Thursday Sep 30, 2004
O.K. I have no idea how Microsoft placed, certainly not in the top 20. Sun tied with Cisco for 5th place in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Best Workplace for Commuters (BWC) campaign. Kudo's to Intel for ranking first, we'll get you next year!
The great thing about this competition is that everyone wins. Employers pay less in energy and real-estate costs and get more productive employees, employees have less stress, more money, less unproductive time away from their families on the road, insurance companies pay less auto and life insurance claims, cities spend less tax money on transportation infrastructure, prosperity is geographically more evenly distributed... The only real losers are those who sell oil. And with the price hovering around $50/barrel I'm not shedding many tears.
Russia's cabinet ratified the Kyoto agreement today (Clinton signed Kyoto, knowing that U.S. congress would not ratify it.) Since most developing nations are exempt, Russia and Canada are the two large signatories with continental climates most similar to the U.S. Local climate is a variable Kyoto doesn't consider, but if Russia and Canada can pull it off, the U.S. should be able to. How about this as a new challenge to replace the space race? The U.S. led the world in the reduction of CFCs, DDT, PCBs, Lead, mercury, asbestos, why is it dragging its feet on CO2? It would take a shift from a 19th century industrial way of thinking. Efficiency is more important than power, productivity is more important than time or place. It might not be a coincidence that previously agricultural societies such as Ireland have done well in adopting IT and a 21st century way of thinking.
Sunday Sep 26, 2004
Kerry won the all-Ireland Gaelic football match by beating county Mayo 1-20 to 2-9
What other Kerry?
Thursday Sep 23, 2004
My uncle is a shade-tree auto mechanic. Whenever my dad had a problem with his 1969 AMC Rambler, Uncle Dell would recommend, "Jack up the radiator cap and drive another car under it." From what I've seen, that's often how problems in the Microsoft desktop world are solved. Reboot or reinstall the O.S. Fear not, whatever demons were possessing your desktop will be exorcised...for a while anyway. But you don't learn much that way.
Last week I was running SunRay Server 3 beta on a Java Desktop System 2.0. A couple of users had problems logging into their NIS home directories which mounted /home on a local NFS server. I logged into my NIS home directory and experienced the same problem. Nautilus and gconfd-2 weren't happy. df -k showed mounts for dozens of users under home, even though only three of them were being used, and it showed multiple mounts for some users. Earlier I had found that restarting autofs fixed a similar problem so:
/etc/init.d/autofs restart
Well, the extra automounts are gone, but my session is still messed up. I cleared out my .gnome*, .nautilus, .gconf, .gconfd preference files and found the problem only became worse. It would have been easy to just reboot. The system had been working fine for a couple of weeks before that.
Aha, it turns out I accidently wiped out the global configuration database in /etc/gconf while experimenting with an optimization script. I decided to kill the APOC configuration daemon before I reinstalled the gconf RPMS, but I did it in the most clumsy way and killed all JVM instances running on the machine, including those responsible for core SunRay services! The SunRay clients displayed a box indicating that they can't find the server. I should just reboot, but let me look at the SunRay manual. Hmmm, /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utrestart. Like magic my session reappeared along with the sessions anyone else who had been sharing that box.
Earlier versions of nautilus/gnome-vfs had a nasty habit of searching for trash and for a writable directory on any share where it could put trash. This was not nice on a SunRay server with hundreds of deep automounted NFS trees. But I thought I remembered that this problem was solved by Sun engineers and other GNOME community members. So my next suspect was autofs. I found
a Sun engineer's whitepaper on some autofs deficiencies.. Further investigation showed these deficiencies to be unrelated to my immediate problem. Then I remembered that NFS home directories were being shared between Solaris 8/9 GNOME 2.0 and the newer GNOME in Java Desktop System 2.0. The file
~/.gnome/gnome-vfs/.trash_entry_cache
contained entries for nearly every user under /home. Apparently even the newer gnome-vfs reads this cache and stats everything it sees there. Autofs notices that someone is looking and mounts the shares. Sure enough, if I launch nautilus without gconfd-2 and with the trash cache in place, mtab immediately fills with extra junk. So now how do we solve the problem of forward
and backward compatability of GNOME configuration files? I think this will take agreement from the entire GNOME community. As configuration moves from flat files into LDAP backends the problem may become irrelevant. In the meantime, I'm glad I didn't reboot.
10:32am up 30 days, 13:58, 3 users, load average: 0.13, 0.09, 0.02
Yeah, this is a beta.
I once explained my reboot philosophy to my brother as:
- Microsoft Windows: Reboot for minor configuration changes, even to change IP address or upgrade a library!
- GNU/Linux: You should only reboot when installing new hardware.
- Solaris: Why would you reboot just to install new hardware?
Apologies if Linux and Microsoft Windows have improved recently, but can you swap out a CPU without rebooting?
Tuesday Sep 14, 2004
Tip #1: A new connector allows the Java Desktop System's evolution email program to receive email from a Microsoft Exchange server. Launch Applications->System Tools->Online Update and install:
patch-118241-01 oxygen2 1.4-5b
New feature: Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server.
The next time you configure Evolution, you'll see a new option:
Tip #2:Blog from the South explains how to view RSS blog newsfeeds in Evolution's Summary page!
Monday Sep 13, 2004
It looks like my sister-in-law came in 31st in her age category. Way to go Becky! Last year I was disappointed that local news media gave almost no coverage to the ironman and remained hyperfocused on the Green Bay Packers! This year I watched the event live from Ireland via broadband on ironmanlive.com. I did take a break to walk down to the sea and around the castle to avoid being a total desk-chair potato. Becky might have to run another tri to qualify for Kona, in cooler weather. Is there an ironman in Eire? It's certainly cool enough. I sailed again Saturday under force 6+ wind and the wind has been rising since. Ireland would be a great place for an ironman, but you'd want to have the wind at your back.
Thanks to a posting by Brian Costello (our Brian Costello?) at http://www.irishgaelictranslator.com, I found a blessing in Irish.
Go n-éirí an bóthar leat.
Go raibh an chóir ghaoithe i gcónaí leat.
Go dtaitní an ghrian go bog bláth ar do chlár éadain,
go gcuire an bháisteach go bog mín ar do ghoirt.
Agus go gcasfar le chéile sinn arís,
go gcoinní Dia i mbosa a láimhe thú.
Saturday Sep 11, 2004
Finding the needle of truth in the haystack of propaganda, legalized slander and mudslinging surrounding the neverending U.S. presidential campaign is rarely easy. But a document pertaining to Bush's service supposedly written in the early 1970s with a proportional Times Roman font and superscripting identical to that used in Microsoft Office is a bit suspicious. They should have used a courier font in StarOffice or OpenOffice.org, disabled spell checking and auto superscripts. That might keep us guessing for another few weeks. And in an election that's all it takes!
Finally there is a use for that old typewriter!
Update: It looks like the jury is still out on whether this font and typeface was available to Air National Guardsmen in 1972-73. To me it seems too subtle to be an effective hoax at this point in the election cycle in an age when infomercials win Cannes awards. When I was a photographer for UW-Oshkosh's Advance Titan newspaper, one photographer hoaxed the editor and most of the staff with fake photos of his "radioactive hand" and a group of students hoaxed regional news organizations into reporting that Mercury Marine's Outboard motor testing on the Fox river was gradually moving Oshkosh north. Still, the Bush font issue is an interesting case in document forensics and proof that bloggers are performing a role in keeping traditional news organizations honest.
Final update (I hope), It took a while but CBS finally admitted that this document and similar ones may have been fake. It's tempting to gloat when bloggers trip a traditional news organization, but CBS isn't the only major news organization recently caught publishing fabricated news. The New York Times had Jayson Blair, USA Today had Jack Kelly, the New Republic had Stephen Glass and now CBS has Dan Rather. This blogger's page links to some examples of such yellow journalism. I once maintained a web page referencing junk science in the news, but I gave up because I didn't have enough web storage.
Friday Sep 10, 2004
Yesterday I was wondering why a 3 bedroom detached house with 3 car garage on 1/4 acre lot a 5 minutes stroll from a beautiful long stretch of Lake Michigan beach...
...sells for almost exactly the same as an empty boat berth (slip) in Malahide and for less than a public toilet in Dublin.*
I wondered whether engineers could ever understand the goofy logic of economics, why stock analysts encourage short-term thinking, fluff and downsizing and discourage R&D and innovation, why penny wise and pound foolish is the rule rather than the exception and why governments don't understand the law of diminishing (tax) returns. But then Bryan Cantrill wrote an excellent article on the Economics of software. Bryan, you should submit this to The Economist,The Wall Street Journal, IEEE spectrum or something!
*I now believe the answer to my real-estate question is a modified realtor's cliche: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCAT-Irrational exuberance.
Wednesday Sep 08, 2004
You can't go home again, well not completely anyway. Ten years ago Canada geese were a rare sight in Wisconsin, now they are a plentiful pest. Racine's harbor has less water now, and more zebra mussles. The tractor plant foundry burned down, subdivisions are replacing cornfields, downtown is finally recovering from a rust-belt industrial hangover, and my favorite electronic parts store is now a Spanish Apostolic Pentecostal church. But some things never change...
"May I help you?", The manager of the home office store used a cliche uncommon in Irish retail. I was actually waiting for my wife, but to make conversation I asked for something I really was looking for:
"Do you have a SCSI to USB or SCSI to Firewire converter?"*
I had asked the question at three other retailers whose salesman looked at me as if I had asked for a flux capacitor or a chunk of kryptonite**. But this manager had an answer.
"SCSI? No, is that for a Mac or what?"
"It's for a slide scanner, you know like the Kodak slides?"
"You're not going to find anything like that here. This is a Windows town." He suggested that I try the internet, or Milwaukee.
"Windows town?" I told him that governments and businesses elsewhere are switching to alternatives such as Linux.
"Lie nucks? Wait a minute, do you mean unix or the free operating system?"
"Linux." I told him that Allied Irish Bank, the British health system and the city of Munich adopted linux based IT solutions. (I forgot to mention the Peoples Republic of China.)
"Huh, that reminds me of how the Amiga computer caught on so much in Germany, but never came here. Some of these Linux guys remind me of those Amiga guys."
"It's too bad people in Racine don't have more choices." Lack of competition here in Ireland leads to high prices in everything from real-estate to beer.
"Yeah, If there were anything other than XP I would use it because XP watches everything you do."
I asked him to elaborate, "Really, like what?"
"The other day when Windows crashed it asked me if I wanted to send the information to Microsoft. Heck no! I don't want to tell them that I was being stupid. I was trying to run 5 applications at a time." I reminded him that the Amiga could run more than 5 applications simultaneously on a 7 MHz processor with 1/2 Mb of RAM and assured him that what he was doing was totally reasonable. Modern operating systems shouldn't have any problem coping with a few dozen applications, this JDS box is currently running a few hundred processes for 6 user sessions and it has been up for 17 days.
"Yeah, I guess those computers were pretty good. I have to get back to work now."
I wish I had brought my Morphix-based Java Desktop System demo. It would have been nice to leave him a sample of the future. The old saying "Will it play in Peoria" referred to testing theater productions in a U.S. heartland town a few dozen miles southwest of Racine. Linux counter shows only 25 known linux users in Peoria and 10 in Racine so it may take a while for towns such as these to abandon the monopoly, but it will happen. The forerunner to the automobile was invented in Racine in the early 1870s and later dismantled because it frightened a horse to death. But the horseless carriage eventually came to Racine in a variety of models and brands. Alternatives to Microsoft Windows will eventually play in Peoria, and Racine.
*
SCSI: An interface standard which supports up to 80 Megabytes/Sec, requires only one interrupt for up to 15 devices and often requires less CPU resources than typical IDE configurations. SCSI was used on Apple computers and Sun workstations, it is still used on servers and in performance critical applications (e.g. uncompressed video.) Firewire/IEEE1394 initially supported up to 50 Megabytes/sec, USB 1 supports up to 2 Megabytes/sec. Firewire and USB speeds are usually expressed in Megabits/second rather than Megabytes/second because 400 Megabits/second sounds much more impressive than 50 megabytes/second ;-)
**You can however buy USB and Firewire cables that glow in the dark.
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