Wednesday June 15, 2005

I promise not blog for any more petitions like this for a long, long time. Maybe years. I usually don't even pass these things on to friends and relatives. But this one strikes too close to home for me.

I received an email today pointing me to this petition site to comment on a proposed House bill to gut spending for PBS and NPR.

http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/

The email also pointed to a Washington Post article (warning, this article and/or link may or may not persist, I don't have time to investigate that)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/09/AR2005060902283.html

Now, I will blog much later about my opinions about fixes needed to the U.S. educational system, and possibly introduce a new <rant> < /rant> macro.

And I also believe it is critical to have a news source that is not heavily influenced by a dependence on advertising revenue.

But for now, suffice it to say that despite a slight bias towards libertarianism (no claim that I'm any kind of true libertarian), I believe that some things like public health and universal literacy are crucial to our future and cannot afford to be ignored.

So I have entered this into the petition site and given them permission to send the letter from my home email address:

I consider PBS to be critical to American competitiveness in the world
marketplace,  as it partially compensates for many remaining deficiencies
in our educational system, compared to that of other countries.

With our trade deficit as it is, we cannot afford to give up any edge.

( Jun 15 2005, 01:56:02 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday June 14, 2005

I like tools. So when they asked me to write the mdb macros for the crypto framework for Solaris 10, I said "Yesssss!"

Turns out somebody else likes tools, too. So they implemented the ::array command, which had not been there when I did my mdb modules.

But my modules are still prettier -- much prettier. Unfortunately, in order to really see them in action, you have to be either running a whole slew of crypto stuff, enough to back up the system, or you have to be debugging crypto code and insert pauses into the code -- or be dealing with a crash dump or live dump.

I found that there really weren't existing examples in the mdb code to handle all the array searching I had to do, so I was working really hard to implement my array walker. If you want to do something similar, you can probably look at the source for the array command instead of looking at my code, it's more recent.

Another good place to look is in the print_array function, though I have not figured outexactly who calls it (I'm busy with Trusted Solaris escalations.)

In any case, if you're not familiar with mdb, ignore my contributions and just start using mdb for other purposes -- you can start with these commands:

::help
::walkers
::dcmds
$C (mdb will call adb macros)

# echo "::dcmds" | mdb -k | grep crypto
crypto_data              - print as crypto_data
crypto_dual_data         - print as crypto_dual_data
crypto_find_reqid        - look for reqid, print if found [ -v = verbose ]
crypto_key               - print as crypto_key
crypto_mech_info         - print as crypto_mech_info
crypto_mechanism         - details about a crypto mechanism
crypto_provider_ext_info - module-private crypto provider info
kcf_areq_node            - print asynchronous crypto request struct, [ verbose ]
kcf_global_swq           - global or addr global crypto queue.  [ -v = verbose ]
kcf_policy_desc          - policy descriptors for crypto
kcf_provider_desc        - crypto provider description struct
kcf_sched_info           - scheduling data for a crypto request
kcf_soft_conf_entry      - head or addr of configured software crypto providers
prov_tab                 - global table of crypto providers 
# echo "::walkers" | mdb -k | grep crypto
crypto_session_cache     - walk the crypto_session_cache cache
kcf_reqid_table          - table of asyncronous crypto requests

crypto_find_reqid

....but the guts of this are in an eccentric walker:

reqid_table_walk_init
reqid_table_walk_step
reqid_table_walk_fini

Have fun!

opensolaris.org

OpenSolaris

Solaris

( Jun 14 2005, 10:40:26 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday June 06, 2005

1.  Choose "rolling" for your theme
2.  Use sdtimage's snapshot capability to snapshot a region exactly
    the right size for the right sidebar, save the image to a file.
    (I'll blog more about this image later.)
3.  Go to the "files" section of your "Website" tab and upload the
    image.
4.  right-click the image name and open in a new window.  Then copy
    the URL.
5.  Go to "Page Templates" in your Website tab and choose to edit
    _sideColumn.  

    Add this right under div id="SideBar" EXCEPT of course there are
    those less-than and greater-than brackets around each of these
    lines:

        div class="box"
       img src=http://blogs.sfbay.sun.com/roller/resources/YOURIMAGE
        /div

....now save.

Wednesday June 01, 2005

And I'm putting back a module to whatever exactly we're going to call the 10- incarnation of the Trusted Solaris Operating Environment (it's NOT going to be called the Trusted Solaris Operating Environment, because it will sit on top of the Solaris 10 OE.)

Since I still need to get more details how to talk about this while following all the right trademark and other policies, I'll go back to the primitive technology.

I just got back from spending Memorial Day Weekend at Rattlesnake Rendezvous in the east bay (Sunol Wilderness.) This is an event where if you get caught trying to use a match or lighter (or even flint and steel) to start a fire, you'll be teased incessantly for the next 10 years. I mean, these folks think the SCA (Society for Creative Anacronism AKA "Harmless Historical Nuts" (Hi, Leslie!)) are 'way too modern!

So I've been letting the other folks start the fires while I tried to fix a major hat-felting mistake (BIG hat, originally formed over a large plant platter and a Harry Potter Souvenir Popcorn Tub, turned into teeeeeny hat when I tried to wash it.)

But finally one of the teachers announced that his bow drill class was infallible -- guaranteed success!

Since 4 years ago I spent a week trying to use a cedar-on-cedar bow drill under a tarp in the rain and failed miserably, I have been considering myself too traumatized to go back to trying to make fires.

But, hey! With the right tools and the right materials and a little guidance, I DID IT!

Man, I cannot believe the difference tool design makes! The original bow I tried 4 years ago was arm-length. This bow was heart-to-fingertip on a tall man, and I'm a medium-sized woman, so I got lots of nice torque out of it.

And using bone-dry cottonwood for both the hearth board and the drill helped, too.

I also finally got to eat out of my "burn bowl" -- made from a nice piece of Sycamore. But the burn bowl is another whole story -- Dick said people my age are not supposed to be stubborn^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H persistent enough to make one of those for real.

Well, if I wasn't stubborn, I would have given up before I succeeded in creating the fixes for some of the things I've patched, especially for the Trusted Solaris OE.

So the world can just put up with my eccentricities.

BTW, anybody from soc.men or soc.women circa 1989, HI!!! ( Jun 01 2005, 06:18:05 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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