Tom at 16

Week of July 29th, 2002

Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com

Saturday August 3, 2002

From our local newspaper this morning:

August chill smashes records

"The thermometer dipped below zero in several Saskatchewan locations early Friday morning, shattering 79-year-old records and bringing frost to drought-stressed crops. Environment Canada reported 15 record lows in the province, with the coldest temperature recorded in Spiritwood at -2.8 C. Saskatoon thermometers fell to 0.4 C Thursday night, breaking a 1933 record of 1.7 C."

Mmmm. We had frost June 1st. August 1st we had frost warnings. It would appear summer is over -- two whole months of nice weather. Bleh.

Oh, and by the way... it snowed in Calgary this morning ;-) Time to go see what's left of my vegetable garden.

[Top]

Wednesday July 31, 2002

Cool, damp, and gloomy today... almost feels like September. Ah well. It'll pass, probably by late afternoon; I suspect the farmers are pleased with the rain, as most of the province has been suffering from drought conditions for the past month.

Didn't get anything accomplished on the LDAP front last night -- I was too busy updating the OpenSSL libraries on all my systems. In case you haven't heard yet, four potential vulnerabilities were discovered yesterday during a routine security audit of the OpenSSL codebase. The security advisory is here for anyone interested. Bottom line: Update your OpenSSL libraries to 0.9.6e ASAP. To the best of my knowledge (I'm sure one of my readers will quickly correct me if I'm wrong), any programs statically linked to OpenSSL will also need to be updated/recompiled; programs dynamically linked are not affected.

My Internet connectivity sucks today, so I'll keep this short for the moment. More later when the dead bunnies get flushed from the straw I'm connected to.

[Top]

Tuesday July 30, 2002

I decided to take an extended weekend away from computers. Friday I caught myself exhibiting, on more than one occasion, early signs of burn-out. My productivity dropped off the scale, I struggled to find the right words and phrases, and the topics I was researching all seemed so... well... boring (yawn). Yep. Time to close the lid on my notebook for a few days. The weather mellowed significantly this weekend (mid to high 70's), so we spent the majority of our time tending to the yard -- weeding the gardens, cutting the grass, etc. Turns out my decision was a good one. I feel more relaxed and focused today than I've been in weeks.

Last night I began the process of installing Gentoo Linux 1.3b-rc1 on Donovan, my old Compaq Deskpro (P166, 64MB of RAM, 3GB IDE HDD). Despite the fact I started with the precompiled stage-3-i586 tarball, it still took about three hours to install the base OS; compiling the kernel took almost an hour and a half! (had to do it twice, as I screwed up the first time around). With the base install complete, I then did an emerge -up world. The resulting list contained about a dozen packages, including a new release of gcc 3.1 and several small system utilities such as which, binutils, grep, and less. I started the recompile about 10pm -- it's still trundling away ;-) Poor Donovan. The system sits on a shelf for a year, and out of the blue I put it to work rebuilding all gcc's libraries... Generally speaking, however, I'm impressed. The machine is slow compared to my other systems here at Syroid Manor, but it remains a reliable workhorse. Why Gentoo on Dononvan? Because the IBM system I've been using as a developmental box for the last four months is going back mid-August. So my plan is to move the LDAP configuration currently on Thor over to the Deskpro. I'll detail my config files and show how to use LDAP's various command line tools to create/search the directory store tomorrow.

Cheers.

[Top]