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GRAFFITI -- January 11, 2010 thru January 17, 2010

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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.



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MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 11, 2010

2227 -Whew. A whirlwind of a day. Work was work, with added Windows goodness sprinkled throughout, 'specially because I keep threatening to install Linux on everything. Tonight, all the normal Monday stuff: bills, backups, and trash. Then I formatted and posted Jerry's Orchids and Onions column, turned around, and did a bit of remote configuration work that needed to be done well-afterhours. All of a sudden, it's 2200, and I hadn't had supper yet. Blargh! Oh, BTW, this is for you, Mike:

glxgears running in LFS

Yeah, that's glxgears, a Mesa demo program, running in X on a Linux From Scratch system built from scratch using an Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD as the host OS for the initial and chroot build phases. I got that working last night before bed. It should not have taken that long, but I was a bit loopy this last weekend. Systems are coming back online, though: did I mention that I also managed half an hour on the elliptical tonight? Go me! Ciao!

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 12, 2010

1759 - I received today my post-renewal package from the IEEE. I've been a member for 6 years now, and in general, I've found that the resources available to me outweigh the disadvantages. Disadvantages? Yep - there are two: The first is that it's not inexpensive - a year's membership in the IEEE with Computer Society affiliation runs nearly as much as three years of XM/Sirius subscription, and I just bypassed that due to the cost. The second disadvantage is a byproduct of the self-selecting nature of the IEEE demographic — smart people who make money. (No, I don't know why they let me in, now be quiet!) It is the bane of my IEEE membership that every couple of weeks I get a new "opportunity" to get some form of insurance+ from some partner of the IEEE. Sigh. I've asked and begged and pleaded to be removed from these lists. I've been promised that I have been removed. Still, the mail arrives. Aaaargh. Well, at least insurance companies are doing their part to support our tottering USPS.

On tap for tonight: roasting coffee and plowing through Michael Jang's RHCE Study Guide. I was able to save a couple of hundred bucks if I signed up to take the exam, and took it before the end of February. Come to find out the only local test time is next Friday. So I want to at least skim through the book, and do one of his practice exams before that day arrives. And of course, the first of my Spring 2010 courses at UMUC opens next Tuesday, as well. It's better to be busy, but some enforced sloth seems tempting. You know I'll never go down that path though, right? So, stuff to do, see y'all later. Ciao!


+ From the Discworld: inn-sewer-ants - a funny concept that you give someone a few coins, then they give you a LOT of money when your house burns down. In hindsight, not such a steller concept to introduce into a relatively mercenary "society" such as found in Ankh Moorpark.

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Mon    Tues    WEDNESDAY    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 13, 2010

2029 - I'm listening to the 30th Anniversary edition of Born to Run while I run some practice RHEL5 installs in preparation for my RHCE exam next week. Two minutes until this install is done, then I have other things to work on again. Progress is. Oh, hey, and progress isn't, too. Did I mention that WGBH canceled New Yankee Workshop? Argh! Argh! Sigh. Ciao!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
January 14, 2010

No Post....

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
January 15, 2010

No Post.....

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    SATURDAY    Sun   
January 16, 2010

0845 - Good morning. I've been remiss, again. There's two real issues. The first is that I just can't talk about most of the interesting, or even mundane, stuff I do at work. No point leaving the door open to social engineering attacks, or targeted hardware/software attacks. It all comes down to "I did stuff with computers." each day, anyway. Secondly, all the other waking minutes in life are spoken for at least twice, between remodeling, exams, classes starting, and funny old life itself.

I broke down the other day and bought myself an RH license (of the JBoss developer strain, which is the cheapest way of getting an update entitlement) - there are other RH-based distros like CentOS that work just fine for many purposes, but this is explicitly a performance-based Red Hat exam I'm taking on Friday next. No point in skimping on the tools I need to ensure that I pass. That done, I was finding that the VMware server install under my Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic ServerStation just wasn't stable enough. I'd login from work, and the VM would have just ... stopped. Sigh. So I deleted the system from RHN, blew away the local install (didn't I? Hmmm, okay, now I have, no point in backing up a junk install), and done a clean install and registration under VMware Fusion 3.mumble over on the MacBook Pro, now known as Darla. So far, that seems fine, and it makes some activities more convenient, having the VM with me wherever I go. Now on to the next phase of my studying: NFS, FTP, and Samba. Ciao!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    SUNDAY  
January 17, 2010

2222 - I had problems setting up NFS under RHEL yesterday. I did a clean virtual install to muck around in, and after a couple of firewall tweaks, all was right with the world. I'm not going to agonize about it much more - my first UMUC Spring class starts Tuesday - this one on Technical Writing. And after literally years of nudges, nods, and reminders filling my inbox, I finally broke down and joined Facebook today. As with virtually all my other online presences, I'm not hard to find.

Of course, I blew a couple of hours poking around the place, looking at (and for) people I knew before I was young and dumb. (Yeah, in high school, I was just young. Then I had a decade of still young, and dumb that followed that.) I found a few folks and sent out some friend requests. I didn't find a couple of others and went looking online. Come to find out that "Bruno", an influential gonzo guy named Brad Kerth whom I knew in high school, a year ahead of me, died a couple of years ago. Wha? A sadness. And now, more sadness...


A rough week in Afghanistan - a dozen men gave their lives this week in service to our country. Our condolences to the families and units of the fallen.

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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.

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