The Time Sink

Well, just welcome yourself to another week! It may start out on a Monday; but eventually Friday will come along and we can emulate my youngest. As Bradley exited his kindergarten class last Friday, he came running out of the classroom shouting, "I'm free! I'm finally free!" Shelley advises that the parents were most amused and the teacher seemed a little confused; as in, "Aren't I the one that's free?"

My adventures in LinuxLand will have to continue this evening. I'm playing with the Corel Standard Distribution (I didn't need Tux, WordPerfect, or the game from the deluxe distribution). It was recommended as a 'head-bump' install; and what the heck, I have this P-75 that's mostly a doorstop. (What's a head-bump install? You put the CD in; and when the installer asks you anything, you just bump your head on the space bar<G>). Well, things went a might too slow for even a P-75 and the install aborted. To be fair, I have to say that I wasn't real nice to the installer: I left whatever junk video card came with the box in place; threw in a NIC from the junk box; I suspect the CDROM is a .5x; there's only sixteen meg of memory and I'm using a Glide touchpad/keyboard through a KVM box that is reporting who knows what to the system. No wonder it seemed to blow up. Oh, and I have not even looked at the manual; I just pulled the floppy and the CD out of the box and went for it.

OK, I caught it that time: as the graphical install started. Time to change out the video card.

...and that was it: the video card (and maybe more memory helped). Though the video card I pulled out was a Diamond Stealth SE pci card??

Regardless, I had another S3 chipset video card literally laying on the counter from working on something and I threw that in. I changed out the memory to 32mb and went for it again. When I got up Monday, I had a Linux box! It was so much fun, when I got home from work, I did it again and told it to install everything in the package: Desktop, Desktop Plus, Server, custom this and that, stuff that I have absolutely no clue on. A few hours later, I had a Linux box! Again! Okay; that's as close to head-bump as I'm likely to get. Now it looks as though I'm going to have to find a closer location for this beastie. Right now, it's on the bench. That's all well and good for testing and hardware swapouts; but I can see that I'm going to be spending some serious time learning what all the goodies are about and that means no more than six foot or so from the KVM box here at the main workstation. Hmmm... Stand by one. NP; that video card will drive the twelve foot run of cable that I put in for special occasions.

Let's see... A very nice shell with four desktops ready to go; a stripped-down version of WordPerfect; Netscape 4.7; more stuff that I am so clueless on it's hilarious; and OMgosh, there's even a copy of Minesweeper in the games menu!

Hmmm... again. It looks as though it likes pci cards real well and has not a clue about my ISA cards; no network (although it let me configure the Samba server), sound or modem that I can see. Well, that sounds like a nice way to spend some time. I'll get to some mail that I'm behind on and fill you in on the next chapter tomorrow.

Well, the Net Weather from yesterday seemed to be caused by a denial of service attack directed at Yahoo. What fun. ...if your tastes run to disruptive endeavors. Dave said it well one day with:

If you like computers but they bore you, find a challenge. There are plenty of challenges out there that are perfectly legal. Get a couple of cast-off 486s and a couple of $12 network cards from CompUSA and play around with your own network. Mess around with a free Unix like Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD. Make a Unix workstation out of a Pentium-166. You make an obsolete computer useful again, keeping it out of a landfill, and you gain valuable and marketable skills. Then volunteer some time at a local school, church, or another community organization. There are plenty of people out there with dead-end jobs who would benefit from computer skills.

Who knows? You might find it's a bigger challenge to leave your community a better place than it was when you came than it is to see how much you can get away with. Copyright ©1999, 2000 by David L. Farquhar

From his View 10.

...and the local weather is starting to play a role in people's lives once again: our tule fog has returned after the recent rains. This can mean leaving for work in the morning in full sunshine and five miles later hitting ground fog that limits your visual perception to 150 feet or less. Not too bad at thirty-five miles per hour; at freeway and rural roadway speeds it leads to munched cars and crunched people. It was mild yesterday morning; I could see the equivalent of "across the football field", but there was no way to see "down" that field. Hopefully we'll get a weather system through here before we get to the "I can only see one stripe on the road" version of the central valley's fog.

...and for those with foggy memories, Valentine's Day is coming up fast! Fair warning; you heard it here: Unlike Men's Shopping Day (December 24th), this is one time when you do need to plan ahead. She'll know on Monday if you stopped by the local Thrifty Drug on the way home and found that last box of candy (she knows the stuff that's left over; that's why it's left over) and that lame card that barely alludes to affection. Better to stop on the way home tonight while the selection is still good and gain the bonus points for giving her fun stuff Monday morning rather than Monday evening. ...when you come home late from that last minute stop at the flower stand. ...where you paid way too much for even those wilted things <g>.

Nothing to report from LinuxLand locally as I didn't have time to play with my toys. But on the international front, serious business is afoot. Corel and Inprise are joining forces in an attempt to fill Corel's hand in the Linux card game. My programmer was very interested in this as he recently picked up a rumor that Inprise was porting Delphi to Linux; now we know why. This merger will give Corel some development tools to add to their productivity packages. Targeted to small to mid-sized businesses, this could get interesting. ...and if they can pull off the GraphOn Bridges product release later this year, life could get even more interesting. I'm somewhat amused to find the last pieces of the Borland puzzle back in the WordPerfect camp. They were quite a complementary team back in the DOS days. It will be fun to watch.

Which brings me to a home user question: If I set Shelley up on a Linux box with the Corel Deluxe distribution (OS/WP/Netscape) my entire software cost is $79 or so.

What a weird day. ...and evening. So, I'll let my Wednesday carry over to your Thursday.

Time for your new acronym for the week: It's no longer a "DoS" attack; you must now use "DDoS" (for distributed). ...and things some of us have known of for a while as potentials are now coming out of the woodwork. ...but the general public is feeling better about the net after hearing that even with all this "hacking" and attacking going on, no one managed to get into the credit card records (that's obviously what the bad guys were after). Sheesh. There is quite a message here for those with unsecured machines. Although... Brian reports that the FBI will help you take care of that if you'll be so kind as to throw their code on your machine. ...without being able to check that code content first. Hello! I survived "the sixties" and I still recall... some things.

Speaking of silly stuff, I downloaded this piece of craziness the other day and it has proven somewhat useful. Gurunet is a pop-up that will attempt to give you information on any word your cursor is sitting on. I've used it instead of www.dictionary.com as a writing tool and a general lookup tool and it may have a place in my Utilities folder; time will tell. It does use up 7 meg of memory and does stick itself in your startup folder; you can control it and others of that ilk with Startup Manager (look at the end of the Freeware section).YMMV

...and yesterday at work, I made an introductory call to a new vendor to introduce my firm. When the phone was answered, I asked to speak with Mary. The person on the other end replied, "She's not here. Would you like to call back?"

Okay, I admit to being a little to obtuse at times: yesterday's punchline could also have read, "What ever happened to, 'May I take a message?'" I'll save the rant on phone etiquette for another time; suffice to say this was a poor way for her to introduce her company.

...and sometimes people just don't get it in other ways: On a national radio news spot I heard while out on business yesterday morning, a government official said in all seriousness that government computers were "relatively immune" from the recent attacks. ...and the newscaster followed up that comment with the late-breaking story that the hackers had been using programs called "Demons" to carry out these attacks. I made it back to work without wrecking the vehicle I was in, but it was a near thing.

The trick here of course is the fundamental lack of understanding demonstrated by these statements. The government flak doesn't know the difference between his back orifice and the real deal; and the newsie doesn't have a clue whether to call Buffy or a kill -9. That this type of mis-information is presented to the public as useful researched data galls me to no end. </Rant>

...they are probably running Windows. That means the user will not recognize a DoS attack, it looks just like the standard Windows behaviour.