Tom at 16

Week of December 12th, 2002

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Saturday January 4, 2003

I'll be in Vancouver for the weekend tending to some family matters -- see you Monday.

Friday January 3, 2003

I stuck my head out the back door last night about 10 and discovered -- to my horror -- it was raining. Rain. In Saskatchewan. In January. WTF would have been a gross understatement. It just doesn't rain in Saskatchewan in January. On second thought, I guess it does... I've seen some pretty wild and wooley weather in my lifetime, but nothing like the winter we've experienced this year.

The mercury plunged in the wee hours of the morning, and when I awoke at 6 or so it was -10C. If I had hair, I would have been able to use our driveway as a mirror and comb it. Then, just to add some excitement to the situation, about 9 a thick fog rolled in. The kind that -- when it's 10 below -- leaves a fine layout of ice on everything. Needless to say, travelling by motor car was a tad on the dangerous side today.

I finished See No Evil by Robert Baer tonight. In case you missed my earlier post, the title is "the true story of a ground soldier in the CIA's war on terrorism". Very compelling. I don't have the means to challenge the facts as presented, but if half of what he says is true, September 11th should have come as no surprise to anyone in the US government. According to Baer, in the months prior to the attacks there was a grand total of two operatives working in the Middle East. Two. And it 'twernt cuz there weren't things to keep watch on. I won't spoil the story lest you decide to pick it up; I do promise if you read the book from cover to cover you'll not only come away with a new appreciation for the "foot soldiers" of agencies like the CIA, but a new distain for the antics of government in Washington.

I think I'm going to tack another wack at Gentoo tonight. The dev team just kicked out RC2 today, plus a timeline for testing. If RC2 is relatively solid and any bugs that arise can be easily addressed, 1.4 final should hit the streets in two weeks. Guess it's time to give back to the months of hard work the Gentoo development team have put into this release. Wish me luck...

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Thursday January 2, 2003

Good day, and a very Happy New Year to everyone.

I have indeed been a bit remissive in my duties here the past few weeks. I've enjoyed more downtime in the last two weeks than I have in the last two years, and I'm not done yet. Offically, I start work again Monday. I do, however, plan to start mapping out on a piece due next week today and tomorrow to prevent next week from becoming a zoo.

Saskatoon is still digging out from the snowfall we had Sunday night / Monday. We got over a foot in 24 hours. The city's been pretty much shut down since late Tuesday afternoon, and while the snow removal crews got the main streets done Monday night, Tuesday morning, most side-streets still look like a winter wonderland. All of which makes me very much appreciate my morning commute -- down the stairs, with coffee in hand.

As you've probably gathered, I haven't spent much time at the keyboard this week so I don't have much in the way of war stories to tell save for one... Tuesday, after mulling the matter all day, I decided to scrub my notebook hard drive down to bare metal and start fresh. The reason: My Gentoo 'root' partition was sitting at 96%. I had a couple options I could have persued, but everything I came up with was a stop-gap measure and not a long-term solution. In short, to correctly address the problem I'd eventually have to modify my partition layout. Funny how my attitude's changed over the years. There was a day not so long ago that I'd think nothing of once a week blowing away a Windows installation and starting over. My decision Tuesday was a painful one and took an inordinate amount of time. Nothing was broken. Everything worked, and worked well. I was just fast running out of space on one critical partition and I wanted to address the issue before I started back to work. I guess I could have gone out and bought a copy of the latest Partition Magic (I understand the latest release supports EXT3 partitions, and I use EXT3 on all my Linux installations), but I was either too lazy or too cheap -- I don't recall which was the deciding factor. So I moved everything I wanted to keep off the drive, stuffed my Gentoo boot CD into the drive, fired up fdisk, blew everything away, and started with a tabula rasa. While I don't necessarily regret the decision, spending $70 on a copy of Partition Magic would have been a wise investment.

I fully intended to rebuild my system just as it was before -- Windows XP on the front of the drive, Gentoo 1.4 on the back -- except with a "more better" partition structure. I'll get there eventually, but for the moment I'm stuck with XP/Red Hat 8. Not that there's anything wrong with Red Hat 8. It's not my beloved Gentoo, though, and after working with KDE 3.1 for the past several months, KDE 3.0 really sucks.

For the first time ever, I couldn't get Gentoo to install. I should clarify that statement. I couldn't get the latest stage 1 rc release installed (20021223, IIRC). Stage 1 built without error, and stage 2 completed (which for the most part is nothing more than emerge -p system), but every time I tried to fire up make menuconfig to configure the kernel, it would die with a "can't find ncurses" error. I started from scratch twice, and both times watched ncurses build, correctly, without error. I checked all the library configuration files. I manually injected ncurses. I backed off one rev. No bloody joy. I eventually quit in exasperation and threw RH 8 on the system. I didn't take the time to configure wireless, but aside from that I had a fully functional installation in just over an hour. I gotta hand to the folks at Red Hat -- they got 8.0 "right" in almost every sense of the word.

Yeah, I could have gone back a release or two and probably got Gentoo installed. I decided to wait. Gentoo 1.4 final is due out soon; so is KDE 3.1 final. Waiting means I'll only have to build KDE once ;-)

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