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Last Week Next Week Insights Index Daynotes.com Email: tom@syroidmanor.com
Sorry about yesterday... I found a good read -- much more compelling than pecking at a keyboard, especially given my week. Escapism has its place.
I chewed through three books this week. Which is not to say I had copious amounts of "free" time; just that I felt the need to get my head out of computers for at least a few moments every day. I started with The Rumsfeld Way, moved into John Maxwell's Thinking for a Change, and rounded things out with Stephan Coont's Deep Black. The latter's a story about a "black" covert operation in the Far East. High-tech, good plot, a classic Coonts page-turner. Good stuff.
I typing this from SuSE 8.2. Yup, you read that right. SuSE. Red Hat 9 pissed me off Thursday night. I'd been getting "BAP" errors (don't ask me -- I don't have the foggiest) from my wireless card for a week, primarily when rsync'ing my data to a backup box. The error would repeat in an endless loop until I pulled the card. I tried rebooting. Nope. I tried tweaking the configuration. Nada. And the problem was cropping up with increasing frequency with each passing day. By late Thursday the problem was not only starting to cramp my style, but it was starting to piss me off. I was sitting watching the error loop, mulling possibilities, when my eye caught the shrink-wrapped SuSE Professional 8.2 box sitting in the corner of my office. A courier had delivered it earlier in the week.
The Lord hates a coward. He (or she) doesn't favor inaction much either. So I stuffed disc one in the drive, rebooted the machine, and settled back in my chair.
SuSE's come a long way in the last two years. Their installer is every bit as good as Red Hat's; in some ways, better. Screen are laid out intuitively and it's easy to customize the process on a multitude of levels. Package choices are impressive and extensive. Their KDE implementation is excellent and very functional. But SuSE's init system is distinctly non-standard and very annoying for someone like myself. It's bound tightly to YaST and purports to know more about my needs and wishes than I do. Which leaves me less than amused on occasion. In short, close but no cigar.
My experience with SuSE over the last few days leaves me with the distinct impression that Linux distributions as a whole are "close but no cigar". SuSE correctly detects my sound card, but fails miserably when it comes to wireless. There's a symbol mismatch between the kernel drivers and the PCMCIA version. I could correct it, but it would mean re-compiling the kernel, bringing in an outside driver, and figuring out what PCMCIA driver is needed to bind the equation together. Experience has taught me getting the moon in line with the stars, at least for wireless connectivity, is nothing short of exasperating and time consuming. With Red Hat, on the other hand, I can get wireless functioning by twiddling with the configuration, but I can't get sound working. To do that I'd need to recompile the kernel and move the Maestro driver to the kernel and opposed to running as a module. Again, time and effort based on experience and intuition.
When will Linux "arrive"? I have the test bed sitting in my lap. When I can install a distribution on my Dell Inspiron and have it correctly detect and configure every device, with minimal operator intervention. Close, but no cigar just yet.
It's Landon's birthday next week (the 15th), so we're having a party for him today -- next weekend would have been more appropriate, but it's a long weekend and lots of people will be out of town. Better run and get on with the preparations. Places to go; things to do. Have a pleasant weekend.
Spam has officially become an "issue" for me. I used to get 10-20 spam messages a day. In the last couple weeks, the number has more than doubled. Last weekend, I didn't check mail for two days. On Monday morning I had 120 messages in my Inbox (excluding all the list traffic, which is automatically sorted into mailboxes via server-side rules); fifteen or so were what I'll term valid. This morning I had 49 new messages in my Inbox; they were all spam. I currently rely on several RBL's to keep spam in check, but this single-tier approach is obviously not enough. I'll have to give this some thought, but suspect my next move will be add another filtering layer -- probably SpamAssassin -- to the server.
I've got another piece due today, so I'd better get at it.
It's Windsday. It's also Waining. But that's OK, the grass looks very happy this morning. Oh yes, and Landon's running around the house in shorts and a tank-top while Christmas carols play on the CD player in his room. Welcome to Syroid Manor.
I stopped digging last night. I did manage to get GNOME emerged successfully on Kronk, and in all fairness to the Gentoo devs, once I twisted the dials the right way, it did so first crack and without error. The trick was to set the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS flag to unstable ("~x86"). I then re-emerged the NVidia drivers to bring in the latest (emerge -up nvidia-glx), which in turn brought in a whole raft of dependent packages including GCC, the newest GLIBC libraries, binutils, etc. etc. I then left the "unstable" bit set, and simply typed: emerge gnome. Like I say, two-to-three hours later Bob was my Uncle. But then I had to fight with the XF86Config file for 45 minutes before I could get X to start, and when GNOME did come up it looked horrid. And while I'll grant you, some of the rough edges were no doubt due to me not having a properly tweaked config file, there was more to it than just configuration. And right then and there I put down my pencil (I'm forever making notes about something) and stopped digging.
Let me 'splain. Kronk is a development box. I use it to test new products and learn established ones. And in the course of my tinkering, I inevitably break things. Most things Linux I can fix. But depending on what's broken, sometime re-installing the operating system is the fastest cleanest route. And despite the fact I love Gentoo and use it every day on my notebook, it's hardly what I'd call an "industry recognized" distribution. What would happen if I recieved a product tomorrow for testing and evaluation that had a prerequisite of Red Hat 7.3? I'll tell what would happen... I'd have to wipe the Gentoo installation off my box -- the distribution that took me three or four days to build and tweak -- and install RH. In other words, I had reached the point of zero-sum-gain with Gentoo on Kronk. If I had been able to throw Gentoo on the box, tweak, twiddle, and enjoy the distro for a week, that would be one thing. But that's not how the cards fell and the hole I was digging was getting deeper by the day.
So I hauled out my Red Hat 9 discs, clicked through a few setup dialogs, selected a diverse mix of packages to install (primarily server stuff, but a handful of admin and GUI trinkets as well), configured the basics after the first reboot, and had my desktop tweaked in just under and hour. Yeah, I'll miss the speed and flexibility of Gentoo. But if I have to blow everything away next week and throw a different version of Red Hat on the box so I can write a tutorial, I won't feel near so bad pulling the trigger.
The birds were unusually vociferous this morning (and still continue to chatter loudly outside my window). I'm not fluent in bird-talk, so I have no idea what their feathers are so ruffled about, but something is obviously in the wind. Hopefully this is not nature's way of forecasting a severe weather warning seen in parts of the US yesterday -- which CNN are still droning on and on and on about. Life's clearly a bitch for a 24/7 news channel when there's no war or political rumors to report on.
Yesterday I was dealt one of those "out-of-the-blue" one-two-three financial punches. First, the US/CDN exchanges rates took a nose dive. I get paid in US funds, which is a plus when the rates are up, and a minus when the rates are down. We're seen exchange rates of 1.5-1.6 percent for almost a year now, but yesterday they dropped to 1.4. An unexpect 10% pay cut hurts the pocketbook in a rather dramatic way. Second, we got our power bill and at the bottom was a "settle up amount" of over $500. We're on an equalized payment plan. Based on historical records, the power company calculates the amount of power they think we'll use on a month basis, and bills us accordingly. At the end of the year, they subtract the amount paid from the amount actually used, which is theoretically supposed to result in a zero balance. Well they calculated the equalization wrong. Either we used more than they anticipated, or their historicals were off. So why didn't they inform us when they saw the numbers schewing? I was informed they simply don't do that. Suffice to say I'm biting hard on my tongue at the moment. Finally, I went to the dentist yesterday. I need a bunch of fillings replaced (old and worn out), two crowns, and two wisdom teeth out. Some of this is covered by our dental plan, but I'm still looking at a $3000 bill over the course of the next six months. I'm not amused. Not one little bit.
Speaking of non-amusement, I tried building GNOME on Kronk again last night. Still dies on the same error. This is the first time in over a year of use I've had trouble with what I consider a "base" installation of Gentoo. Ironically, this is the first "stable" installation I've ever done -- I typically run "unstable" or bleeding edge on my systems. But I want a stable, proven server, not a system I have to fix when an ebuild goes awry. Serves me right for trying to be conservative after all these years of flamboyancy. I'll give it another shot later today, but I don't have a lot more time I can throw at this. And the first rule of holes is: When you find yourself in one, stop digging (Rumsfeld's Rules).
My timing was impeccable. The best time to fertilize a lawn is either just before it rains, or while it's raining. And given the fact I don't particulary enjoying pushing a spreader around in the pouring rain, I try arrange the former whenever possible. So I watched the storm clouds move in Friday night and waiting for what I considered to be the perfect moment. I was just finishing the last patch in the back yard when the rain began. I love it when that happens ;-)
And so began our first "outdoorsey" weekend of the year. Saturday I cut the grass, sorted the garage (it's a guy thing), washed down the driveway, and turned all the front garden beds. Sunday Leah and I found some nice tomato and pepper plants at a local nursery, I turned the back yard beds, and generally puttered. We finished up the weekend with a nice roast, completed with garlic roasted potatoes, and some idle chit-chat on our neighbor's back deck, rounded out with a bottle of our own homemade red wine. This is the first time I've pecked at a keyboard since Friday evening. Perfect. I feel rejuvenated and ready to begin a new week.
I'm still trying to finish up my Gentoo install on Kronk. I tried running emerge gnome on Friday, but the compilation failed on gedit-conf. Bother. I gave up after twiddling a few dials. I'll re-visit the task tonight.
I picked up a new book yesterday: The Rumsfeld Way, by Jeffrey Krames (author of The Jack Welch Lexicon of Leadership). It's not really a biography, per se, although the book does contain a fair amount of insight into Rumsfeld's accomplishments over the last four decades, many of which I was unaware of. The book is a look at the leadership skills, methods, and strategies the author feels has contributed to making Rumsfeld "one of today's most trusted and accomplished public figures". An excellent read if you're into that kinda stuff. I might return later and post a few more notes if time permits.
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