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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.

Merry Christmas (or whatever)...

Good Morning. You'd think that if there was one morning a year that I could wake up with Hollywood hair, that is, perfectly coiffed starting out of the gate, this would be the day. But noooooo. Bed-head again. Hair to frighten children, pets and small household appliances with. Hmmm.

Apparently Marcia likes her gifts: some fuzzy slippers, a ceramic art thingy, and a couple of sparklies. I am going to enjoy working with the new Wacom Intuos tablet (pictured at left), once I get it working again. I had it working for 15 minutes last night, then I upgraded KDE, which killed the tablet functionality. Why, oh why do I insist on fixing things after they work right... Oh, yeah, that's my job. <g>!!! Now I can start to actually learn some stuff using the Gimp (which has a new 1.2 release just out). Time for a copy of Grokking the Gimp of my very own.

We're off to join the rest of the family shortly, so I'll be brief. Stay safe, be happy, enjoy yourselves. And Bob... better luck next year.

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Good morning. Since according to the Policy Handbook, today is a paid holiday, it is clearly a good day to head into work. There won't be anyone there (except perhaps Jack) to bother me while I do some major systems reconfiguration and upgrades. For the applications server MickJagger (running SQLbase), I am going to get a new mobo, processor and RAM. It's running on the original PII-Pro. The other alternative is to move the drives to the newer server (JerryHall). This is a reasonable choice, because JerryHall is simply in use as a VERY low requirements file server. By the end of the day, the file server is going to be Linux and Samba powered. I'll be going with Debian on this one.

Yesterday, a fun time was had by all. We were in Orinda with my folks, my aunt, uncle, grandmother, sister and her family. Good time, lots of reality checks in playing with nephew Robbie, who has progressed from a teetering stance to full-on running about. His parents look ... tired <g>! We ate ham and au gratin and salad and spare grass and apple pie and cheese cake and all sorts of other goodies. Oh, and niece Alex still really likes presents, especially when they're for her.

We'll see how the day goes - I have a few pictures to post, but don't have them ready just yet, as well as a couple of snaps of the big present that Marcia and I received... Hmmm, more on that later. Tonight we're supping with Marcia's sister Nancy, who's out here from Maine. Don't know when or if I'll be back here later today, but should be a little more ... talkative tomorrow. Today I'm still digesting <WAG>.

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Good morning... but it's not an Edsel (see the ALT tags). It ha2s finally begun to come out of puberty, at age 17, and so it left home and came to live with us for Christmas. Thanks to Mom & Dad. Definitely way solstice booty, dontcha think? It took Marcia all of three seconds to get over owning a non-Chevy. It's a 1984 190D, with 128K under it's belt. Still a youngster in Benz terms. Kinda tingly, if you ask me.

Also worked on getting the Wacom tablet up and running last night - I definitely broke too many things in my recent upgrade spree. More on this in a moment... OK. It appears (to the best of my currently feeble understanding) that KDM is the culprit here. I am back to a stock Mandrake 7.2 install. Impressively, the required stanzas in XF86Config-4 (the ASCII configuration file for the XFree server) included the Wacom. It auto-detected and installed. However... it did not work. I reconfigured to use GDM instead of KDM, and all was well. I'll try XDM later today to be sure.

Oh. Sorry. The xDM programs are display manager programs. They are invoked when Linux boots directly into GUI mode (runlevel 5). Their minimal function is to provide the login box, mediate interaction with the password check and login process, then start the window manager of choice. That's pretty much all that the original XDM does, and for many people, that's quite enough. KDM and GDM (from the KDE and Gnome camps, respectively) add assorted other features, like dynamic WM selection, startup and shutdown choices, and (in the case of KDM) GUI user selection. Really, a bit over the top. If you want to run any environment you choose, you can do so using any of these Display Managers. Each configures differently, though. I like GDM rather.

Back later with more to resolve - I am still having problems with SSH, but one thing at a time. TTFN.

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Morning. I am trying out a new HTML editing tool called Quanta Plus Web Development Environment. It is packaged with the MDK 7.2 release, as well as being part of the KDE pantheon of applications. It plays better with the other KDE programs (surprise, surprise), and has some nice features. Right now I am simply using it as a typing tool. However, I plan on looking further into its capabilities. Mmmm. XHTML, anyone?

On the OpenSSH front, it turns out that my difficulty in using the packaged version from Mandrake is that it is compiled to natively make use of TCPwrappers as a security feature. TCPwrappers permits you to specify host names or (preferably) IP addresses, which are allowed to have service. Because I have Grendel pre-configured to allow most services on the inside net (for those few servers I have running), the OpenSSH worked out of the box for me. But when I tried to connect from work... nothing. Fortunately, there was an error code: "ssh_exchange_identification". Searching Google on that lead me, after a few false starts, to an archived mailing list message stating that most pre-compiled OpenSSH packages are built with TCPwrappers. AHA, says I, and it works like a champ now.

At the salt mine, I've successfully migrated the applications server bits to the new machine, where they run much more quickly, thank you. Then the old server, actually a Pentium Pro 180, with 128M, is now running Mandrake 7.2 in minimalist mode, and serving up Windows shares with Samba 2.0.7. Easy configuration. Today I complete the backup scheme, probably including pulling data directly from the client machines, much easier to script from a Linux server. I'll just create administrative shares on each client, then nightly rsync (thanks, Tom) to the server. Then I'll back the whole schemiel up to tape, 4G Travan, up to 8G compressed, which should be way more than enough.

Guess I'd better hit the road. Have a lovely day. After a hard couple of hours at work, I am going to make a Costco run, then go to the DMV and legitimize the Benz.

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Welcome to Friday and good morning. As we rapidly approach the beginning of the next millenium, I am unreflective and apathetic ... not really, but I think it makes a nice change from all the publications that are looking with green envy at the past and sick anticipation toward the future. People, civilizations and species come and go, life goes on. Hari Seldon understood this, as did Chuck Darwin.

In other events, it turns out that to transfer title on the Benz, I have to get it smogged. So I'll do that today, and head into the DMV next week. I'll make an appointment, though - the standing lines for walk-in service at DMV yesterday were ... astonishingly long.

Funny, I have a lot on my mind, and many irons in the fire, but not much to say. Linux is just plain working for me right about now, nothing broken, nothing to make work. I played a bit more with the tablet yesterday, works like a champ. No, I'll never be Picasso, or even <shudder> Warhol (thank goodness) </shudder>, but it should make some of my tasks easier, or the output quality better. Something about the right tool for the job.

Good News: Killed our PBI DSL line yesterday. This is why I changed. It took me 25 minutes of crawling through the PBI/SBC voice mail maze before I got to a live person. It dumped me out to dial tone THREE times. Feh. Glad to be shut of them.

Oh, that's right, I knew I was forgetting something - Marcia posted pictures of Christmas Day ... OK, mostly my niece and nephew, but they're cute...

Now to work with me. I guess this weekend we make both cars shiny, and properly put the Cavalier up for sale. Plus there are a couple of other cleaning chores to be done. Then we're finally meeting up with Marcia's sister for brunch on Sunday. New Year's eve will be spent quietly at home, away from the morons on the road who shouldn't be driving.

16:45 - I'm baaaaack. Or is that, "Oh, my aching baaaaack!" Probably the latter, as I've finished cleaning up the Cavalier for sale. Pictures and promotional page now online here. If you're local-ish, and interested in the car, then definitely click on that link.

Yeah, it cleans up nice, doesn't it? But I'd forgotten how ... painful a good Thompson-izing of a car can be. Of course, it'll rain overnight, then 4,500 birds will crap on it, then someone will back into the tree, toppling it onto the car, leaving... the hood ornament. Oh, no hood ornament. Sigh.

There really isn't anything else to report at the moment - the car sucked up my late morning and the whole afternoon. Getting up and moving about tomorrow should be a real joy, eh? I suppose that I'll post links to the Cav page in a few crucial places, then chill for the rest of the evening. Mañana

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I know. Thanks for waiting for me, there was another chore taking up my energies. I figured that if I was willing to shine up the car we're getting rid of, then it's only fair to wash and wax the 190D, too, and RainX on the glass as a finisher. While I did that, Marcia dismantled Christmas around here - it's all back in boxes, locked up in the garage against next year's need.

They say (the mysterious omnipresent they) that Open Source development happens because someone is scratching a personal itch. My itch is a machine that washes and waxes the cars while inflicting absolutely no stress on my back. Whee-hoo. It's better than yesterday, though. Restretching and working it a second day in a row, I can hold out hope that it won't lock up on me very badly.

More later if I feel the urge, but right now... I'm shrubbed.

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Good Evening... welcome to the end of the millenium. I took the opportunity to sleep in a bit, then watch the DSL lights go from sync to no-sync to sync... you get the idea. I am really bamboozled - If we're too far away from the CO, or there's too much resistance on the line, then we shouldn't be able to reliably sync. That I can understand. If those factors don't apply, then we should be flawlessly connected full time. My question is, "Why are we flawlessly connected for two straight weeks, then have 15 hours of DSL diarrhea???"

Are we too far from the CO, intermittently? I don't think so! And if there's a line quality problem, why is it not a problem, most of the time, with no discernable association to weather, day, night or usage pattern cycles??? Arghhhh. I do have an idea or two to try out tomorrow, so I'll do so. If the line's dead tomorrow, try again two minutes later - it'll all be network routing, rather than machines being down. Should be reasonably fast transitions - I am going to add a Linksys BEFSR11 Cable/DSL Router into the mix, and put the Speedstream DSL Modem at the phone line POE for the apartment. Then Marcia can go straight into that, and I'll send a link back to my office and the 10/100 Switch. Mmmm. That's only about 30 feet less of wire, but a connection count reduction of perhaps 4 or 5 - might help on the resistance end of things.

Well, I finally met my sister-in-law Nancy. It was touch and go there for a while, since she was ill earlier in the week, but we managed lunch with her and her friend and former co-worker from here, Carla. Nancy actually lives in Maine, and in our trips back east and her's out here, we've never managed to hook up previously. A pleasant time was had by all. Then we tanked up the Benz and did a little shopping, finally back here.

Since then, I've been doing some artwork for a friend, as a good reason to start learning how to use the tablet effectively. Mmmmm. Got a ways to go, but it's definitely easier to control certain operations like smudge and erase with a pen. The flow is different, though. It'll take some getting used to.

Here's an interesting excerpt from December 2000's Netcraft survey (found at http://www.netcraft.com/survey/):

Linux distribution trial of force

Competition between the Linux distributions has been particularly fierce since the release of Red Hat 7.0, which has provoked a great deal of controversy, initially because the C compiler produces binaries incompatible with other Linux distributions. The argument has escalated to a point well beyond a difference of opinion over the technicalities, with part of the Linux community suggesting that Red Hat is using its leading position in the market to marginalise the other distributions, while Linus Torvalds called Red Hat 7.0 "idiotic", "broken", and "unusable as a development platform".

It poses the question whether the Red Hat brand and market position is strong enough to withstand this kind of assault.

On a crude count of Linux Apache sites found by Netcraft where the Apache signature has been branded by the Linux distribution company, Red Hat currently has 69%. SUSE and Debian are the closest challengers with 9% and 8% respectively on a worldwide basis, though SUSE is the leading distribution in German speaking countries. Critically, Red Hat is established as the standard install at most well known dedicated server companies and Linux hardware vendors, is the base distribution used by Cobalt, and has the best established retail channels in English speaking countries. If there is to be an impact on Red Hat's share of the Web, it may be the case that the volunteer Debian distribution is the most likely to gain in popularity and credibility, rather than the other commercial distributions.

There's a fair bit of smoke, but the flames aren't as high as all that. Clearly, Red Hat annoyed a few significant people by shipping the GCC 2.96 compiler, patched out of the CVS version, and including the older version (egcs / gcc 2.95) specifically for compiling the Linux kernel. More on this next year. Dinner's headed to the table, and I think that I will, too.

Be safe this evening, please. I want to see you around here tomorrow.

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