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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 morning. Sheesh, another manic Monday, and I haven't even gotten started yet. For those of you weekday readers, Saturday was rant day: Brian get's sick from the news. After that, we just got out of the house, and had a wonderful day...

Sunday was computationally bound, trying and failing many different things. But first I posted Chapter 15 from Tom and Brian's Linux Book. Warning, these are the bits where we do our darndest to speak native Klingon, so be warned. Then, from our adventure at Mount Diablo and at the Blackhawk Automotive Museum, I posted a brief trip report, and a couple of pictures Sunday afternoon, and a separate whole page just of thumbnail links to the nearly 70 images I captured, mostly of gorgeous old cars, like the Tucker pictured at left.

Things that worked this weekend: Wine is up and running, and I've tested it with a number of applications, from wordpad and regedit, through American McGee's Alice Demo. A couple of warnings about Alice. The official site there is obnoxious, keeps popping up windows wanting me to install a plugin that clearly won't work with Konqueror. Second, the Demo itself is about an 80 Meg download. Once running though, it's very cool. These new games sure have stunning visuals. Thanks to Greg Lincoln for the assist with Wine. Otherwise I wouldn't have gotten there.

While on the Costco run yesterday, I picked up Myst III, Exile. I know, like I have time for a game. But worse, I can't get it to run in ANYTHING but a native windows environment, Win95/98/ME. I didn't have one of those around. First pass, VMware with Win2K (no, I didn't read the box) - game wouldn't install in "NT". Sigh. Oh, yeah, VMware version 2.04 seems rock solid under the 2.4.x kernel series, in case you wanted to know.

Next try, Windows 98 in VMware. Installed fine. Win came up, Myst III installed fine. Upon running the game, it detected a debugger running, and bailed. I guess they don't want anyone reverse engineering their ... whatever. So Myst now declares VMware to be a debugger, and won't run there at all. Myst III - 2, Brian -0.

So I decide, fool that I am, to sort out some space at the front of /dev/hda, on which to install Win98 for gaming purposes. Sigh. Of course I have my boot and root partitions there. A horrible tale ensues, for which I have not the time at this moment. Be patient, we'll return to this story soon. Like the missiles approaching the Heart of Gold, I'll let you know in advance that no one is actually hurt, and better yet, no tea is spilt. Back to this tale later today, or perhaps tomorrow...

Why tomorrow? Because tonight I am headed over to the Computing History Museum, which is currently housed on Moffett Airfield, for a talk by Chuck Thaker and Butler Lapson, presenting a retrospective on the Xerox Alto. Nearly everything we take for granted in a modern desktop computing environment was first done on the Alto. Wasn't cheap, but my those boys at the Xerox PARC sure could design a box.

Now to water the plants, and hit the commute. Y'all have a lovely day, and I'll see you back here soon. TTFN

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Good morning. Well, this is sorta soon... <grin> I ended up choosing not to attend that meeting last night, since my eyes were pointed in clearly different directions. From what I was able to pick up in assorted mirrors, I am not Marty Feldman, so this eye thing wasn't normal and I'd best lay low for a bit. Had pizza in, puttered about for a bit, played a game of Rummy or two with my lovely Marcia, and then tottered off to bed, at the late, late hour of 9PM.

I know, I know, but I plead the stress of the last couple of weeks, in conjunction with a very late Sunday night working on restructuring Garcia, my main workstation. I owe you the rest of that tale, too. You can have that this evening.

I am still actively job-seeking, my resume is here, in case you've not seen it yet. I've had a couple of little nibbles so far, but both turned out to be less than they seemed - I am looking for permanent full-time work, not a contract position. I will consider a contract-to-perm, but that means I have to do an evaluation on the likelyhood of the -to-perm bit, which is always challenging. I don't actually enjoy job-hunting, so this is not something I want to repeat in 6 months or a year. I may have to go with a big company just so that I can find a place where I can work until 3 days after I die. That would put paid to any more job hunting...

So, to return to the main thread of this post, I am much better rested today. Thanks. As a result, there isn't much to report. Oh, I saw that ORBS was down last week, but it didn't catch on until yesterday, when the Register picked up the story. You may recall that ORBS (Open Relay Behaviour Modification System) is a "competitor" to MAPS (the Mail Abuse Prevention System). Both have (or had) their methods of generating lists of servers, addresses and domains which are spam havens, and made these lists publically available for anyone to use them for blocking all mail from those points, theoretically cutting down the amount of Spam email.

Both of those organizations annoy corporations whose sites are the source of ... questionable mail, or simply have open relay servers that spammers take advantage of. At the same time, they are only effective because mail admins and ISPs elect to use the services. MAPS, at least, is a lawsuit magnet. ORBS was simply an open-relay tester. No contact, no recourse.

Mmmm. Anyway, no one yet knows why ORBS is shut down, just that it is. Keep your eyes open for more on this. I think they provided an important service. Now it's time to water the garden and hit the road. Take care, see you back here later.

Afternoon. Welcome back. Yeah, I know, Greg told me today in IRC that I'd forgotten to publish before I left home. Easy fix, that: I just ssh over to Grendel, thence to Garcia, type siteout, and two SSH passphrases later, I've got the latest and greatest copy of Grafitti here on Grendel, as well as the mirror that Tom has graciously granted space for.

Now, I promised to tell you about how Brian is stupid. I put it that way because gbot, the helpful infobot (an avatar that Greg runs on the IRC server) now acknowledges me as such, given my outbursts on Sunday night.

Here's the drill. Myst III: Exile looks pretty cool. So I pick up a copy at Costco on the Sunday run. I first try to install and run under Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator), the LInux based Windows API project. Some games do work. However, I can't even install it - the latest version of InstallShield foils Wine. So the next try: VMware.

The good news is that VMware (http://www.vmware.com/) 2.0.4, as I previously noted, works wonderfully with systems based on the 2.4.x Linux kernels. Excellent, two thumbs up. An invaluable too. So I pop the latest VMware onto the system, run up a copy of Win2K, pop in the Myst III install disk and ... dialog box - no joy, can't install on "NT". I snatch up the box. On the bottom, in ultra-mega-miniature text it says "Windows 95/98/ME only" Sigh. Stupid # one.

Still with VMware, I hose that Win2K install, pop in the Win98 CD, and spend 50 minutes installing that. Yeah, it's a long time, but the faster box is down-compensated by the IO problems created when running VMware. For code in memory, VMware flies. IO is still pretty sucky, at least with IDE devices. I understand that SCSI drives yield much better performance. Mmmmm.... Anyway, So I install Win98, then do all the driver updates, and pop in the install disk. Voila. Install shield comes up fine. The installer recommends the typical installation: 187 Megabytes. The alternative is the "Full" installation, clocking in at 2129 Megabytes. That's right, over 2 GIG !!! Wow. Larger than the virtual partition I am running Windows in. Ah, well. On with the typical install. Successful and then Play. Dialog box. Myst III has detected a debugger running. Terminate the debugger and restart the game. Ok. <shudder> Again. No joy. Task list, no debugger, no joy. Think, think... VMware is being seen as a debugger layer by the game's code. Not debugger, but BUGGER! Stupid # Two, not mine, but now comes the fun bit.

I must have taken leave of my senses. I decide that to run the game, I am going to try a live restructuring of Garcia. I like my setup, and while I could replicate it with a fresh install, in a couple of hours, I should be able to move my root, /boot, /var and /tmp partitions to the back of the boot drive, leaving enough space at the front to do a native install of Win98, so I can play this stoopid game.

I have Greg and Moshe on IRC (moral support) over on Gryphon the Acer Travelmate laptop boxen, so I take Garcia down to runlevel 1 and start mucking about dumping spare partitions, copying data from one old partition to one new partition, trying to figure how to get out from under my current root directory without hosing the box... Long story short time. Use dd. dd makes sector by sector copies of anything. If you have two identical partitions, of the same size, and dd, then Bob's your uncle.

This is important. Use dd to copy from primary to primary, or logical to logical partition. Don't try from primary to logical. It doesn't work, at least for me. So, for example:

[root@grendel /]$ dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/hda3 bs=64k

The bs=64k option sets the block size to something reasonably large, in this case 64 kB. If I remember correctly, the default blocksize for dd is only something like 512 bytes. Using little chunks like that, copying a 1 Gig partition takes for bloody ever. Fortunately I skipped that particular error. Finally the deed was done. Several hours I spent getting this to work, and I learned some painful lessons along the way. Mostly, don't use cp for anything in admin work. Permissions and ownership are hosed. Period. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I knew that, too, but bulled ahead after all my failures to run Myst III virtually rather than putting up a game-play Winstallation. The good news is that if it crashes, I don't care, since it's only for games.

Now I have some proposed tutorial topics to review, and a bunch of job listings to look at. Has anyone seen that winning Lottery ticket with my name on it? I know it's out there... See ya tomorrow.

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Not much time at the moment, I am afraid. It's going to be a busy day. No, I am not happy, not happy at all (said in the tones of Marvin the Martian), but there's precious little I can do about it but soldier on, grin and bear it (oh, and keep job hunting - see the resume for details, thanks!). Nope, I ain't gonna get into the nitty-gritty with this in public, but ... ::sigh:: you can probably figure it out.

Good morning, anyway. You'll recall I asked about a winning lottery ticket recently? Well, I just heard from Svenson...

> Has anyone seen that winning Lottery ticket with my name on it?

Yes.

But I chunked it. The date was wrong. It said "due 08 June 01".
Must have been the Roman Lottery, some 2000 years ago. Can't cash that
anymore.

Huh?

--
Svenson.
Mail at home : [email protected]

You're welcome to send him an email thanking him for his thoughtfulness in this matter. I know that I will, soon. I first have some work to do in Arabic - I understand that's a great language to express some of the concepts I have in mind... <grin>

Oh, did you catch last night's post? I delineated the extent of the disaster area that was my learning experience around trying to get Myst III running. Gorgeous game, visually stunning, nice blend of CGI and integrated live action shots. Not to mention how much more I learned about Linux getting it there. Heh, yeah, it's a Windows game, which is what caused all the problems.

Time for me to get outta here. Tonight at SVLUG, we have Jon Callas, Director of Software Engineering from Counterpane (which is Bruce Schneier's gig), speaking on The Effect of Anti-Circumvention Provisions on Security. sounds to be interesting. This one I am likely to make, since I've caught up on my sleep again. If you're there, look me up - you know what I look like, that's at the top of each of these pages.

Have a great day. See you later.

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Good morning. Last night's talk by Jon Callas was really rather interesting. The speech title was rather droll, as you may have noted yesterday: The Effect of Anti-Circumvention Provisions on Security. However, what this means in English is: The DMCA, Security and You. BTW, Professor Felton, he who was threatened by the RIAA when he wanted to present his paper on the attack on Digital Watermarking, along with others, has filed suit - here comes the first Constitutional challenge to the DMCA...

From: Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty dot org>
Subject: [svlug] EFF files Felten lawsuit
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 01:19:16 -0700
 
Those who attended the meeting this evening heard me announce that the
EFF had filed the first-ever affirmative constitutional challenge to the
DMCA, in a lawsuit by Professor Ed Felten of Princeton University
against the RIAA, SDMI Foundation, Verance, and John Ashcroft.
 
Felten is joined in the lawsuit by his colleagues from Princeton and
Rice, and by the USENIX Association, sponsor of the security
conferences where Felten's team intends to publish its work.  They are
represented by a team of EFF staff attorneys and outside attorneys
from Ohio, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey, all with major
civil liberties experience.
 
Press release:
 
http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/Felten_v_RIAA/20010606_eff_felten_pr.html

Complaint:
 
http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/Felten_v_RIAA/20010606_eff_complaint.html
 
Background:
 
http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/Felten_v_RIAA/
 
FAQ:
 
http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/Felten_v_RIAA/faq_felten.html
 
Felten's project page:
 
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/
 
 
There has been a fair amount of press coverage already, including
slashdot, Reuters, AP, ZDNet, CNET, and NPR; you can expect stories
from several major newspapers in the next few days.  RIAA also issued
a brief statement, and EFF issued a response to it.

I like this case, and the legal team handling it, a whole lot.
 
I think this announcement fit well with the presentation by Jon Calas
about the effects of the DMCA on security research.  In fact, I
couldn't have asked for better timing. :-)
 
At the meeting, I asked SVLUG members to show support for this
litigation, and other EFF projects, by joining and contibuting to EFF.
 
http://www.eff.org/support/
 
You can contributing with a credit card or in many other ways.  EFF is
largely member-supported, and its high-profile DMCA litigation is
costing over a million dollars per year.  Although the EFF receives some
institutional support, contributions from individuals are an important
part of its budget.  Without them, EFF would not be able to take on
cases like this.
 
(With the addition of this case, EFF is now simultaneously litigating
DMCA cases against both the MPAA and RIAA -- with the Department of
Justice as an additional opposing party in each case!)

If you can't give money, there's a lot else that would help, including
publicity.
 
--
Seth David Schoen   | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5

Well, I am already a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because, to paraphrase the quotable Don Marti, "If you use Linux, you want to keep using Linux, and you don't belong to the EFF, you're a jackass." Don repeated that statement last night, although he softened and broadened the scope just a bit. But anyway, here's some of that publicity Seth was asking for.

Of late, I appear once again to have lost sight of the forest for the trees. I enjoy using Linux in and of itself. But also, an OS is a tool, not an end result unless you're an OS company/community, researcher or student. With Debian I was running into too many conflicts between my desire to be near to the state of the art, and the result of living on the bleeding edge. And I just don't have time to mediate those conflicts - I have a job (such as it is, yes I am looking for a new one), I have a life and a lovely wife, and too many bits keep breaking when I try to make some new feature of the OS work.

I am now running Mandrake 8.0 here on Garcia, and will be doing the same over on Gryphon before the day is out. I want one environment, so that I can get on with the goals I have. I'll continue, from time to time, to experiment with new distro's and releases, but they'll be in a VMware jail, where they can't corrupt my working environment. Thanks for bearing with me as I keep rediscovering old things, and making them new again. It is rather like a sheep, from time to time, waking up each morning to a new dawn, and saying to itself, "Ooooooh, green. I wonder what that stuff is? Does it taste good???" ::sigh::

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Good morning and TGIF, indeed. Everything's back in order - I successfully converted Gryphon back to Mandrake 8.0, too. One addition: I upgraded there to XFree86 4.1.0. That provides me with 3D acceleration and Render support for the ATI Rage Pro Mobility chipset in the Acer, so now I can have the Anti-Aliased fonts that QT 2.3 and KDE 2.1 applications bring.

Other than that, nothing particularly new or exciting to report at this time. I am hopeful of a quiet day to get a bunch of datasheet work done - I am upgrading/modifying many of them to bring them in line with the big changes that are planned for shortly down the road.

I will be back later, with something more interesting, and perhaps just one snap of the Patio Farm. Meantime, have a lovely day and TTFN.

19:15 - Hey. Trapped between a digestive nap and Doctor Dolittle, I thought I'd take a moment to say hello. The first problem is caused by Quesadilla and Fajitas at Casa Lupe tonight. Yummer-doodles lip-smackin' embarrass Marcia with the noises I make while eating, just plain great food. Excellentosis.

The latter, Doctor Dolittle is not the pathetic remake starring Eddie somebody. This is the original, with Rex Harrison, and delightfully, Richard Attenborough. Wouldn't you just expect him to be in an animal film, even at that early date! We're about to settle in to give that a watch. But first, a bit more news from a variety of fronts.

First, there are a couple of followup stories in The Register on the topic of ORBS, which I was discussing briefly the other day... perhaps the most pertinent writing is found here. I'll address the topic of network anti-spam measures in an upcoming rant, the next time someone lights my fire over it.

Next, following an email I saw from Tim on one of the mailing lists I hang out on, the announcement is out. Craig Mundie is going to be speaking at July's Open Source Convention. Can't you just see some Borg drones spraypainting out Open, and popping in SHARED, no, really! in it's place? Nah, me either. Musta been a flashback. Anyway, follow that link, and use your special powers to come up with some great questions that Tim and others can ask Aligator Mundie... (like the moniker? remember you saw it here first).

Then, if you haven't been keeping up with Kuro5hin since the shutdown last summer, and keep promising yourself you'll get back there one day, then do yourself a favor and visit. With articles like An open challenge to Creationists and In Favor of Compulsory Voting, this isn't like other techie hangouts on the web. Strongly recommended for writing to make you think.

Now it's movie time... good night.

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Good morning. The moronette from Slovenia who lives downstairs from us brough home about 25 or so of her idiot eastern block co-morons-in-cahoots. A few of them apparently immediately began having really loud sex in the bathroom, with the shower running to pretend to cover the noise. Most of the balance appeared to want to have conversations at the top of their lungs while standing in our courtyard, on our stairs and generally creating a general disturbance. I just called them in. Feh. Bill, one of the maintenance guys for the complex wandered past them and warned them about the noise, didn't seem to faze them much. Ah, but one more incident and they're evicted. Boy, won't moronette's mom be happy then...??? Hmmm. They all bailed about 20 minutes later, before our men in blue had a chance to show up and inform them of their ill deeds in a more official capacity. So I called back, and cancelled the dispatch. I only hope that they get the bill anyway.

I really can only put it down to them coming from a culture where consideration for one's neighbors is dramatically less valued. Oh, and by the way, I don't know where our neighbors are actually from - they speak one or another Slavic dialect, but Slovenia jumped into my brain, mostly because their detrius from last time was evidence of slovenly behaviour.

Occasionally I find myself turning a bit into my parents, thinking things like, Kids today have no respect... On the other hand, when I was growing up, I knew that some kids were buttheads, severely mis-aligned with reality, and many were just normal kids who would make an occasional mistake every once in a while, and learn about behaviour and consequences. The buttheads, on the other hand, flaunted their ability to disregard normal social conventions as a badge of honor (by their lights). So I guess nothing much has really changed.

Left out of yesterday's surf list entirely through information overload and an oversight on my part was Doc Searls. Today, Doc points us to the CIA's guide to relative geographic sizes, Dubya-style, stunningly entitled Area-Comparative. Heh.

Finally, I must apologize. In my mind I confused Richard Attenborough (who was in the cast of the original Doctor Dolittle) and David Attenborough, stalker of non-human carbon-based lifeforms. Somehow it gave me such a mental giggle to imagine a younger David doing song and dance: "I've never seen anything like it in my life...". Apparently that was enough justification to write Richard, think David, and post the sentence implying one was the other last night. Mea Culpa.

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Been busy surfing, sipping coffee, and generally being lazy this morning. Feels wonderful, thanks. Oh, good morning. Yah, not much to report at the moment. Yesterday was full of a variety of things, including finishing up Chapter 16, on Vi, Emacs and Joe. CLI text editors. I'll just keep plugging along. Eventually The Book will be fully out in HTML. Then I'll convert the chapters to PDF, and jigger up a search capability and an index. Those shouldn't take too very long - I have a couple ideas that I could code up fairly easily in Perl, but first I want to survey the crowd for indexing software. The search feature will either be ht::dig, which I've been meaning to learn how to implement, or Perlfect, which this site uses now (see the search box at the top?).

Anyway, I'll be back later. It's errands time. Have a lovely day.

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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.