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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
I currently have -- I think; I don't really don't have time to track stuff like this as I'm too busy writing ;-) -- three or four articles running concurrent on IBM developerWorks at the moment. As I encourage feedback/comments on my work, each article tends to generate a lot of email. Ninety percent of this reader feedback tends to be simple 'Kudos' or 'thanks for the material' oriented, but I do get a lot of queries and/or questions: "Hi, I'm running RH 6.2 with a custom patched PHP installation and Apache 1.3.2 along with latest "gizmo-whamo-zam" wireless keyboard. When I pass my mouse cursor over an open addressbook window, my system segfaults. Can you tell me how to resolve this?" No, my friend, I cannot, because (1) I'm not omniscient, (2) HW/SW interactions are not something that can easily be solved remotely, and (3) while I do my best to present the material I write about in as generic a form as possible, in today's world of ever-shifting OSS development, specifics have a shelf-life of about... ohhhh... 10 minutes.
One of the biggest challenges I face every day, given most of the stuff I write about is OSS-based, is finding just the right "tone" or approach to the task at hand. I do the best I can to give the reader enough background to sort through potential glitches, and try to remove the "mystery" behind the seemingly mystical process of choosing the right package/OS version, orientation to Mecca, etc. But it's a razor's-edge-kinda-thing (aka, "Walking the Razor's Edge, The Uppanishads, circa 400-800 B.C.). Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. Sometimes I succeed enormously with Group A, and sometimes Mary and Joe-Bob "just don't get it". Linux and OSS material, (un)fortunately, cannot always be compartmentalized into Step-1, Step-2, Step-3 procedures. Which is probably why I love writing about it so much. I'm a strange mix of scientist and philosopher. I like to analyze and experiment; I also like to step back and ponder the intangibles.
Most of the interesting Linux/OSS stuff out there is not Plug-n-Play material. If you want Plug-n-Play, choose your poison of Windoz, insert CD or execute-executable, puzzle through the vagrancies of the EULA, and have at it. Want to get your feet wet with Linux without mucking about with initialization scripts or device driver configurations? Pick up a copy of Red Hat 7.3, insert CD, click Next-Next-Next... and presto-pocus. Nothing wrong with this approach whatsoever. Why do you think I keep an active XP partition on my system? 'Cuz there's some things I'd simply rather not WTF with. Take CD burning-recording-duping for example. I've yet to find any good quality, no-brainer CDR software that runs under KDE. That doesn't mean I can't puzzle and hack my way through the task; it just means that -- pour moi -- it's easier to drop into XP when I need to burn a CD. I also write some of the material you read here using Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX running under XP. Sacrareligious? Hardly. Just less hassle. Yes, I could run Dreamweaver MX under Crossover Office. But it's painfully slow under said environment, and again, not worth the effort/frustration quotient. But as they say, YMMV. Welcome to the concept of choice. Said another way, YQMV (Your Quotient May Vary).
Linux, in some ways, is oxymoronic. It can be Plug-n-Pray, kick-ass stable if you so desire. I know people who have Linux servers running with uptime stats of over a year. It can also be flexible beyond your wildest imagination, finicky, and downright fragile (I could easily write a treatise on "Ten Ways to Totally Bork your Linux Installation in Less than Five Keystrokes" ;-). I typically write from a BIB approach (Blooded in Battle) because, like the Marines, I enjoy adventure. It also provides me with unique writing possibilities. Some of the stuff I've written is truly unique because no one else has taken the time to ask the questions I have, or come up with the solutions I have. Which doesn't mean my solutions are necessary unique. What makes my views unique are (a) the path I take to a given solution, or (b) my understanding of why a particular solution works (or doesn't work) is different from the masses. Of course, I could just be totally, flat-out wrong/confused. That's just one of the risks inherent in playing with sharp instruments...
Yes, sometimes nasty flame-laden messages get deposited to my Inbox. Somewhere in one of my recent tutorial (the LDAP address book one, methinks) I made reference to the "fact" the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) was in part sponsored by Red Hat. It's not, and the head coordinator of the LDP shot me an "attitude correcting" email pointing out this fact. Sincere apologies for my transgressions, past and future. Unfortunately, getting IBM to apply corrections to material already posted is akin to getting one's wisdom teeth out. It's a difficult and painful process, due in large part to some very deep political/budgetary constrains inherent in IBM's internal policies. Sorry, I didn't make said policies; I do have to tippy-toe within them.
Enough prattle for now... I've got a busy day ahead. Lot's of household chores to get through, and hopefully -- somewhere in the midst of everything -- some downtime amidst the neverending chaos to enjoy the nice weather we're having. The leaves have begun to change, so it's only a matter of time before the inevitable... snow, cold, bitter winds... you know -- the arrival of Old Man Winter.
Roland shot me an interesting URL this morning: the RHSD, aka the Red Hat Server Development Project. Interesting stuff -- check it out.
And a peaceful and quiet Yom Kippur to my friend Moshe.
I've been nursing a headache most of the week. Odd, because I don't normally get headaches. And this one was more like someone was squeezing my head, rather than the classic internal throb. Today, I finally figured out the problem: Allergies. I didn't immediately tumble to solution as I only suffer from allergies about once every four years. It's been so long, I didn't recognize the symptoms ;-) A Reactine fixed me right up -- within an hour my headache was gone, and the pressure in my sinuses was a thing of the past.
Today was Danielle's belated "public" birthday party. We took her, and a half-dozen of her friends, glow bowling. A fun time was had by all. I haven't been bowling for about 30 years...
Tonight I'm busy trying to build the latest KDE CVS under Gentoo -- 20020913 (ebuild packages are available from www.gentoo.org/~danarmak). No success yet, although the latest QT CVS did build without error and the only thing under my current KDE 3.1 beta that got messed up are some dialog fonts. No biggie and easily fixed by simply resetting them under Control Panel. I'll have a full report on my success (or abysmal failure ;-) tomorrow.
Later all.
I'm wounded, so apologies for the short post.
Last night we harvested our potatoe crop. Gorgeous. There's nothing like fresh potatoes (Yukon Gold, of course) to tame the wild male heart. Most of the "skin" peeled off when I washed them. Anywhooo... We had a bunch of small, bite-sized reminants that would do a potatoe sald justice. So I boiled them up, and when they were folk-tender, I poured the water out... right onto my index finger. Ouch. This morning the skin peeled off, leaving a 1/2 " square of exposed, and very sore skin. Yup. What a Gonnad.
Any chef will tell you, one of the most important tools of the kitchen is a good knife. A good, sharp knife. Rumor has it that sharp knives rarely result in cuts, as people are aware of the sharpness of the knive, and treat it with requisite respect. Of course, said theory only holds true when the bearer of the knife is not trying to cut up a fresh pepper while trying to have an intelligent argument with his/her daughter. Yep. I did so. My middle finger (hence, I can't offer up the "bird" quite so readily as I could yesterday). So my fingers are a tad slower in reacting to events like keystrokes and leud gestures as they were yesterday. As Pooh would say, Bother.
To Kevin Mills: I tried to email you back, but it bounced :=( For my LDAP address book article, go to : http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/. The article is headlined at the top of the page. And thanks. The turkey "chemical" that escaped me the other day is indeed "L-tryptophan".
Be well. I'm off to find something non-exertive to do with my hands...
12:30 hrs: Today is quickly turning into one of those "bazillion-little-annoying-but-necessary" things to do kinda day. I've got a pile of CD's on my desk I need to insert into my drive, figure out the contents, and label. I've got a dozen emails containing queries and comment on my latest developerWorks tutorial I need to respond to. My paperwork pile, carefully hidden from view beside my desk, is starting to get out of hand. I've got about a dozen app/project "check-me-out" URL's spread all over my desktop that are demanding my attention. So it goes. Taken in discrete chunks, each task should only take a maximum of 15-30 minutes -- which is probably why I've been procrastinating about getting them done; lump them together, factor in the demands of my day job, and it appears I'll be chained to my desk long into the night.
Which is too bad, as the weather outside my window is terribly distracting. The last two days have been absolutely splendiferous. Sunny, hot, with a slight fall breeze to keep things fresh. Oh well. Close the binds, head's down, chin up old chap...
For those of you who like to "dance on the razor's edge", Mozilla 1.2 Alpha is out. I've been running it under XP most of the morning -- so far, so good. No crashes or bumps of any kind. One of the new features slated for 1.2 is Type Ahead Find. It's described as "a new feature that allows quick navigation when you type a succession of characters in the browser, matching the text in one or more links on the page". Can't really say I've got a handle on this one yet, but I'm sure I'll grok the concept a little better with a bit of practise. There's also the usual smattering of bug fixes, and it appears the devs have further tightened up the base code -- the programs "seems" to load faster, and pages "appear" to render faster than 1.1. Subjectively speaking, of course.
Looking for a consistent way to uninstall source from your system? Check out CheckInstall. Haven't personally tried it yet, but it's on my TO-DO list. I did managed to give Partition Image for Linux a whirl on RH Null yesterday. Works as advertised. It also supports all the latest filesystems (ext3, JFS, ReiserFS, UFS, etc.). If you're looking for a Linux-driven replacement for PartitionMagi, check out Partition Image. Recommended.
Goede Morgen (Compliments of Swenson ;-).
Fell asleep at the switch last night -- literally and figuratively. Monday I cooked up a nice, fat, juicy turkey. Which meant Tuesday was turkey-and-rice-soup day. I must admit, I really outdid myself this time. The soup was excellent. So much so, I had two large bowels for dinner. And turkey, of course, contains a unique chemical (the name escapes me at the moment) that induces serious mental relaxation, and for most people, sleep. It did, and I did. For a good three hours, upright, on the couch ;-)
I've spent the last two days trying to resolve what -- at first blush -- appeared to be a relatively simple problem. I wrote an article for IBM developerWorks on how to configure OpenLDAP as a "personal address book". I included a short blurb on the Rolodap project, plus two screens to show the apps capabilities. IBM needed the screen reshot smaller. Fair 'nuff. Being short on development boxes, my original installation had long since gone bye-bye, so I set about re-creating the installation on my Red Hat "Null" installtion. No joy. I tried with both the RH supplied OpenLDAP version (2.1.3, me-thinks) and with the latest compiled-from-the-ground-up 2.1.4 release. Nada-workie-workie. OpenLDAP refused to load the Rolodap-modified core.schema. So I tried with RH's default core.schema file. That worked, but when I added the sample.ldif entry to the database, it crapped out half-way through the process. Bleh. The problem might lie in the Apache and PHP versions I'm running (2.0.40 and 4.2.2, respectively), but I don't think so -- Apache loads, and a simple "Hello World" PHP file executes as advertised. Today I plan to revisit the situation, and see if I can't find a resolution to the problem(s). Piffle. Two days to simply reshoot a couple of screens...
I also downloaded Gentoo 1.4 RC1 this morning. Not sure yet where I'm going to excercise it yet, but I'll report back when I have.
Bonjour!. Nope, no idea where I got this sudden propensity for foreign language/quips -- guess it's simply my attempt to mix it up a bit. SSDD (Same Shit Different Day) is a boring for me as it is for you...
I stand pleasantly corrected. It would appear the weather gods do indeed have a few nice days reserved for us here in Saskatoon. Today is shaping up to be a perfect "early fall" day: Sunny and somewhat crisp in the morning, warming throughout the day, and not a cloud in sight anyway. No complaints here. Having experienced a VERY long winter or two in my time, we'll take what we can get.
Public opinion polls always give me a good chuckle. Last week CNN spent considerable airtime broadcasting results of a "recent survey" (based on a sample of 1000) that showed 65% of all Canadians (all?) felt that the events of September 11, 2001 were a direct results of American foreign policy. On the front page of this morning's local newspaper is a story detailing the results of yet another "recent survey" that reveals 54% of Canadians polled (no sampling rate disclosed) support a US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein from power. Yep, we Canucks are indeed a fickle and contradictory bunch ;-).
Time to swing head-long into the day ahead. I've got a two or three proposals to think through and draft into a semblence of coherency, a couple screenshots to redo, and some Java-related WTF's on Janus to try and get my battle-scared knuckles around.
Say what? WTF's hock someone's choiniks? It's a Yiddish phrase which -- loosely translated -- means to "rattle" someone's "teacup". Google is your friend.
Ciao.
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