Month: July 2002

the uses of downtime

I took advantage of the downtime and the fact I have a spiffy new power screwdriver to rebuild some of the furniture all the machines sit on, hang all the power strips up off the floor (they have hanger holes so I got happy with the screwdriver), hung the KVM switch up where I can actually reach it without scrambing under stuff, and otherwise straightened things up. Tie-wraps were even employed at one point.

network outage resumes

My AT&T Broadband link went out last night at 07/Jul/2002:21:57:45. Their tech support acknowledged there was an outage when I called this morning.

We did have a hard rain last night, with thunder and lightning (rare for Seattle). Perhaps there’s a link.

UPDATE: the outage ended about 1600 PDT.

another outage

This time from around 07/Jul/2002:06:05:58 to 07/Jul/2002:10:53:20. Apologies to anyone who stopped by and found nothing. Initially, it was a network (ie, AT&T Broadband) problem, but I took advantage of the downtime to upgrade from FreeBSD 4.5-STABLE to 4.6-RELEASE. That process may have made things a little slow (the machine was pulling a load average of 4+).

Service was restored at reboot but the process of building and installing the world had the box pretty well utilized. I didn’t realize the reboot to load the new kernel had restored service: ideally, buildworld and installworld are supposed to be done at the quiescent single-user mode.

Something was unhappy with the network interface (the xl/3Com Etherlink XL and Fast Etherlink XL driver) and the cable interface. This happened before, at least something symptomatically similar: that time I reset the cable interface by removing the power for awhile. Hmm, almost exactly a month ago, too.

That will be the last upgrade until 5.0 comes out.

bumper sticker philosophy

Seen on the back window of a car today:
Grateful to my country
Proud to pay my taxes

Someone else sees taxes as the dues they pay for the privilege of living here. Not everyone sees it that way . . . . .

So if people don’t want to pay taxes, here’s an alternative. Instead of paying in cash, perform some public service at the current hourly minimum wage. Highway cleanup, painting, park maintenance, graffiti cleanup, washing police cars, that kind of thing.

Members of the skilled trades could pay off their dues at their local school: I’m sure there’s ample projects waiting for willing hands.

The simple fact is these tasks need to be done by somebody: either pay for someone to do it or do it yourself.

more on Palladium (aka sealed storage)

vitanuova.loyalty.org: July 3, 2002

Think about this: if you move the file (and, if you like, the entire software operating environment!) to another PC, the application can no longer decrypt the file. If you modify the operating system (which you are able to do), the application can longer decrypt the file. If you run a different operating system (which you are able to do), the application can no longer decrypt the file. If you modify the application (which you are able to do), the application can no longer decrypt the file. This is a technically impressive capability! After the meeting, I kept realizing more and more interesting features of this design.

Technically, this is quite interesting stuff, but I don’t know that I’m all that crazy about being locked out of my system because of some hardware being changed or the security mechanism being convinced that it’s no longer in a “trusted” environment.

When computers you can use any way you want are outlawed, only outlaws will have them, I guess.

There’s more on this here.

feedback for the aspiring author

Through a strange series of events, I discovered that someone I knew from my publishing days in Atlanta had simultaneously worked her way up the ranks to become an associate publisher and (though she would demur) had been key in making the firm as strong as it is today.

I had some childrens’ stories I had written for my own amusement and that of my young’uns, and since I made the above discovery while looking for information on submitting them, I ended up sending the stuff off a few weeks ago. I just received some really helpful feedback this morning.

Now I know where to go next. Thanks, Kathy.

The Vice President of Fun

At my last job, there was some discussion about how best to handle team-building and other extra-curricular activities. The rank and file hate what management comes up with, and management doesn’t trust the other ranks to come up with something reasonable.

So I came up with the VP of Fun. The idea was simple. A job that gets staffed by a new person every three months, and that person has to plan three events. They get a budget, some basic guidelines, a box business cards that have their exciting new title on them, and they go have fun with it.

Like so many of my ideas, it met with an enthusiastic response and was then ignored. I offer it gratis for anyone else to use.