EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I respect that. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.
My morning's been eaten by email, so sorry. Nothing wonderfully, terribly interesting, however. A fair bit of traffic about the new Webvan site which refuses to do business with Linux clients, due to bad coding - their old site used to, apparently. Javascrap is what they're calling it, and what they're blaming. Heh.
More later, but I need to hit the road. Have a lovely day.
17:45 - Home again, home again... with some mail. I sent Bob Walder a reference to an article called Conventional Public Key Infrastructure: An Artefact Ill-Fitted to the Needs of the Information Society ...
Thanks for this - very kind of you to send it. I will study it when I have more time. MY first impression is that the guy is not exactly wrong, but I don't see him come up with any firm alternative that has deliverable product out there at this time. It's like WAP, I guess - everyone can see its problems, but it is the best we have at the moment. The problem for companies is, how much money do you want to spend implementing an infrastructure that may or may not be valid in five years time?
To which I replied something along the lines of needing to bet on horses, the state of Category 6 structured wiring standards and the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, a'la Dirk Gently. That is to say, I answered at work, and didn't copy myself, sigh.
On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 05:16:49PM -0600, Matthew Harting wrote: I am glad that you and Tom finished the book. I was wondering how closely this book is tied to Caldera. I use Red Hat 6.2 currently, but a lot of the stuff you talked about writing up in the book is stuff I am trying to learn. Will the way you presented it be good for any Linux distro?
The short answer is yes, we wrote the book to be useful to Linux users in general. A book that's only good for one version of one distribution has very little lasting value. We worked *hard* to convey data that is applicable to general circumstances, which is useful, of course, to Caldera eDesktop users, too. Where there is information specific to Caldera's distro, we noted that. Most Linux distributions have less distance between them than Windows NT and Windows 98. The true differences between the various distributions is in the installer, and a bit of difference in where specific files land in the filesystem from the packaging system (RPM in Caldera's case). The latter should be lessening as the FHS is slowly adopted. Additionally, the commercial third party packages that are bundled with each distro are different, but mostly those are the same eval or limited use versions that are available online. I think you'll like it. It's the book I wanted when I was getting started in Linux.
Top & Search / Index & Links / Home / Email Bilbrey
This computer doesn't know how to behave. Grinch hasn't run Windows in nearly 48 hours now. Heh. And a good thing, too ... WARNING - VIRUS SPREAD - Danger, Will Robinson. The name of the beast (according to Symantec) is W32.Navidad. It's got a high evilness rating, and is apparently spreading rapidly. Here's the alert page at the Symantec AV Center. It appears to require reinstallation of Windows to repair the damage done. Whew. Update those virus definitions, folks. I know you've probably heard about it in recent days, but it's being discussed on a Linux list, which is a threshold indicator for me.
Good morning. It's Live from the Archives Day. My radio station, KFOG, holds and records lots of live small events each year with popular artists in the Alternative and Rock music genres (Sorry about the popup crap when you hit their website). Each year a handful of tracks are donated by the musicians, and published in a limited pressing. All the proceeds aside from production costs go to Bay Area food banks. They've raised over a million dollars over the last 6 years. A good cause, and great music, but it goes fast. 25,000 discs sold in less than 36 hours last year, an area sales record.
I have some more experiments to do with Mandrake 7.2 - it is still unstable on Gryphon. Yes, I am trying it again, because I like the distro muchly. On the face of it, though, it's way less useful for me than Caldera's eDesktop, with a kernel and KDE2 upgrade applied. Stay tuned to these pages. Off to work at the salt mines for now, look for me to be back later, as I was last night, only perhaps a bit more... talkative <g>. Take care.
Top & Search / Index & Links / Home / Email Bilbrey
Or not at all. Sorry for the lack of update,and today's brevity... I started to get halo effects at the edges of my vision, a whole-head ache, and light nausea yesterday morning, so I downed some caffeine and some Ibuprofin, then headed for home and a quiet dark room, trying to stave off the migrane. I managed to sleep for about 5 hours, and woke up absolutely washed out. I don't feel great this morning, but I'll get by.
I didn't do, learn, or read squat yesterday (an annoying non-event), so I have nothing interesting to report, though I now know that we're supposed to have a CDRom in the book. Sigh. I know that we both thought that was settled months ago. Now I am going to go to work. Should be OK. Take care, peoples. Later.
Top & Search / Index & Links / Home / Email Bilbrey
Good morning. Feeling much better for some reason today. I put in a grueling 6 hour day at the office yesterday, and headed home for $BRAND_NAME_HOT_MEDICINE_DRINK (Thanks, Tom) and a nap. I didn't get all the way there. Instead I started editing Author Review Chapters. After a kvetch session with Tom over the joys of coping with someone that's piddled in our soup, I knocked out Chapter 5 and sent it on to Tom for forwarding to IDG.
In the interim, I started ripping and encoding some music for Marcia to listen to at work. I did that on Gryphon, who is once again running Mandrake 7.2, after many makeovers in the last week. This one may stick though - it appears stable, and the only difference is that I am using the old 3.3.6 XFree86, rather than 4.0.1. Hmmm. In other news, I noticed only after ripping 4 discs that the output format is .ogg.
Now that in itself isn't startling, though you may not have heard off Ogg Vorbis, the OS replacement for the patent-encumbered MP3 format. Check it out - you'll be wanting to convert to this, since the "owners" of the MP3 format (the buttheads who's name escapes me at the moment) plan on charging for use on or about the end of this year. Oh, yeah, they're going to be doing a streamable video format next, too. Keep an eye on Xiphophorus.
No, the surprise is that this is the first distribution I know of to both include oggenc in the packages, and have it installed as the default format in grip, the GUI rip/encode frontend tool. It's OK for me, since the OGG codec is also in XMMS, but I don't know if Marcia can listen to these - I may need to re-do these 4 disks. Hmmm.
By the way, if you have some time and bandwidth on your hands, then check out Stephen Adler's photo gallery on Super Computing 2000 - there are several pages of very, very cool computing machinery pictured there. I found several years worth of Christmas presents there, Bob! Credit the link to Technocrat.net, a place with usually serious issues to be considered, but the occasional eye-candy link.
Now to work with me. Take care.
Top & Search / Index & Links / Home / Email Bilbrey
So, welcome to Friday. Am I really going to make this a Friday, and not work this weekend? Errr. Probably not - we want the AR chapters to be finished by end of month. I forwarded one to Tom yesterday, and finished most of another, after tracking down our Technical Editor, Kurt Wall, to answer a couple of key riddles raised by his comments. That one goes in tonight, along with another - we should have half the book done by Monday at this pace. Not altogether a bad thing. I might slack a little though... <g>
I did take a break last night to watch the second edition of What's My Line, the Drew Carey hosted improvisational comedy show -- guesting along with the regulars was ... Robin Williams. While I am sure his standup skills are just a tad rusty, he more than makes up for it in "just plain strange". I like it. At one point the question before the four comedians was "thoughts going through Robin Williams' mind". Robin jumped out and said, "What the hell am I doing? I have a career!" Heh. I'll tell you this, while I run hot and cold on his movies, I really, really liked What Dreams May Come, both as a story, and for the effects.
Gryphon the Acer Travelmate appears to be finally taking to Mandrake 7.2. I can only suspect XFree4.0.1, so we'll leave it at that. I've nearly got the KDE2 configuration as I like it. I'll continue to use Gnome on this desktop for a while, but we'll see - I may have to switch. I did end up re-ripping that music for Marcia last night as well. While apparently there's an Ogg Vorbis plugin for WinAmp, I couldn't get it (server difficulties, apparently), and I think that Marcia uses either Real or MediaPlayer anyway, on her work box, neither of which appears to be champing at the bit to support OGG, even though many Linux players have jumped on the bandwagon.
We thrashed out a pricing structure for a batch of new products yesterday afternoon, now I have to head in and meld all those changes into a new price sheet revision. Then I've got three more PCB designs to work on (for three of those new products we've just priced), and a second round of prototype for the new Cat5e patch module to experiment with. Should be a busy day at my rowing bench.
Have a lovely day. Later.
Top & Search / Index & Links / Home / Email Bilbrey
Good morning. Up at 7-ish, but only now, with coffee and a couple of waffles ingested, do I feel vaguely ... what's that word? ... oh, right: human. <g> Chapter 7's on its way, and I have two that I want to get through today, we'll see. I've been to Bob's message board, courtesy of Greg Lincoln. Turns out I've some defect in Konqueror 2.0 that prevents me from interacting with the CGI scripts that run Ikonboard, the message board software. I can work with Netscrape and Galeon (and one presumes Exploder) just fine. But Konqueror, which I am striving to use exclusively, doesn't cut the mustard. May be time to compile from sources.
I'll be back later, but there's AR chapters to work on, and chores around the freehold that need tending to. Y'all have a great day, now.
Top & Search / Index & Links / Home / Email Bilbrey
Sorry. A mis-behaving application (not this one, but gPhoto, somehow, someway... BAAAD program. Sit. Stay.) just hosed the last half hour of typing, and I have neither the patience nor the energy to recreate my whole post at this time, so here's a quicky reprise of some bits that I enjoyed: Found InPassing.org from Dan Bowman's site, laughed hard enough to need medical attention and shot most of my free time this morning. At Slashdot, I found a link to the Times story of the recovered Enigma machine
I did take the evening off yesterday, and we put the fireplace to good use for the first time this season (get your mind out of that gutter, young person - we built a fire, you know, flames and seasoned oak, crackle crackle crackle?), watched a little TV and generally enjoyed some serious quality time with one another, which has been rare-ish with the book work that is ongoing.
Today, I have Costco and maybe Frys again, then I have Chapter 12 and a start on Chapter 16 to make for Author Reviews. I know, but Tom and I collaborated on bringing Chapter 14 into the 21st century yesterday, and that ate most of our days. Now I have to run. Have a great day. TTFN.
Top & Search / Index & Links / Home / Email Bilbrey