Tom's Insights - Week of 10/8/01

Week of October 8th, 2001

Last Updated: October 15, 2001 22:55

Most Recent : October 12, 2001
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Wednesday October 10, 2001

Bother.

Saturday, Leah was bitten by a dog. Off to the hospital for a tetanus shot we go.

Sunday, Landon awoke with an ugly-looking rash around a scrape. It looked infected, so off to the hospital we go to have it checked.

Tuesday night I'm cutting up a gorgeous pork roast (cooked by rotisserie on the BBQ) and somehow manage to cut my finger. It wasn't that deep or long, but it wouldn't stop bleeding so... yep, off to the hospital I go for a stitch. Actually, three.

And given that that was the third of three things in four days, hopefully I won't be anywhere near the hospital anytime soon. Hopefully.

As you may have noticed, I've changed my layout a bit. Several readers pointed out that when I didn't post regularly, part of the guilt I felt came from looking at all the empty holes on my weekly page. So I'll eliminate the holes <grin>... This will do for now, given my schedule -- we'll see what I can conjure up down the road when I pry loose some time in my daily schedule. Note I said when and not if. The mark of confidence.

My Linux adventures of late have been focused solely on "tinkering". The current drivers from NVidia do not allow me to use Linux on my laptop for any serious work. I say drivers, but it could also be the BIOS, the XFree server, or how KDE/Gnome is built. So I'm playing on the bleeding edge to experiment and learn about some "down the road" stuff. I've currently got QT 3.0.0 beta6 built and running, and I'm in the throes of compiling KDE 3.0-alpha1 piece-by-piece (or perhaps more appropriately, package-by-package). QT alone takes over an hour to compile, and if an error occurs toward the end of the process, you start all over again. So it's a time-consuming process, but given I have no expectations of anything I'm playing with due to the early stage of development, I don't get all tore up when something doesn't work. In short, I'm having fun with Linux again, and learning a great deal about how all the pieces of a desktop environment fits together.

Ooops. Power just went off. Better go monitor the batteries in case the outage is longer than 1/2 hour or so; if it is, I'll have to do a orderly shutdown... Blast. There go my uptime stats again. Can't complain really; this is the first time the power's been off all summer.

See ya'.

Friday October 12, 2001

My experimentation with the "bleeding edge" of Linux continues and I'm not only having fun, but I'm also learning a whole bunch of new stuff. In addition to QT 3-beta6, I now also have the latest development build of Samba (soon to be 2.2.2) and GCC 3.0.2 compiled, installed, and running on Phaedrus. Doing so entailed learning how to use CVS, which is something I'd avoided in the past because it appeared -- from a distance -- to be waayyy too complicated. Turns out that it not all that complicated, and most site that provide CVS also provide detailed instructions on how to use it. I have discovered, however, that all CVS sites are not alike. While the basic commands are the same (sorta), the Samba CVS and the GCC CVS each use a different process to log in to the server. To access the Samba CVS server, you type a string of commands, you're prompted for a password, and you're in (although no message appears to indicate the login was successful); to access the GCC server, you have to set an environment variable, then login, then issue the download command. Mmm.

On a positive note, both products work flawlessly -- without error and as advertised. It certainly helps that both programs are very close to release.

I compiled Samba 2.2.2 with PAM support, smbmount support, and smbwrapper support. For the first time ever (with the aforementioned options, that is) I got a clean build first whack. Cool. There's been a lot of "under the hood" work done on Samba the last few weeks, and from what I see so far, 2.2.2 is shaping up to be a must have for anyone running the product. So far I've had no problems whatsoever, and I've switched configurations a half-dozen time to try different roles and options.

GCC 3.0.2 also simply works. One word of warning: It takes a LONG time to build -- almost an hour on my notebook, which has a 1GZ processor and 512MB of RAM.

The weather remains grand here in Saskatoon; sunny skies and warm temperatures (70-75 F) continue. A remarkable fall. I find it difficult to relate what I see outside to mid-October.

The kids are well and remain... er... challenging. Landon's favorite word is "no" and Danielle has learned to "huff" when she doesn't like something we're telling her to do.

Bother. Interesting times indeed.

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