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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 and Happy Monday. Much fun and craziness. I am thinking this will be a full gonzo, fear and loathing in SillyPutty Valley kind of day. Thanks, Hunter! First order of business: recognition of the marvelous stuff that Marcia did with her holiday spirit. We've a lovely dining table setup (linked to at the left), and the Tree of Death, WHACK! errr, Christmas tree decked out with ornaments from our travels, and many that Marcia has made this year, and in holiday seasons past. Grinch-like behaviour on my part aside, it really, really is lovely - much nicer than the picture shows.

Watched part 1 of 3 last night. Huh? Oh, the new Dune mini-series, on the SciFi Channel. There are bits that have me scratching my head a bit, and others are right on. They've left out elements that were in the movie version, and put in elements that were in the book, and not the movie. The funny thing is that most of the characters seem to talk in this vaguely germanic/midde Euro accented English. Hmmm. Overall, I think they're following the book a bit better than the movie (easy with a three night thing, even with commercials). But I think the choice of actors in the original movie was so good overall, that these players, even William Hurt as Duke Leto, really don't cut it. Oh, well. I'll watch the rest, if I can. It is better than you average commercial programming, to my tastes anyway.

Got in the last two chapters for AR last night. I'd take today off from the salt mines to finish them out, but Jack and Trudy are out of town on business, so I'd best be in to work. I've sent myself the documents there, and I'll finish them there, and send them on. Should only take about an hour or a bit more apiece, because these aren't copy-edited, just Kurt, our TE, and Valerie, the PE, have had their claws in this one <grin>. Oh, well, best get to it. Have a lovely day. Hope to report later that we're really, truly done with the book. Later.

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Good Morning. I am done. And I do mean done. (I think Tom is, too, for this book, at least.) Done answering questions from editors who should have read the sentence immediately preceding their comment. Done working for a publisher who changes personnel the way I change underwear. Done working like a dog for sub-minimum wage. I really should have gone to work for Jack In The Box or another burger joynt - we'd have more to show for it in the bank now, much better than twice as much. And that isn't even the real issue, since I worked an average 6 hours a day, 7 days a week for nearly 9 months, on top of my normal day job.

Whaddaya mean, what about royalties? I have no idea, but Linux books are like dust in the wind. I happen to think we've written a pretty good one, but the halflife sucks. Most of the information therein should be valid at least halfway through next year.

Tonight when I get home I am collecting all of the assorted documents, email folders and everything else associated with this project. I am going to compress as necessary, make an ISO filesystem of it, then burn it to three CDR discs. One I'll mail to Tom for posterity, one goes into the safebox, and one in the stash here. I am not working on it anymore. If they send me another chapter with a request to review for comments, I'll return it unopened with the note, "Revisions accepted." Enough.

I have a crashing headache this morning, and I feel particularly bitter about the whole process - I guess that shows, huh? Not to mention that I was trying to do four final submissions yesterday. PBI's critical need detector kicked in on all four cylinders. I couldn't get more than 30 seconds of uptime on the DSL line all day. I really, really, really want an SDSL line, conditioned for data. But without knowing that we'll be in this apartment for more than another 6 months, I am loathe (?) to go to all that effort, only to abandon it if we do manage to buy a house next year. Sigh.

My problem with this whole thing is that I might even be halfway good at this writing gig. But the treatment by all of the personnel associate with the publisher in combination with the absolutely terrible payrate versus intellectual and temporal investment makes this a seriously losing proposition. Regarding the first bit, I can hear Bob say "I told you so." And indeed, he did, on more than one occasion, but I had to stick my foot in the water someplace - wouldn't have been so bad, except for the piranhas...

********

In other news, nephew Matt, hope you feel better soon. John Dominik, congratulations on the new job. Kaycee, Merry Christmas, look for a card from us in the mail, we're pulling for you.

Now I am off to work. Sorry about all this, I am sure I'll be in a better mood about it later, say when I am eighty or so. TTFN

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Mailer problems, but not at this end, yet! Marcia's mail for her DutchGirl site comes into this box, then forwards out to her PBI account. During the day she fetches that mail via Yahoo, since she can't directly receive it at work (a corporate firewall policy, methinks). At night she gets it all again, and sorts it into various folders. Yesterday I happened to be watching the mail log for a while, trying to determine something which now eludes me entirely. But I noticed that Marcia's mail was hitting smtp-relay.swbell.net, and getting a deferred status, because that server was refusing connections. Not sure what to do. This morning, I've seen a message go through to her, relayed by mta2.snfc21.pbi.net, and another one refused by the SBC server. I simply don't understand. I may need to bring a POP server up on this box just because. Hmmm. I don't think I wanted to do that. We'll see.

Ya, thanks for asking. I am in a slightly better space this morning, just. Trudy returned from her part of the business trip yesterday, and I joked with her that the emotional fallout of finishing a book might be the closest that a male comes to post-partum depression. Heh. Anyway. I still feel rather empty. We'll see! Marcia asked me what I'd do if Studio B called and said they had an ORA book... I don't know. I'd probably work for O'Reilly, but I think I'll wait until after the holidays to talk to Dave Rogelberg over at Studio B and see what he thinks.

KDE 2.0.1 came out yesterday - mostly translation additions, and a few crucial bug fixes. I've upgraded the Mandrake 7.2 installation on Gryphon the Acer Travelmate, and I'll report on it later. My first impression: annoyance that it hosed the Panel program shortcuts that came from the initial Mandrake setup. Of course, that's not too surprising, since while these RPMS are "for" the MDK 7.2 release, they aren't "from" Mandrake. One interesting feature that I've run across is that when you hover over a panel mini-icon, instead of a simple subtle change of shading, the icon actually grows to it's full-sized desktop icon cousin, rather like a soldier stepping forward out of line, volunteering for duty. Pictures later, check out the KDE site for details now.

Now off with me. See you later. PS: Yes, we're really done. Tom finished the last part of the unexpectedly painful fill-in-the-blanks Appendix that we left until last, and we put it in the kitty as a final, yesterday afternoon. If they send *anything* back, requesting review, I'll just hit reply, and respond "Revisions Accepted, sight unseen." Really gotta run now, though. Have a lovely day.

17:45 - Pre-meeting update. Yup. With more free time than I can shake a stick at, and a seemingly bottomless pit of not knowing what the heck to do next, I am off to the December SVLUG meeting momentarily. I've only made two meetings since Tom and I started writing. This month we're graced with Fred Finster of NEC and Mike McDonald, on the topic of porting the Linux kernel to an embedded system. Not much more detail is found at the SVLUG website.

The image up and left is of the current KDE 2.0.1 desktop I have running on Gryphon, the Acer Travelmate. There are a few under-the-hood changes. The Javascript parts work right, and I can now participate on the message boards that Bob Thompson runs over at Greg Lincoln's site. Previously, I kept getting accused of hacking the website, but I knew it was the browser, because Netscrape, Internet Exploder and Galeon all worked fine for me. Now Konqueror works fine, too. One other little cute feature (as noted previously) - scroll to the bottom rightleft of the linked screenshot to see the new Panel icon highlighting scheme - when the pointer is hovering over each icon, that image expands in size, rather than just a subtle alpha color shift. In this case it's the KMail "E" that's outsized. The pointer isn't visible in this screenshot. The desktop wallpaper is culled from the recent snaps taken by the Cassini probe as it swings by Jupiter for a gravity assist on its way to Saturn. (I first happened across that link on a pass through Slashdot).

Now off to the meeting with me. Have a nice evening. Later.

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Howdy. Yeah, it's the downslope of the week, and I am rather grateful. We have more (bah humbug) holiday stuff to deal with tonight - it's time to write cards ... I said something like, "Can't we just mail-merge some notes in a nice script font, and print to and from address labels???" The answer to that question is not just guessable, but small household appliances which may be found in Outer Mongolia have guessed the answer correctly. Right, Marcel Marceau's one word from Silent Movie: "NO!" So hand-written and hand-addressed cards are the order of the day, and you should see my handwriting... you won't, of course, since it's so bad that nothing will get delivered as intended, but there we are, I will have tried to suppress my essential Grinch nature in the interests of domestic tranquility.

Interesting SVLUG last night. Prior to the meeting, I met some of the SBAY.ORG guys: Ian, Paul, Ian, and Sean. You may remember I've volunteered to work with this organization to watch over the newsgroup sbay.linux, which has such traffic, such traffic - my intro message remains the only non-spam in the last couple of weeks. We're going to be working on building that newsgroup as a local resource for area Linux users.

Don Marti announced that he was glad to welcome us to the meeting, "Secrets of the Tetris Masters", then we got into the presentations. First there were a couple of show-and-tell bits about the NEC (MIPS Architecture) VR4122 (?) reference design board, and some of the hand'held devices which have been recently build using MIPS chips, including the new Agenda. What's special? These devices are running Linux and X. <g> The bulk of the meeting was given over to Mike McDonald, who was the only one to USE Linux to make his presentation, and spoke to the effort, planning and pain involved in porting Linux to an embedded platform. Apparently it's really, really hard until you can start getting output.

Off to the salt mines - If you're a Holidaze fanatic, then check out Marcia's Christmas Page. Workwise, Jack is back from TIA a day early, and I have lots of stuff to pile onto his plate. So let me get to it. I'll see y'all later.

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TGIF & Good Morning! Thanks for dropping in. First, I'd really like to apologize for the connectivity around here - While it is certainly a pain in the a** for me, it also isn't fun when y'all come by to see what insanity I've gotten into, only to find the server isn't responding. It's the DSL line that keeps de-syncing on a terribly regular basis, but it appears only during daylight and evening hours, left coast time. Now this tells me, and it tells you, that we've got an equipment problem in the CO. Unfortunately, this isn't what it tells PacBell. I am going to forward them my downtime logs of the last few days, not that it'll do any good.

Then there's the middle term solution and the long term solution. The middle term solution is to get DSL on our main line, from a CLEC (I'll probably go with SpeakEasy.net, provisioned by Covad - more reports as the process continues), then cut over service to the new line and down the old one altogether. Longer term, Marcia and I are working hard to get into a house sometime next year. Once we do, I plan on getting SDSL on a 1.1/1.1 Mbps bandwidth pipe, which'll be nice... of course, there's always that OC-192 ... < GGG >

In the meantime, thanks for your patience and your tolerance. I will keep working on it. Reliable service is my goal.

Topic Change. We have a digital camera, as you know. It's an Olympus D450-Zoom, and overall, we're really happy with it. Of course, the software that comes with the camera is all Windows-based. Under Linux, there is software called gPhoto with works to talk to the camera via the serial port, and download pictures. Of course, the interface is reverse engineered so far as I can tell, as apparently the camera companies aren't hot on the sharing information page. Quite honestly, downloading pictures on a bitty pipe sucks, and isn't nearly as reliable as I'd like - it can take 4 or 5 attempts to get a good download from the camera.

Last summer, I picked up a Fujifilm SM-R2 SmartMedia card reader, USB. I have a similar device from Lexar at work, and it's a dream to be able to pop the memory out of the camera, into the reader, and treat it like a removable disk, simply copy the photo files over to the hard drive. One small problem - as I said, it's USB and all of the software is, duh, Windows-based. Now this wouldn't be a major hink, except I don't have Windows on the Gryphon the Acer Travelmate, which is the machine that makes the most sense for interfacing to this reader. We take lots of pictures while traveling, and it'd be really nice to be able to quickly transfer the images.

USB support on Linux is improving, and I happened to see an announcement from Linus that 2.4-test12-pre7 was out, and along with improving a variety of features commonly used in laptops, an "embarrassing" USB bug had been located and destroyed. Hmmm. I've already heard about good support in the 2.4 series for USB, but maybe... just maybe. So yesterday I pulled down 2.4-test11, applied the test12-pre7 patch, compiled and installed. HA!!! First good news, it boots. Couple of bits missing - ALSA sound, and the Supermount driver, both of which are incorporated into Mandrake-edition kernels, aren't there, but it boots just fine, thanks very much.

At home, I started mucking about with the SM reader. A couple of problems quickly arose. First, I couldn't get online, so I was unable to look anything up about what I might could try to make the beast work... So I spelunked around in the source tree for a while, reading bits of code and documentation... it appears that the thing loads as an emulated SCSI device, and maybe shouldn't need any dedicated driver. Also, I think I remember reading that it actually stores the data in a FAT-formatted filesystem. Things to try, things to try. The upshot:

2.4.0-test12pre7 running on MDK 7.2, hack-kernel config basis. 
Some cuts in xconfig for unused hardware.

Add the following kernel modules:

modprobe usb-storage
modprobe sg
modprobe sd_mod

Device should now be listed using 'cat /proc/bus/usb/devices'
Run 'cdrecord -scanbus' to confirm the device is recognised SCSI

Cdrecord 1.9 (i586-mandrake-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2000 J�rg Schilling
Linux sg driver version: 3.1.17
Using libscg version 'schily-0.1'
scsibus0:
	0,0,0	  0) 'MATSHITA' 'UJDA310         ' '1.37' Removable CD-ROM
	0,1,0	  1) *
	0,2,0	  2) *
	0,3,0	  3) *
	0,4,0	  4) *
	0,5,0	  5) *
	0,6,0	  6) *
	0,7,0	  7) *
scsibus1:
	1,0,0	100) 'HAGIWARA' 'SmartMedia R/W  ' '2.00' Removable Disk
	1,1,0	101) *
	1,2,0	102) *
	1,3,0	103) *
	1,4,0	104) *
	1,5,0	105) *
	1,6,0	106) *
	1,7,0	107) *


mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash

VOILA!!!

I love it when a plan comes together. That was fun. That done, Marcia and I did our holiday cards, all signed, addressed, stamped and ready to hit the USPS like a badly written brick upside the head (they'll have to figure out my handwriting to deliver these, so don't feel bad - if you don't get one, then it's not my fault, I tried). Yes, of course we included a card for Kaycee.

Now to work with me. Have a lovely day, catch up with you later.

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Good day. Game on!!! The winds of service change are in the air. The saga to date:

For several months now, the Pacbell DSL line has been plagued with occasional and random connection problems. Lately it's gotten worse. A few weeks ago we had a PBI tech come out, after working with SBC and Pacbell DSL phone support to remote diagnose the possible problems. When the "tech" got here, he was unprepared to cope with possible line problems, and didn't have a replacement DSL modem for me should that have been needed. He left without accomplishing anything.

In the last week, the connection has been down more than up. It's not a hard outage - instead it is a random cycle with a period measured in single digit minutes, the DSL modem loses sync with the CO equipment. It'll last for a period of hours, then go away. Personally, I think it's the DSLAM that's hinked. But PBI doesn't have an interest in hearing that. And email...

Additionally PBI's mail servers are the lowest of the low. They suck, at least at the residential service end of their food chain, and when the DSL connectivity is dicey, I lose messages for the Orb Designs and Dutch Girl mail servers. This makes me very angry (click the link for a chuckle - I needed one)

The upshot is that I've signed on with Speakeasy.net as an ISP, with Covad providing the CLEC DSL service. The new line caps out at a 384/1.5 Mbps connection, and may be less depending on a variety of circumstances. Overall, I am hopeful of a better experience than I've had with PBI. I spent half an hour on the phone with Speakeasy about a month ago, discussing options, etc. Yesterday, I just signed up. Everything's online, with a tracking page that lets me see everything, including the email communications between Speakeasy and Covad. Theoretically, within 25 days, the new line is supposed to be up and running. I don't have an install date yet - I expect to get that by Wednesday.

I am going to reconfigure the AWN to feed both DSL lines in a parallel configuration, then update the nameservers up at Register.com (they provide DNS as a feature of their service). Then I'll let both lines serve as the changes propogate. After about a week, I'll reconfigure again, take the PBI DSL line down, and discontinue that service. Right now, I figure that'll be done (pending unforeseen changes) on or about 15 January 2001. Woo Hoo! More reports as progress is made.

EMAIL ADDRESS UPDATE INFORMATION: If you have me in any address books under [email protected], please change it. The current official address is [email protected], and I get mail that way quickest (barring connectivity problems, sigh). The official backup email address is now [email protected]. And yes, that's already live, along with SpeakEasy dialup access, in advance of the DSL installation. Very nice, very handy. Now to set up Marcia with her backup address.

Back later. Have a great day!

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Morning. Afternoon!!! So far today, I've been fighting with a mobile nest of common ants, fighting with assorted drawing tools for use under Linux, and fighting with a 'whelming desire to go back to sleep. In the first case, I think a combination of recent weather and some spraying by the groundskeepers have conspired to drive the ants inwards, and up. They appear to have taken up residence in the wall between the kitchen and bathroom, and are using the assorted fixture housings in the tub as their front porch, as it were. At first I held out hope that it was just a few roving scouts, and used spray bleach to knock out the ants and their trails, but if the nest is ensconced in the wall, then little I can do will help. I'll have to let the landlord call in the professionals (no, Chris, no boilers, walls or ceiling work, thanks very much).

Next, as previously noted, I'll be reconfiguring the AWN (Apartment Wide Network) to accommodate the two static IP addresses that come with the Speakeasy/Covad DSL setup I've ordered. Grendel is going to sit on one IP all by his lonesome, and the balance of the network is going to be hooked up through a DSL router/Gateway, and protected in that fashion.

That needs a drawing (thanks for the inspiration, Tom) While I've never worked with Visio, I have used a rather wide variety of CAD tools in my day, AutoCAD from v0.91 on up, TurboCAD, various and sundry others, including PCB design tools, each and every one with a distinct (and sometimes polar opposite) User Interface. So while it's possible that the UI is what's holding me back from being more effective with the Linux tools I've tried so far, it's not likely. I think there are critical features missing. Sounds like a coding opportunity, don't you think? Heh, yeah, but right now I want to draw a diagram, not re-write the drawing program. I've done one, you can see it at the left. This was executed using Dia, a tool that is a gtk+ based package. It works, and it prints OK, too. But the export features leave a little to be desired - for graphics, there's only a low dot-pitch PNG output. I might try something else to publish it, like using EPS as an intermediate format, then scaling it up using the Gimp. Nope. That didn't help much.Other problems I have with Dia: it doesn't use the fonts that are available to most of the programs, and I can't do rotated text. I like rotated text in diagrams. Much more efficient use of space in some areas.

Anyway, another try, using KIllustrator. I have different problems there. The ultimate goal for KIllustrator is to be competitive with Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. This is an ambitious undertaking, and I am having difficulty finding some of the features that I know must be there. I can't create a closed Bezier form, then fill it. And I really want to be able to (like in a CAD program) be able to cut one object using another object as a cutting plane. Some of that may be done by using union or intersection tools, but I haven't found those yet (if they're implemented). So what starts as a desire to do a little network drawing has grown into a quest for a drawing package I am comfortable using. We'll see.

Nothing else new - I've reported the ants, learned a few things about drawing in Linux, and appear to be remaining awake. Altogether not a wasted day so far. Oh, yesterday we watched Mission Impossible II, Red Dwarf Smeg Outs (the blooper reel), and Chicken Run. Nine thumbs up (three for each film, not forgetting the gripping hand). Have a great day. Later.

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