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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. Tom Syroid and I have co-authored a Linux Book. It was cancelled by $LARGE_PUBLISHER, so we're posting it online, here and here. Have a looksee! 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 afternoon. Yeah, well, I've been busy. First you may (or may not) recall my frothing at the mouth over setting up font anti-aliasing yesterday. Well, the screenshot at the right is of two distinct Kword windows, one started with the benefit of anti-aliasing (upper left), one without (lower right). By the way, the thumbnail image links to just a small crop out of the center of the shot. For the full-rate, 240K 1280x1024 shot, you can click here.
It makes a major, major difference in the apps. As Greg noted, it makes viewing generally so much nicer that you go hunting for KDE apps to accomplish the task at hand. They've built a nicer set of hammers. Will I compromise functionality for AA fonts? Not yet. Still doing this in Bluefish. Still using X-Chat for IRC, and the Gimp isn't a KDE app either, but then the latter certainly isn't a font-centric application. Mmmm.
Speaking of Major Major (well, I wasn't, but read the first line of the preceding paragraph), I had a flash of Catch-22 yesterday for a variety of reasons. I'd forgotten what a star-studded cast that movie sported. Bob Newhart was Major Major, which cause me to laugh out loud, remembering. I need to pick up a copy of that one. It must be out on DVD, right?
Also, I've been busy with another chapter from the book. That's right, Tom and Brian's Linux Book continues to pop up online, though not as fast as some of you would like, judging by the email... So here's Chapter 14 for your reading pleasure, on GUI Tips, Tricks and Techniques. Yeah, I know, but some of the chapter titles and section headings were bequeathed upon us by over-enthusiastic editors, and it would be a real pain to go through and change all the references, so we won't. The material stands. The next few chapters in line are on the command line, so stay tuned for more updates and less screenshots in the work.
Finally, yes, let's not forget, Brian's looking for a job. If you are in the lower three counties of the SF Bay Area, and you or your employer is hiring for a position that you think I could fill, then drop me a line. After all, you could probably use that referral bonus, eh? I am not out of work, but I am looking HARD, so please, keep me in mind.
Tomorrow's a work day, cut short by a trip to the Sadist's ... Dentist's office. Just the quarterly torture cleaning, though. Shouldn't be anything too extraordinary. I'm going to check IRC, then play a little Quake3, since I got that up and running the other day, too. We had a nice weekend off, but back to the daily grind and the nightly job hunt mañana. Meantime, take care ... TTFN
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Good morning, welcome back to the routine... not so oddly, I don't have much to say this morning. I accomplished a bit with Garcia this weekend, and made baby steps into getting Wine up and running, but only just - It's downloaded from CVS, built and installed. I have a config file to review, and then we'll see how it goes.
We watched Space Cowboys last night. That was a fun flick. If you haven't, then rent it. Just remember, Clint is not a team player! Also, we did some garden work, restructuring a bit of the layout. I'll share that with you along with just a few photos this afternoon.
Speaking of this afternoon, let us not forget that I am going to the Chambre dú Dental Tortures at about 2. I've tried to, but only just. So with that image firmly in your mind, I'll leave you until later today. In the interim, take care!
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Good morning... and what's special about today? It's HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, BABY!
We met via the internet, began the process of getting to know one another vie email, and 3 years ago today (although it seems both like just last week, and 20 years ago), we married. Thanks, Marcia! I love you!
So, to start us off in proper anniversary style, the phone rings at 05:56, it's our neighbor Jan - the Benz has been spotted with a flat tire. Fortunately, Mercedes has a really nice system for putting the car in the air, I didn't even break a sweat (hardly), and still have time for this brief post, which is a pleasant surprise...
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Over the weekend, I ripped out the Peas, since they weren't performing. It is just too hot, and the concrete decking concentrates the late afternoon heat and light. The tomatoes, of course, lap it up, but the Peas were burning up. Ah, well, valiant effort. We'll try them again as a winter crop next year. So I moved the Spider plants over to in between the main herb boxes, and dropped those down about 3 inches on their chains to let them catch more light. We picked up some unknown flowers (second from the left, if you know what they are, write me). I've wrapped this short photo session with a long view of the Tomato hedge, more starter... I think these are climbing cactus something-or-other. That name I can find out today. Lastly, you may remember the early Thyme was decimated by birds stealing for their nest linings. We tried and tried to recuscitate the poor thing, but finally replaced it this weekend.
The temperatures are rising fast, mid 90's here today, 3 figures tomorrow, according to the professional weather liars, so I'd best water those poor guys in case it's true. Y'all have a lovely day and I'll see you later.
Thank you, Marcia my love...
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Good morning. Here in the currently well named Sunnyvale, the temperature peaked outside our apartment at 99 degrees. It was 88 outside and 92 inside when we tried to retire at around 11 last night... today is supposed to be the *really* hot day of this particular spell - it is already 74 out. ::sigh:: I don't do marvelously in high heat. I have a strong preference for climate (what Californians often experience) as opposed to weather (which most of the rest of the world has to suffer through). Mmmm. More on this topic later, unless I melt.
Marcia is a head-in-the-clouds romantic - you can see evidence of this in last night's brief post, which shows off the gorgeous roses she had sent to me at work. I, on the other hand, am a practical romantic. I've been after her to stop digging her bagels out of the toaster with metal objects, 'cause I want to have the pleasure of her company for years to come. Thus the toaster oven, as shown on the right. We've actually decided to declare that one as an anniversary gift from my folks, so just for Marcia, we found this foot therapy tub thingy, something very handy to have about after a hard day shoe shopping... <grin>
Regarding those lovely flowers that we planted, John Vogt and Dan Bowman both have weighed in. Cockscomb is apparently the common name, and we have Celosa Plumosa, or Cellosia as the more official names. John sent me one other formal name, but I apparently lost that email. Mmm. 'nuff to work with for the time being - Thanks, folks!
Finally for the moment... I don't know. My train of thought just derailed someplace south of Deluth. That makes two ::sigh:: moments in 10 minutes. I guess I could put it down to the sporadic sleep I get when the weather's hot, but either way... I stopped and thought for a moment, but nothing. So instead I'll warn you to steer clear of the virus making the rounds, associating with an email about Snow White, the .scr attachment is the beast in question - this one's dropped into my mailbox twice in the last week. Be careful out there, people.
Now to water the garden and hit the road. Have a lovely day, see you later.
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Howdy. One good thing about four day work-weeks. I know, it's blindingly obvious, but Friday arrives sooner, and it's easy to lose sight of that fact while caught up in the middle of a crisis in a firestorm. This has been a challenging week, I think I'll leave it at that. I still do like Fridays rather a lot, though.
Let's review a problem fix first, then look at some stunning numbers. Each month, at the beginning of the month, my webstats would go flat. Nothing. Blank. Oh, I knew why, the httpd daemon was writing to the old log file. This correctly generates the assumption in your mind that I rotate weblogs monthly. Yup. So to make things work, on the first day of the month, I would manually stop httpd, modify the webstat collection scripts to look at the rotated log, run the stats (to bring me into the new month), modify the collection scripts back, and restart everything. Then it would all work until the beginning of the next month.
Now this seems silly. It is silly. But it wasn't a daily task, so I never quite got around to fixing things. I looked at the /etc/init.d/httpd script, which is used to start and stop the service (and edited out the bit that was starting httpd-perl), but saw no other problems. I looked at the log rotation script, found at /etc/logrotate.d/apache, and it was correctly calling the aforementioned httpd script to stop and start httpd at the correct times during log rotation. I guess I just figured I would have to live with it. I wasn't getting up at 4 am to watch the log rotation happen. Period.
Last night, I thought, what the heck, and I added an explicit death for the httpd daemon in the pre-rotate script in /etc/logrotate.d/apache ... it worked. All logs logging fine. No data lost or misplaced. Everything works. So, this solution applies to Mandrake 7.2, serving Apache. There is a problem somewhere that prevents httpd from correctly logging after rotation. The ugly hack I used is in the following listing of /etc/logrotate.d/apache - the bold line is my addition.
/var/log/httpd/*log {
monthly
missingok
nocompress
prerotate
/etc/init.d/httpd stop
killall -9 httpd
endscript
postrotate
/etc/init.d/httpd start
endscript
}
Now, that's ugly, because if anyone happens to be retrieving a page then, the system doesn't kill the daemon gracefully, it kills it with malice aforethought, immediately, totally. Now I know there are other methods, but I wanted to be sure. Now I can change the log rotation to weekly and bump up the log count (keep 2 months or 9 weeks worth of logs - right now I have 4 months history, that's way more than I need). Then I can experiment with killing httpd gracefully, and watch the results in the log files. I'd guess that there's really a problem in the /etc/init.d/httpd script that I missed when I've looked at it before. I'll try to track it down.
Now for the cool numbers... Thanks to your continued patronage, page reads for the month of May were up to nearly 24K, the hit count nearly 137K and over 1 Gig of data moved for OrbDesigns.com alone, in 11,415 visits from y'all. The full listing of the numbers and their breakouts can be found on this Webalizer page for May. Thanks, I am glad that you apparently find these pages and reports and such to be of service. I am honored.
It's time to water the Patio Farm and hit the road. Yesterday, the traffic home was horrendous, because a major artery between the south and east bay areas was fully blocked by a tiipped over semi-rig filled with assorted toxics... hosed traffic everywhere, all day. Should be better today. Have a great Friday, and I'll see you later.
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Good morning. Well, good if you aren't a former Nepali royal family member, in which case you're either DOA or in hiding while you try to figure out what must really be going on. Meantime, Israelis are righteously outraged by the Palestinian suicide bombing that killed 18 young people outside a nightclub, <sarcasm> where they were obviously gathered in opposition to Palestinian sovereignty.... </sarcasm>. All in all, the behaviour observed on this sorry dirtball is reprehensible.
Oh, but wait. For every act of insanity, stupidity, violence and rage, hundreds upon thousands upon millions of lives progressed normally, with children playing, parents laughing, and life going on... That's not news, is it. So what we get is this litany of dispair, that panders to our desire to DO SOMETHING about, to or for those poor people. Feh.
To take control of the world's peoples and cultures in the manner necessary to prevent such things from happening would require such a draconian solution, a police state of unimaginable proportion and power. And it would be abused. The cure is far worse than the disease. Personally, I think it's time that we accept that some people, and some cultures are not going to be fit to join in the society of nations, and cut them loose. From us a nation, no more foreign aid on a governmental basis, to anyone, for any reason, good or bad.
Bu-bu-but then they won't "trade" with us anymore! Well, OK. You mean so they won't spend part of the money we gave them with our captains of industry? Oh, well. At least then we can reduce taxes (if the tax-eaters let us - thanks, Jerry).
Yeah, I know, some good people will die, and some bad guys will win. Face it, that happens whatever we do. Mostly because good people often play by the rules (whatever those are), while the morally bankrupt just fight to win, by the means at their disposal. If we as a nation played the way Hussein and Arafat play, then Iraq would be a glowing glassy plain right now. That, of course, would have been a bad thing, as it leads down a path that none of us dare tread ... yet.
This quiet Earth, this turning wheel of a cosmos cares not. Whether we go on or not matters hardly at all, except to us. Well, some of us, anyway. Just not Nepali Royal Crown Princes and Palestinian suicide bombers and ... the list goes on. ::sigh::
My guess? News is about unhappy people. Revolution is about a lot of unhappy people. There aren't enough unhappy people yet. But there's a tipping point, though probably not a balance. We've been fortunate, you and I. The universe gave us a place to live - a lot of us do that quite badly. However, it's been less bad than on average over the last 150 years or so. Probably it's going to be worse again one day soon. How soon? Don't ask me, I am not a soothsayer, nor a harbinger of doom. Just a realist without enough information.
In the meantime, it sure is exciting watching the mail flow in around those script editing episodes I write about, like yesterday's. Let's see, I got ... oh, no mail whatsoever on the topic. OK. Maybe I just don't write in a sensational enough manner about cron jobs and init scripts or whatever, to get your blood flowing. Mmmmm.
Today is up in the air. We have chores to do, a field trip to take, I am working on Chapter 15 from The Book about Linux that Tom and Brian Wrote, and Marcia has several projects to select from. Who knows what will really happen? I sure don't, but sitting here accomplishes none of it. So on with the day - I'll be back later to let you know how it goes. TTFN
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Not much done for here, yet, but I've been at Chapter 15, Consoles and Terminals (and shells, Oh My!) for the last two hours, and it is now as ready for your eyes as I can make it at this hour on a Sunday morning.
Good morning. I've got lots more material for you yet today, as we made a trip up to Mount Diablo yesterday, as well as stopping in at the Automotive Museum at Blackhawk. I've got a bunch of really nice pictures for you, so later today, after errands, I should have them up for your viewing pleasure. Now, however, it's time to get ready for the Costco run. Y'all take care, read our Linux Book, and check back here later this afternoon for the Benzes and Bugattis, OK? TTFN.
14:00 - OK, I promised some pictures of yesterday's adventure, here's a few of them... later on in this afternoon's show, I'll give you a link to a page full of snaps, for you car buffs out there (and you know who you are).
So anyway, we bailed out of here about 10:30 yesterday morning, driving east, then north towards Mount Diablo. From San Jose, you can get there by heading north on Highway 680, to the Diablo road exit, then simply follow the signs. About 50 miles one way. Once on the mountain, the roads begin to seriously wind. Lot's of switchbacks, and pretty views. From the top, we stood in on a lecture about the history of the place, from several thousand years of Native American use, through the Spaniards, Mexicans, and finally us 'Mericans. Still a pretty place, mostly because it's too steep to be easily exploited.
There was a fair breeze, not cold, but not warm, so after a brief walkabout, we headed back down the hill. At the bottom, we turned left instead of right, and headed into Blackhawk. Blackhawk is a community of about 6000 or so members of the rich and extremely snooty faction. Multi-million dollar houses built practically on top of one another, behind walls and guarded gatehouses. Also home to the Blackhawk Automotive Museum. There's on the order of 60 or so gorgeous cars, from the 1890's through the 1940's. Small, but very, very elegant. On the left you can see one of the Benz vehicles - there are several, including a Gullwing 300 SL. Plus there's plenty of Rollers, Hispano-Suizas, Bugattis and much more. Some of the ragtops are open, and I can get good dash shots, like that from a Rolls, at right.
If you want to see more, I have lot's more pictures, but I won't load down this page with them - head over here to the Mount Diablo / Blackhawk Automotive Field Trip Page for all the snaps, and none of the explanations. I don't have time for captions, so I won't even try. But the mountain and the cars sure are pretty.
What to do, what to do. I have chores, book chapters to work on, a demo of Alice that's currently running on Wine very nicely thanks, and a brand-spanking new copy of Myst III to look at. What do you think???
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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 by 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.