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More on "doing the right things" in the future.
(7/2) They Took My Kodachrome! Medical Addendum 
"Don't take my Kodachrome away" - Paul Simon (1973) "They took our jobs!" South Park (April 28, 2004)
67 years after introducing the reference standard color film, Kodak
discontinued Kodachrome
25 in 2002.
(It is my understanding that the other two versions, Kodachrome 64 and
200, are also being discontinued.)
When I was a child, first learning about photography and film,
Kodachrome 25 was exotic.
I mostly used black and white film and borrowed darkrooms because I could
not afford color film or commercial processing.
I never became more than an amateur, having neither artistic gifts nor
great fascination with photographic technology.
But I took lots of photos and accumulated lots more family pictures -- I
maintain a family photos web site with about 1800 photos, some dating
back to the 19th century.
To be honest, I've rarely used Kodachrome, mostly opting for
Ektachrome (to enable indoor photos without flash) and print film
(Kodachrome was/is primarily for slides).
Though not really the end of traditional photography, the end of
Kodachrome symbolizes the end of film-based photography, ignoring
disposable cameras and (semi-)professional photographers.
Low cost, automated digital cameras let the average person, the
amateur photographer, replace a bulky camera, scattered
negatives and disorganized collections of prints
with pocket-sized and television-like alternatives.
(It literally took years for me to collect, organize and digitize
the prints, slides and negatives that are the basis for my family
photos site.)
Digital photography has tremendous benefits:
One example of a hazard: catastrophic loss of photos seems more likely to
me with common practice today than common practice with film-based photos.
With film-based photos, one usually had both negatives and prints,
often in separate rooms if not further apart, so it would take a major
physical disaster, e.g., a house fire, to lose the photos.
With digital photos, common practice is to transfer photos to a computer
and delete from the camera.
If the computer fails, because of infection, a disk failure,
whatever, the only copy of the photo is lost.
(There might be a printed copy, but even then, if made on a home
printer, that print might deteriorate more rapidly and/or be of
noticeably lower quality that commercial prints.)
One example of an unrealized benefit: digital images, computers and
web sites allow for far more ways to identify, organize and present
photos than traditional envelopes and albums of prints.
But in practice, the software and web sites for digital photos seem
mostly oriented toward selling prints of digital photos, doing little
different than film-based photography in allowing sharing and viewing of
photos.
With digital photos, it feels like we're where personal computers
and/or the Internet were in the mid-1980s.
The potential is thrilling, but the reality is not.
As I've said before, I'm trying to figure out how to leverage
what others have done with incremental improvements I might suggest.
Medical Addendum
First, I am delighted with my wife's recovery after her
hip replacement.
Just seven weeks and a day after her surgery, she is so much more
mobile, and so relatively free of pain, that we are both in somewhat
of a state of disbelief. But her recovery is real and seemingly faster
than what we were lead to expect.
However, her experience and another family member's experience after
multiple glaucoma surgeries have made me very conscious of the importance
of following the doctor's orders after surgery.
My wife was given three primary rules of things she was not supposed to do
for the first six weeks after surgery. She was very careful to follow those
rules, and her caution, along with a great surgeon and a very good
physical therapist, are some of the main reasons she is doing so well
now.
The surgeon, his staff, and the written instructions she received
all emphasized the importance of those three rules (which were formally
termed "precautions").
In the case of the glaucoma surgery, perhaps the surgeon was not so
emphatic in discussing the post-surgery precautions. In any case,
the family member was not carefully following the restrictions and had
a frightening setback. After a couple of weeks of realization that this
was seemingly the primary problem, including a second opinion from
a different surgeon, the restrictions are being followed. Yesterday,
the surgeon said the eye is "well on its way to total recovery".
Bottom line, I omitted a critical issue in Navigating
Modern Medicine: the importance of understanding and strictly
following post-surgery directions from the surgeon.
That is the patient's responsibility!
(5/23) Navigating Modern Medicine, Miscellany
"Well, Jane, it just goes to show you. It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another." - Roseanne Rosannadanna
I've been spending hardly any time on the things I expected I would be
a month ago. But I am not about to complain. Rather, I thank God for the
magic of modern medical technology, and my late mother, a nursing
professor, for preparing me so well to cope with the complexity of
modern medical practice. (Besides thanking my mother for teaching me so
much about nursing, I have to thank her and my father, who is
nearing 95-years-old, for giving me a wonderful sister who became an
M.D. and my most trusted medical advisor.)
I'm going to mostly focus on my wife's condition and treatment,
comment on the challenges of being a patient and a caretaker where we
live.
There will be a little discussion of computer-oriented things, but
expect this to be mostly different from what I usually write about.
My wife developed "avascular necrosis" in her right hip, the
same condition that ended Bo Jackson's football career.
With an artificial hip and rehabilitation, Jackson was able to resume
playing major league baseball. That was almost 15 years ago.
Hip replacement has progressed so far since then.
It is one of the two surgeries with the highest rate of
patient satisfaction, the other being cataract removal.
(I'm basing this on what an anesthesiologist told us. I assume he
both knew what he was talking about and had no reason to be biased.)
We originally scheduled surgery for May 24. The surgeon asked that we move
the date up to May 13. Given how much Caroline was suffering, I would
have voted for an earlier date.
Caroline's orthopedic surgeon is probably the best in Austin.
The hospital, next door to his office, is probably the best in
Austin.
Yet, I tremble when I think about those patients who don't have
the kind of facilitation I was able to provide, and regret the one
night I chose to sleep at home instead of in her room.
The 24x7 effectiveness of a hospital is almost entirely dependent on the
nursing staff. We encountered mostly excellent, dedicated nurses,
some not quite so good, and a few that needed discipline and
re-education.
I knew beforehand that good nurses are scarce and overworked.
But I didn't know that viscerally until the weekend Caroline spent in
the hospital.
I didn't have a clue about the degree of overwork.
Which gets back to me as a facilitator. I was able to remind the nurses
of things that had been forgotten or delayed. I was able to handle some
of the tasks that were really the nurses' responsibility.
I was able to talk to the nurses in the terminology and abbreviations they
are used to.
And,
except for the one night I slept at home, I was able to prevent the
less than excellent nurses from making mistakes, large and small.
This gets me back to thanking my mother and my sister.
I'm very good at teaching myself, but without the basic training
from my mother and the counsel from my sister, I could not have
learned what I needed to learn, could not have done what needed to
be done.
The surgeon recommended that Caroline's rehabilitation be at home
(vs. a much longer hospital stay). Since she hates being in the
hospital, since hospitals are full of germs, and since the surgeon
believed we could succeed with home rehabilitation, the decision was
easy.
(In general, everything the surgeon and his assistants have said has
so far proved to be correct, so my attitude has been to trust him
entirely.)
Caroline has been home for a week, as of today, and all seems to
be going as we were led to expect.
There are lots of computer oriented things I could talk about from the
hospital experience, but I'll pick one piece of "low hanging
fruit".
One of the devices used for post-surgical patients is a PCA ("Patient
Controlled Analgesic") which either continuously or on patient push
of a button introduces intravenous narcotic.
The PCA Caroline had was a very sophisticated device, but totally
baffling to almost all the nurses, even the most technologically
sophisticated nurses.
By the time it was removed, I had figured out how to understand its
display, and I knew what it was supposed to be doing, but I
certainly would not have wanted to be responsible for programming the PCA.
A couple of unrelated tidbits:
Back to digital photography, I have been able to use digital photographs
of Caroline's incision to show medical professionals how the
incision is healing, not infected, etc., without Caroline
having to go through the discomfort of those professionals
removing/replacing the dressing.
(4/23) Digital Photos, PHP, FC3, Dead Fans
"Come together right now over me" - John Lennon
I wouldn't dream of comparing my writing to Jean-Paul Sartre, but
this may seem like stream of consciousness, so please bear with me.
I hope it will all come together by the bottom of the page.
This week it seems to me that there's nothing like being a first time
grandfather (April Rose was born this past Monday) to make one conscious
of digital cameras, the huge benefits of digital cameras (see April) but also the unnecessary
discrepancies between different digital cameras and deficiencies in the
associated software.
This reinforces my motivation to document the benefits and problems of
digital photography and to pursue software to make things better.
I expect I'll have lots more to say about this in the future,
based on thoughts and draft documents I'm not ready to reveal.
I've been looking at all of the (free, bundled and/or affordable)
photo software I
can get my hands on, and have lots of opinions.
Bottom line, I don't think any of the software is close to getting
things "right", though some is much closer than other
software.
In the process, I've discovered that PHP probably has better
primitives for dealing with the problems than any other web environment.
Since PHP has so many other advantages and advocates, it was easy for
me to conclude that anything besides the two heavyweight contenders (from
Microsoft and Sun) could not compete with PHP.
Unfortunately, my own Apache modifications had broken
PHP on my own Linux servers.
I realized quickly that there was no inherent conflict, just my
naive approach of entirely rebuilding Apache to add mod_auth++.
So I resolved that quickly on my test servers.
That brought me back to whether I was going to upgrade my production Linux
server to Fedora Core 3, now that FC2 is "legacy".
The only plausible answer was "yes", but when?
And what do I do about the unnecessarily manual process, I'd go
through to configure Fedora after install?
To exacerbate things, the processor fan in my Linux server developed
bad bearings.
As much as I like the "medium desktop" Dell Optiplex chassis
design and all of the improvements and variations that have appeared over
the last decade, my production server was early vintage and it looked
like the fan was one of the hardest components to replace.
That server normally sits in a minimally temperature controlled closet with
a newer, fully loaded Optiplex running Windows 2000 Server and a
well-loaded Mac G4.
Between the three of them, they generate lots of heat, so I knew
I had to make hardware changes before summer.
Fortunately, I have a half-dozen of the right vintage Optiplex
desktops, so I could swap hardware easily.
I developed a collection of useful scripts for configuring
Fedora after install. So all that was left was to be brave and put in
place the things I'd been contemplating/prototyping. I did that today.
So far, so good. So now I can get back to digital photography software.
(2/28) (disc)centricity: Solaris X and Fedora in a Windows world
"It was 20 years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play." - Lennon/McCartney
I wrote
before about my frustrations and concerns with Fedora and my intentions to
explore alternatives, especially Solaris X.
In my recent explorations, I've puzzled about what Sun has released
and wondered how serious they are about Solaris on X86.
Having been involved with Solaris on X86 since the very beginnings, I
would be delighted to enjoy Solaris on X86 and see it have some success.
(In 1991 or '92, before Sun said anything publicly about Solaris
on X86, four Sun executives paid me a surprise visit at Dell to talk
about collaboration on putting Solaris on X86.)
Before starting to install Solaris X on my favorite test machine (an older
Dell Optiplex with a 733MHz PIII), I installed larger disks
to have plenty of space for Solaris, multiple Fedora
releases, and Windows 2003 Server.
Suddenly, I seemed mired in all of the arcane details of disk
partitioning that trace back to the 1983 introduction of the IBM PC/XT with
its "large" 10-megabyte disk. (The disk really was large, both
in capacity, and in physical size, at that time.)
Today, with disk drive capacities thousands of times larger in much
smaller physical packaging, the "PC architecture" still
reflects decisions made back then.
Much has been written about the shortsighted memory parameters
("who will ever need more than 640KB of memory") of the original
IBM PC.
By the mid-80s, the PC world was struggling even more seriously with
the limitations of 16 bit addressing, just as the PC world is beginning
to struggle with the limitations of 32 bit addressing today.
Disk capacities have increased roughly comparably with physical memory,
but there has seemingly been no de facto standard for extending
the disk partitioning parameters.
Until recently, I naively assumed that Microsoft was/is able to set the
de facto standard.
Sun (Solaris) and Red Hat (Fedora) seem to disagree.
Worse, Sun and Red Hat seem to have changed their own partitioning
assumptions between Solaris 9 and Solaris X, and between Fedora Core 2
and 3.
(Fortunately, Windows seems to accept any of these partitioning setups.)
On a disk with Microsoft established partitioning and Windows 2003
Server, I installed Fedora Core 2.
Then I tried to install Solaris X.
(On this same machine, with a smaller disk, I'd previously had
Windows NT4 Server, Solaris 9, Free BSD and FC2 all on the one
smaller disk.)
Solaris X told me the disk partitioning was invalid and that if I wanted
to install Solaris X, I'd have to re-initialize the partition
table, and, in doing so, delete everything on the disk.
Grumble.
Before accepting that, while ruminating about workarounds, I tried
Fedora Core 3. It told me essentially the same thing, that it would
have to re-initialize the partition table!
I'll skip most of the subsequent arcane tribulations I experienced.
I was able to create a partition table acceptable to FC2 and Solaris X
(and Windows).
Then the Solaris X install told me it would not allow Linux on the
same disk (machine?) and it would delete the Linux partition before I
could proceed! This made me think back to mid-80s battling amongst the
vendors of all the different versions of Unix.
SCO dominated market share on PC hardware and Sun dominated market share
on workstations.
There were lots of other Unix versions in the mix.
Sun, and to a lesser extent, SCO, seemed unaware of how
the rapidly increasing dominance of Microsoft, Novell and Apple
products would leave little room for even one version of Unix.
That the battles went on between the different versions of Unix,
especially since there were so many arbitrary and unnecessary
incompatibilities between the versions, made
it impossible for any of them to thrive.
Today, it seems those lessons have been forgotten.
Only to the extent that the various Linux distributions remain more or less
compatible with each other, then Linux on server-like machines
seems a realistic alternative to Windows.
I managed to get Solaris X, FC2, FC3, and Windows Server 2003
barely coexisting on the same machine, using three disks.
The Solaris graphical user interface wouldn't start because Solaris X
installation had mis-configured the "Xorg" X-windows server
instead of the "Xsun" server. (Apparently, this is
a common experience, based on my search for a solution.
The solution buried in http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=22723&messageID=73851 worked for me.)
Solaris needs to be obviously better than Linux to even be in the
competition (while hoping that Apple doesn't release their Unix, OS
X, on PC hardware).
So far, Solaris X has frustrated me more than it has engaged me.
I'll probably gradually learn more about Solaris X, but not now.
Paying attention to Linux and Windows (and OS X) seems much more valuable.
Red Hat continues to indicate
better attention to Fedora.
I've figured out workarounds for all of the problems I'd been having
with Fedora Core 3 and may even use it on my production Linux server soon.
(2/3) Closing Out 2004, Planning 2005 Research
Let's see, I could start on income taxes.
No, I still haven't received a couple of 1099s. Whew!
It's not much more fun to admit that many of the things, I've
tried to work on the last year or so have led me to disappointing technical
conclusions. "You can't always get what you want ... you get
what you need". (That could be attributed to Mick Jagger/Keith
Richard, but I'd rather think of the Biblical basis.)
Anyway, this is intended to be a brief recap on various technical
topics, approximately in order of most disappointing first, and
a glimmer of where I hope research will take me this year.
Replacing/Preserving NT4 Server
There are "lots" of organizations still using NT4 Server,
even though it has reached "end-of-life" in Microsoft's
perspective.
Since I manage a few of these servers myself, and the owners
cannot easily migrate to Windows 2003 Server, as Microsoft would
want, I'd hoped to come up with strategies that are viable for
either staying with NT4 or switching to Samba.
However, my reluctant conclusion is that neither of these are good
solutions:
LDAP For General Use
Unfortunately, I have no better report than that of my "LDAP Angst".
The more I learned, the more OpenLDAP seemed incomplete, and the
more Samba seemed incomplete, due to dependence on LDAP. But I'll
continue to learn more about both, hoping that new releases will
bring both closer to being complete.
Fedora
Ambiguous, conflicting messages are coming from Red Hat regarding
Fedora.
http://fedora.redhat.com/ seems
to indicate that all is going according to plan.
However, news reports quoting
Red Hat sources admit "mistakes" and suggest changes are coming.
I hope so. I've seemingly wasted much time and had allowed myself to
get very frustrated with Fedora Core 3. After extensive testing on several
other machines, I tried to switch my production Linux machine to FC3.
I could never even get it to boot after the install! I submitted detailed
bug reports with Bugzilla.
As far as I can tell, those reports were never even read.
Further, even new FC2 kernel updates seem to have significant problems.
They "panic" in the disk driver at boot time on my best test
machine. (That machine happily runs NT4, Solaris 9, FreeBSD,
... as well as older FC2/FC3 kernels.)
For most purposes, I'm backing away from new Fedora releases until
I see what changes, if any, are made in the overall Fedora strategy.
My production Linux server should be happy with FC2 for the foreseeable
future, even though FC2 is going to "Legacy" status soon.
However, I have some plans for new FC3/FC4 experiments.
I'll also be looking at alternate Linux distributions and Solaris X.
Secure Wireless; Spam
I don't think I've written anything about these topics in a long
time, basically because I think I have good solutions in hand. Between
WPA, SSL for picking up e-mail, SSH for sending e-mail, and
other usage of SSL and SSH, I think
pretty much everything I do using wireless connections is encrypted at
least at one level if not multiple levels.
Spam continues to be an annoyance, but my
simplistic solutions
still seem to keep things under control.
Looking Forward
So what next? SBC's intent to purchase AT&T and discovery of an
ancestral tie
to the Wright brothers have made me ponder the formerly
dominant commercial research labs in the U.S. a few decades ago.
The main three I think of are
One of the bureaucratic, yet effective, procedures at T.J. Watson
used to be annual production of "Research Orders" that documented
what a group had accomplished and why it should continue to be funded.
Sort of like a grant proposal, except that it is easier to
justify continuing successful efforts than to compete for external funds.
I'm thinking I should at least sketch out something like a research
order or a grant proposal for the things I want to work on. I think I am
on the verge of a one paragraph introduction, which might be something
like:
"Computer-based photographs, from digital cameras and scanned conventional media, have become pervasive. Major companies, notably Google, have produced a variety of (free) software and services (e.g., Blogger.com, Hello, and Picasa) to facilitate Internet communication and sharing of photographs. Yet, these have seen miniscule use, in comparison to email, web browsing and other more established Internet capabilities. This research will identify barriers to broader acceptance and attempt to overcome these barriers."2004 (11/15) Corrigenda, Dropping Notebooks, LDAP Angst
Corrigendum: Fedora, a year later
In Fedora, a
year later, I lamented the difficulty of changing from the
"legacy" (University of Washington) IMAP to the
Fedora Core 2 mail server implementation, based on
the CMU Cyrus IMAP
Server.
A kind reader pointed out that FC2 includes two IMAP
implementations and that the second, Dovecot, allows a much more
graceful transition from the UW-IMAP found in FC1 and older
Red Hat distributions. I've been using Dovecot in production on FC2 for
several weeks and have no complaints.
On the other hand, FC3 is now "final", so I've begun
to explore what is different in FC3 vs. FC2.
On a separate but possibly related note, Sun's announcement today
of (nearly) free Solaris 10 for X86 reinspires me to look more at Solaris.
Corrigendum: Windows XP Service Pack 2
In Windows XP Service
Pack 2, I said "The problems I've noticed were there
before SP2".
That is no longer true. I have concluded that XP SP2 is very troublesome
in domains where the servers are still running Windows NT4 Server.
There seem to be two cases:
In Mac OS X,
I talked about traveling with my iBook as my primary notebook, bringing
my ancient Dell Latitude along for software not available on the iBook.
A couple of months ago, I was leaving on a two week trip with both
notebooks. I removed both from my luggage to go through the security
checkpoint, and managed to drop both of them! After clearing
security, I determined:
LDAP Angst
In "and all
those things" (Directories, volunteering, ...),
I wrote that an ex-Dell colleague considered LDAP and Active Directory
"fundamentally flawed" but that I felt compelled to work with
them because they are the seeming dominant directory approaches today.
All of the time and frustration I've spent with LDAP recently makes me
remember both his words and mine.
After much reading, trial, and error, I have OpenLDAP working
on a production FC2 machine mostly the way I wanted.
Since the NT4 end-of-life "witching hour" is just six weeks
away, I'm assuming that for now I have an adequate understanding
of LDAP to pursue Samba and other solutions to NT4 end-of-life.
I intend to get back to the NT4 experiments I planned earlier in the year.
(9/7) Static in the Ether
"Lightning is striking again and again and again" - Lou Christie "It's a jungle out there" - Randy Newman Lightning strikes thrice
I used to be so naive about lightning. Of course, a direct strike
could be catastrophic.
Ignoring that, I assumed the main vulnerability of electrical devices is
surges on power lines -- if power wiring had enough surge protection,
then things would be OK.
About a decade ago I started thinking that phone lines needed surge
protection, which they do.
The last year has made me realize that just about any kind of wiring and
device is vulnerable to static electricity damage from a nearby strike.
This seems to be particularly true of Ethernet (10/100/...BaseT):
For this time of year, it seems I know/know of lots more people with
bacterial/viral infections than I would expect.
But whenever I start talking about "viruses" people assume I'm
talking about computers.
That's understandable, given the prevalence of hostile, vicious
software succeeding in infecting so many computers, especially home
computers.
Neurotic hygiene, fastidious enough to make
Monk
seem normal, is the order of the day.
I keep seeing more and more computers so seriously infected that I see
no choice but to retrieve whatever data can be retrieved, erase the
disk, and re-install all the software.
Computer manufacturers are making such "Full System Recovery"
easier, but that is little consolation in the face of many hours of
effort and the almost certain loss of some data.
This is inevitably most noticeable with Windows-based machines, for
a number of reasons, but is true for other platforms, as well.
I'm discouraged that I have so little constructive to say on the
subject:
Fedora, a year later
Speaking of alternate platforms, I'm pondering my approach to
Linux. I'm too busy/lazy to deal with anything but a prepackaged
distribution. When Red Hat was "free" (as in money) and the most
popular distribution, the answer seemed easy.
Fedora Core 1 has seemed
a natural progression from Red Hat 9.
However:
Windows XP Service Pack 2
I don't know of a publication that has even noticed the Fedora
transitions. On the other hand, there has been lots of coverage
of XP SP2. Even the daily newspapers have had their say.
And much of what has been said has been "static".
I went to SP2 on my main Windows machine four weeks ago and not looked
back:
I can't say much about the things I was writing about
last, partly because
I have little new to say and partly because of non-disclosure
responsibilities.
I've delved much more deeply into Mac OS X.
New clients and personal responsibilities have taken me in new directions.
I'm still trying to balance my time between paid and pro bono
activities.
I always seem too busy for "self-funded research" yet optimistic
that I will find time to get back to old and new ideas.
(4/5) Keepin' on Keepin' on: OS X, Fighting Spam, XP Media Center, "and all those things"
"Genghis Khan and his brother, Don, just could not keep from keepin' on" - Bob Dylan Mac OS X
I've continued pursuit of Mac literacy,
mostly trying to see if I can be confident that the iBook is a complete
replacement for my old Dell Latitude running Windows NT4/2K/XP.
Mostly it is. I think I could make a stronger statement -- I can do anything
I normally do with the Latitude on the iBook, with the major exception
of purchased software (mostly from Microsoft and Adobe, but also things
like TurboTax) that I do not plan to purchase in Mac versions.
(Traveling locally, I do just fine with only the iBook.
For out of town trips, carrying the iBook in my
briefcase and the Latitude in my suitcase seems to work.)
In a number of cases, I've had to find OS X equivalents of what I
normally use in Windows or Linux. The Unix (Mach) and X11 underpinnings of
OS X make all the difference in making this feasible. A couple of examples:
As much as I tuned and tweaked my Procmail anti-spam stuff (Getting Away From
SPAM?), I was still spending too much time checking the
"Suspect" folder and finding hardly anything interesting there.
Since I'd seen such positive reports about SpamAssassin and
SpamAssassin was laying dormant on my Fedora-based mail server,
I started using it, with essentially the default settings,
and sending anything it marked as "[SPAM]" to /dev/null
(the traditional *nix trash can).
There have been minor difficulties:
Before SpamAssassin, I sent anything not classified to the Suspect
folder.
Now, so little bad stuff gets through,
I let anything not classified come to my Inbox.
Windows XP Media Center 2004
Before getting the iBook, I was thinking that the next computer purchase
for myself would be a Centrino
notebook.
Since the iBook has worked out so well, and since it had been 5 years
since I'd bought myself a new machine (desktop or notebook) for
Windows, I started thinking about getting a better desktop instead of
a Windows notebook.
Saturday's Fry's ad had a seemingly unbelievable bargain on a
Sony VAIO "Windows Media Center". Since much of my thinking about
a new desktop was motivated by audio and video processing plans,
the VAIO proved irresistable.
The system unit has more connectors than any other electronic device I
own, excepting a 16 channel audio recording mixer. In other words,
I've been challenged to connect it up reasonably, and I wonder
how anyone without serious A/V experience would cope with it.
I've been further challenged because I wanted the keyboard/mouse/display
on my desk, about 12 feet away from all of the audio recording gear.
Cabling things so that the computer stuff works well and the audio signals
are clean was not easy, but by putting the system unit along the wall
in between the desk and audio gear, I seem to have succeeded. (I
carefully avoided "ground loops", a notorious source of 60 Hz
hum, but still ended up with one ground loop due to the cable TV
connection.
A homemade isolation transformer made from back to back 300 Ohm to 75 Ohm
transformers solved that.)
So far I am very pleased with the VAIO. I've barely scratched the
surface of all of the bundled software, and haven't tried any of
the video facilities, except for the TV tuner.
I expect I'll use the VAIO to facilitate ongoing conversion of
LPs and cassettes to MP3's and figure out the video stuff ad hoc.
"and all those things" (Directories, volunteering, ...)
After what I wrote last month, a colleague/friend from when I worked
at Dell wrote back with at least a couple of memorable points: (1) he
wanted to know why I spent any time with LDAP and Active Directory when he
considers them fundamentally flawed, and (2) he wanted me to
write more about personal stuff, so here's a little bit in response.
I really don't know enough about LDAP and Active Directory yet to know
whether I think they are fundamentally flawed or not. What I do know is
that they seem to be the dominant approaches to directories at present,
and that the people I want to help are using LDAP and Active Directory
more and more. And as organizations feel forced to migrate away from NT4
Server, the emphasis on LDAP and Active Directory will be that much
stronger. So even though I think of LDAP as anything but "light
weight" and Active Directory as inevitably more complex, I see
no choice but to understand and work in that context.
When I worked at "traditional" jobs at IBM/Dell/VTEL and software
startups, my
wife said I worked "half-time" -- 12 hours a day.
Now she says I'm a "full-time volunteer".
By her previous standard, I think a more accurate characterization
would be "quarter-time volunteer", but that is just playing
with words. (I also spend time on paid consulting and "self-funded
research".)
The important thing is that I am finding many opportunities for helping
my church, with everything from
removing spyware and virus infections, to re-purposing unused computers
for backup servers and disaster recovery, to using telecom cost
reduction experience from my last startup to cut the monthly phone bill in
half and the monthly Internet bill by two-thirds. I'm also trying to
help Texas Reach Out Ministries.
Texas Reach Out is "providing Christian transitional services for
former inmates".
Amongst the services are housing and computer access, so I help them
both with their office computing and with the computers for the former
inmate residences.
I think that's enough for today.
(3/1) Mac Literacy, Printing Challenges, Directories!
Mac Literacy
The last few weeks I've given myself a crash course in Mac literacy -- I
now feel pretty accomplished/confident, especially with OS X.
I gave up, at least for now, on getting one of the
"museum" Macs to work.
Instead I got a 900MHz G3 iBook, then added memory and an Airport (WiFi)
card. {Aside -- I thought I was going to order through the
"Special deals" section of
http://store.apple.com, but
found I could get a "more special" deal by calling 1-800-MY-APPLE.
Apple seems to almost have sales channel conflict between their own web and
phone channels.
I wonder whether things are different/similar in other countries.
Different confusion seemed to reign with regard to customer/technical
support -- the web site seems to encourage calling for help, but the
on-hold chatter on the phone lines encourages going to the web.}
One of my worries with starting with OS X was that I would lean on the
Unix underpinnings of OS X and not really become Mac literate.
But I had the discipline to pretend Unix wasn't there until a couple of
nights ago, when I felt sufficiently accomplished/literate to not
taint myself.
I fear that people will see me carrying my iBook and think of me as a Mac
chauvinist. In the past, things like that have given people the
perception that I am a Unix chauvinist or a Windows chauvinist,
whatever.
I think of myself as pragmatic. Just as I jump freely between Unix (really
now, Linux) and Windows environments, I'll start mixing in
the iBook.
To the extent I can be platform neutral, I can choose the right tool
for the task at hand for things I'm doing myself and can help others
regardless of their choices of platforms.
Printing Challenges
If the task at hand is networked printing, OS X isn't even as
good as recent Linux distributions. That's a pretty harsh assessment
given my past dissing of Linux printing support.
(Linux printing support seems noticably better to me recently, at
least in what I find built-in to Fedora.)
I'm not alone in this perspective -- a couple of friends who are long
time Mac users/experts have recently been challenged by setting up new
printers with their Macs.
I should temper this assessment by pointing out that this is based on
a very small sample (my/my friends' experiences) out of a huge
population of printers, networks, and protocols.
With the iBook, I had no trouble with direct USB connection of my
newest Canon ink-jet nor my Samsung laser. They work fine with direct
USB connection, but I have no desire to have them USB connected to
the iBook.
The Canon is normally connected to a Windows machine, and the Samsung
is normally networked via a Hawking print server that supports both LPR
and IPP.
My Windows and Linux machines seem to work fine with both of those.
But not the iBook.
I have yet to make it work with either of those.
However, I do have it printing, using Windows protocols!,
to an older Canon connected to a different Windows machine.
Fortunately, I don't do much printing. One of the nice features
of OS X is that the print dialogs have a pervasive
"Save As PDF..." button. So if I need to print something on
the nicer Canon or the Samsung, at least there is the option of
hitting that PDF button, saving to a Windows or Linux machine and
printing the PDF from that machine. Did someone say "easy to use"?
Directories!
Another issue the iBook raises is that now I have yet
another e-mail client on yet another platform.
I'm stalling on bringing my address books into the iBook, hoping
that I will finally follow through on my LDAP plans.
So I'll sign off here now so that I will sooner get back to pursuing
LDAP/Active Directory/NT4 End of Life.
(2/2) Viral Spam, Macs, Mirroring, mod_auth++ 
Viral Spam
In my December overview/details of my simplistic
approach to spam filtering, I mentioned that virus management and spam
filtering should be coordinated, and that I mainly depend on
renattach
to neutralize potentially viral e-mail attachments.
This past week of MyDoom dominating e-mail systems, and the attention of
many people, from end users to administrators to reporters,
re-inforced this point in a way I never could have.
One of my clients kept calling me thinking that his computer was infected.
I kept checking the computer and finding that his antivirus software was
doing what it was supposed to and keeping him uninfected.
I had to keep saying that he was "inundated but not infected".
I tried to think of a good way to get my simplistic spam filtering to
deal with MyDoom. At first I was stumped, but then realized there was
an almost trivial solution:
I must admit that I am discussing this from a platform neutral or even
Windows friendly perspective.
(In the interests of full disclosure: I have direct or indirect
financial interest in Dell, HPQ, Intel, and Microsoft.)
There are Linux and Mac advocates that will
simply say the solution to these problems is to not use Microsoft software.
For example, Walt Mossberg's October 23, 2003 column in the
Wall Street Journal was If You're
Getting Tired Of Fighting Viruses, Consider a New Mac. Friday,
a Mac advocate seemingly seriously tried to convince me that "Microsoft
Office is a worse virus than MyDoom". I disagree.
Macs
With lots of help from three different Mac experts, plus my own
investigation, I've made little progress in bringing the Mac II to
life. I've tried OS 6.x tools/install diskettes, OS 7.x
tools/install diskettes, an OS 7.1 hard disk pulled from a once
functional Performa that lost its video circuitry, and an OS 7.5.0
install CD. (Supposedly, Mac IIs were supported up through OS 7.5.5.)
At this point, I'm believing that there was more wrong with the
Mac II than the missing hard drive. It may be that resumption of my Mac
self-education will have to wait on me acquiring more modern hardware,
such as the PowerBook I keep thinking I want.
Mirroring
My mirroring explorations have progressed far enough that I feel very
confident of being able to rapidly recover loss of any component or my
entire production Fedora machine. Not perfect, but good enough. Besides
my ad hoc procedures, I've started exploring/testing the
software RAID capabilities built-in to most Linux distributions. I'll
probably start using those in place of some of my own procedures once I
get more comfortable with them.
But for now, I think other projects are more important.
mod_auth++
There were two main problems in the mod_auth++ Beta 0 level release:
(1/28) XP, Macs, Mirroring, Museum, mod_auth++
I've been working on lots of small projects. Some I won't describe
here since they were for paid or pro bono clients. The rest of the
story:
Windows XP
Not all that long
ago, I wrote about Windows XP: "I've tried it
numerous times on different machines and just don't like it".
A couple of months later, I had to write Making Peace With
Windows XP when I discovered I needed XP to reasonably use WPA.
A week or so ago, I felt compelled to change the Windows 2000 partition
of my favorite machine to XP so that I could take full advantage of the
DVD burner I'd acquired. In particular, I wanted to try Windows
Movie Maker.
So now I am further compelled to admit that I'm beginning to like XP
better than 2000.
As long as XP is configured for the "classic" start
menu, and I customize the explorer defaults more or less the way
I've been doing since Windows 95, I have no serious
complaints. And I'm starting to take advantage of XP features such as
"Switch User".
Macs
Since I got serious about working with computers in 1971, I have worked
with many different types and brands. In the 70s it was mostly CDC 6600s
and related models, IBM 360s/370s and a little bit with Digital minis.
In the 80s it was mostly what were then called "engineering
workstations" running some flavor of Unix. Since then it has been PCs
running Unix, Windows, and Linux.
I've always felt remiss in not having more experience/expertise
regarding Macs. I bought my daughter a Performa in 1993 with the intention
that I begin teaching myself about Macs when she was not using it.
Several years later, the video circuitry stopped working, she was
going to a school that used Windows machines, so the Performa went into
the attic and I got her a Dell Optiplex. (I'm partial to Dell and
especially the Optiplex line.)
My sister, an M.D., has always been a Mac user, partly because
of medically oriented software and partly because I told her she would
probably find the Mac easier to use. (Aside -- at her clinic she now has
to use a Windows ME machine. My personal opinion is that Microsoft should
have ended the Windows 9x family with Windows 98SE. Everything I know about
ME makes me wish my sister wasn't stuck with it.) Anyway, she and
her daughter have been wanting to make their OS 9.2 iMac a vehicle for
recordings of my niece's singing and guitar playing. With lots of advice
from Mac expert friends, I've got them going with recordings and
sending me the AIFF files. (Hopefully, they will soon switch to sending
me MP3s.) In the process, I figured out how to remotely manage her
router, a brand previously unknown to me, with a confusing user
interface, and set things up so that I could remotely control things
with VNC when they need help.
(Unfortunately, it appears that none of the modern enhanced performance
VNC versions are available for pre-OS X Macs, so VNC access is
painfully slow, even though access to her router is quite responsive.)
Last year, a good friend with long experience in Mac usage and advocacy
offered me an original Mac II that was intact except for no hard drive.
In principle, it would be possible to pull the Performa drive,
put it in the Mac II and be up and running. A couple weeks ago I was in
the attic looking for the video camera that came with my original Intel
ProShare videoconferencing system. I also found a couple of half-height
5.25" SCSI drives that I thought were functional, just large in
size and small in capacity: 330MB. I also saw the Performa and thought that
I could remove its disk without tools, which I did.
Unfortunately OS 7.1(?) on the Performa disk doesn't like the Mac II
and asks to be reinstalled. I've purchased an OS 7.5.0 retail CD on ebay
and hope I can use that to at least get the Mac II operational and maybe
recover the sofware/data from the Performa drive. We'll see when the
CD arrives. I have several other strategies for proceeding if that one
doesn't work.
You might ask "Why not just start with OS X?". Two answers:
First, if I start with OS X, I'd probably not resist treating
it more like a Unix machine than a Mac. So I really wouldn't learn the
Mac environment that is forced upon me by OS 7 and OS 9. Second, I
don't want to buy a modern Mac at this time. (Sooner or later,
I expect I'll get a PowerBook G4 of some kind.)
Mirroring
If you read Disks STILL
Fail (Sometimes Catastrophically),
you would expect that I've been incrementally working on ad hoc
mirroring strategies for that machine. Right now, that machine has
three disks: a small one that I think of as the operating system disk,
a larger one that I think of as the "content" disk and a mirror
for the content disk. Though not perfect, this works fairly well with
ad hoc mirroring procedures. The content disks have RCS controlled
copies of all of the operating system configuration/customization files,
so if any of the three disks fails, I should be able to recover very
quickly. On the other hand, I'd like to have a mirror disk for the
smaller operating system disk. I even have the drive in hand, but no
more free disk bays in the cabinet. However, there is a bay that is
occupied by a rarely-used IDE CD-ROM.
Because of the Mac activities, and even more because of wanting to
replace the IDE CD-ROM with a mirror system disk, I wanted a reliable
external SCSI CD drive. I had an external 2X (!) Toshiba, but the drive
had failed. I had an internal 3X NEC in my Dell 450 DE/2 DGX museum
machine, but that drive is not reliable and obviously not fast.
I found a fresh-in-the-box HP CD-RW 9200i at a good price on ebay,
put it in the Toshiba's cabinet, so now I have a good external
SCSI CD-RW drive.
(It may never get used to burn CDs, but I have four other
drives that will burn CDs, so I don't care one way or the other
about that.)
So now the missing pieces are (i) a SCSI controller for the Fedora
machine, which should arrive soon and (ii) better software approaches.
When I get the mirroring more to my liking, I expect I'll write more
about it then. Just as a teaser, I'll say that part of what I've
already done is targeted at mirroring the content drives across all three
of my Fedora-cabable machines.
Museum
With all of the above, especially with the Mac II sitting next to the
450 DGX, it was hard to avoid playing with the DGX, so I've been
spending more time with Dell Unix 2.2, NT4 Workstation and Red Hat 5.2.
I'm pleased with the things I've rediscovered. I just wish I could
safely make these museum machines accessible over the Internet. I probably
would have tried to install NEXTSTEP, but (a) I couldn't find
the install CDs I thought I had and (b) I could not find anything
reasonably priced on ebay. (Anyone who has unused NEXTSTEP X86 they do not
want, please contact me.)
Also, while in the museum mode, I tried to fire up the TRS-80 Model
100 that my pastor wanted to place in a good home vs. trying to sell it for
$25 on ebay. I've spent enough time with it to be convinced that the
Ni-Cd battery soldered to the system board will no longer hold a charge
for more than about 15 seconds. I've tracked down and ordered a
replacement, so I hope to get this machine dialing up at 300 baud
some day soon. (I have a 2400 baud modem for the Mac II. Whee! I remember
being excited when I got my first 2400 baud modem!)
mod_auth++
There have been a number of things I've wanted to work on in
mod_auth++:
2003 (12/24) Getting Away From SPAM?
After I wrote my lengthy "End of Two Weeks of SPAM
Purgatory!?", I almost discarded (did not publish) it
because I thought it was too long and not that interesting.
In retrospect, it is obvious that my perspective was distorted,
since there has been significant subsequent positive impact:
This "tidbit" is even more technically presumptive than the
predecessor .
I'm hoping it will be helpful to a broad audience, yet
definitive enough that I can get back to some of the other topics I keep
saying I'm going to bring to completion, e.g.,
nt4eol and
mod_auth++.
My intention here is to explain my practices in enough detail that anyone
who runs their own mail server can adopt (with or without modifications)
my practices. By far, the biggest assumption is that the mail server
is a Unix oriented machine.
(And to make it easier for me to get this
written, I make some very weak assuptions that the server is
running something similar to recent Red Hat releases or Fedora.)
I've not even thought about doing similar things on a Windows-based
mail server:
I hope that is enough background. I am assuming that anyone who reads
further has already gleaned the basic strategy from the prior posting and is ready for more detail.
One of my challenges in describing things is that my personal usage has
been strictly IMAP oriented, but I expect that most people are more
interested in POP.
Assume an e-mail gets in far enough that this discussion is
relevant.
I'm assuming that the default Red Hat/Fedora mechanisms are already
in effect, plus all spam-oriented options in sendmail.mc are
enabled, for example, sendmail.mc has
dnl FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains´) I am pretty sure, based on my server's log files, that such settings are pretty important. On the other hand, I don't have any evidence one way or the other whether spamassassin as supplied/configured by Red Hat does any good. In my experience, Red Hat has good judgement on such things, so I accept their judgement when I don't make the effort to make my own assessment.
All of the above could/should be seen as disclaimers.
The substance of what I do is best visible at
https://technologists.com/~procmail/.procmailrc
and the referenced files visible as links in
https://technologists.com/~procmail/.
Notes:
Happy Holidays! (12/21) End of Two Weeks of SPAM Purgatory!?
Background
This will be longish, definitely not a "tidbit".
I hope you will find it worth reading. It concerns
spam, spam filtering solutions, and ISP customer
service experience.
If those topics do not interest you, you need not read further.
Some of this will seem very technical to some of the e-mail recipients,
but I will try to explain the technical aspects as I write.
Spam is frustrating to all of us. Some say that more than half of e-mail is
now spam. It seemed like spam started escalating dramatically after the 9/11
tragedy.
My wife and I seemed to be victims of the early escalation of undesired
e-mail two years ago, presumably because we had made our e-mail
addresses very visible publicly, especially on our web sites.
Starting in early 2002 I have been crafting a custom solution that has been
satisfactory for the two of us.
Technical Issues: There are two primary Internet e-mail protocols
for picking up mail: POP and IMAP.
Most people use POP (Post Office Protocol). POP stores the mail on the
client, so (unless you tell it otherwise) it deletes the mail from the
server when your client gets it.
If you only use one computer, that's fine. But if you use more
than one computer, POP can be frustrating.
My wife and I use IMAP (Internet
Message Access Protocol) because it stores the mail on the server in such a
way that it is the same regardless of what client computer you use.
Originally, my spam solutions only worked reasonably with IMAP.
(On the other hand, IMAP is inefficient and can be frustratingly
slow...)
A good friend, very astute technically, called a few weeks ago and
asked about using what I had done. Then the answer was wishy-washy,
since he wanted to continue to use POP.
Week before last, one of my client's people and my client
complained to me about spam. They all use POP, with Outlook 2000.
I told them I would make him a guinea pig for a modified
version of what my wife and I use. I spent midnight to 4:30 a.m. that night
reworking what I had done to make that possible, making a coordinated
IMAP and POP version, got some more sleep, then
spent much of the afternoon tweaking/testing what I had done earlier.
I applied it to my client's account and he seems happy with the changes.
I think what I have done is immediately applicable to anyone who uses my
mail server.
Stepping Back
First, what is spam? Some think it is any unsolicited e-mail.
My wife likes to get e-mail telling her how to enlarge her penis!?
My male friends don't!?
More seriously, if you've ordered stuff from Amazon and they suggest
you buy something similar, is that spam? Some say yes, some say no.
If an outfit you've never heard of tries to sell you Vicodin, we
probably all would call that "spam", even if Hormel wishes
we wouldn't.
Second, in some sense the spammers are winning.
They're tricking a lot of people.
If you get spam and it gives you a "take me off this list"
link, the last thing you want to do is click on that link.
Spammers are looking for viable e-mail addresses.
Most of the stuff they send goes to invalid addresses.
If you click on a "take me off this list" link, they've
suddenly discovered a valid address and will add your address to their
list of viable addresses, exactly the opposite of what they said and
you wanted.
Third, the e-mail protocols were designed without thinking about this
problem.
Unless/until those protocols change, which is not easy, there is
no 100% solution.
It is very easy to forge e-mail addresses.
Spammers have lots of other tools at their disposal.
The most we can hope for is to make spam no more annoying than the junk
paper mail we receive and recycle.
Server vs. Client solutions: Ideally, this would all be dealt
with at the e-mail server.
That way, your dial-up connection wouldn't waste the time of
downloading a virus you didn't want in the first place.
(I'm not going to try to distinguish between spam and viruses.
They're different, but I don't want either of them, and I
use coordinated mechanisms to keep them at bay.)
However, many of the commercial solutions, and there are some very
good ones, deal with things at the e-mail client (i) because there can
be more control at the client and (ii) maybe they can make more money
selling solutions per client than solutions per server.
Open Source vs. Commercial Solutions: There are many good efforts
both from the free software advocates and those trying to make money.
(1) I didn't
want to spend money or time sorting through all of the options and
(2) I wanted to understand as best I could how to deal with the
problems directly.
It turns out that everything I use is either free software or stuff I've
crafted myself. However, my client's request forced me to look at
how to make what I did work with commercial software, specifically
Microsoft Outlook, and I think I have done so.
Perfection: If you're looking for a perfect solution, stop reading.
I don't have one.
What I have is good enough for me, good enough for my wife, and,
I hope, good enough for everyone who uses my mail server.
Because of all the problems listed above, any attempted solution is
going to fail to some extent, either by throwing away mail you want to
see, or making you look at mail you don't want to see.
My bias is to try to never throw away good mail, even if bad mail gets
through. (I have a strategy for neutralizing viruses in bad mail, so
even if bad mail gets through, it is unlikely to harm the computer.)
My Basic Strategy
First, I use an automatically generated "white-list" -
anyone that I (or other user of my mail server) says they want to receive
mail from gets to send me (or the other user) mail.
If George W. Bush (probably forged, since he said he stopped using
e-mail entirely when he took office) wants to tell me how to enlarge my
penis, and G-dub is in my white-list, the mail gets to me.
Part of what I have done is to make it easier to make this
"white-list" be based on addresses the user has put in their
address book.
Second, anyone not in my white list who has VIAGRA or Vicodin or
similar words or common mis-spelling of those words in their subject line
gets their mail thrown away.
They can be clever with mis-spellings and get the mail through.
Every day, I (and other users of my spam filters) get a list of who had
their mail thrown away, so if
someone I really wanted to hear from wrote me, I can write them back
and say "so sorry, my spam filter threw your mail away".
Third, I have a growing list of "suspect" domains and
addresses.
Anything from those lists gets re-routed to a "Suspect" folder, in the
IMAP case, or gets an X-Suspect header in the POP case.
Either way, the "suspect" mail is in a
separate folder and can be quickly scanned, when/if it seems worthwhile.
95%+ of what goes in my Suspect folder is immediately deleted.
Finally, anything that doesn't pass/fail the above tests ends up
in my inbox.
My Purgatory
Most of the above is excerpted and abstracted from an e-mail I sent to
clients, friends, and family December 14. The youngest recipient
was my niece just turned 15, so I didn't think I would offend her
or my sister with the word "penis" and so forth.
About 15% of the recipients had addresses at one of the largest
ISPs, which I will refer to as XYZ hereafter. I think everything
I am saying is factual, and there are only two reasonable
interpretations of "XYZ" but I am trying to avoid offending either
one of them. My telephone conversations with XYZ have intended to be
polite and constructive, in spite of XYZ severely trying my patience and
forgiveness. Anyway, the December 14 mail got through to all of the
recipients, even with the potentially offensive content.
December 16 I sent a family-letter, to the same addressess, and the
ISP (XYZ) rejected all of the copies going to their clients. The rejection
message was very unclear and truncated. For my personal account with
XYZ, the rejection said:
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<chsauer@xyz.com>
(reason: 554 TRANSACTION FAILED: (HVU:B1) The URL contained in your
email to XYZ members has generated a high volume of complaints.??
Per our Unsolic)
This is literally what it said, except that I have substituted XYZ
for the ISP's domain name.
(I assume they intended to say "Unsolicited" and continue
further, but the many rejection mails I got all stopped at that same
spot.)
This made absolutely no sense. If my spam descriptive e-mail got
through, including potentially offensive words, why was this
rejected? (A slightly excerpted version of the e-mail is visible at
quarterdecademilestoneletterexcerpted.html.)
What URL could be the problem? Certainly not the one for the Methodist
Church, http://nwhillsumc.org/.
And seemingly unlikely any of the https://technologists.com/ URLs.
I sent e-mail to the postmaster at the ISP and got no response. Surprise.
So I started calling their customer support numbers. I probably spoke to
20 people, most of whom were seemingly not competent for the discussion
at hand. They would give me a ticket number and say they were transferring
me to someone who could help. Half of those transfers were disconnects!
Finally, I got a toll-free number for the postmaster's office.
I called that number, waited on hold for an hour and 20 minutes,
then finally spoke to someone who seemed to have a resaonable idea of how
to diagnose the problem. The first thing he did was have me forward the
rejected e-mail to an address at Yahoo.com! (XYZ is not Yahoo!) When he
read the message, he couldn't see any reason why it was rejected.
He gave me a new ticket number, admitted they were swamped with
technical problems, and said that someone would resolve. He couln't
say how long that would take.
Since I knew that most messages I sent to my XYZ correspondents were getting
through, I realized there was an obvious workaround: put the e-mail on
my web-site, password protect it, and tell the XYZ recipients where
to find it and give them that id/password. That worked. So besides
clumsiness/frustration, all of the problems were solved.
Last night I received an e-mail from my pastor, who is very computer
savvy and aware of what was going on, saying "Thank God I don't
use XYZ. A friend just upgraded to their latest software and now his system
is unusable."
This afternoon, when I was intending to write this, I suddenly
realized there were 3 URLs, not two that might be offending XYZ.
I was pretty sure that http://nwhillsumc.org/ was not the
problem, and I doubted that anything related to
https://technologists.com/ was an
issue, but there was a third domain name in the e-mail.
In the postscript of the e-mail, I had said
P.S. This is not the end of my project, just a milestone. I still want more family e-mail addresses to add to the lists. I still want more photos. I'm also beginning to make MP3s of my out-of-print LPs, etc. One of my accomplishments last week was to help the Red Clay Ramblers make CDs of out-of-print albums they recorded! I'm astonished that I could help them in this regard to help them recover lost recordings of their own music. The MP3s are in a separate password protected directory to avoid copyright violations.In doing so, I had given the URL for the Red Clay Ramblers web site, http://members.tripod.com/~RedClayRamblers/. Note that I am not making this a hyperlink, because that is the URL XYZ is rejecting. There is no sense in this at all that I can recognize. http://members.tripod.com/ was one of the first, after XYZ, to inundate their users with pop-up/pop-under windows. With that exception, I know of no reason why XYZ should be blocking references to http://members.tripod.com/~RedClayRamblers/.
When I realized all of this, and made tests that proved to me
conclusively, that I had diagnosed the issue, I called the
XYZ postmaster toll-free number, expecting to be put on hold for
an hour. To my delight, a human answered immediately, seemed to
understand what I was saying, said she was adding the info to my
trouble ticket and that even though they are horribly back-logged,
they should fix this problem in about a week.
(12/17) Quarter Decade Photo Project; MP3s; Simplistic Spam Solutions
Quarter Decade Photo Project
Somehow it always seems like I spend my time on things other than my plans.
Sometimes this is logical, sometimes it is serendipity.
For 2 1/2 years I've been working on archiving family and friends'
photographs, for a number of reasons:
Rise and Fall of MP3.com
One of my real thrills of 1998-99 was the emeregence of MP3.com, and the
ability to make Caroline's 70s/80s/90s recording available to a broad
audience.
We were both thrilled in 1999 when some of her songs hit the top of the
charts on MP3.com, not only in folk/country genres, but even her
tribute to Bob Marley Tuff Gong
and some of her other songs e.g.,
Lonely Man
being promoted by mp3.com.
Unfortunately, it looks like only the domain name "mp3.com"
will survive, and all of the 250,000 artists' music will
disappear unless/until something is done to make it available elsewhrere.
Fortunately, all of Caroline's MP3s are vislble at http://kaybuena.com/songs/.
Simplistic SPAM Filtering
The other thing I've been doing is making my simplistic spam filtering
solutions useful to all who use my mail server. If they endose what
I've done, I'll tell more, but the biggest limitation
is that my solutions only work for those who receive mail on my server.
(12/1) Making Peace With Windows XP
A while
back, I admitted that I needed to make peace with Windows XP.
I had three main issues with XP:
I've newly started attending services at a neighborhood church.
The senior pastor called me and suggested a 1-1 meeting.
At the end of that meeting, I volunteered to help with any computer
problems at the church, other churches and/or non-profit organizaitons.
Bill, the pastor, immediately said he was having problems making his
WiFi connection as secure and functional as he would like.
It turns out that Bill has been working with computers about as long as
I have, and has been working with PCs longer than I have!
Though he's quite adept with managing his own and the church's
computers, sometimes he gets stuck, as we all do.
When I arrived the next day to follow-up, I found out that
(a) Bill's notebook was running XP and (b) the church had
802.11g equipment, with capabilities beyond my obsolescent 802.11b
stuff.
At first I was stumped, and didn't get things working much better
that they already were.
I installed XP on my notebook, yet again, with several significant
differences from before:
Then I went ahead and fetched the church's 802.11g equipment,
got everything working the way I thought it should, including enabling
WPA.
I've taken 802.11g stuff back to the church and have it working well
there.
So now my attitude toward XP is similar to my attitude toward Outlook --
in general I'm not a fan of Outlook, but for some situations it is
the tool of choice.
All things being equal, given a choice, I'd use Windows 2000
before using Windows XP.
However, there is at least one thing I can do easily with XP,
enable WPA, that I can't do easily with Win 2K.
So I think I've reconciled with XP at least as well as I have with
Outlook.
The church's primary server is running NT4 -- yet another motivation for
me to get back to
nt4eol.
(11/21) Disks STILL Fail (Sometimes Catastrophically)
Those of us who remember computing before the last decade probably
remember the great improvement in disk drive reliability that occurred in
the early 90s. Before then, disk drives seemed to be the most
failure-prone component of computers.
"Everyone" was concious of "head crashes" (when a
recording head hits the spinning magnetic platter, usually destroying
both of them).
Backups, mirroring, "Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive
Disks" (RAID) and other strategies were emphasized to cope with the
failures.
Seemingly overnight, disk manufacturers dramatically improved
reliability.
At a time when disk drives seemed to last a couple of years,
manufacturers started quoting "Mean Time Between Failures"
(MTBF) of close to 30 years!
It is critical to realize that this is predicted average
behavior, and that any given disk can fail at any time.
Still, it is very easy to lull oneself into thinking that disk drives
last forever. They don't!
Between my own premises, other commercial premises, and residential
premises, I probably control forty to fifty disk drives. They do fail.
I think I'm well prepared for failure of the most important drives.
(I'm usually obsessive about backups and redundancy.) However, I
got caught this week.
In my experience in the last decade, when a disk drive fails it is
almost always gradual, not catastrophic.
Presumably, the magnetic material fails in spots, and sectors of the
drive become unusable.
Depending on the circumstances, this may go un-noticed, but more
often than not, even the in-experienced user will notice that
something is wrong and at least ask for help.
However, this Tuesday I saw the first catastrophic disk failure I can
remember in over 10 years.
Unfortunately, it happened to the disk drive that is most important
to me, the primary drive on my Linux production server.
My NT4 production server was designed to be a rack-mount server, has
a built-in RAID system and good monitoring software. As long as I keep
an eye on the monitoring software, any significant problem is very
unlikely. (One drive failure would probably only be noticed by me and the
warranty service person.)
However, my Linux production server was really designed to be a desktop
machine and has had minimal disk redundancy.
I had been planning to institute much more formal mirroring when I upgraded
that machine from RH 9.0 to Fedora, probably Thanksgiving weekend.
I still intend to institute the mirroring, but right now I am humbled
and embarassed that that machine failed Tuesday, with a small loss of
data and an outage of several hours.
It could have been worse. I was on premises and noticed the problem within
an hour. My existing redundancy strategies worked as expected so that the
loss of data was minimized. I decided to go ahead with Fedora on
Tuesday, since I needed to do a complete OS install in any case.
That went well. I had been out of town three of the previous four days
and would have had much more of a challenge fixing things remotely. (I
believe I could have done so reasonably, with one of my hot spare
machines and backups. I don't think there would have been any worse loss
of data, but the problem would have not been recognized so quickly and
the recovery would have taken longer.)
For those of you in the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving!
(11/12) Fedora's Fine; nt4eol; mod_auth++
Fedora's Fine
So far, I have no complaints about Fedora. It feels like a good
successor to Red Hat 9.0. The only obvious omission is tripwire.
I created my own ad hoc, simplistic analog of tripwire
in 1998, before I knew of tripwire, and have continued to maintain
it. So the omission of tripwire
probably is a concern to others, but doesn't directly affect me.
I have Fedora installed on all of my Linux machines except for the
production machine that is still running RH 9.0 (and the museum machine
that runs Red Hat 5.2).
Assuming things go as I expect, Fedora will replace 9.0 on the
production machine in a couple of weeks.
Of course, the big questions revolve around updates, business
practices and other potential changes as Red Hat proceeds with Fedora.
For now, I'll hope that those questions are resolved positively.
Tangentially, I have learned a lot more about multi-booting many of
the operating systems in my
museum.
In other words, I've spent many frustrating hours installing and
reinstalling many of those operating systems.
The big problem seems to be that they make different, incompatible,
assumptions about disk geometry. I won't rant about that the way
I might want to, but I will say that NT4's "Disk
Administrator" tool was my best friend in resolving the problems.
NT4 Server End of Life
All the above and other activities have impeded my nominal plans.
I'm filling in my experiments and experiences in
nt4eol,
but have much more to do.
mod_auth++
Because of the above, no new news about
mod_auth++.
However, I plan to use Fedora to test/fix/enhance mod_auth++ before
I put Fedora on my production Linux server.
(11/06) Brave New World: NT4 2004 Edition
NT4 Server End of Life
Huxley probably wouldn't notice, but 2004 is when we'll have
to deal with the real demise of NT4 Server.
I've started nt4eol to
describe my experiments and experiences.
Right now there are four placeholders for additional pages I plan to add.
"and all those things" (mod_auth++, Fedora)
Except for the citations in the October 30 and November 5 editions of the
Lockergnome IT channel
(thanks Chris!), I don't have much to add about
mod_auth++.
I continue to use it, test it, and recognize bugs, but I
need to allocate time to fixes/enhancements.
In the Linux world, there's lots of news, especially the Core 1
release of Fedora and Novell's
acquisition of SUSE. I got the Fedora ISOs quickly, thanks to BitTorrent, and am beginning
to assess Fedora as a replacement for Red Hat 9.0. Obviously, there are
going to be many assessing/wondering this, e.g., Red Hat's
Fedora released - the upgrade path for the rest of us?.
My assessment so far is definitely "thumbs up". I think Red Hat
has done the right thing.
Technically, Fedora feels to me like an incremental Red Hat Linux
release. I probably grumbled more about the changes between RHL 7.0 and
RHL 7.1 than I will grumble about what has changed between RHL 9.0 and
Fedora. My evaluation of a new Red Hat release goes through three stages:
(10/31) mod_auth++ Beta; "it's the end of NT4 as we know it"
(I was going to post this 10/30, but how could I not wait for more burnt orange on Halloween?) 1. mod_auth++ Beta
I've solved the biggest problems I had with mod_auth++. Let's call the current version
"Beta". I'm expanding my production use of mod_auth++. If
you're curious, (and willing to assume any risk involved) please
give it a try. The usual disclaimers apply -- I take
no responsibility if something goes wrong.
A special thanks to
Matthew Gregg at the mod_auth_any
project for telling me of their approach to avoiding the "browser
close/reopen" problem.
2. "it's the end of NT4 as we know it"
Microsoft is bringing Windows NT4 Server to "end-of-life".
See Retiring
Windows NT Server 4.0: Changes in Product Availability and Support.
My interpretation is that there will be no new fixes, except for
security issues, after this year. Security fixes will stop a year
later, after January 1, 2005.
This seems perfectly reasonable. NT4 is ancient. Microsoft has released two
successor products, Windows 2000 Server and, now, Windows 2003
Server.
(Of course, there are sub-versions of both 2000 and 2003 Server.)
However, there are lots of production NT4
servers going strong. My two production servers run NT4 and Linux,
respectively.
The biggest problems in the upgrading are the directory issues.
Because of the radical changes between NT4 and the successors, there is
no easy answer. Here are some possibilities:
(10/20) mod_auth++ "and all those things"
mod_auth++
"mod_auth++" started with my frustration with existing
authorization mechanisms that are available with standard browsers (IE,
et al) and web servers (Apache, IIS, et al).
I wanted to be able to control access to web cams, photographs,
and other static content on my web servers in ways that seemed impractical
with the commonly used mechanisms.
After investigating and thinking, I believed I knew how to do so.
I think I have successfully prototyped what I envisioned, at least
with IE and Apache, and believe
what I call "mod_auth++" will also work with other browsers and
servers. There is a first draft document at mod_auth++ which describes what I've done, how mod_auth++
might be used, and the limitations and problems I've recognized.
"and all those things"
A friend who read that I was making
12-year-old software
and hardware work
asked if I was a "masochist". I said "no, I am a
historian". I took his comment as a challenge and brought my Dell 320N+
386SX 20MHz back to life running Windows for Workgroups 3.11, including
an alpha version of Mosaic 2.0.
A different friend said I had created a museum and should make it visible
on the Internet. I wish I could. Unfortunately, 12-year-old software
(and lots of more recent software) would be very vulnerable in the
currently dangerous state of the Internet.
I did install Windows 2003 Server on a couple of machines, but have not
done much more than that. Perhaps for good reasons, Windows 2003 Server
is much less friendly to multi-booting other operating systems (Microsoft
and non-Microsoft) than previous Windows Server versions. In particular,
on one machine that already had Windows 98 and Red Hat 9.0 installed on
it, the Windows 2003 Server install disabled the Windows 98 and
corrupted the Linux install. However, on a different machine that had
Windows NT 4.0 Server, Red Hat 9.0 and Windows 2000 Professsional,
installing Windows 2003 Server did no harm to any of the existing systems.
So I have to assume that the Linux corruption on the first machine was not
intentional. The Windows 98 disabling clearly was intentional.
(10/6) "If Tomorrow Wasn't Such A Long Time"
When I said "Diving In", I thought I would stop updating this page for a month or so. I had no idea it would be 8 months! But everything always takes longer than you think it will. The words of one of my main muses, Bob Dylan, have resonated with me as I've tried to overcome bloggers' block and get back to writing. (I don't really think of this as a daily blog, but I have meant to write something every few days, not allowing lapses of months and months.) What have I been doing?
(2/6) Valuable Distractions and Discoveries: Diving In
I've not written one word of my intended requirements document. Rather, I've been pursuing a "unifying access control approach that will be both secure and usable":
2002 (12/23) Seeking Simplifications
The optimism I had a couple of months ago was short lived, optimism about being ready to write a requirements document for software that would facilitate communication and collaboration amongst small groups. I've become more aware of the challenges and limitations of some of the components I hoped to "drop in". Most notably regarding LDAP, but also aspects of existing Windows applications, Jabber, and other pieces of the puzzle. At the same time, I'm seeing new requirements and opportunities. For example, I should at least allow for the possibility that Chandler will successfully address part of the problem and look to leverage Chandler, or at least avoid duplicating what they might do. Perhaps more significantly, I'm trying to come up with a unifying access control approach that will be both secure and usable. That's not easy. I've also allowed myself to slow down with the holiday season, and pursue some seemingly unrelated tangents. But back to the thoughts of a couple of months ago: it is time to attempt a requirements document! Beginning a document would demand a clear one sentence description. Writing a document should force much needed simplification of thoughts that are probably too ambitious. The simplifications should guide where to go next. (12/4) Disaster Preparedness for a Small Organization
(With deference, but no real tie, to Frances Moore Lappé) I target making computers more useful to organizations with minimal professional system administration (most likely, no professional system administration). One of the worst scenarios is to become dependent on computers and suddenly not have them available! Computer disasters, small and large, are inevitable:
(11/20) Outside/Inside Maintenance, Part I
I like to mow the lawn. Gardening, even weeding, can be satisfying. I like to apply preservative/stain to the deck (before or after summer!). Outside work frees me to think about things. This has been especially valuable when making major transitions, for example, when I left IBM to join Dell in 1989. (In 1989, Dell was just barely a public company. Everyone thought I was crazy. I said that Michael Dell would be comparable to Henry Ford. The people at IBM did not like hearing that, but Michael has justified my claim.) I think I've mowed the lawn the last time this year. The chard is still producing and the Fall tomatoes are ripening. The deck is in good shape. But two different catalysts on Friday have set me about maintenance of most of the Technologists computers. First, a bad splice in an Ethernet cable in the wiring closet stopped working. I'd been sloppy and got caught. Second, stepping back from LDAP, I zoomed through a bunch of instant messaging explorations: refreshing my knowledge of "the big three" (AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo), quickly getting Jabber working on a test server, etc. I like system administration. Doing system administration right is challenging and rewarding. The Jabber successes quickly made me think about putting Jabber into production, and I knew the servers weren't ready for that. The bad splice was also a wake-up call. So the last five days have been mostly spent on sys-admin things:
(11/14) Small Successes and a New Course
I said before that I was overwhelmed by LDAP and that it fits a 90/10 rule, that most of what is there will go unused. I could repeat and amplify on all that after my last few days. This morning I was ready to give up, but somehow didn't. After plodding through a couple of tomes, a dozen LDAP "tutorials" and more utilities than I want to remember, I succeeded in getting a working directory server based on OpenLDAP, and had added a few entries to the directory. All of the books and tutorials seemed to omit key information, but the union of the tutorials got me through. The next step was to get e-mail clients to use the directory. But I couldn't get Outlook Express to find any of the entries. The success finally came when I tried Mozilla's mail client. Then I went back to Outlook Express, figured out I needed to go to the "advanced" settings to set a parameter, and O.E. started working. Next (non-Express) Outlook, and it is working, too. But these are small successes, and the best I can say for LDAP at the moment is that it is still probably better than the alternatives. LDAP is not focused on a "directory" in the pre-computer sense, for example, the phone book, nor is LDAP analogous to a file system "directory". LDAP is more oriented toward displacing "/etc/passwd" in *nix systems and equivalent primitives in other operating systems. I still have a ways to go before I'll use LDAP regularly myself; in particular, I need to figure out how to easily add/modify/delete entries without resorting to an "LDIF" file and the "ldapadd" command. Before I recommend LDAP to others, I need to navigate through the incomplete work on access control to figure out how a non-administrator should access/add/modify entries. But for now I'm relieved that I got this far, can step back from LDAP, and get to the next items on my priority list. (11/8) B.B. King & Slack Key & Back To LDAP
In Legendary R&B guitarist so happy to play the blues, Derek Paiva writes: "It's not every day a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee asks you to recommend a few slack-key guitarists he should have in his CD collection. But B.B. King (class of 1987) made me promise to do just that. ... "I like the sound, but ... I don't know who to listen to." ... " Paragraphs later Derek answers "Oh, and about that promise, sir? I recommend you start your collection with CDs by Gabby Pahinui, Ray Kane, Sonny Chillingworth, Led Kaapana and Keola Beamer. But remember, that's just my opinion." That's a couple more players than my initial list, but those additions look great to me. This article resonates with me for lots of reasons. I listen to slack key as much as any music these days. I've been a B.B. King fan since I first heard him in the mid-60's. One of my proudest moments as a musician was when my band was on the same bill with B.B. King in Houston in 1970. Back to LDAP. I made good progress prototyping yesterday. I started reading the tome Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services. I just weighed the book: 4.5 pounds. (11/6) Truth In Naming
Most software is too complex. The so-called "80/20 rule" is really the 90/10 rule -- 90% of the users of a software application use less than 10% of the features. It's not just the software -- the associated protocols and data representations are comparably bloated. Browsers, HTML and HTTP started out simple, exceptions to the 90/10 rule. Their collective lack of complexity was a catalyst to the Web/Internet explosion. Naysayers said "too simple", but the populace said "good enough". A decade later, inevitable pressure for features has taken a toll, but not noticeably in comparison to most software. The other day I set my sights on making LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) more usable. I've immersed myself in that pursuit and been overwhelmed. "Lightweight, my a--"! If this is lightweight, we need weightless. No wonder no one uses directory software and directories. The "lightweight" started out as a comparision to X.500. Probably still applies. Everything is relative. Novell has been a leader in directory products, but the 90/10 rule applies. Active Directory doesn't have simplicity credibility, either. Next step: try to prototype and subset something useful out of all of the LDAP options. As an inventory of the options, and much more, I've found Adam Williams' LDAP and OpenLDAP (on the Linux Platform) very helpful in sorting through all the options. There are 402 charts in that file, so it is not "lightweight". Though Linux-centric, it does touch on Windows software, Active Directory, and non-Linux Unix. (10/29) It's 10 p.m. -- Have you posted your blog today?
You've read email today. You've probably sent email today. But if you're like most Internet users, you don't have a weblog and wouldn't distinguish a 'blog from any other web site. Irregardless, there are hundreds of thousands of active blogs and millions of blogs total. Until now, I've not called this site a "blog". I've avoided the label, but the site fits the usual definitions, especially now that I've added an "RSS feed". Much of the focus of blogs is cultural, especially the sites with creators passionate as if their blogs were progeny. That may be overstated, but thoughts along that line prompted the "10 p.m." title. Serious blog authors update their sites multiple times per day, those who update less than daily seem compelled to defend their "at least twice a week" committment. Bloggers are passionate about what they have to say and reaching an audience with their ad hoc journalism. (i) The labelling and the passion have a downside to the extent that blogs are treated as a category unto themselves instead of an organic part of Internet communications. (ii) Moreover, there is pervasively useful technology underlying blogs:
(10/25) One, Two, Three... A Few Dozen
I think I first became aware of the traditonal definition of "google" (ten to the hundredth) forty years ago when I read Gamow's One, Two, Three... Infinity. Similar to Chandler's orientation towards small and medium organizations, much of my my thinking is oriented toward software that facilitates communication and collaboration amongst groups of "one, two, three... a few dozen". This is not just the sort of things Chandler aspires to, and not just the media breadth I referred to before (publishing, photos and video as well as interactive text), but also things such as providing directories that are simple enough for everyone to use. (That is probably not Active Directory or LDAP implementations in their current forms.) This probably DOES include "presence" in the IM sense. I'm approaching this in a mathematically inductive sense, and think I'm almost up to two or three (users). (It works for one, maybe it works for two, so it should scale to dozens?) I'm almost ready to write a requirements document. I don't know if I will literally write one, but being able to write one is necessary. I'm also ready to do more prototyping. At the moment, making LDAP implementations more usable seems near the top of the priority list. (10/23) Chandler and/or Conan Doyle?
In concluding "The Big Picture" in Mainstream Videoconferencing we wrote: "But first, we seek inspiration from Sherlock Holmes! In the early pages of "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," Holmes and Watson are sitting in the same room. Watson believes that Holmes is not paying attention to him. After prolonged silence, Holmes tells Watson what Watson has been thinking, based on the visual clues from Holmes' observation of Watson during the silence. Predictably, Watson is amazed and Holmes represents his observations as "very superficial." Though fiction, the Holmes stories are replete with examples of the usage of all senses, particularly vision, to gain understanding. Attempts at a distance meeting with only audio seems like sensory deprivation. This is a conscious phenomenon for someone used to using videoconferencing. For others, the deprivation is no less real, but less likely to be consciously recognized." This week, Raymond Chandler's ears are burning, thanks to the announcement of his namesake product from OSAF. I like much of what they are saying, especially today's Chandler Not Outlook Killer, After All?:
More next time. (10/18) Public WiFi Privacy, Part II
Part I set the stage for discussing the state of VPNs. This is both highly relevant and of broader interest, so please forgive me if I lose a little focus. VPNs are relatively mature, increasingly common, and sufficiently confusing that there is still room for new technology to make VPNs more useable and more secure. There are at least four approaches to encryption-based VPNs. (To me, private networks without encryption are not VPNs, but others would count things like MPLS, which I tend to ignore, as VPNs.)
(10/17) Public WiFi Privacy, Part I
Privacy in Public?
At an airport, or a Schlotzsky's, or a client's office, none of the simple measures help: 1 through 4 contradict the intent of public access, and impracticality of key distribution eliminates WEP. There are other options:
More on VPN approaches in Part II. (10/16) Lull in PDA Phone market?
My Samsung I300 has pleased me since I got it in February. This has been my first PDA -- I'd waited until I could get Internet connectivity without a big monthly fee. I mostly use it as a phone, but having a browser, email, VNC, and an SSH client in my pocket is very appealing. I've even started to use traditional PDA apps! However, the I300 seems to have gone out of production, as have many of the competing products. Checking out the wireless carriers' sites this week, I found no PDA phones at all at AT&T and Cingular, one Pocket PC phone at Verizon, one each of Pocket PC and PalmOS at SprintPCS, and three (RIM/PocketPC/Sidekick) at T-Mobile. A couple of conclusions:
(10/15) Aloha! Changes are afoot:
More to come!
Security: Stop ignoring the obvious mistakes (ZDNet 9-19) Navigating the Embedded Java Maze (SD Times 9-15) 10 choices that were critical to the Net's success (SiliconValley.com 9-8) Remembering Vignette (Scripting News 9-3) What PDA/phone can pass the test? (ZDNet 8-15) Tech's 'dirty little secret'--cybersecurity (ZDNet 8-14) Minding Your Language (SDTimes 8-1) XML security: A who's who (ZDNet 7-8) Hot Spots for WISPs (ZDNet 6-28) Tempest in a coffee pot (ZDNet 6-26) Watch this airspace (Economist 6-20) Getting Started with C# On Linux (C# Help 6-10) Campus WLAN Design (Network Computing 5-13) P2P Makes a Corporate Play (ZDNet 5-7) .NET: Microsoft's Enterprise Ticket? (ESJ 5-2) Just How Trusty Is Truste? (Wired 4-9) Apple Ties the Wireless Knot — Again (DDJ 4-6) IBM's unfolding power play (ZDNet 4-3) Dan Bricklin review of Handspring Treo 180 (found on useit.com 3-24) Sun blinded by paranoia (Financial Times 3-13) AT&T Privacy Bird (2-22) Grid Project to Wed Web Services (NY Times 2-19) Videoconferencing Snapshot (CHS 1-30) Understanding the value of Web services (ZDNet 1-28) Shadow initiatives: .Net and Java (ZDNet 1-24) 10 things Google has found to be true (Google Corporate Information) Open source, standards and Windows (ZDNet 1-22) The MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop (Dr. Dobb's Journal, February) 2001: Pocket Slides v1.2 Released (from Lockergnome Tech Specialist, 2001-12-17) GINGER the Segway, IT Scooter (Slate, 2001-12-11) CD-R media: testing for quality (CNET, 2001-12-3) |
[koko] knowing and accepting limitations
February 6, 2024 [koko] keeping warm August 7, 2023 [koko] still learning June 18, 2023 Roe is gone, one more round June 28, 2022 “just as good as Caruso” – props for Kim Wilson & Charlie McCoy May 5, 2022 Mel West, engaging people to help people in Nicaragua April 25, 2022 Glimpses from the Vulcan, 1969-70 February 14, 2022 [koko] MISP 2022 Janary 10, 2022 Why I continue to serve — I remember Nicaragua December 13, 2021 Making private 1960s and 70s recordings public August 21, 2021 Jimmie Vaughan set w/ Storm track I recorded August 4, 2021 Celebrate Ramblin' Jack Elliott's August 1, 2021 [koko] LP digitizing milestone approaching May 18, 2021 remembering Denny Freeman April 28, 2021 [koko] Dell Unix sustainable! January 19, 2021 Computer Systems Performance Modeling August 25, 2020 Remembering RESQ August 25, 2020 [koko] (welcome to …) eight Jurassic O.S. on 1992 Dell 486D/50 September 26, 2019 [koko] reviving timbl's WorldWideWeb browser July 1, 2019 [koko] exploring NEXTSTEP 486 July 1, 2019 1992 JAWS demo for Stewart Cheifet May 17, 2019 Let's start at the very beginning... 801, ROMP, RT/PC, AIX versions March 8, 2017 NeXT, give Steve a little credit for the Web October 8, 2011 Mainstream Videoconferencing available again February 14, 2008 A brief history of Dell UNIX January 10, 2008 | |
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