Tom at 16

Week of March 24th, 2003

Latest Update: Friday March 26, 2003 22:10 CST

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Friday March 28, 2003

I'm gloating tonight. I don't gloat often, or for long (I've been around computers long enough to know the danger in that), but every now and then I allow myself the privilage.

I can't say a whole lot, as I'm under ~~DNA~~ NDA [Thanks Brian ;-)] up the whazoo (think first born :-). Suffice to say I've never run into a piece of software as complex or "innerant" since I started this gig almost 20 years ago.

To tell me something can't be done is akin to waving a very large red flag in front of a big, ugly bull. It's not a healthy thing to do and the results are predictable. It took five months, but early this morning I did what they said couldn't be done. Twice. And I added a level of complexity they didn't consider. Then I did that twice -- just for consistency. And that's about all I have to say about that. </any sense of arrogance>

Today I heard news anchor utter what I'll term a "quiet irony". He said, "Suddenly this war has become much more complex than we anticipated". Mmmm. Who -- in their right mind -- ever thought war was simple? The act of war, and its consequences, has been publically discussed since man hefted his first spear. The topic is a deep and wide one. It is part art, and part sophisticated planning. It is never simple.

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Wednesday March 26, 2003

Whew. It's been a busy few days around here. Long days, slow steady advances, punctuated by small skirmishes. Sound familiar? I worked late into the evening last night sorting files. I completed a rather intense round of installations/configurations over the weekend (and into Monday), supplemented with pages and pages of notes and -- quite literally -- hundreds of screenshots. I was working from several machine throughout the process, and as a result, I ended up with my valuable insights "spread all over hell's-half-acre", as the saying goes. Having reached a consolidation point last night, I decided the first order of business was to get all my 'impotent stuff' copied off to CDR, then try to synchronize all this material into a central location. I was quickly reminded of what a mentally strenuous process this is, even one is using cool tools like rsync. Too often in the past I've gotten in a hurry and overwritten new material with older material, which, in short, is Very Ungood for the blood pressure ;-) So I proceeded with caution and followed that time-honoured adage: Measure twice, cut one. 'Cept I measured about three time before cutting. About 11pm I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes to relieve the strain, and that was the end of that. Poof. There he was, gone. I awoke about 3am and crawled off to bed.

While I was busy shuffling and sorting, Phaedrus was busy doing an "emerge world". Due to my schedule over the past 10 days or so, I hadn't kept my Gentoo install up to date (I'm running bleeding edge [unmasked ~x86] on the system and try to run rsync every day or two so I can keep a close handle on what, if anything, breaks, and why) and the list of updates was long. Normally, when there's only four or six updates in a given time period I inject them one at a time and test before moving on to the next. That way when something goes bump, I can either back off to a prior version or, if time permits, sort through what went amiss. When I end up with a "world" update list of forty or more ebuilds, as I did yesterday, I just take my chances and let emerge -u world trundle away overnight. Which is what I did last night (I really don't need to sit and watch KDE rebuild for 12 hours). When I check this morning everything had updated without error, but when I logged in I once again was confronted with a long scrolling list of a bunch of modules that had "failed to initialize". Mmmm.

Fortunately, I've been down this road before. Last time I toiled with the same issue, the problem was devfsd. So I backed off the latest update. Nope. My next guess was the new baselayout ebuild. Backing off that fixed the problem. But then I had to discern whether the problem was an interaction between the two new ebuilds, one, or the other. So I played music ebuilds. The bottom line: baselayout. Problem resolved, bug report filed. I've made my contribution to the Gentoo effort for the week.

Lot's of news on the distro front this week. Mandrake 9.1 is due out the end of April; Red Hat 9.0 will be available for RHN subscribers on March 31 and the rest of the world on April 7th. I plan to obtain copies of both (I haven't looked at Mandrake for since 8.0, and the screens for 9.1 are compelling enough to make me want to give it a look) and report my impressions here.

I have no comments on the war today. The TV is droning in the background as I write this, but frankly, I'm getting a little "CNN'd out". Time to give it a break.

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Monday March 24, 2003

It's closing on 11pm, and I'm pretty much spent. It's been a busy, productive day here for me. Lots of little insights I've been amassing over the course of the last five months coalesced (sp?) today. Kinda nice when that happens; unfortunately, it doesn't happen often enough. At least not of me. Yeah, I know... I'm getting old.

The weather remains "coolish".

The coalition forces have suddenly found themselves in what's being termed an "asymetrical" confrontation. Interesting to say the least.

I'm very tired, and my eyes are starting to bleed out onto my keyboard. 'Nuff for today.

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