freemode.net

More furniture    [ News ]

Assembled another piece of furniture for the house, although for the first time in 4 weeks, it's not baby-related.   Jessica & I went out on Friday to Staples to pick up an honest-to-goodness office desk, so that's put together and serving its purpose in the study / guest bedroom.   Fits fairly well, although I need to grab some dead trees from Lowe's or Home Depot to craft a back lip for the keyboard tray (nothing there right now to prevent the keyboard or rodent from sliding off the rear of the tray) and a middle support beam to counteract the desk's tendency to tilt back towards the wall when it's on a carpeted floor.

In other exciting furniture news, there's now four, count them, four desks of various sizes and usefulness sitting in the basement now.   Have no idea what we'll end up doing with them all.

HP-UX and swinstall    [ Software ]

Finally starting to play around with my HP-UX box a little more, I grabbed some precompiled GNU + open-source software from the Software Porting And Archive Centre For HP-UX so that I could get a GNU-based compiler toolchain going.   Since it's been almost a year since I did any real work with HP-UX 11, I had to google for the invocation to avoid going through swinstall's curses-GUI screens:

# swinstall -s /var/spool/sw/full-name-of-package.depot \*

And then it'll happily install the contents of the HP software depot, log the session to /var/tmp/swagent.log, and put some more info in /var/adm/sw/sessions/swinstall.last and /var/adm/sw/swagent.log.

One other buglet - after installed OpenSSH 3.7.1p2 from the HP-UX software archive, I got the following errors when trying to run any SSH app:

/usr/lib/dld.sl: Can't find path for shared library: libcrypto.sl.0.9.7
/usr/lib/dld.sl: No such file or directory
Abort(coredump)

I went into /usr/local/lib and did a:

# ln -s libcrypto.sl libcrypto.sl.0.9.7

to link the library properly.   SSH was all happiness after that.

Berke Breathed interviews    [ Humor ]

Slashdot has a story and some links to new Berke Breathed interviews up.   I've gone through and looked for other previous interviews posted over the past few years:

MSNBC Interview
Deseret News
The Onion AV Club

And some older Slashdot stories on Berke Breathed's interviews:

On the Onion AV Club interview
Scott Kurtz of PvP and Chris Jackson of In2It convince Berke to talk

For me, 1995 was the end of an era.   No more Outland, no more Calvin & Hobbes, no more Far Side.   The cartoons that defined my childhood and adolescence did not go quiet into that dark night, but strived mightily, shone, and voluntarily retired.   Their authors pulled what Michael Jordan wanted to do, only before he did, and with more grace and dignity.

I flip to the comics page now, and find it far more dreary and bleak than it was 10 years ago.   There's some old favorites and new stars like The Boondocks exist, but the soul and sincerity that used to exist in Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes is no more.

Dilbert, though funny, is so mechanical and exploitative (Scott Adams never met a merchandizing deal or a tie-in or profit that he didn't like).

I still read comics, on-line though.   Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly and Penny Arcade are fun, but none have the philosphical depth of Bill Watterson, or the political incisiveness and soft soul of Berke Breathed, or the true oddball sense of humor like Gary Larson.

An era has passed, the last golden era on the comics page, and will not rise again there, I fear.   The future of graphic entertainment lies either on the Internet or in collections and graphic novels, not on a slowly fading mass-media market supplanted by cable and satellite TV, niche magazines and publications, and the all-enveloping force of the 'Net.

Baby stuff    [ News ]

Wow, we're on week 34 or 35 now, and finally have the majority of stuff we'll need for the first few days after our baby comes into the world.   We've got the baby room painted and decorated, the crib assembled, a dresser/changing table put together, a comfy rocking chair/recliner moved in, and various & sundry baby supplies purchased from Babies'R'Us.

We've been taking lamaze classes at the local hospital, so Jessica & I get to go on Wednesday nights with seven or eight other pregnant couples to learn about childbirth and breathing methods and what's supposed to happen during labor and delivery.   She's getting very pregnant [pictures should be forthcoming!] and ready to have the baby soon.

The expected delivery date is somewhere between December 24th (latest estimate from the last ultrasound) and December 31st (original estimate).   We're both hoping for a tax-break baby, so a bit earlier would be better, but we're both excited about the impending arrival!

Security Basics    [ Geekiness ]

Every so often, people ask me where they can find more info on IT security.   I had put this list together a little bit ago, but hadn't posted it.   It includes links for reading material, organizations, tools and newsletters.

Drupal install    [ Software ]

Worked on installing Drupal as a web forum/discussion board thingy for my lab project. [removed link 20031123 edobbs]

Why Drupal?   I haven't really worked with it before, but it looks interesting and seems to have some nicer customization features above and beyond what phpBB or Post-Nuke has, and doesn't seem to suffer from the same extent of security issues that those two packages do.   Plus, it's in the Debian package repository, so I can 'apt-get upgrade' between releases on whatever hardware I want to run it on.

I did run into some gotchas during the install, so I documented the steps I took below so that the next unlucky victim can learn from my mistakes.

Ports for XDM login    [ Software ]

Some notes on setting up XDM login from a Linux client to a Solaris server - got this working between a Debian box with iptables and a Solaris 8 box with ipfilter.   The fonts still look ugly, so I need to poke around with font server settings to see if I can pull the fonts from the Solaris box for just that one X session and retain the native fonts for the "ordinary" X session on vt7.

Baby Shower    [ Site Info ]

Jessica just had her baby shower, so the pictures are now available in our photo gallery.