard rock station at high decibel levels. Not that much earlier than we planned on getting up anyway, but I am pissed at their thoughtlessness and plan on letting them know later today. If I went down now, I'd be much ruder, which is generally a bad idea, I've found.

Next, we're off to meet the tax guy today. Nick has been doing taxes for Jack and Trudy (and for ETS) for many years - he comes highly recommended. We gave him a call, and he suggested that we meet for coffee at some roasting company on Sunday morning. Hmmm. Well, OK. Odd office hours, odd office but what the heck, we didn't have to bail on work (except for the book), and we'll go from there to Costco. However, the records aren't where we remember them being, so I have to go rooting around in the garage to find last year's return. Best get to that.

I only got about 6 pages in on Sendmail yesterday, and spent the balance of the day working with the 40 plus pages of Apache that Tom dropped in my inbox. Good, good work. Took time to read and proof carefully because it's so tightly written.

An apology to John Dominik for spelling his name two different ways (originally) in yesterday's post. Bob grin>was kind enough to bring it to my attention. Besides, honestly, John? A novella each day? A novella!!! <grin> Now for the garage, then a bit of writing before we depart. Have a lovely day.