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Musings for the Week of November 26th These are my musings for the week. Pull up a keyboard or mouse, click here to read the latest ramblings, and off we go...

Hello, all. Long time no see!

Well, as promised, I'm back now that things have settled down a little bit. Those of you who read Keri's page know that things aren't exactly settled - I still don't have a definite position in Seattle, for one thing, and I'm still in Phoenix, for another - but things are at least improving. The new office is more-or-less complete, in that although there's one floor remaining to be completed, the details have mostly been worked out and the contractors now know what it is we want. So, although there's plenty of room for fun and frivolity with work, things are at least no longer so hectic that I have no time for anything else. Thanks to all (you know who you are) who've emailed, called, or harassed Keri for information, updates, and well-wishes. I appreciated it, and still appreciate it.

You might have noticed a few changes with the layout of this page. I got tired of the old layout some time ago, and my return to regular (I hope) posting and the sudden spate of changed layouts (Brian, Bob Thompson, etc..) gave me a good opportunity to change it to its final, permanent, no-more-changes layout. Until the next time I get tired of it, of course. If you notice something broken, please let me know. If you don't like the new look, you're free to say so - but I warn you, I'm stubborn. And my recent close experience with contractors has increased my vocabulary of curses considerably.

There's one change that goes beyond color, image, and font choice; you'll notice a link above to "Current Week's Column". That's my answer to all you people with so much free time you post on weekends. <G> Essentially, every weekend (Saturday or Sunday; I may or may not pick one day and stick to it, we'll see as time goes by) I'll post a one or two or whatever-length column on the topic of my choosing. It may be inspired by current events, by discussions I've had or seen, comments, or random neurons firing in my brain. It may or may not have anything to do with the week's posts, and the topic may never be referenced again. This week, it's Gift-Giving for Geeks. What could I possibly have to say on such a topic? I dunno; why don't you go look?

There've been some changes here in the computing stables of the Beland House; we now have (count with me) Anya, Athena, Brigid, Fortytwo, Homer, Pluto, and Scooter. Yes, that's right, seven computers. Anya is Keri's Gateway 2000 workstation, a PII-266 running Windows 2000. Athena is my fill-in workstation, built from scrounged parts; I think it's now a Cyrix-300 with 98 MB of RAM, 12 GB of SCSI hard drives in three drives (plus a fourth 4 GB drive that refuses to cooperate) an old NEC CD-ROM, and an old SiS 4 MB video card. The video card may be replaced shortly, and I think I've got an old sound card to add to the mix; at any rate, Athena runs RedHat 7.0, more or less, since Mandrake 7.2 refuses to cooperate and 7.1 doesn't like KDE2 very much. Brigid is Athena's twin, without the makeover; also a 300 Mhz Cyrix, but only 32 MB of RAM, 1.2 GB of IDE disk, and so on. Brigid will be a firewall/router for Keri's uncle and his family, but I may need to add some bits first. Right now, it's a testbed Apache server. Fortytwo is our email server, web server, Samba server, and just about everything else (hence the name); once the move to Seattle is complete, it'll take over hosting duties for this site, Hiddenstar.net, and the not-yet-implemented Netwidows.net. Fortytwo is running Mandrake 7.1 with kernel updates and without any frills on a 133 Mhz processor with 92 MB of RAM and 6.4 GB of IDE disk space. Homer is a laptop picked up dirt-cheap, an IBM Thinkpad 570E similar to my old one from Siebel. No, not my favorite model, but the price was too good to pass up. It's Keri's laptop right now, although when I leave Siebel, I'll most likely reclaim it - unless my new employers replace Scooter.

Pluto is our trusty router/firewall. Still running RedHat 6.2, sort of; the kernel's been upgraded, along with ipchains, ssh, and the firewall software, which is all that's running on that box, so I don't know as it's fair to say it's running RedHat. Still, the banners say RedHat (those that I haven't edited, anyway) so I guess that's what it's running. Pluto is a 486-66 with 800 MB of disk space and 24 MB of RAM.

Scooter is my Siebel-owned Thinkpad T20 laptop running Windows 2000. I use it for everything at work, but lately it's been giving me more trouble than it's worth; inexplicable blue-screens (more than any other Win2k box I've used), poor performance, and an amazing lack of battery power. I'd ask procurement for a replacement, but since I keep hoping I'll be officially handing in my notice momentarily, I don't want to do that.

And that's about it for the moment, I guess. Let's see if I can make it two days in a row tomorrow...

Monday, November 27 - Another Republic Turns to Empire

With all the discussion lately about Microsoft's .NET initiatives, and more generally, the privacy problems with various software makers and other companies, it was kind of nice to deal with Linux companies. They gave away their software, for crying out loud. I didn't think much of their revenue model, but that was their problem, and in the meantime, they at least didn't demand full DNA profiling to use their software. (OK, so that's an exaggeration...)

Still, I'd always wondered what would happen when the companies realized they didn't have a revenue stream they could count on. We're beginning to find out.

I mentioned that this computer - Athena - was running RedHat 7.0. One of the things I wanted to do was upgrade to KDE2; I've played with it a little bit, but not all that much. So, I downloaded the RedHat packages of KDE2 and went through the upgrade. Wasn't too tricky, but after it was done, I couldn't load KDE2. I could load Gnome, and I could run KDE2 apps from within Gnome, but I couldn't run the "startkde" script.

After playing with it for a little while, I went to various websites (beginning with KDE.org) and started reading the instructions. Some interesting info there, but it was all focused on Mandrake - it worked, partly, but it wasn't perfect. So I went to RedHat to see if they had any RedHat-specific information. Turns out all the interesting information is in the "RedHat Network", which is officially for-pay - although you can sign up for a free trial, and I didn't see anything that would prevent an individual from signing up for unlimited free trials. So, I thought, this is what they're going to do when the revenue runs out - just force everybody into the "charge for tech support" model. Sad, in a way, but - at least in a sense - reasonable.

Then I signed up for the free trial.

Or started to. Name, phone number, email address, meatspace address, IP address, system profile... none of it voluntary. EVERY information field was required, or you couldn't get in, whether it was a free trial or a paid subscription. Now, you could maybe make a case for the system profile. Microsoft needs one to perform Windows Updates - except that they leave the profile on your machine, and the only information that goes to Microsoft is the list of available updates you want. RedHat wants to store the information for you. As for the rest - what possible need does RedHat have for it? Because they want to join my fan club? I don't think so.

I can think of only one clear reason why they want this information - as a revenue stream. Selling the information to marketing companies, or using it themselves for targetted marketing. Most companies, as we've seen, eventually start trying to use their consumer base as an added revenue stream, but I didn't think a company like RedHat would do it so quickly. Oh, there's no clear evidence that they're doing it - and who knows, maybe they never will.

But if they weren't planning to use it, why do they want the information? The only possible explanation for collecting this information is to use it, somehow. And as long as the information is in their control instead of mine, they'll be the ones to determine what "somehow" means.

As soon as I get this update posted - say, five minutes from now - the disks come out, and RedHat goes bye-bye from this machine. And when I get a decent chance, it gets scrubbed from Pluto, too. I don't have much choice when Microsoft pulls a stunt like this - I have to work with them, my job requires it. I don't have to put up with it from a so-called "free" OS.

So what distro? I was thinking about SuSe. I don't have a lot of experience with it, but all of the experience I do have has been pretty good, and I know quite a few people who swear by it. Worth a shot. I'll let you know how the install goes tomorrow.

Tuesday, November 28 - Around and Around We Go

Where we stop... um... stop?

Last night I had resolved to remove RedHat from Athena, and I did in fact do so. RedHat is not on that machine. The first distro I tried next was SuSe 7.0. There are a lot of things I like about SuSe; for a text-based system, I don't think I can beat it with a stick. But I could not get the system to work properly with XWindows. No matter that I knew what configuration would work - it didn't. No way, no how, not happening.

This is annoying.

So, I said, we'll try another distro. Hmmm. Brian thinks highly of Debian, so do many other people... it's worth a shot. I installed it on one of my test machines at work today; no sweat. The install took a little getting used to, but it was no serious problem - except that the video didn't work right. Well, it was a machine I'd never installed Linux on before, and it was a funky IBM OEM AGP card, with their odd proprietary interface... that was probably the trouble. So I installed it again (fortunately, these installs consist mainly of waiting for the packages to download and install without human intervention) after throwing in a different card, one I knew worked.

Did it? I dunno... the machine's sitting (hopefully) at the end of the package download-and-install. I left while it was downloading.

But I'm a bit concerned. Debian didn't detect the video on Athena, either. And manual config failed, as well. It's a standard (if poor) SiS board, Mandrake 7.1 and RedHat 7.0 both installed correctly on the first try... so what's the deal?

Anyway. I'm a bit perturbed... at this rate, I'd be better off with Windows 95. At least that would detect the video. I think I'll play with it a bit more, and if I figure it out, you will all be the second to know. (Keri will be the first, she'll hear the cursing stop...)

On the job front, I had a very interesting first interview today. No details at this point, but if they're reading, I'm extremely interested.

Wednesday, November 29 - Eureka!

Well, I'm back to working on Athena again. This time in just about exactly the ideal environment - KDE 2.0 on Mandrake 7.2.

The only reason I didn't use Mandrake in the first place was that I couldn't get it to install. No matter what I did, the install failed at one of three points; A) installing the bootloader on the hard drive, B) configuration of XFree86, even though 7.1 and RedHat had no problem, or C) everything would appear to install correctly, but on that first "smoke test" reboot after install, the system would refuse to boot. But this afternoon, I found a way to successfully install 7.2, and so far it's worked flawlessly three times on three different machines.

Step one is to install Mandrake 7.1 on the system. That's easy, I have cds kicking around of 7.1. I just put the smallest, simplest install I could on the systems, but I made sure that A) Grub was properly loaded and configured, and B) that XFree86 was properly configured and working.

Step two is to install Mandrake 7.2 without changing the disk partitioning. I accidently formatted more than I intended to, but so long as /boot and the MBR were still ok, the bootloader bug couldn't damage the install. Whatever the problem with XFree86 was, it disappeared; I suspect that whatever the bootloader problem was affected the installation process, so solving that problem killed the other bugs, too. At any rate, Athena is now running Mandrake 7.2 with KDE2, and boy is it purty. <G> Konqueror is not quite ready for prime time - at least not compared with IE - but then, neither is Netscape, so I'm not that upset. Opera on Linux seems to work fairly well, too, so I might end up using a combination of the two on this system.

On one hand, it's annoying to have gone through all this messing around only to end up back at my starting point, but on the other, it was nice to take a look at what distributions are available. I really do like the power and complexity available with SuSe, and when Pluto goes down for the next rebuild (somewhere in the next month or two, I think) RedHat is going to be replaced by SuSe. Debian was interesting; I like the tools they ship with it for laptops, and if Homer should end up with a Linux OS on it (it has a 12 GB hard drive, I'm thinking about dual-booting it) Debian is probably the way I'll go. The .deb package format is interesting; I like the way it can automatically go out to the ftp site and download packages for you, rather than forcing you to download the packages you want to use. And the gripping hand of the matter is, Athena is running the way I wanted it to. That's good enough for me.

In other news, I ran across an article on CNN, and particularly a comment, that got the blood boiling a little bit:

Berkeley protests block speech by former Israeli prime minister

And the quote that really got to me:

"I don't believe in free speech for war criminals," said one demonstrator, Lori Berlin.

Despite that, the protesters have the right to assemble, they have the right to protest, they have the right to their opinion that the former Prime Minister is the reincarnation of Satan, Stalin, and Vlad the Impaler all in one. They exercised one of the greatest rights we have, one that is exercised far too infrequently - the right to stand up and with one voice declare "WE DON'T LIKE THIS." Good.

But.

"I don't believe in free speech for war criminals"?!? Excuse me?!?

I tell you what, Lori - I don't believe in free speech for you. Why not? Because I don't like the way you think. Your ideas disgust me, your morals are appalling, and I just flat don't like you.

What? I'm wrong? Very good. I am. Why? Because I'm attempting to infringe on the rights of another without justification. I'm saying that I don't like what this person thinks, that I do not like their opinion, and so therefore they should not be allowed to speak. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is wrong. No matter what the opinion is.

Freedom is not easy, it is not simple, it is not clean and neat. You can't just take what you want and throw away the rest. If you're going to have freedom, true freedom, then you must have it for all. It's been said many times before, but here it is again; Freedom of Speech means standing 10 feet from someone who is advocating at the top of their voice something you would willingly give your life to prevent. More, Freedom of Speech is defending that person's right to be heard. That's tough, it takes discipline, it takes courage, and it takes something more - the belief that freedom is so important it's worth fighting and dying for, without regard for the possible consequences.

That seems simple enough in the abstract. In real-life, practical, modern terms, it means that the Klan has the right to march in your town. They have the right, the same as any other organization, to file for a permit, have the city police close off the main street, and march right down the middle. They have the right to do that and they have the right to demand that the police arrest you for attempting to interfere with their freedom to do so. It means that extremist pro-life groups have the right to assemble outside of abortion clinics. It means that neo-Nazi groups have the right to claim that the Holocaust was faked, that the they have the right to spread their hatred. It does NOT give them the right to burn synagogues and churches. It does NOT give them the right to lynch civil rights leaders. It does NOT give them the right to paint swastikas on private property that they don't own. We have laws against all of those things, against arson, against murder, against assault, against vandalism. We don't need laws making criminal acts more severely criminal because of the beliefs of the criminal.

So Lori, I applaud you for standing up and making your beliefs known. But please, don't fall into the trap of believing that gives you the right to restrict the freedoms of those around you.

Thursday, November 30 Friday, December 1 - These Changing Times

Sigh. I wrote a post yesterday, really. But when I went on my daily reading rounds... um, hello? Where did it go?? Turns out my nifty auto-update script barfed after updating the first location - Athena. So the main site on Hydras, and the mirror on Fortytwo, were both un-updated. Sigh.

Anyway. Onward and upward...

If you haven't seen Tom's post for today yet, go read it. Daynotes.com, his page, and this page will all be going through IP changes tomorrow today, which means the DNS entries for all those pages will not work properly until it's propogated.

Anyway. Until Hydras comes back, go here for Daynotes.com. Tom's pages are available here, and if you want the Syroidmanor.com root site, that's here.

To get to this site is easier; http://mirror.rearviewmirror.org/musings/current.html is already up and working. It'll (usually) be up-to-date even after the changes are completed, so if the site's ever down, go ahead and use the mirror.

Anything else... oh, yes. It seems I spoke too soon on Athena. There's a very odd problem with KDE's fonts; after a few minutes, every font that's not explicitly set (web page <font..> directives and so on) changes to 11pt LEDFIXED. This is a very large (100 pixels high, at least) greyed-out font, difficult to read, stretches all the windows out, and very, very annoying. My workstation at work, also Mandrake 7.2, doesn't exhibit this behavior. Logging out and deleting .Xdefault and .Xauthority seems to cre the problem - for about 20 minutes. Then it comes back. In addition, I've noted that the startups on the two machines are different; Athena's is the normal, white text on black interface we've all come to know and love, but Igor (the work machine) has a snifty GUI startup interface. Both machines are set to NOT start X11 on boot, and Igor logs in through the normal text interface. But these two machines are supposed to be identical except for hardware config; I'd really like to know why they ended up so different.

Anyway. That'll give me something to play with over the weekend, I guess. TTFN.