George got an email this morning from the TV station in DC that was going to interview him on September 2 telling him that they were cancelling the interview. He figures they finally actually read his book and decided they didn't want to risk being associated with his message.
He'll be with us for another day or two while he figures out his next move.
This really sucks. He felt like he'd lucked out getting this opportunity and really wanted to make the most of it. It was a good opportunity for him, too, because he comes across in person (or on TV or video) better somehow than he does in print, even though the message is the same.
The Oyster Bay train was 7-8 minutes late this morning so our "regular" train to Penn Station was long gone. Fortunately there's another train scheduled a few minutes after ours and when we're late we're usually in time for that one. Unfortunately, because of those of us who don't normally ride that train, it's very crowded. I was lucky and got a seat.
George is going to Levittown this morning to pick up five copies of his book from a printer there. He decided he needed more attractive packaging of the book for his TV interview.
Later today he'll head back toward DC. The interview is scheduled for September 2, and he wants to leave himself plenty of time. His vehicle was acting up (fuel pump, apparently) when he arrived, and he wants to make sure car trouble won't blow the interview for him.
The interview probably won't air for another month, so he's not sure what he's going to be doing in the meantime.
Running just about half an hour late. When I got to Penn Station only one train was posted and the trains on the board were a good 15-20 minutes behind. I guess a train was disabled in the East River tunnel again. That seems to be happening more frequently lately.
Add that to "new students day" at Columbia. Sigh. It looks like all entering students, both undergraduate and graduate, show up a week before classes start (that would be today). There were students and parents and "stuff" everywhere. Crowded elevators, crowded walkways, etc. The relative peace of summer seems to be over.
I don't know if this is new this year or if I somehow missed it last year--I sure have no memory of it. Perhaps classes started later and this event happened after the Labor Day weekend. That weekend was my bicycle-Volvo run-in, and I was off work for the next five weeks. September 4 will mark the one-year anniversary of that unhappy event.
I just took a look at to-mars.org/stats/ and it's clear I need to factor webazolver into my cron job. Or, more accurately, the system cron job. It will be best to do that in webalizer.conf if I can. If I modify the cron script it will get awkward for security updates, etc.
Got to-mars.org updated with the George's Blog link on my morning commute. I also made the updating scripts a little smarter.
George had emailed me a new links.dat file. I fixed one tiny typo and put that in place and rebuilt links.html. He's getting the hang of it.
Further testing on formmail.pl showed that I hadn't set a parameter that needs to be set if sendmail is going to be able to send mail off the box under control of that script. I made the change, but then my test ran afoul of sendmail not being able to connect to the relay. I know that's a temporary problem because I've successfully relayed mail from vps.ourmanpann.com before. However, I couldn't find a way to force sendmail to attempt delivery on the deferred message sitting in the queue waiting for the next "normal" retry.
I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and put postfix on that box.
I need to email the contents of note.george to George.
Look at our DokuWiki and see what George has had to say.
George is busy posting stuff to his blog. I need to change the admin password on that blog so I don't have to look it up in my gmail archive every time I want to log in.
I'll need to create a George's Blog menu item and rebuild the site, probably under Who We Are.
I think I'm almost done with the formmail script for the Contact Form. I had to fight with non-informative error messages generated when it encounters what it thinks is a poorly formed email address.
Once I have it working the way I want locally, I'll need to verify that I can point contactf@to-mars.org where I want to. And once that's done, I'll need to implement a Membership Form and an Order Form.
to-mars.org Contact FormI need to install tkdiff on the laptop.
After having read through the README file for the NMS formmail.pl script, I need to redo a couple of things on my test form.
I want to set this up so that I can use a single script for multiple forms. I'll do that with the %recipients hash. I can then leave both @allow_mail_to and @recipients empty.
In general, I'm going to try and leave the guts of the script alone and do everything that needs to be done with configuration variables and "hidden" variables passed to the script, and (perhaps) with environment variables.
Does man need to waste? Is the species or group motivated to create an environment where waste is acceptable? If so, what is the evolutionary advantage of such a characteristic? Is that why we've always had explorers and pioneers? Territorial expansion. Eradication of other species, who compete only for habitat. Do we destroy or at least reduce the quality of our existing habitat to provide motivation to seek another, better (what does that mean?) habitat? Evolutionary habitat, territorial expansion.
Speculation: Man came to the Americas "last." By dispersing tribes a secure habitat was obtained. Better to adapt to a physically harsh physical habitat than engage in conflict for a better one. Until the "disperse" option was no longer available. Since the native Americans weren't, as a rule, conquerors, they didn't stand much chance against Europeans whose crowded continent gave them lots of practice in expansion through conquest.
How do the Africans fit in? Did they really make "good" slaves? What can we compare their situation to? How strongly is culture related to geography and climate? What about evolution? Fair vs dark, etc.? Is there really any substance to the idea that blacks were bred for strength (and beauty) when they were slaves, and that factors into the predominance of blacks in many if not most athletic fields of endeavor?
What about immigration as a strategy for territorial expansion? Competition between ethnic groups. How do you tell a Bosnian from a Serb? How do we decide between "keep 'em out" and "take over their land"? Do we ever welcome them with open arms? If so, when/why?
What are the long term prospects of leaders who use enforced ignorance of the populace as a tool for maintenance of power? Or even expansion of power? Can one both incite and control a jihad?
Just for tickles I ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 again tonight and selected the vesa driver instead of the chips driver. No difference. So I'm still trucking along with the Xvesa server.
I just realized that I don't have an httpd daemon running on this machine so testing CGI scripts isn't really possible. I guess I'll install boa and libcgi-perl.
Both are installed. boa is working fine.
I recall that Text::Template is a Debian package, but that Text::Textile is a /usr/local install.
Editing nms formmail.pl:
/usr/bin/perl)/usr/lib/sendmail)@referers = qw(localhost to-mars.org www.to-mars.org)@allow_mail_to = qw(pann pann@localhost pann@to-mars.org gwdrake@to-mars.org)It happens a couple of times a year, I guess. This morning when I was about halfway to the train station I realized I had left my reading glasses and my cell phone on the kitchen table. I really had to go back for them and that made me miss the 6:58, so here I am on the 7:42.
It gave me some time to try and figure out what's going on with George's laptop and the PanndaBear wireless network. No such luck. If I get time today I'll do some googling and try and figure out how to reset everything to "I've never accessed a wireless network" state.
As is traditional for a blog, the articles are sorted in reverse creation order when they're displayed.
Since I've started the Goodnight Girls project, it's come to mind that it might be a good idea to have a switch to have the articles optionally displayed in the order of creation instead. This would make some sense if the blog model was being used to monitor the creation of an actual writing piece.
I had such good luck with dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 on my rescue partition over the weekend (I had to replace the monitor) that I figured I'd give it a try on the laptop and see how it worked out. No joy.
The Xvesa server seems to have a few issues and since I had X properly set up under woody I continue to hope I can get it properly set up under sarge. So far, no joy.
I managed to get away in time to catch the 4:54 train tonight. I should get home by 6 and George and I can grocery shop and cook while Lee's at the gym.
George did go to Bob's place and pick up Lee's monitor. FedEx delivered the wireless router, so I'm set with computer projects this weekend.
I need to fit in a haircut if I can.
I brought home a Village Voice so we can see if there are "things to do" in the city.
All year long this is the case, but even moreso during the summer. Looks like I'll have a double seat to myself all the way to Jamaica. A seat on the train from Jamaica to Penn Station should be a given as well.
Yesterday I had to stand on that leg for the first time in a long time. It's really too bad it was the day George decided to come into the city with me. He really has only two obvious manifestations of his MS: balance and fatigue issues. Standing for twenty minutes on the train kicked in the fatigue. Doesn't always happen that way, but it sure did yesterday. All in all, he seems to be managing his disease really well.
George told me yet another tale of computer woe this morning. He was unable to get our computer to shut down last night. Eventually he turned the monitor off, and then was unable to turn it back on. Apparently the power switch on the monitor was ready to go; it hadn't been turned off in years.
At any rate, the monitor is now for all intents and purposes dead. Fortunately, Lee's PC and monitor are in Bob's basement. I'll call Bob when I get to work and see if I can arrange for George to pick up the monitor during the day (he has the use of Lee's Mazda, still unsold). I'll ask him to pick it up but to wait and let me connect it when I get home.
At some point we should upgrade to a flat screen monitor, but I want to finance that acquisition by selling off some of my computer "junk." Just like I want to finance other things by selling off surplus bicycles and bicycle parts. Finding the time to do that is a challenge. Hell, Lee hasn't even found the time to sell her Mazda, and she's got a bit of change (relative to my computer and bicycle surplus) tied up in that puppy.
Last night it happened again. This time I paid closer attention. It's clear that I get one shot at Ctrl-Alt-Fn to get a text console. I do in fact get the text console, but when I try Alt-F7 to get back to X, I get a non-recoverable blank screen. The power did not go off; I powered down manually and disconnected the battery to recover.
rxvt-unicode-liteOK, I've found a terminal emulator that properly displays man pages on my laptop. I've set up my .xinitrc file so that it will come up instead of mrxvt the next time I start X.
And we've just gone through Mineola and I'm really running out of steam, so I think I'll do it now.
makeblog.pl continued...Well, the loop efficency improvement appears to work, but I've got to run the script against a "new" file to be sure (hence this "new" file).
Yee haw!
OK, it looks like the regexp cleanup is working as well. I'll need to do an edit to this file and to an existing file to be sure.
That worked fine. I think makeblog.pl is done. Perhaps more comments or POD.
makeblog.plWe now have the day of week back in the article date/time stamp. I'm pretty sure this version is ready to release (or very close).
Actually, I still have to clean up the messy regexp I'm using to match file names. And there's one little loop efficiency fixup (that I'm testing now).
And this should be the final test of the two changes.
I copied a gzip'ed version of my george mailbox to moose this morning. I'll bounce all those emails to gmail.com. I need to start thinking terms of using gmail as an email backup server.
to-mars.orgDesktop and server are in sync. buybook.[dat,html] is out of date on the laptop. I need to think about cvs (or some other version control system.
I seem to be completely in sync between the server and the laptop at this moment. I don't plan on working on the site on this commute, so if I sync my rescue desktop to the server tonight or tomorrow morning, I should be good to go (for the time being).
Hmmm, I did an apt-get upgrade just before I left work and one of the things that got upgraded was firefox. It's starting up rather noisily. Wow, v1.04 (with security patches backported by Debian, no doubt). I think I'll probably try the /opt installation of the current version that I'm using on my Ubuntu desktop.
I was surprised this morning when I rsync'ed my rescue desktop to to-mars.org by the number of differences. I had thought that as of yesterday morning the laptop, desktop, and server were all in sync. I need to come up with a better method of keeping them all in sync.
I had hoped to do some basic testing of buybook.html on my desktop this morning but I ran out of time. Actually, I was going to do it last night, but by the time I got home and we went for pizza and did a little grocery shopping, I was too pooped to do anything other than collapse in front of the tube.
I guess I'll sync up the laptop and server when I get to work and let George fool with it, looking for obvious problems.
I modified links.dat (and therefore links.html) at to-mars.org today, so I need to update the laptop accordingly.
There are some other differences as well. I'm pretty sure buybook.dat doesn't match either.
Update with care!
The skeletal buybook.html with PayPal shopping cart links is ready for testing.
Here I sit betwen Albertson and East Williston on a train that isn't moving.
Now the train seems to be moving fine. I'll probably have to walk over to Track One at Jamaica; the Track Four train will be long gone.
And so it is. The good news is that our train arrived in time for me to get over to Track One in a timely manner and get a seat on the train.
to-mars.orgI made a few changes in situ last night and I need to propogate those back to the laptop. Once that's done, I'll need to propogate any changes I make on the lpatop this morning (probably makefile and buybook.*) to the site.
When I got on the train tonight I couldn't turn my laptop on until I removed the battery for a few seconds. I recall powering it up in the lab to update my Work ToDo List, and then something funky happened when I powered down. I usually execute halt as root using a remote ssh login, then exit from my root shell and then exit from my pann shell. I messed up something in the sequence because I had to close the terminal window on panda and power down the laptop by hand.
Last night I had a recurrence of an issue that I think I've improperly diagnosed before. Until last night it had always happened when I inadvertently used Ctrl-Alt-F1 when I meant Ctrl-Alt-1. I would get a text console and then press Alt-F7 to get back to X, and the screen would go blank. No matter what key combination I pressed, I couldn't get anything on the screen. I would then turn the laptop off with the power switch and when it stopped beeping, remove the battery for a few seconds, then replace the battery and power back up.
Last night it happened when I pressed Ctrl-R in firefox to refresh the display after I had re-made my blog. And this time it was clear that the power went off. It wouldn't come back on with the power switch. Removing the battery for a few seconds did the trick as usual.
But this series of events called into question the accuracy of my recollection of previous events: did the screen blank or did the laptop power off?
At any rate, I decided to boot into DSL this morning instead of sarge. I figure I can do what I'm doing under DSL, and that would give me a chance to see if the same condition every occurred in that environment.
Much to my surprise, the laptop refused to boot DSL. I have to have a look and see if I can figure out what's changed.
OK, now I'm editing this file in DSL. Apparently the refusal to boot DSL was a one-time thing resulting from "Resume failed..."
And I can't make the blog under DSL because Text::Textile isn't installed. I guess I'll have to figure out how to install it (and make it persistent). That may mean installing into my home directory. Or a working directory under $HOME.
There must have been some kind of problem earlier. When I got to Penn Station only two trains were posted, and this one wasn't posted until four minutes before its scheduled departure. Only eight cars, so that's why it's crowded. I'm hoping it's hot because the train was "turned off" waiting for a crew until a minute or so before we left. I can feel some cooler air trying to make a difference.
pppoe setuplynxvimcupsmuttfetchmailprocmail (is there a better alternative?)mcxorg)icewm)LeafPadgaimfirefoxflash plug-injava plug-ingvxpdfxmmsxfe)At this point we should be ready to do some basic usability testing (with our in-house Grandma). We should also make some comparisons with DSL and other "easy to use" LiveCD distributions.
I took a few minutes to look at Linux distribution overviews. Not very encouraging. Looks like I've already winnowed them out. Probably gonna be Arch. I looked at NetBSD and OpenBSD, but they're still much more server than desktop oriented. And I figure FreeBSD probably suffers most of the ills of the more popular Linux distributions. And the OpenPkg project definitely isn't targeted toward Grandma Linux. It's for folks who want a standard package environment for FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris servers. Nor does Linux From Scratch have anything to offer Grandma. Very hacker-ish, and not very up to date.
So I need to review my notes from installing Arch (twice, so far). I'll do it one more time, keeping even better notes. After trimming out everything I don't need from the initial base install, I'll install a few tools so that I have a usable and comfortable text-based environment.
Once I get to that point, I'll just follow the mini-roadmap laid out in Build it ... First X and a window manager (icewm?). Then a simple editor and printing capability. I guess the printing could come first as it might come in handy in the text environment.
Once we have a GUI and can create and print simple documents, we need to be able to browse the web. That should include the ability to handle Flash and Java, and, of course, to ability to print the pages (including PDFs we view on the monitor. And to listen to any audio files that are available to us.
Just before changing trains at Jamaica I had a recurrence of an issue that has arisen before. I meant to change virtual workspaces under evilwm by typing Ctrl-Alt-1 but I inadvertently typed Ctrl-Alt-F1, which put me at the first text console. When I typed Alt-F7 to get back to X, I got a blank screen, from which there seemed to be no recovery, save powering down and removing the battery for a few seconds. Does this perhaps have to do with Xvesa?
Whatever, I'm very hungry and very sleepy. I think I'll doze until Penn Station and then find some lunch. Then I'll go to work!
I had time to do a quick check on MousePad and LeafPad. It seems like MousePad is XFCE-specific, and was created because LeafPad didn't support printing. LeafPad does now, but not in the version available in Debian stable. Which is one of the problems with Debian stable; it's pretty much always out of date in some important (to someone) area.
I suppose one could start with an XFCE-centric distribution like Xbuntu or ZenWalk and "work backwards" to Grandma Linux. I've already discussed the problems with ZenWalk. Xubuntu, like all the flavors of Ubuntu, suffers from kitchen sink syndrome. Not only that, in the installation I have at work, something as basic as bash completion doesn't work as expected in the default terminal. It's probably something simple, but it's not something I should have to chase in a popular modern distribution.
So what to use as a base system? Arch and Frugalware seem like possible candidates. Arch seems to have a bigger head of steam than Frugalware, but as I recall, there were things about Frugalware that I was enamored with. On the other hand, Frugalware demonstrates its immaturity in its failure to handle a real issue with network installation and network upgrades. Much of the time a package download results in an apparently bogus "package corrupted" message and the downloaded package is thrown away. On the Frugalware wiki and in the forums, the maintainers dismiss this as "a mirror problem," but it clearly isn't. This sort of behavior doesn't bode well if more difficult support issues come up.
So I guess the thing to do is look around for distributions that have a lean and clean base install, look like they will be around for awhile, and if they don't have an extensive package library, at least don't have configuration issues that will make it difficult to build things from source.
I wonder about OpenBSD or NetBSD. I'm pretty sure I'll run into Linux applications that won't run, or at least not happily, under the BSDs. Something like Firefox or Acrobat reader. That would be a real deal breaker.
I certainly don't want to have to go back to Linux From Scratch. Maybe I ought to have a look at the OpenPkg site and see what distributions they're supporting these days.
We need to start with a base system and then get X installed. A window manager must be chosen. At the moment, my inclination is to go with icewm.
The simple editor and printing capability should come next. Then the browser and associated plugins, including something to handle PDFs.
After that, I think we'll get sound up and add the capability to listen to music on the web. Next will be CD playing capability. Do we add CD burning at this point? So a CD can be copied? I think so.
I think it will be helpful to look at how Lee uses her PC now. She uses AOL for email and as her browser. She's really not aware of the concept of a browser, just that she "looks stuff up on the Internet."
She doesn't use Instant Messaging but lotsa Grandmas do. gaim should fill that bill nicely.
She wants to be able to put music on her iPod. I have some notes somewhere about a Linux app to do just that (less Apple's proprietary format). So she needs not only to be able to listen to CDs, but to rip them to MP3s. And to navigate between her music library and her iPod.
She's used to WordPad so something roughly equivalent would be nice. And (integrated) spell-checking capability would be a big plus.
In her email client it must be very intuitive to open attached photos (mostly of Caden). It would be nice if there were an easy way to "detach" selected photos and put them into "albums" for viewing without reference to an email client.
She needs to be able to print (easily) email messages, web pages, PDF documents from the web, and even photos (B&W draft quality, of course), as well as anything she creates in her simple editor.
What does Grandma want to do with her PC? Obviously she needs to browse the web, so she needs Firefox. I think an /opt installation is appropriate (outside the OS packaging system). And she needs appropriate plugins (Flash, Java, ?).
She needs to be able to view any PDF files she comes across on the web. xpdf works for me, but perhaps an Adobe Acrobat plug-in? I need to look into this.
She certainly needs email. AOL should be discouraged since there is no Linux client (check on the current status of such). gmail should probably be encouraged since then she wouldn't have an email client separate from her browser. Otherwise, I should consider making my vps system a grandma email server and have her use Thunderbird to access it (regardless of how she obtains Internet connectivity).
She certainly needs to be able to listen to CDs, listen to music on the web, and download (and play) MP3 files. xmms seems like a good candidate.
Hell, she's probably going to want to be able to burn CDs as well. Since my own preferences in this regard are pretty hair shirt, I'll really have to do some investigating.
And we'd better give her the capability to play DVDs. I don't think being able to burn DVDs is necessary (yet).
She'll need a simple editor like mousepad or leafpad. I really know nothing about either of these other than that they exist. I'll have to look more closely at them and any of their competitors to select a "best of breed" simple text editor.
She may also want an editor that can manage more sophisticated tasks and/or be able to render Microsoft Word files. Will abiword fill the bill? What about open office?
Shall we add a spreadsheet just on general principles? If open office is not installed, what about gnumeric?
She'll want to be able to view photos, of course. ImageMagick is my favorite, but I'm not sure how accessible it will be to Grandma. More investigation. And she may well need to be able to transfer photos from a digital camera to her PC. I do this at a low level, but I'd better look into gphoto or something similar for her.
I've recently done some test installations of Linux distributions on my desktop at home. The first was Arch Linux, sort of a "Linux for grownups." I was quite enamored of it when I first installed it, and spent some time using and configuring it, mostly when I'd wake up in the wee hours of the morning and not be able to get back to sleep. For some reason I became a little disillusioned. I don't recall why; I'll have to check the notes I made while working with it.
The next distribution to catch my eye was Frugalware. In many ways it's similar to Arch. They both use pacman as a package manager. Package management is always a problem for Debian users such as myself who move to another distribution. We always miss
apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
The latest distribution I've installed for testing is ZenWalk, which brings us to the title of this article. I've often thought about what it would take to migrate Lee to Linux, and lately I've had the same thoughts about her mother Claire.
ZenWalk takes a "best of breed" attitude toward applications and includes only one application for each common task. Two great things about this approach is that you end up with a manageable distribution size (the ZenWalk install CD is less than 500MB), and all the applications work well together. The crummy thing about this approach is that applications you love may be missing, and the distribution maintainer's choice for the application included instead of your favorite may be sorely lacking.
For example, they've chosen evince for displaying postscript documents, and I've never had any luck with evince (which seems to come along with Ubuntu). I've long used gv and xpdf for my display needs, with the occasional use of Adobe Reader. Under Ubuntu I can easily find packages for gv and xpdf and just ignore evince. One of the annoying things about the larger distributions (that handle package dependencies well) is that it's often impossible to remove an annoying application owing to interlocking dependencies.
My idea is to start with Arch or Frugalware and build something like my own "best of breed" configuration to use as Grandma Linux. ZenWalk is not a good candidate for this because it's a real PITA, for example, to replace evince with gv and xpdf. I'd love to use Debian or Ubuntu, but they start out with too much baggage and while pretty much everything is available for those distributions, it's not so easy to get things working well together. I'm still wrestling with UTF-8 issues on my Ubuntu Breezy Badger desktop at work, my Ubuntu Dapper Drake desktop at home, and this Debian Sarge laptop.
Hopefully by starting with a base install of Arch or Frugal I can then add just what I need (using packages native to the distribution) to get to Grandma Linux.
Hey dummy, you wrote a Perl script this weekend to deal with the missing day of week in the article headers for this blog. It seems not to be on this laptop, so it must be somewhere on your desktop. You needs must find it and incorporate it into makeblog.pl.
There seems to be a little bug in Text::Textile which prevents enclosing two-character strings in attribute markers such as @ or *. I need to look into this. gv in the preceding paragraph reminded me of it; I've seen the behavior before. Annoying, to say the least.
OK, it looks like the @ marker is a problem but the * isn't. At any rate, the judicious use of {brace} characters can overcome the problem. I don't know if it's possible to use Textile markup to get a strong asterisk.
It's a little more complex than it appears at first glance. Of course, one could always use the actual <strong>HTML</strong> tags. Couldn't one?