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Email Brian Bilbrey

EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so, I'll pay attention to your wishes.

Good Morning. Yeah, I've been mucking about with layout and such. Started in on Friday and finished up Saturday. Not a lot of changes but I want it to be a bit more like the most useable of the Daynotes sites. Also, I did publish a couple of pictures from last week's Thanksgiving bash, on Friday last.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox is out once again, this time entitled Security and Human Factors. What I've been hearing and saying for quite a while now - Long and/or complex passwords that have to be changed on a regular schedule is an invitation to disaster, since users will write them down.

Me and Sweeney Todd are planning a rumble this morning - well, actually, that's why this post is running late - I am futzing about and surfing a bit and so on - I have an appointment with the dentist. Getting a crown in place of an old broken tooth. Isn't there a word for paying someone to inflict pain on you? Oh, right, "stupid"! How could I forget? <G>

Other changes, less visible around here - Much of the connectivity trouble I was experiencing yesterday was due to the PBI name servers doing a yo-yo routine. So I finally broke down and built an internal name server for the AWN (Apartment-Wide Network). It only answers on the local and internal interfaces, not even listenting for outside requests.

I am temporarily stymied in my quest for a working Konqueror browser. That is, the browser works just fine, thanks, but I can't use the Thompson message boards. Something's mis-configured. I fetched down some of the KDE2 sources and tried to build a fresh tool. No joy - I think I need to compile both A and B, before I can approach C. Oh, well, another day. Now I have some work to do prior to my dental agony, so I'll progress with my day. Y'all take care, see you later.

Evening Update, 20:09 PST - Feh. The man who invented computing (who else could have come up with Al-Gore-ithms?) has made his speechifying regarding the right to steal the Presidency back from the Shrub, who stole it fair and square. I look at both of these guys, and see the potential for an administration that's fodder for a whole series of Stephen King novels (you listening, Steve? It's all yours, gratis, if Mark Russell doesn't get his hands on it first). I watched Shrub talk yesterday, and he really looks like he's just about ready to rejoin the guys over at Animal House. At this point, I'd rather have Bob Thompson for the job, or Zaphod.

I've been catching up with Kernel Traffic, the summary site for the high-volume Linux kernel mailing list. Couple of bits that crossed my eyes this time are the Large File Support in Linux page and the KernelWiki, which includes the newly introduced How to Get Your Change Into the Linux Kernel (or The Unofficial Linus HOWTO, note the 's' there).

Following a request on the SVLUG main mailing list, I have volunteered to keep an eye on the posts at the newsgroup sbay.linux. Having done all this work on the book, I figure I might as well put the knowledge to work paying forward and helping out the community a bit. It's so low traffic right now that there's only my introductory message and four bits of spam.

Oh, the visit to the dentist went OK, gotta go to the lab for color matching the crown on Wednesday, and the placement should be on the 19th of December. Hopefully I'll be fully ready on Christmas for the next feeding frenzy.

Doc Searls has posted an interesting question (about the applicability of Moore's Law to software) that he forwards from Ellen Ullman, in the course of discussing his work on the upcoming article, Why operating systems suck (and what we're doing about it). Sounds like it's going to be an interesting piece. Dave Winer posts an good thinking piece in response at Scripting News. Slashdot brought me to the Guardian's article on the Clarke Omniputer... Heh. Guess that's enough for now... TTFN.

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Good morning. Greeting me in my PBI inbox is an email from Adobe. It turns out that after nearly a year of "beta" testing of FrameMaker 5.5.6 (which I did work with, a bit), they're dumping the nascent product. They say "The beta licenses will expire on 31 December 2000, and you will be unable to use the product after that date." They do go on to tell you to export your material to text (which isn't much of a translation), unless you want to open it in one of the FrameMaker products on another platform, or lose it. Of course they could have done something like: "Here's a key to fully unlock the beta. We won't support it, ever, but at least you can keep the work that you've done, and do some new work - you invested your time in our evaluation, here's your payoff." But nah, nothing like that.

Well, there went the rest of my posting time... Matt's back in the game, and he's got a new, less formal picture up, too. <g> Sorry folks, but I've got to run along. I'll be back later, like I was last night.

Tuesday Evening, 19:21 -

Well, I am busy writing the Preface for Caldera OpenLinux Secrets (the task Tom's assigned me for the day, figuring I didn't need to over-react to our editors again so soon), but thought I'd share a couple of screen shots in the interim. WARNING: these are big images. While they're only about 100K PNG each, they are full rate 1280x1024 screenshots - what I see, you see, no shrinkage. Pictured at the left, over the weekend, I had to check on the backups for the NT servers. I SSH into work, then SSH again over to my workstation from the gateway. Then I start up VNC and login to the NT server in question (which has the VNC server running). The lag times are something fierce, even with DSL - I wouldn't want to do CAD or image editing work this way - but for clicking a few buttons in a dialog or two, it's just dandy.

Then, tonight's shot (to the right) is XMMS playing me some music in the background, and me writing the Preface in the latest release of OpenOffice (formerly StarOffice). You know, it cracked me up the other day... I was wandering through Frys on my mission to get a sound card when I happened to overhear a moron I mean "sales associate" attempt to pitch a customer on StarOffice 5.2 retail boxes, which they have a lot of on the shelf... He knew nothing about the product. I said to her, "Stop, don't buy that. Go to www.openoffice.org and see what's what, there's been two revisions since 5.2, much better filters for Word and Excel, and it's a free download." Then I turned on my heel and walked off, leaving the moron clerk turning a peculiar shade... Hmmm. Anyway, now for some supper, then back to the writing. Later.

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Late, late, late, and it is raining, to boot. Not cats and dogs, more like gerbils and hamsters, but the roads are soaked, all the same. Also, I am on a wild goose chase for errant usage of apostrophe in "it's", theoretically someplace in last night's post, according to an email from Bob Thompson. I only find two, used properly. In the interim, I will attempt to do away with colloquial usage of contracted words in my writing. Of course, once we've identified and annihilated the miscreant, it is going to be back to business as usual.

I am actually rather liking the new OpenOffice. Unfortunately, the printing subsystem that was inherited from the StarOffice roots is non-free... yup, you have got it, I can't print. Sigh. Silly. Oh well. Now to work with me, take care, I will be back to abusing the 'Merican English language just as soon as possible. TTFN.

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Good Morning! My first cut at a preface for a book is completed. I worked on it in OpenOffice Words then exported it into Word 2K to do the final bits, everything came through just dandy, even the extra apostrophe... yes, that's right, there's resolution in the great apostrophy scandal.

On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 10:12:43AM -0500, Jonathan Hassell wrote:
I only see two as well, and they're properly used.

Maybe RBT should spend less time with those reindeer antlers on.  

---
Jonathan Hassell
[email protected]
http://www.hasselltech.net

You'll note that the emailto link that I used for Bob Thompson's
name in today's post was "[email protected]", because I thought he
was just jerking my chain.

Now I find that it's both better, and worse. I asked Bob for
context, and he gave it to me. I couldn't find it anywhere on the
page, and said to myself, "Feh! I was right. Abuse, plain and
simple."

Now, from work, one of those little animated Acme lightbulbs blinks
into existence above my head. He is referring to the Preface, which
is pictured in the screenshot at the right of last night's post.

So I was wrong, and I was right. This is abuse, but not plain and
simple. Instead it is both cruel and devious. I should have known.

My original message to you was as follows, quoted in full:

> me writing the Preface
You have an "it's" where it should be an "its"]

So, if you'd actually *read* my original message it would have been
clear that I was pointing to the preface.

To make matters worse, you refer to but do not quote the context I gave
you. That message was as follows:

  "due to it's active development community"

If you can't remember writing those words in your preface and instead
wasted time searching your daily journal page, it's hardly my fault, now is it?

But I've already gotten my revenge for your vile aspersions. Marcia
asked me for some Winter Solstice gift ideas for you. I told her that you had a
secret passion for Barry Manilow music, but that you'd deny it because
you were deeply ashamed. (Like Angel, but I assumed she doesn't watch
Buffy/Angel). So she bought you the "Best of Barry Manilow" CD. You'd
better act pleased (and surprised) when you open it.

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

barry mmmmph cd ... with edges sharpened it make a lasting
impression when thrown.

And the conversation went downhill from there. Bob did indeed tell Marcia to get me Barry Manilow. The amusing bit was that as I was being musically flayed by Bob (who continued into Yanni, and Neil Sedaka - I am only grateful that he gave Neil Diamond a miss ... Don't even think that!), Marcia sent me an unwitting email asking what we should get the Thompson's for Saturnalia gifts. I replied, "Sharpened Barry Manilow CDs." She didn't get it until I gave her the rundown later. <g>

Had a nice chat with Moshe last night on IRC, as well as with Tom and JHR. Mr. Bar has graciously written us a foreword for the book, and claims to have been brutally honest. Hmmm. <g> I got down the latest Mulberry Unix demo from Cyrusoft, since both Tom and JHR seem to really like the thing. There's one set of problems that I am having with the KDE suite that I am not yet sure how to resolve - When I cut from Konqueror or Kmail, I can't paste into Bluefish (this HTML editing tool. Now I suppose that I could change, or perhaps the version that ships with Mandrake 7.2 is brought into the fold (perhaps I should test that). But for now... hmmm, again.

Off to work with me. See you later.

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Welcome to Friday, and good morning. Plenty to do in this brand spanking new December. I have to:

• start whittling slingshots.
• sharpen my Who carving knives (better than Ginsu).
• train that little Aibo feller to go around the mall biting Santas.
• find a way to smile without showing the fangs... until the last minute.
• throw another reindeer to the wolves, they're restive.
• roll all those useless catalogs into a colorful fire "log".
• buy Bob some John Tesh, whoever that is.
• dig out my extra-large roll of flat black tinsel.

There's lots more than that to be done, but it is a good start, and I am sure to get mail suggesting many more Grinchy bah-humbugish things that need doing. There's more changes in the computing scene around here, that I'll detail this evening. Of course, by then Tom's site will be in transition...

*** NOTICE *** Excerpt from Tom's Thursday evening post follows:

21:00 hrs... A quick "late-night" post. As you probably already know, tomorrow my domains go dead for a day or two. When I switch to the new IPs late tomorrow, I'll go in and put some port-based virtual host entries into Apache's config file to allow people to get to my webs. It's easy to add them in, and easy to take them out when my domains propagate through. So you can connect to Hydras via:

         Prior Links removed. Tom's up, and requested the links come down
         2000-12-01 19:00 PST

To work with me for now, back later.

17:30 - News of the day. By 9:30 this morning, Tom's DNS changes had propogated to the left coast nameservers operated by PBI. Color everyone surprised: 3 hours or less for DNS propogation??? Whew. So of course nothing was ready in Saskatoon. I am sure that Tom will have a tale or two for us, at his usual haunts. If you can't resolve yet, then go to http://142.165.167.14, to get to the entry way. Should be OK from there, I think.

I was taking a real performance hit, running multiple partitions on ReiserFS. I do a fair amount of disk-IO intensive stuff, and everything just s-l-o-w-s down noticably, which is to be expected of a journalling FS. I back up the important stuff, and guess I can live with the occasional long boot when there's a need to fsck. Plus, I needed more space, so I re-orged some of my partitions, clearing and converting to ext2, then putting the data back in place. Once the /home and /usr/local directories were rebuilt, I just reinstalled Mandrake 7.2. It's easier than clearing and reformatting one partition at a time. All my setup and installed software is preserved on the /home and /usr/local, so I was up and running full jingle in no time.

Besides, I need to convert from running a dual-boot system to a full-time Linux station again. I am setting up VMware to run Win98 and O2K, which is a sufficiency for the remaining book work, and anything else that might come up - that's how I work at the salt mine, as well. Anyway, I have a chapter to do the Author reviews on, which means I need to finish setting up the VM and get to it. Later, y'all.

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Good Morning. Do we have someone to move into 1600 on January 20, yet? I don't know, haven't been paying attention. Nah, don't bother to tell me, I'll find out on Inauguration day. Maybe Skippy Bush (George the Elder's invisible evil twin) will step into the breach.

Tom appears to be off the air at the moment. No http connections, no ping, nothing. Ah, well, it couldn't be easy, now could it. IP transitions are tricky, especially with equipment upgrades. I'm sure all will be well later today. Meantime, if you want a set of links for the daynoters, my start page has them in the two righthand columns.

Do you SSH or OpenSSH across Linux firewalls, via masqueraded connections? I do. Not only that, but I also use SSH (as the generic term) for all of my internal commo, too. The funny thing is that when I am connected across my internal net, SSH connections live until I terminate them. When I am connected across the Internet, they've been dying after a matter of a couple inactive minutes. I always believed that there was something about SSH configuration that I was missing.

I was wrong. It's a feature of IPChains, to tear down inactive connections. When I SSH into home to pick up my email, I cross two IPChains firewalls - one at work and one here. I am not sure off the top of my head what the default value is, and the IPChains manpage doesn't say, but I've found that the command

ipchains -M -S 7200 10 60

Also, I've learned some interesting things about the newest version of VMware (2.0.3, build 799). Wheel mices now pass through to the GuestOS properly, I've configured sound (which I hadn't before), and they have a new feature called Plain Disks (in addition to Raw disks, Virtual disks, and CDROM). Apparently Plain disks permit joining several Virtual disks (files in the host OS), or Raw disks (actual partitions) into larger logical drives. This looks to be most useful for Virtual disks, which are filesystem limited to 2GB right now (2.2.x kernel not LFS patched). More on this when I've time to experiment. Additionally, if you're interested in the "hobbiest" version of VMware, for only $100, instead of the commercial price of $300, then December 4th is the last day. The VMware people are eliminating that price point as a direct sales product, and instead putting it into educational sales channels. I *really* like having VMware around, and can strongly recommend it. A good investment, whether personal OR business. It doesn't take much time spent dual booting to pay off a 100 to 300 dollar tag.

Now into the rest of my day. The car is in for it's last service (we'll be selling it in a couple of weeks), and I've got a chapter AR to work on, and some around the homestead chores to take care of. Seems there's enough to fill my day, as usual. Take care, maybe back later.

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Well, hello. Yesterday, everything that had to get done got done. A few chores remain, and may do so until next weekend. We have two chapters left for AR, neither of which appear to be forthcoming from our editors at the moment ::sigh:: -- Marcia started and finished the tree yesterday, I stayed out of the way except for the heavy and tall work, as a good Grinch should. We'll have pictures later, once the living room is cleaned up a bit.

Today we have a bit of a driving adventure in front of us, and then I am going to accompany a neighbor down to Frys to look a components for a new system - he and I are using Bob and Barbara's book as a reference. (yeah, an Amazon link, for those that want that. I've given it as BN and Fatbrain, previously. If you want to kick the Thompsons a little more gelt, then go to the HardwareGuys site, and use the Buy the book link.) Either way, I strongly recommend the book. Once that shopping trip is done, hopefully the last two chapters should be here, and I can dig into them.

Now to get ready for the day. Take care.

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