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Email Brian Bilbrey

Orb Grafitti is sometimes a conversation, sometimes a soapbox. I use Linux most often, and I write about that and related software frequently. I also have a day job working as a dogsbody for a small manufacturing firm here in the SF Bay Area. Also, Tom Syroid and I recently co-authored Caldera OpenLinux Secrets, unfortunately cancelled by the folks at $TINY_MINDS. I'm glad you've come to visit, and always happy to hear from you.

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. I remain reptilian this morning (I am draggin'), mainly due to the scratchy throat that kept me up off and on through half the night. The good news is that I should sleep better tonight, eh? I suppose the real problem is that when bugs like this hit, I give them no quarter, I just keep slogging along, doing the best I can, rather than giving in to them and just resting. I've never been very good at just resting. But then either I don't seem to get well quickly, or the wee beastie comes 'round to bite me again, and again. OTOH, there are a number of people at work in the same straits as I, and they do take the time to rest, so perhaps it's just the nature of this virus, rather than my methods of treatment. Heh.

I've been working all weekend (aside from the social bits, and the whiney ones) on a new website for my brother's business. He works in the fabric and accessories trade, selling primarily to the business market - hotels, chains, upholstery firms and such. The business is called International Design Resource, and his current website is here.

Not his fault at all, but I'm sure you see what I mean. When we talked at the holidays, we decided that I'd take a cut at giving him a punched-up version that was a bit more user-friendly, and had at least one mutable area that made sense to update on a regular basis to show off the products that he hawks. The pilot of the new site is here. I'd be pleased if you'd beat on it a bit, have a look around, and give me your feedback.

Pete and I spoke on the phone a couple of times yesterday as he looked at the work in progress - generally he seems pleased with the direction I've taken. There are still holes and broken bits, and parts that aren't in place yet. The forms (except one) work, but they send data to me, rather than him (testing, you see). After submitting a form, the Thank You page still needs redirector code put in it - right now you need to click out of it. Finally, the RFQ form for bedspread fabrication is nothing but a shell from one of the other forms, with incorrect format. That's a complex form, and is going to take me a day or two to set up right.

Now my time's up, and we need to hit the road. Thanks for dropping by, and for reviewing my work for me. I appreciate your time. Later!

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Good morning. I am feeling slightly better this morning, having slept though a considerable portion of the night this time! Yesterday I got some great feedback from a number of people on the new website design for my brother's business, including these:

IDR website feedback
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 10:41:38 -0800
From: "Clark E. Myers"

Everything on a dial-up from home, unedited first impressions, don't take
anything very seriously.

People just might look for professionalism in the source so it pays to spell
check it - you might do a custom dictionary with common tags and terms so
you can spell check without flagging everything; e.g. simple typos do show
up "scripts functions alow you do execute a "single rollover""

You do include alt tags on the images. You may well have run everything past
Bobby (I always do) and Bobby shows no significant issues except in my view
time to load.

URL                                              Size  Time (secs)

http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/ 10.69 K 2.97

http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/banner2.jpg 33.10 K 9.19
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/finder_main.png 14.91 K 4.14
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/finder_cont_off.png 16.43 K 4.56
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/finder_res_off.png 15.36 K 4.27
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/finder_hosp_off.png 15.54 K 4.32
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/gfi_quote_off.png 14.87 K 4.13
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/fabric_lines_off.png 16.00 K 4.44
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/prod_lines_off.png 15.13 K 4.20
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/contact_off.png 16.27 K 4.52
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/asid2.gif 1.52 K 0.42
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/images/ff_010224.jpg 46.43 K 12.90

Total
 216.26 K  60.07

HTTP Request Delays
 --
 6.00

Total + Delays
 --
 66.07

For this page I would slice the fabric image as it was slow loading and
without an image size for the browser to create a place holder (IE5.5) the
page realigned (polite for jumped around) as the image finally loaded. Much
the same in Netscape 4.7 as elements loaded but it did show the placeholder
for the banner. The fabric image did come in in stages in Netscape 6.

I don't like scrolling quite so much as this site requires to see everything
and losing the navigation aids on the sidebar - once you have decided to use
frames perhaps keeping the navigation aids on screen as the main content
area scrolls or repeating the navigation aids with some variation to
emphasize associated links from the main content frame on the right and
navigation aids on the left? Or more internal links to jump around the page
and the site?

Absolutely vital to have scroll bars on the forms as you do, people will set
fonts largest on IE 5X and create real problems there.

Good to have a format for date needed, have you considered separating day,
month and year with pulldowns or picklists so people can stay on the mouse
rather than move from picklists to keyboard and back?

If you are going to invite scanned fabric images you might tell people how
big a file you really want or can conveniently handle - I can imagine
someone doing an 8-1/2X11 32 bit color scan because it is convenient or
default - great if you are set up to handle it.

Clark
[email protected]

IDR website feedback
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 21:11:59 -0500
From: Greg Lincoln 
To: [email protected]

Here are the bugs I've noticed. Browser=Konqueror (KDE 2.1cvs)

1.  The file http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/hospitality.html,
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/contract.html,
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/bedspreadform.html, and
http://www.orbdesigns.com/bpages/testsites/residential.html
have broken links for the fabric lines and other products links. (they should 
point to index.html)

2. The forms on Residential and Hospitality quotes are broken. (Formmail.pl 
not found)

3. The bedding quote link in the nav bar points to the hospitality quote 
page. The Link at the bottom works.

4. It still sends the message if I leave all the fields empty. =) 
(residential form)

Overall very professional and well designed. 

Best wishes,
-- 
Greg Lincoln
Mazin Software
http://www.mazin.net

There was a lot of additional feedback, from Dan, Bob, Jan and others as well. Thank you all!

I incorporated many of the suggested changes to the new IDR site prototype, although I will continue to avoid frames as an incarnation of Satan. I unified the background, and changed the color a bit, made three required fields from each form, and so on. The Bed Spread form awaits my attention, but overall, it's close to "in shape". Not bad for a freebie. If you take the time to look, and want to let me know where I screwed up, please feel free.

Now to hit the road, jack! Take care of each other and have an interesting day.

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Briefly, since I am running late...

Good morning. I think the new website for my brother's biz is finally about done. There are undoubtedly some tweaks yet, and I put a feature or two into bedspreadform.html to provide hints as to length... If you looked at the site before, could you once again, please? I think I fixed just about everything that I was told about from round one. Today I am going to print everything, and do a consistency check, then tonight scroll through the form code one more time, looking for overlapping text field names.

Next, there's a memory leak someplace... I'm running KDE 2.1 Beta 1 and XFree 4.0.1here on Grinch, and X is currently up to 90 Meg in footprint. That's compared with less than 20M on Gryphon (who's running Beta 2 KDE and XFree 3.3.6) I need to find a way to do some apples to apples testing...

Anyone else getting through to the Setiathome people? They've been down for me for over 24 hours. Mmmm. Have a lovely day, catch you later.

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From: "Luis Ramos" 
To: [email protected]
Subject: hello guy!
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 10:32:52 +0100
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
 
I need your help!
 
I have an script that has "su" and "kill" in it (Solaris -UNIX).
 
I trying to find a way to execute the script as a user with limited access,
but somehow with root privileges to be able to perform
the "su" and "kills".
 
How do I do this?
 
thanks

Hi, Luis -
 
Type man chmod, look for the +s info to learn about setuid, where the
program runs as the user that owns the program, rather than the
executing user...
 
Better, look into a program called sudo - I have it on my
linux boxen, but I don't know that you have it under Solaris. Allows
normal users to run specified programs as root, said programs fully
specified in a file called sudoers in /etc. If your name and the
name of the program or script ain't in the file, you don't get to
run it. Very much more secure than a setuid script.
 
With either of these, you may not need to have an "su" command inside
your script. Hey, send me a copy of your script. The charge for help
is that I get to understand what you're doing, rather than just be
an unpaid flunky! <g>
 
regards, .b

And thus my day often starts. When I know the answer, it's easy, when I don't... it's still easy, because I say so, and move on <g>. Good morning. Welcome to Thursday. I've pretty well finished the work on my brother's site. Tonight I'll package it up (fixing the links up for his location in the process) and burn it to a disk for backup, then zip it up and send it to him. He can give the package to his web guy for installation. Wheeeooo.

Last night, I spent some more time with Progeny Debian. This is going to be the ease of use packaged version of Debian. I have been on the "official" Beta Testers list for this new distribution, and have tried all three betas so far....

Whoops! Gotta run. I'll be back in half an hour. I have a late starting morning, with a pickup of sheet metal here in the South Bay. But I needs must drop Marcia at work. See you in a few...

08:45 - Hi. Sorry about that, doing a little research on Progeny on the laptop, and checking over the at-work email scene... as I was saying, I've tried all three betas so far, and have been able to do ultimately successful installs on Grinch. The installer is awfully pretty, and relatively efficient at asking the pertinent questions, and just doing the job in the interim.

I have been thoroughly unable to install Progeny on Gryphon the Acer Travelmate. There's an initial installation routine to put up a minimal system on the hard drive, and that's GUI-ized. Unfortunately, it doesn't register on my display, except as the occasional flash of color as I switch between VC and DISPLAY=:0. Mmmm. I've asked the question in a couple of different ways, but gotten no answer yet - how can I do an initial textmode install, when the fancy installer fails. I probably just need to pass a parameter or two to the init process, but I don't know the syntax.

Ah, well. A little more exploration, and my day needs to get underway with a vengeance. So y'all take care, I'll see you later!

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Hello. Welcome to Friday. It's raining, apparently all through California. Lovely. ::sigh:: Anyway, we're off later today to another rainy bit of the state, so we can stay inside at somebody else's place, and watch doom and gloom from there. Oh, and on the weather front, there's still smallish patches of snow on Mount Hamilton (the nearest local high peak around here)... global warming, my a**!

Oh, on the truck front, it appears, after much effort, that the engine is toast, after all (as the first estimate from another location said. The warrantee company has authorized replacement, with a used (rebuilt???) engine with fewer miles on it than ours. Of course now they have to find the engine, get the expense authorized, get the engine, then take their sweet time installing the sucker. It's been three weeks now, and really, they haven't accomplished much of anything except paperwork.

Agenda VR3 tricks, part three: I connected up via serial port, Gryphon to Galileo. Then, on the VR3, I entered 'export DISPLAY=10.1.1.2:0' (Gryphon is IP 10.1.1.2 on the serial link, running X on display :0). At Gryphon, I typed 'xhost 10.1.1.3' to give Galileo entry. Then from the telnet session, I typed 'contacts' and voila! Up popped a window containing the Agenda contacts manager, on my laptop screen. Heh. Nope, I didn't come up with this - it's on several lists of things you can do with the agenda, and I wasn't in the mood for anything particularly challenging last night - I packaged my brother's website and sent it off, did my first of month systems maintenance, and sundry other things.

Anyway, Marcia's ready to roll, so I suppose it's time to hit the road. Have a lovely day.

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Nothing here - we were in San Diego...

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Late enough??? Yeah, I thought so. We stood at the baggage carousel for a good 75 or 90 minutes waiting for the stinking luggage, after the flight hit the ground 15 minutes early. Feh. Mechanical problems turned us back to San Jose on Friday's flight out, making a 10 hour trip to San Diego by air, that day. I'm not too pleased with American at the moment, but that'll ease with time, perhaps...

Anyway, I'm tired, there's better than 200 emails since Friday noon - light for 2.5 days, but it was the weekend. We had a nice time. More tomorrow, as time permits. Take care!

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

All Content Copyright © 1999-2001 Brian P. Bilbrey.