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BPB Grafitti for Week ending September 26, 1999

Bear in mind that I am not a professional writer. I just enjoy the written word, and this area on my site forms a buffer between coding and other "real" work, and life in the world at large. I enjoy doing this, and I hope you do, too. Updating will happen (generally) in the evenings, more often when I feel like it, or if something really interesting is going on.

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September 20, 1999



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Happy Monday. Welcome back. A reminder of a few of the changes which have taken place over the weekend, as we spruced the place up for you. The index page has been revamped. Marcia added a fair amount of content, all accessible from the index page. The Art & Picture page has filled in a bit (not too many, for every one that shows up, a hundred lie on the cutting room floor, well, ok, in a photo album).

An article has popped up here. This is on the site of Linux Journal. It appears to be another Microsoft Wants To Dominate The World, Flee, Flee - but with a new-ish twist which have the linux faithful up in arms (again). Microsoft supports centers of higher learning with cheap and free clients and client software, if centers of higher learning use NT servers. I want to dig up another reference about students at UCLA being disallowed to hook up their Linux boxes to the dorm networks, while Windows machines were allowed freely. While I question much of the anti-MS hype, there is no doubt that Gates & Company practice VERY sharp business practices, and get-them-while-they-are-young is by no means a new tactic. More on this later, because this is a topic I want to work on - How much FUD is too much?

This morning from Dan Seto, out of Honolulu Hawaii...

This may be a duplicate message since Opera 3.60 fell over and died when I tried to submit this first time around. If so, gomen nesai a thousand times. But instead of using email, why not use "post" or "get" and a Perl script. If not, my comment was that as is the case with ny new must read every day or I will be filled with a sense of loss site, drkeyboard.co.uk/diary, it would be helful if the links for "last week" and "next week" are at the bottom of the page as well as the top. Most people reading English go front to back, top to bottom, and left to right, neh. So for those of us who followed the link from Dr. Keyboard and started to read your daynotes from front to back, top to bottom, please duplicate the links at the bottom of the page.

Aloha, Dan

Thanks for the feedback. Good suggestion, easily implemented and... done! I want an address at aloha.net, too.

Linux advocacy, Linux lunacy. First of all, when you know enough about what you are searching for to select the 3 to 5 words that best categorize your goal, some search engines work wonders. I rely heavily on Go (formerly Infoseek), because I really like the search within previous results feature, thus easily allowing me to narrow my search, and use the browser's back button to re-widen the search. As noted above, I was going to hunt up a reference for Linux problems at UCLA, so into the infoseek search box went "Linux UCLA dorm server", those being salient words remembered from the story. Top result GNU/Linux Discrimination at UCLA. Voila. Well, almost. The link here works, the link from Infoseek was 404. But it was a simple matter to move up to the top level of that domain tree, and see a notice that said " See blah-de-blah-blah.org instead for this kind of stuff" or something to that effect. So there is that link.

There are strong similarities between today's situations regarding Linux, and the era of transition from "Big Iron" to Personal Computers. I remember that bringing a pc into an offfice where there was a MIS priesthood department, this could create career-change defining moments in one's life. PC's snuck in the back door, and by the time eviction was attempted, the benefits and ROI were too evident to justify moving backwards. This is roughly similar to the moves Linux has been putting on the business world over the last couple of years. There are significant differences, though. One is connectedness. There is a coordination among the Linux Faithful which is astounding and pervasive (and fractious, but more on that later). The Open Source movement (or Free Software movement, free as in speech, not beer... wait, I did say later on fractious, right?)... Right.

The Gnu/Linux phenomenon (how's that for straddling a razor-wire fence, huh?) is propogating at net speeds, from individual to individual. Overheard at a Linux meeting (SVLUG) recently - "Linux took SGI kind of like Ebola." . . . "Benign, I hope?" Someone chimed in. ISP's use Linux (or other low-cost *nix varients of the BSD type) for stability, customizability... oh, and stability. Businesses use Linux (often without even knowing it in the rarified vapors of upper level management) as servers for mail, web, intranet & print services. We are even beginning to see (as Linux comes of age) support for Linux application servers utilizing enterprise scale database products. Not all of these things work well all the time yet. And certainly, whether as a server or a desktop, the learning curve for the neophyte is steep (perhaps an understatement). However, usability is coming. Unattended installation is coming. Desktop environments and office productivity tools are in development NOW! And Microsoft knows it. They know because the linuxen are vocal, and well-connected (in the internet sense, certainly).

Do you want to know what features are going to be in the 2.4 kernel, anticipated to be released within the next 6 months? Simple. Subscribe to the Linux kernel mailing list (not for the faint of heart, averages about 1k messages / week or more). You don't see Microsoft developing in public. Well, duh. Different development models and all that. Some very bright people (Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, etc) think a lot about the open source software development paradigm. Progress is fast and furious. Anybody can beta test the bleeding edge overnight sources. Break the software, report the bugs. It will be fixed day after tomorrow by someone on the other side of the world, and you will be able to see that change five minutes after she commits. This is all radical stuff. The business world is just catching its breath from trying to "Get up to Internet speed" in combination with Y2K remediation, and now we throw this bomb in their laps. Whoa, Nellie.

A common enemy. There are several major distributions, and lots of derivative and specialty distributions of Linux out in the world. This is referred to as customization and as choice by the linuxen. According to the enemy, it is a fractured, perhaps even (hush) broken, community, unable to work together, interoperate, etc. Oh. Yeah. The enemy. Commonly known as Microsoft. Some people clearly do not so much like or advocate Linux as they do hate those guys in Redmond. Hate is a marvelous unifier - Hitler showed us that, so have many others. Hate isn't what linux is about. Blowing smoke, cussing a screen blue, using a "$" in place of every 's' in a diatribe... sigh. There is a lot of that. There is also a vast amount of well reasoned, well thought out arguments for the use of this operating system, this development model, this GNU/Linux. Often such is buried in the dross, in places like slashdot, but, cool, freedom is freedom, man. REALLY - READ THE FOLLOWING...

[Excerpt from the Canons of Conduct, Linux Advocacy mini-HOWTO] As a representative of the Linux community, participate in mailing list and newsgroup discussions in a professional manner. Refrain from name-calling and use of vulgar language. Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer. Your words will either enhance or degrade the image the reader has of the Linux community.

I like that. Here's my stand. I use GNU/Linux at home because I like to work with operating systems and computers, and Linux lets me do that as well (or as badly) as I can. I get to experiment. I get to contribute (when and if I can). And I can tell you that it is working for me. If you want, I will help you get it working, too. That's a philosophy I can live with. (A note. Yes I could have provided more links in the above. I may edit them in later this week. There is lots to read which is both sane and compelling. Stay tuned. This is definitely an E-ticket ride).

"For those of you sleeping in class last week, we were discussing web usability..." Enough already, Mrs. Hillman. (Mrs Hillman was my eighth grade english teacher. Vicious with a yardstick. Then there was Ketterman... but I digress). Jakob Nielsen is one of the several people whose writings about what and how on the web make vast sense to me. He has just put out another Alert Box message to his mailing list (yes, you should sign up, too). This one is called User-Supportive Internet Architecture, check it out here.

OK. I admit it. I put on Mr. Happy Face this morning. I am sorry. No more Happy Monday's. Sigh. NEXT - This is a link to a column at Linux.com, The Free Software Entrepreneur's Guide. To what, you may ask. Go and read it. Come back tomorrow if you want. Tomorrow I am going to figure out why I can't get reliable behavior out of RealAudio© G2 for Linux (hint - could it be because it is an alpha version!). Good night, Dilbert-boy.

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September 21, 1999



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One of my daily emails arrives each weekday morning from ZDNET. Jesse Berst's AnchorDesk. I keep this particular subscription alive for a couple of reasons, and regret it for a couple more. First, the good. It is timely. Monday through Friday, I get a 3 to 5 minute brief on what this bunch thinks was important in tech news the previous day. There are other resources, but ZDNet spans a lot of the industry. Second "good thing" - They take a stand (sometimes) - Berst will say this is what it is, and that's why... and later crow over his prescient ability, or ... eat crow. And he will do both. Often times you never hear a peep about the oops of yesterday. AnchorDesk does. On the flip side, this is MTV style tech reporting - admittedly this is an overview, but too much flash, too quick. I would rather about twice the material be published, and about half the contests. And the ongoing, beat a horse long after it's dead caricatures that this group of people paint each other with is getting tiresome. If I have invited a group of people onto my desktop each morning, eventually I expect to learn something more about them than that one makes lots of to-do lists and lines up pencils, etc, etc.

That being said, there were a couple of interesting tidbits this morning. Buried in the obligatory weekly DOJ / Microsoft update story was a repetition of a Berst stand with which I strongly disagree. "The PC era is over" is that statement. Someone is a customer of farmers southeast of Hollister. This is a Berst stand, taken to an extreme. I just don't buy the concept of Internet Appliances, refrigerators with web access. If I wanted to have dedicated information appliances, then that Wang word processing system and a 10key adding machine (with paper tape) would still be on my desk. Right now I have this box on my desk that can put on just about any face I want, and be effective at it.

Second item of interest. Gateway drops AMD microprocessors from it's line. Been said other places, but competition is good for Intel, and good for us consumers. Pretty soon the only person with enough money to break into the chip business will be BIll Gates... you don't think... nah. But really. That is too bad. I have heard good things about the Athalon chip, and there are some good mobos on the way for it from Asus and others. Life in the fast lane.

Interim report on Applied Cryptography... encyclopedic, but written with enough wit to jolt me awake as the eyeballs start to droop a little, back up one paragraph and get it. One clear message, most commercial crypto, and certainly most encryption (let's say, that WP document you just encrypted) sucks. He describes how to break that puppy. Being the proud owner of a copy of WP8 for Linux, and a compiler - I will be trying a test of that in the next week... BELOW is a thumbnail of my desktop wallpaper. I built it using The Gimp, just after I started using Linux. The major image elements are all available online, and all seem to be allowable for use personally (not commercial use). These elements are Martian ground from the rover camera, galaxy & starfield from a Hubble image, one of those stunning Apollo Earth photos, and a Star Trek [tm] Voyager photo (yup, that's a plug - I like the show). The thumb below leads to a 1/4 scale image of about 38k in size. The other versions available are 50% (125k) here, and 100% (1019x764, 386k) here. I use the large image stretched to match my desktop here (1162x864, 17") and at work (1280x1024, 21").

This from correspondent Matt Beland

I, too, have an ongoing love/hate relationship with AnchorDesk. Try these guys - Andover Update from Andover.net. [subscription page here - bpb] I'm forwarding yesterday's update, in HTML format. You can select text or HTML, HTML version links directly to the site for full-length stories and columns. They have a problem with time; on occasion I don't get the update until afternoon, and I'm on the West Coast [tm]. But the content is fairly good, and they're usually on target with selecting the most important stories. The columnists are a bit uneven, though.

Later,
Matt

Thanks, Matt. There is some weird effect from the jewel mounted in the headgear worn by Swami Berstenada (?) that clearly does a hipnotic thing, blinding users to drivel... Then he drops an insightful bomb on ya. At least I can speed-read my way through it, slowing for significant info, stuffed animals and small household appliances (without web connectivity, please). Thanks for the link to Andover - I will post, and give them a try. After all, they did display the good taste (and wallet) by buying slashdot & freshmeat, neh?

From a link that came to me via email from a SVLUG member, this article, entitled NT Religious Wars - Why Are DARPA Researchers Afraid of Windows NT? From the paper:

Abstract: Researchers for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are feeling increasing demand to conduct their computer science research on commodity hardware and software platforms, and specifically on Intel-type processors, running Windows or Windows NT. The forces behind this pressure are almost exclusively market-based rather than technical. However, many analyses of the desiderata behind OS selection are conducted from a fundamentally technical point of view. This paper presents a number of talking points that highlight the administrative and political challenges surrounding the decision to use Windows NT in leading-edge operating systems and networking research.

And after a sequence of exchanges with Matt, we come to this : I wrote, "Oh. I thought we were in a parallel dimension. >g<." To which Matt replies...

Can you prove we aren't? Personally, I think this "outside" and "sunlight" stuff is a crock. As far as I can tell, the world consists of small islands of reality connected with CAT5. That's all I ever see, anyway. Oh, and there must be a Mountain Dew factory somewhere, and a Reese's Peanut Butter cups factory. All else is illusion. You're not real, either - just a algorithmic response generator, sort of like that old Dr. Sbaitso on the original Creative Labs cards.

But you can call me Al, signing off for now. And on again, long enough to pop up this link to an article by John Dvorak, called The Linux Myth. John's view would put GNU/Linux as winner on the ultra low end of the computing structure. He also acknowledges, as many saner commentators do, that hating Microsoft isn't reason enough (see above). Certainly, he paints a compelling and realistic view of what may be in the future for Linux.

Round two from Dan Seto.

Without trying to sound like a commercial for the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau, many people have figuratively gotten an aloha.net address. Whether it's working on three of the more powerful computers in the world located on Maui (http://www.maui.com) or cutting edge animation feature films (link here - bpb), people have moved to Hawai'i from all over the world to work in the high tech fields (small pun intended). In other words, you don't need to live in Santa Clara or Boston when you have the connectivity of the Internet. So, would you rather be fighting the heat and traffic of your local highway or sitting back, sipping a maitai while watching the sunset over some beach on Maui? (Exit to the forbidden sounds of Don Tiki).

Aloha, Dan

The first link is cool - computer animation is one exploding field. And I am afraid of Don Tiki. I will not say more. And yes, you do sound like a commercial - but we know that advertising works, and yours does too, Dan. Sign me up. Recruiters - do you need me? Are there openings in the islands where the company is paying relocation expenses? Email me now!

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September 22, 1999



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Today I am working on data sheets for the ETS products... Oh, yeah - I am at work right now, using a secure shell connection into the home box. It is a bit of a pain to edit using a line editor in the terminal window, and I have disabled ftp access to my box. However, I can ftp out, so I open up ftp on my home box, over my ssh connection from my WinNT box, 'put' current.html up onto the corporate web space, then open ftp locally, 'get' the file and bring it down here, where I am editing. Then when I am done, just reverse the process. Not the easiest process in the world, but unless and until I have a secure ftp daemon for LCow, this is good enough.

Later today, I am going to do a reinstall of StarOffice5.1, now available from Sun. The first install, which I did in single user mode, put about 150 MB into my home directory... my home directory isn't for application space! I understand from the bits of the installation README that there is also a couple of different network install modes, and those will be investigated and reported on here later. While I am not required to have MS Office compatibility, SO appears to have lots of more-than-good-enough [tm] functionality. I am also interested in KOffice - the suite being developed for the KDE environment - but, although very active, the code is still pretty alpha, and severely broken in places. Definitely worth keeping an eye on, though.

What a pleasant surprise! I have been graced with a referencing link on the site of the formidable Dr. Keyboard, whose column appears weekly in the Times (London, UK), and has an excellent site for questions, how-to's and tips (linked at his "name" above). Thank you, kind sir.

Lunch today in Mountain View was most wonderful. Fiesta del Mar, on Shoreline Blvd, one block west of Highway 101. Great hispanic and seafood dishes - I have eaten there many times before, and have never been disappointed. I strongly recommend eating at Fiesta del Mar when you are in the area. There are no reservations, and is usually a wait. Make sure you sign in at the binder when you come in - no one is going to do that for you. I am told (being a non-drinker myself) that their margaritas are good, as well. A major hangout for the post-work SGI crowd as well, methinks.

OK. This is being composed in StarOffice 5.1. That is to say, I have opened current.html and begun editing. Wow. I really hate that feature... wait one moment while I adjust the menus with this ball peen hammer. . . there. Now when I compose, ahhh - I had to turn off this REALLY obnoxious auto-completion feature (Tools | AutoCorrect - Options tab, uncheck Auto completion). It tried to turn "StarOffice" into one thing, and tried to turn "compose" into "combine" once I had typed "com"...

The Star Office Report, (give me $40M and I will remove the "Office" from that paragraph title) on getting and installing StarOffice 5.1 for Linux... GET - go to http://www.sun.com/staroffice/ and download the software (that is, if you want to, you needn't on my account). It downloads a .tar.gz file, I think. I put the file in /usr/local/. Why? Well, it didn't come with my distribution, so if I do an overwrite upgrade, and I haven't got this in either /usr/local or /home, then it will be gone. Now I may or may not desire it gone, but I put it in a place where I can choose StarOffice's fate.

Installation. You are running X. Gnome, KDE, AfterStep, I don't care, but SO installs under X. I have done this once before and then trashed my installation. Let me tell you why. SO' Single User Installation procedure unpacks and puts all of the executables... in your home directory... approximately 150M. And you haven't even created a single document yet. Sigh. I back up my /home and /etc directories. I don't want to commit 150M of SO executables to tape. So out the door that went. Now - how to do a "Network" Installation, followed by a User Installation, as recommended by me. ((*&^%* - this thing auto capitalizes by default... fixed)

su....
cd /usr/local
tar zxvf so51a_lnx_01.tar.gz
(or tar xvf so51a_lnx_01.tar if you just get a tarball)
cd so51inst
ls

Which yields documentation and office51 directories. The documentation is a pdf file. Read it if you desire. It contains all sorts of useful instructions, buried within notices about registration and licensing and stuff translated from german into a language which strongly resembles English. There are a few key things left out though, and I will summarize the correct steps. Bear in mind that what I am writing here worked for me. YMMV.

cd offfice51
./setup /net

The spindle trundles for a while, then you start getting dialog boxes. License stuff, registration stuff... An Important Information box, which talks about which distributions of Linux will support StarOffice5.1 without needing any other upgrades. Page down enough to read this, then bail out if you can't. I know it runs on RH6.0. YMMV. Select Custom Installation, then... oops. It wants to install itself in /root/Office51. DO NOT DO THIS. The documentation says select the installation directory, with no guidance regarding which directories might be appropriate. Later, after you have done this step, and completed the network installation, the docs say "cd /opt/Office51/bin" How interesting. This is the first reference to a place where you would want to install. So, to reiterate - do not accept the default installation directory of /root/Office51.... either put it in /opt/Office51, or do as I did, and put it in /usr/local/Office51. You can accept the default group of modules if you want. I turned off all the language modules except for English/US. Then let the install run. It has a familiar looking sliding completion bar, and below, a time-until-completion clock, handy.

Now, become Clark Kent again (drop the superuser guise). Then (using my installation dirs for example) :

cd /usr/local/Office51/bin
./setup.

This asks questions of you that personalizes the software for you. This will be very familiar to anyone who has ever installed Microsoft's suite. It wants to put about 1.7M of files in your home directory, in a sub called (surprise) Office51. Let it.

cd ~/Office51/bin
./soffice &

There you are. Explore. Have fun. Read and write MS Office documents, without a scrap of MS code on your system. Like parts of it, hate parts of it. I am going to try this out for about a week solid, live in the product. Write reports about what I find. I probably will not live in SO. But who knows, things change. (note - final edits and links cut in using bluefish. More to learn.)

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September 23, 1999



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I awake to see a news item (dead link, sorry) in My Yahoo (yup, a portal is my homepage) that Transmeta is going to be making an announcement... and the article, which quotes Linus Torvalds (some Finn of ill-repute) as saying that they may say something, or say when they will say something at Comdex. The suspense is killing me. >g<

Out of the corner of my ear, TV news broadcast, a new Rocky Horror sequel !!! I saw the original more times than I would care to admit (probably X > 100) and while I saw Shock Treatment a few times, and liked the music, the story just wasn't campy enough to be a true RHPS sequel. This one is supposed to be a true sequel, with all the same characters (I don't know that they could get all the same actors), and unless it is a prequel or Frank is undead... well, you never know, given the mind of Richard O'Brien, this could be a The Joy of Rigor Mortis (grimace)

Brian,

Oh dear, I come back to your page after a few days and you've produced reams of interesting stuff, the reading of which took a lot more out of my morning time budget than I expected.

The reverese ftp thing was neat, and is but one illustration of the window-in-a-box power of Linux. And thanks for another good description of StarOffice install. I've pulled a copy of that for my local wiki for the day I get around to looking at this. (I've set up my local wikis so that the pages can be accessed in any OS where I have a browser -- or failing that, these are after all just plain text files with descriptive names (=title).)

Keep up the good work, but don't feel stressed or pressured by any imagined demands by your suddenly growing readership. Do it for fun, that's most enjoyable for everyone in the long run.

/ Bo
--
"Bo Leuf"
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/

Thanks so much for the kind words. I am having fun. This is sort of like what my boss said the other day, "You should be on stage, [or doing this, or doing that] - You would have a lot more fun." To which I replied, "I am having fun now, I am just staying poor (hint, hint)." He laughed. I will get around to de-mucking the background later today. Currently it almost directly matches some parchment-style paper which I use for fancy printing at work, and I like it, but then (lucky me), I still have about 20:18 vision...

Bugs in Bluefish (well, duh, it is 0.3.2 rev. software, after all)... Also, you note that I am not using SO html just now... more later. Home now, it has been a long day, just about half over. I do so like to whine sometimes... there. All better now. Thanks for waiting.

I have now received my copy of O'Reilly's Running Linux (Thank you Amazon for the prompt service and a price about 20% less than the other large online book seller). Yes, unless I am buying Science Fiction through one of Jerry's links, I always side-by-side browse for books in the two majors, because there can be MAJOR differences in price! So, now that I have one of the top recommended books for the Linux environment and I have been running Linux live for about six months or so, this go-round.... I think I will read the book. There is, in the preface, a little bomb icon described as that which is shown next to items for which you should exercise "Caution: you can make a mistake here that disables or damages your system or is hard to recover from." Cool... I wonder how long I've been emulating a blind man strolling about a minefield without even a stick.

StarOffice's HTML wysiwyg tool is almost good enough. But I need to noodle with it when I am not thinking about what to write. Even though right now I am using hard carriage returns, and putting int the href's and font's myself - this doesn't get in my way. How the material formats is part and parcel of what I am presenting, and this rarely interrupts the flow for me. Also, the SO browser runs the text of Bob Thompson's page right off the edge. That just won't do. Clearly there are some more configuration things I need to deal with before I could consider becoming a full-time SO user - If I can't browse or write html easily, then the rest becomes a boot when needed application, and I am not sure it would be needed enough for the 225M + installation space which is committed (150M installation and I am keeping the tarball for if when I futz things up) That of course points up another of the advantages of the $10 CD distribution.

With a tip of the hat to Bo Leuf, the background is banished to the background. Your feedback (yeah, all of you) is important to what happens here. From the Credit Where It's Due department - I note at Tom Syroid's place that Bob Thompson owns Daynotes (as in copywritten)... I grovel in the dust. I just sent the following off

I somehow managed to miss that you had rights on the Daynotes name. Credit where it's due, of course, but I would be happy to discontinue usage if you so desire. Please forgive my ignorance. I was born in the wrong era - I should have been a village idiot.

Late Breaking NEWS... Matt Beland has nailed his plank to a tree and opened for business. As the semi-official (and self appointed (or is that annointed (don't you just love nested parentheses - reminds me of Lisp (Lots of Insane Stupid Parentheses)))) biographer of the people sometimes referred to as the Daynotes Gang [1]... you gotta have a look here. heh. hehehehe...

No, no. I was only kidding. The trouble is, my sense of humor is so dry as to be completely overlookable.

I decided to give Tom a bad moment, so I quickly added a couple of words to my legal notice, claiming the trademark on "Daynotes".

I should've known that a bunch of writers would take any claim to IP seriously indeed. It wasn't funny.

I hereby release any claim I may have to the term "Daynotes" under the GPL.

Bob
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

Ever the scholar and the gentleman... but Bob is right, in this day and age, to coin a phrase, You Are Your Content [tm]... please note you saw that here first... AOL? Line forms on the right, yeah, fall in behind Gates. "... and by your actions will he know you." That applied in the dark ages, when three new people a year turned up at your village (could have been a round dozen, but wolves, four legged and two, dined on the other nine). Now some of us always live just down the hall from everyone else, here on the superhighway.

Matt tells me that DNS only may be hard to come by. Now I understand that some in the linux community will provide DNS services for others. This is nice. However, I am willing to pay a reasonable fee for services rendered - I just have to find a host. I have heard of a couple of free services, and I think that InterNIC itself will be happy to nick you a hefty fee over and above registration fees to provide DNS. How many bytes stored? How much traffic? Can I have a license to print money too?

Lastly (for now). Do you know (in my best Andy Rooney style) what I hate? That when StarOffice had finished editing this document for me, my saved at the bottom blockquote & font combo, that I was able to copy and paste anytime I wanted to print an incoming letter WAS GONE. Argh. Software should never think it is smart enough to take something out that it didn't put in. I really detest that.

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September 24, 1999



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An email this AM reminded me of this piece from the Seattle Weekly, entitled Microsoft's New Brain Project. If you haven't seen or heard this one, give it a gander - it is worth a look and a chuckle or five.

Well, last night the Win98 box started increasing its misbehavior cycle - we had been having sporadic auto reboot problems - which I though were related to power quality but now appear to be a hardware problem - oops, maybe not - it did this 3 times last evening, but then ran fine all night... Argh - I hate intermittent problems. Also last evening, we started the process of getting a couple of domain names, and getting DNS hosting service to point to the static IP that y'all use now to get here. I am currently NOT dealing directly with InterNic (for which I am glad), and I have found a resource for free DNS hosting. We shall see - the innocent shall remain nameless until success or failure has shown its hand. Have a good Friday - I'll be in touch later.

Moshe Bar, Israeli networking wizard, Linux guru and Byte columnist has a web site called cvs.sentience.org, hosted on a Cobalt Qube, living where he is. There is a bit of poking fun at Microsoft here on his site. Well, run by the richest guy in the world, they can afford to have a little fun poked at them. Moshe has done some interesting columns for Byte, and some very instructive stuff, accessible from the Past Articles link on his site. A good resource.

HP wins my Customer Service Excellence of the year award. And we still have 3+ months to go. When I tricked convinced Marcia to let me load Linux on this Gateway, and my programming course load was picking up, we knew we needed another box. A fair amount of shopping around brought us to the HP Pavillion 4445, a cute, well designed box. Well, a cute, well designed box which has been randomly rebooting over the last couple of weeks. The last straw came last night at about 9, when the third reboot of the evening happened.

Everything is backed up to the Linux box, and I am on the phone to HP CS this am... and I get through to a living body inside of two minutes. I nearly hung up on Rob just to let him know how he should be doing his job. We discussed the symptoms, and some manufacturing changes that occurred around the time of our machine's genesis and concluded that (probably) the memory was at fault, and he gave me some instructions on testing to confirm our hypothesis.

This afternoon, the tests having confirmed, I called again. I got through to someone else within about 3 minutes. Will SOMEBODY please tell these people how to run a Customer Service organization!!! Anyway, Michael disagrees with Rob, thinks that while it could be a memory problem, it is more likely heat - are all the fans spinning? They are. OK, well, he will set up a service call and have the power supply, the cpu and cpu cooling, and the memory replaced. I said "a service call". That's right, HP will have a service tech here to do the repairs, between 5 and 7 pm next Wednesday. Convenient hours. This year. Sigh.

So that's why HP wins the award. No one is going to beat that. They may already be next year's winner, too.

Tidbits. RealPlayer G2 Alpha for Linux is running, solid on my machine. Available for glibc2 type distro's here ... NOT ANY MORE... Get realplayer for Unix/Linux starting here. This is REALLY hard to find - doesn't show up in real.com's indexes, but the product is currently working fine for me. I think some content kills it though. More when I know more.

Another daily email I actually look for is Red Herring's Catch of the Day. Now I am neither a VC nor (currently) a looking-for-funding entrepreneur. This is sort of (to me anyway) SV's version of lifestyles of the rich and bored. Today's blurb was on Drive-By Ventures??? Anyway, there was a link to this, entitled Domain Names Want To Be Free. Interesting, eh, Tom?

Lastly, a StarOffice behaviour that I like ... I know - I am a GUI wuss - but I like programs that overlay a filesystem, and open the correct program when the file type is detected. I was testing SO to see how it would handle the protected mode .pdf books I get for my ZDU coursework. SO didn't open the file itself, it looked in the path, found that I had acroread, and started that, with the correct file defaulted in. This is good.

Tomorrow we are off early to visit my folks, then head northeast to Sacramento to visit my sister and the new nephew, Robert Michael Ellison. Have a lovely Saturday, I will drop in late.

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September 25, 1999



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Or I will drop in early... ;) Dr. Pournelle is having difficulties, apparently with his hosting service's ability to serve his pages to the world. They (the pages and/or images) keep half loading and then saying "Done" without that being true. Tom says that he is having trouble with these pages. Anybody else? Just Canadians? There are a couple of things I can do to (possibly) speed up the response of this system, but we are still limited by bandwidth - this DSL connection has a 128k upload rate cap on it, and I am limited enough on funds that I'd rather not spend the extra $50 a month going up to 384k right now. If it is just system response, then I could always re-nice the setiathome (I am currently 58127 in rank, with 85 work units complete, just little old me), since the cpu is always max'd out on seti stuff, it may be taking a couple of taps on the shoulder before apache gets attention. If you have problems accessing this site, let me know - we'll try to work something out. Have a lovely day. See you later.

Is it later, yet? Everyone's fine, we had a lovely 90+ (F) day here in sunny CA. Drove up through the Sacramento River delta, which is just gorgeous. The roads roll on the levees on alternate sides of the river, with a draw bridge to be crossed every few miles. Should have brought the fishing gear, but then we never would have seen the new nephew. Does all the things a 3 week old kid should - eat sleep cry and excrete. We had a nice visit, and a good meal at a mexican restaurant on the road back. Not much blood has returned to my skull from digesting yet, I fear. Lots to do tomorrow! Oh, btw - HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE! Good night.

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September 26, 1999



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0700 -Well, now that I have been at it for a couple of hours, there is finally a significant amount of light in the eastern sky. I have been known to say that I don't like sleeping in on Sunday mornings, since that ruins my sleeping patterns for the entire week. But 5am is ridiculous! Anyway, I have caught up on SOME of my C++ work, and am doing more. Items of interest for the Sunday Morning Crew - Dan Goldin says privatization of LEO space a Good Thing [tm] here, in this article on Wired News. In a Slashdot poll, the most powerful doctor chosen was Dr. Strangelove, squeaking past Dr. Evil for the win. While I approve that "moral" victory (as Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned To Love The Bomb (??) was a much better movie), I am saddened to see that none of the incarnations of Dr. Who even made the final cut.

And said in a mailing list posting yesterday - "StarOffice is an effort to copy Word and Excell [sic]. This I think never works out well." To which I replied something along the lines of ...

Well, you are certain of your opinions. SO5.1 (while quite the space hog, as noted) DOES easily read and write RTF and Word97 documents. I have not either Word6 or any Word6 documents to test it's ability here... but the two types of proprietary formatted docs I did test it did a creditable job. Even opens and plays PP presentations. I got one from a marketing schmu just to test!

The sorry truth of the matter is that many of us WILL have to continue to work with people who are unfortunately unenlightened or corporately clue-free. These people will, in order to become linux friendly, be able to access their legacy documents. SO provides a path for that. Bits of the interface are really clunky, and it is slow and a resource hog, but then, they are trying to access documents created under a slow, clunky resource hog of an OS, so really SO is just being polite to these legacy documents ;)

You see, while I have used MS products for many years, and will continue to do so as appropriate to the task at hand, Linux's success is important to pushing MS into software quality and reliability which has gone missing from their stable of late. The same premise holds for AMD as a viable competitor to Intel. In the end - we all benefit.

Dan Bowman last evening told me that my ugly mug was missing from this page. To Dan - Thanks - its fixed, and thanks for the feedback on site loading speeds. To the rest of you - I apologize for restoring the link. ;)

Well, a semi-non-productive day, all told. Perfect for a Sunday. I have joined Al Gore in the ranks of Internet GODS by releasing speed gremlins into the net so that Tom Syroid can load content quickly from my site. Amazingly enough, I was able to accomplish this feat entirely while shopping, hands free of any computer, for the upcoming camping trip, and grocery shopping for the work week ahead. Aren't I just amazing (and humble, too)

Tom is also to blame thank for the link on his site for today, Sunday 09/25. No link - I am not going to make it too easy for you to get there, because then you will link through to Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (also not a link). You must struggle to get there, because when you do, you will find yourself drawn into this web of personal and web design philosphy which is very interesting, very informative and attractive to us in the same way that the La Brea Tar Pits were attractive to pre-historic beasties. A major time sink.

Games on Linux. I burned a couple of hours today playing Quake for Linux on Lcow. Much more extensive levels and challenges than available in the windows version (that is it is taking me a lot longer, and I haven't completed yet, although I knocked off the Windows version in about a weekend). There are some other games which are very highly rated and are available in the Linux environment. Many of them are referenced and rated at the Linux Game Tome, a cool place to visit. Look up Civilization, Call To Power from Loki. I have heard this is major cool (xmas hint, you betcha). Also, a story on Slashdot reported a Microsoft employee calling tech support for installing Civ:CTP on a RH6.0 system... the story goes that MS is running usability testing on Linux systems. I do think that the story is true - that is to say that if MS is NOT doing any testing of Linux to see how serious the competition is, they are more foolish than I give them credit for.

Late night update and errata... Since I was feeling older (you know, internet years), I must have added 5 years to the age of SNL, too. We enjoyed the TWENTY-FIFTH year anniversary show this evening. Data sheets, digital shoots, pdf files and a new network install, all next week, right here - and that's just the day job. Who knows what else we'll get up to? Certainly more StarOffice. A little more Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++, 2nd Ed. And I'm pulling for Jerry Pournelle to whip Pair into shape. It even blows on a DSL connection. Sigh.