Twiki Blog Archive 2002-12

Wednesday, 01 January, 2003

Happy New Year!

Thanks to all my faithful followers (I know who you are - web server logs, you know). As a reward for your patience at watching the poor older server try to return a page, I now direct you to my new blog, located here. Hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.

Tuesday, 31 December, 2002

Happy New Years Eve. A quiet working day. Completed contract negotiations with a client, installed a new beta, upgraded a machine to RH 8.0.

Monday, 30 December, 2002

An interesting article in the Washinton Post on the engineering challenges involved in weatherproofing Chernobyl for 100 years while decontamination efforts continue.

I don't know if you bother to take time to read through the click-through EULAs, but the VFP 8 one has an interesting restriction that prevents redistribution of "Redistributables in any manner that would cause the Redistributables to become subject to any of the terms of an Excluded License. An "Excluded License" is any license that requires as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of software subject to the Excluded License, that such software or other software combined and/or distributed with such software be (x) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (y) licensed for the purpose of making erivative worksl; or (z) redistrutable at no charge."

IOW, you can't give away a VFP app under an Open Source license, if you use any of their redistributables. That makes sense if they are trying to prevent sample code from entering into the freely-distributable zone, but I wonder if it is possible to generate an app that meets those conditions. IOW, you can't include FoxPro.H, for example.

I'm pretty sure this is a new term in the license agreement, and yet another way Microsoft is attempting to stem the tide. Interesting, no?

Sunday, 29 December, 2002

Spent quite a bit of time with folks on Ed Leafe's new ProLinux list trying to get Samba set up to serve a file share on my Linux workstation. After a few hours of tweaking, I managed to get the network card to refuse to start at all. Not exactly progress in the right direction.

On-again, off-again. Finally got an error message I could track down here, which lead me to conclude the "easy" way to configure my wireless card was not as reliable as the "hard" way. Of course, the hard way was, well, hard. I had to roll back to the previous kernel because the pre-made RPMs weren't available for my latest kernel, and I didn't have the source code installed, nor a clue on how to install it, on my current machine. So much to learn!

But the NIC is running again, and that was enough to get Samba up and running. Go figure!

Saturday, 28 December, 2002

Spent most of the day wrestling with contract terms. Blah.

Friday, 27 December, 2002

Saw "Two Towers" today. A lot more violence than the first, but more rough battle scenes and less drama or character build-up. Samwise shines.

Thursday, 26 December, 2002

Ow, am I sore. Spent two hours digging out the driveway. We got at least a foot of snow, perhaps more. Steve and Laura and I shovelled 4-6" last evening, and possibly twice that this morning. Got to remember not to sit down too long.

Wednesday, 25 December, 2002

A few Christmas Eve pictures at: http://www.tedroche.com/Photos/Xmas2002/Index.htm

A wonderful poem praising the cowardice of lurkers.

Tuesday, 24 December, 2002

Merry Christmas Eve. A puttering morning and then travel and relatives. Ho, ho, ho!

I want to keep an eye on Subversion, as it may be the open-source successor to CVS.

Monday, 23 December, 2002

Mitch Kapor continues to get good press for his open-source project "Chandler," a new PIM not due out for at least a year. I'm concerned that all the buzz will actually put a chill in the marketplace, which already has cool products like Evolution.

Sunday, 22 December, 2002

Vicious, nasty, funny and really well written: The Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2002

Fun with the dogs: http://home.attbi.com/~tedroche/Photos/Xmas2002/Index.htm

Time Magazine's "... of the Year" features a bunch of good articles: here and here and here.

Saturday, 21 December, 2002

Winter Solstice is a favorite day, even though it is the shortest day of the year.

Woke up at 1:30 this morning and knew I was gettting better. Couldn't get back to sleep until after 3. No problem. I'm a happy guy.

Check out http://www.blogcritics.org. Interesting reviews, commentary and just general stuff. Wasted an hour browsing the site, enjoyed every minute.

The Central NH Linux user group maintains their site at http://www.centralug.org/.

Intertrust Technologies is giving Microsoft a hard time on their ownership of key Digital Restriction Management patents, according to this story. Think Microsoft will just buy them?

Friday, 20 December, 2002

Did a little shopping this morning, gathering gift wrapping and some discounted Christmas ornaments.

Thursday, 19 December, 2002

A long day on the road, this time to Providence, RI.

Wednesday, 18 December, 2002

A new free software CD called GNUWin II offers a bunch of free / Open Source software in an easily installable package. The rebellion continues to grow...

Tuesday, 17 December, 2002

The government, lead by once-convicted (later overturned) Admiral Poindexter, has established a "Total Information Awareness" counter-terrorism project. While the goal of protecting our citizens through vigilance is laudable, the reach and potential abuses of the agency are frightening. The Cato Institute warns us here that " we shouldn't always trust the assurances of the Pentagon". Activists are illustrating the chilling amount of information available already, turning the power of the Internet on Admiral Poindexter himself. Similar stories in the Washington Times and CNN.

MSNBC has a scary report on fake escrow services preying on online auction participants.

Monday, 16 December, 2002

Saw Nemesis last night. Great.

Gotta get invoices out this morning.

Sunday, 15 December, 2002

Day two going coffee-free, in an experiment to try to get better behaving bowels. The headache yesterday was miserable. Finally remembered to take some Tylenol, which gave some relief.

On the bright side, we got the Christmas tree up and will be decorating it this morning.

Saturday, 14 December, 2002

A new client yesterday, in a real rush to resolved errors with their SourceSafe database. Seems they are getting "Access to file... Loggedin\action.log denied." The closest I could come to a matching MSKB article was this. indicating a likelihood of a security issue.

Nope, I got blindsided. A very custom installation. They'd turned on journalling, using a UNC path, and it was failing. Worked fine with, um, the other kind of path, whatever they call than, Non-Universal, maybe.

MandrakeSoft has a "Operating System Refugee" discount deal here. Seems like a clever way to get folks to try out the package. Who doesn't have an OS disk?

Marc Andreessen seems to thing the next IT crisis is upon us. I'm not sure he's not just selling whatever his company makes.

Dan Bricklin shares insights and hopes about yet another generation of Tablet PCs.

Friday, 13 December, 2002

Friday the 13th. No triskaidekaphobia here.

Interesting coverage of the trial of a young man in Oslo, Norway, accused of writing DeCSS, software that will allow "non-authorized hardware" (like Linux computers) to read and play back DVDs. The articles are in english, but the surrounding text and advertisments, in the native tongue, are almost as intriguing.

Tim O'Reilly makes some great points about piracy, copying and shoplifting of books vs. legitimate peer-to-peer sharing in this article.

Thursday, 12 December, 2002

Brother Joe is on his way to Guam as part of an emergency medical team to provide support after the island was hit with a big super-cyclone, wiping out the only local hospital. Good luck, Joe.

Wednesday, 11 December, 2002

Interesting idea for a hacker's blog-a-thon at Dave Winer's Weblogs In Meatspace conference proposal. Sounds like it starts too late at night for me.

Jon Udell is very excited about Groove Web Services and, while I understand the words, the meanings of the paraagraphs are eluding me. Wish I had some first-hand-experience with this stuff.

Tuesday, 10 December, 2002

Tuesday is Trash Day. You thought I was kidding when I said the fun never ended, didn't you?

Slashdot is carrying a story that Microsoft is going to start selling Linux software. Yikes. Yahoo! has the story here

Monday, 09 December, 2002

Monday, and back to real work.

The developers on Slashdot had some interesting observations on the recently announced purchase of Rational Software by IBM. I hope they keep the ClearCase product, as it will be good to see more competition to VSS and CVS.

Eric S. Raymond is a favorite author of mine, and I enjoyed his essay on Asking Smart Questions. In it, Eric suggests we may suffer from a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome and that certainly seems likely.

OSDN has an interesting success story on the deployment of computers in Largo, Florida.

Sunday, 08 December, 2002

Rebooted Partition Magic directly off the CD and changed the active partition to the Windows partition, rebooted and was up and running Windows.

The wireless card is not as easy. While I think I can use the generic Orinoco Prism II drivers, ifconfig threw an error on startup that "A278Kearsarge" was not a valid command. There's an ampersand in the SSID just before that, and I think it's causing the configuration file to choke. I'll dig around and see if I can find a work-around.

Well, The Answers Are Out There. They are just so hard to find. Searching for the problem with the ampersand in the SSID was a red herring. Finally found this page with someone else's experience with this card and this distribution, and it was all following instructions after that.

Besides for hobbiest hacking, I've got to do some household things on the weekend, or else I fall hopelessly behind. I had the pleasure of writing Chrismas cards yesterday, and I help re-arrange the living room to make room for a tree we hope to install next weekend. I also set up the outside lights on the one pine tree Steve and I decorated years ago.

Saturday, 07 December, 2002

Pearl Harbor Day. RIP.

Now that I got Win98SE installed on the laptop for testing of the client app, I decided to mess it up by trying a dual boot with Linux. I used the Partition Magic 8.0 disk to repartition: dropped drive D:, added a Linux partition, moved drive C: so there was a 500 Mb swap partition first on the disk, and then installed Red Hat 8.0. The disks from GLGDW were bogus, but I had a previous set I'd burned, so I got it installed.

The RH installer didn't like the partition configuration at all. It complained that the other partitioner did not properly understand the geometry of the hard disk, but that it was recoverable. It created a 100 Mb boot partition out of the swap space and installed GRUB as the boot loader. The rest of the install went without a hitch, and I was up and running Linux.

Next came the interesting configuration challenges. Restarting the machine, the Win98SE loader would fail to start Win98, asking for the location of C:WindowsCOMMAND.COM. Tackle that tomorrow.

The other challenge is getting Linux to recognize the wireless card, a LinkSys? WPC11. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Finished off the day by sitting through the entire showing of "It's a Wonderful Life." While I had seen bits and pieces before, I am sure I had never seen the whole thing, as several plot twists surprised me. Enjoyed it, and feel that I have now plugged it a little better to American culture. Some day I'll understand this stuff.

Friday, 06 December, 2002

Thank Goodness, It's Friday!

A scary story on 2600.org of an amateur photographer detained, his camera seized, on suspicion of terrorism. Don't get seen on the streets with your camera!

Check out this Amazon Listing. Someone's having way too much fun!

Thursday, 05 December, 2002

Happy Birthday, Laura!

A pleasant work day, knocking off a little early, dinner together, presents, and sitting around watching the SciFi channel's mini-series "Taken." Geek heaven.

Wednesday, 04 December, 2002

Wednesday, and off to Waltham for a special FoxPro? Users Group meeting.

Tuesday, 03 December, 2002

Time magazine is featuring a cover story on arthritis, perhaps an indication on where the baby boomers are looking today. Unfortunately, I am personally interested in this story, as well.

According to the US Naval Observatory, Sunrise was at 7:01 this morning, although the sun doesn't touch the top of the trees till 7:15 or so, thanks to Tyler Hill. Sunset is 4:13 this afternoon. The shortened days are hard; I just want to go hibernate. It doesn't help that the wind chill this morning was below zero, nor that the mercury a single digit. Brrr.

This article points out the origin of the name 'blogosphere' and certainly is an interesting exploration of its ecology.

Monday, 02 December, 2002

Monday arrived with vigor. Lots to do, and fortunately some of it billable.

Monday night is our big night out... grocery shopping. We were just over the top tonight with a stop at Staples as well, for Christmas stuff, discounted batteries (woo-hoo!) and recycled printer paper. The excitement just never stops.

Sunday, 01 December, 2002

A rare event - working on business on Sunday. Steve got Partition Magic for us on Saturday and we worked at repartioning and installing Win98SE on one of the surplus laptops. Shouldn't have bothered with PM - ended up having to blow everything away anyway. Bummer.

Got Win98SE on the machine, and VFP7, and Laura was able to solve the problem we were having at the client site.